appiah4 wrote on 2024-09-09, 05:40:

I honestly disagree with the sentiment that Voodoo 3 was late and slow, it was everything I wanted and expected it to be. I could run Freespace 2 in 1024x768. 32-bit gaming was a joke.

As someone who had a TNT2 (regular one, not M64 or Ultra) at the time, I agree with this. The performance penalty for using 32-bit color depth was not worth it for me. Older games (e.g. from 1997 and early 1998) ran fine with 32-bit colors, but for newer stuff, I often had to lower the resolution to 640x480 to get a decent frame rate.

Also, on a CRT monitor, 16-bit colors didn't look that much worse than 32-bit, with the exception of some alpha blending effects like fire and smoke which had noticeable color banding. The difference seems to be more pronounced on LCD monitors though.

I think at the time I went thru several cards quick because I was trying to get a good Quake3 experience on my P2-400. I was disappointed with my Banshee and upgraded to a Voodoo3 but that made almost no difference. Still disappointed, I tried a GeForce2MX and that made all the difference in the world. Offloading T&L from the CPU made Quake3 shine. I was sad to lose the glide support for games like Descent2 but that was progress.

I was surprised how quickly 3dfx folded and it felt like Nvidia bought them just to crush the competition.

You gotta remember, gamers were pragmatic then as they are today buying modern graphics cards. The voodoo 3, while it cleaned up the voodoo 2 or banshee for design and marketing choice, was really a minor evolutionary bump because the technology really didn't change. Even the reviewers at the time understood that. When the voodoo 3 was released, the fate of 3dfx wasn't known to be sealed, and still was a worthy choice for first time buyers into the 3d market. By the time the voodoo 3 was cheap, I was still using the voodoo 2 or banshee myself, and looking at Geforce. Time wasn't kind to products on the market, so 3dfx's offerings weren't competitive for long. That really is the feeling for what happened at the time.

In 2000, those who were crazy enough to buy the voodoo 4/5 to get the top performance, really paid big bucks, when the Geforce 2 was just one step behind waiting to leapfrog 3dfx in marketing, and a little less money. So those that waited just a little longer benefited; such was the case for that era. I remember my friend who I believe said he bought the 2-chip sli voodoo 4/5, which was pretty cool, but thinking now, it didn't last long now did it? What good does brand favoritism do? What one was doing in 2-chips could be done in 1-chip. And then 3dfx was dead. But anyway, about pragmatism, we were already gravitating away toward nvidia in 2000 because we could see the future already on cost vs performance, unless you were loaded with money and didn't care about costs 😉

I'd never say the Voodoo3 was slow, it was not for sure but the logic of releasing it with that name created expectations too big; it wasn't a cheap card and as been said reviews began to look for real reasons for that situation. I never cared a lot about 32bit or the early T&L with the average monitors around, resolutions, software support etc.. it was all too soon and much marketing went into those. But it was the next big thing while their new line of cards with a big jump in time spent for getting ready for it and other cards manufacturers as competitors, offered the Avenger that honestly it felt a perfected Banshee instead of a new chip that deserved a Voodoo "3" name; no matter how fast, it was near to impossible to not "feel" what was happening. If the Voodoo brand was used for high end products only, now it was used for both low and "high" end ones too.

I remember in the early newspaper informations it was supposed to be released in two cards only, one at 183Mhz and the other at 125Mhz or something like that. It always sound to me like that was the original plan to really push that architecture to a limit where speed was the only thing offered against any other cards around to take most time out of it for future never to be released projects. But I suppose the 183Mhz SDRAM target was far from an easy option in that time when only the 3500 had that.

It was a bit deja vu-ish, like the Amiga deathbed vigil over again....

I think I was cognisant that glide architecture was great for it's time, but it's time had ended, but I was hoping the vaunted "Rampage" tech would surface and be a whole new exciting thing... but by 2003 or 2004 I'd given up on that.

I purchased a Voodoo 5 when it came out mostly because I had a large library of GLIDE games, I still played plus it worked with new 32-bit games as well. Not everyone ditched their old games to just play new ones.

3dfx main problem was they invented the first 3d gaming card that worked well, and they assumed they would be in the lead forever. Other companies were coming out with better visuals but 3dfx still had the raw speed and the great API. Money problems are what screwed them. Purchasing STB was a money saving thing that alienated the companies that purchased a ton of 3dfx chips, so those companies moved on to ATI and Nvidia and the loss of chip sales hurt 3dfx in the long run. By the time 3dfx had a new architecture designed they just didn't have the money to finish it. In the end the companies with money to burn are the ones who generally win. When industries mature it costs too much money to enter the ring, look at how Intel is having issues making a gaming card with all their resources.

Unknown_K wrote on 2024-09-09, 20:39:

I purchased a Voodoo 5 when it came out mostly because I had a large library of GLIDE games, I still played plus it worked with new 32-bit games as well. Not everyone ditched their old games to just play new ones.

Yeah, this. A LOT of games at the time only had GLIDE support, OpenGL and D3D support came much later if at all. I was a Jane's F-15 nut for example, and that only worked with GLIDE, for example.

Looks like many VOGONS folks have fond memories of the end of 20th century. 😸

I had to buy a new computer fast in February 1999. Voodoo2 was too expensive; for single-card options, most reviews praised TNT while criticized Banshee for being no merit other than Glide support. So I got the TNT card (STB Velocity 4400; ironically the last Nvidia card by STB before the acquisition) with P2-400, right before the announcement of P3-450 by the end of February, followed by TNT2 Ultra in March and Voodoo3 in April. Duh. Should I know more about overclocking I would buy a Mendocino Celeron 300A, boosted it up to 450 MHz, and use the price difference to buy a Voodoo2. Anyway, I stil had a good time with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six / Rogue Spear, plus less demanding strategy games like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Age of Empires II, as none of them was Glide-dependent.

Until I got Ultima IX: Ascension by the end of 1999. The game had visions and ambitions, but its awful execution almost destroyed a decades-long franchise. All players suffered, but more so for non-Glide users.

Nevertheless I didn't upgrade my TNT with Voodoo 3/4/5 or GeForce 1/2 and kept playing Diablo II and Deus Ex GOTY Edition with it until replacing it with a GF3Ti200 in 2002.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-05-10, 20:24:

Plus when 3Dfx bought STB and started making their own cards, it felt like nVidia cards offered more choices since there were multiple manufacturers. Whereas with a 3Dfx card it felt like you were locked in to a single option. Whether that feeling was justified or not, it's what the general marketing was like at the time.

IMHO being "locked in" was not the problem: if you want a smartphone with Apple Silicon then you must buy it from Apple, unlike Qualcomm Snapdragon or MediaTek Dimensity, yet having everything in-house doesn't hinder Apple's popularity -- if not increasing it. The real problem was that STB simply could not provide 3dfx with the quality and quantity like Foxconn to Apple.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-05-10, 20:40:

Back then, I was wavering between buying a Voodoo 3 and a TNT2. Ultimately, I went with the latter because all computer magazines from that time kept harping on about the TNT2 being a "future proof" card.

In hindsight, I would have been better served with a Voodoo 3, since I was mostly playing Unreal Tournament and Diablo 2, both of which look and run better in Glide mode. As for the "future proof" TNT2, I ended up replacing it with a GeForce 2 MX400 in 2001, after just over a year of service. Out of curiosity, I bought a second-hand Voodoo 3 around 2002 or so, which I've kept to this day.

If I had six more months to consider I might have chosen a cheaper version of Voodoo3 (probably model 2000) as the newest TNT2 Ultra or Voodoo3 3000/3500 were too expensive (the less pricey "regular" TNT2 had to wait seven more months).

zuldan wrote on 2024-05-11, 05:50:

I walked into a PC store one day and remember being lured by the Creative 3D Blaster Savage 4 box art. I thought “this is going to be better than NVidia and ATI”. Oh boy, what a mistake that purchase was. I wish I had kept that card though.

When I wanted to upgrade the 9FX Motion 771 (S3 Vision968) for my AGP-less Socket 5 Pentium 120 build in 2000, the available choices were limited: Nvidia ditched PCI for three years (before returning with GF2MX), ATI Rage series was rare in Taiwan, Voodoo3 PCI was rare AND expensive, so in the end I chose Gainward CARDEXpert SG4 Pro. The card was mediocre in performance but had excellent (if not the best) late-DOS game compatibility. It's still the fastest PCI card in my collection (wish I could find a PCI FX5500 but they don't come by easily or cheaply).

I think I might not have got a Voodoo if 3DFx wasn't already hungry for cash, so for some reason of vouchers, coupons and sale pricing, I was able to get a Voodoo3 2000 PCI from "The Cyberian Outpost" outpost.com an early online store, for $50. I think GeForce was actually out, Radeon rumored, but they seemed pie in the sky pricing and very unproven at the time. TnT series then were the only other consideration, and at the time, the impression was fast and ugly in 16bit, slow as crap and pretty in 32bit, where the downsampled to 16bit Voodoo output seemed the best of both. Also the lower end, i.e. actually affordable cards, seemed to be prone to being fuzzy and muddy in output. Given that eventuality, nVidia being blamed for poor implementations, 3DFx buying STB to control better how it's products were presented to the end user seemed like a "Galaxy Brain" move rather than a misstep. That could have gone more right, the purchase of Gigapixel was the real stupidity though I think. Anyway, I was about 6 months ahead of the bust, 3DFx still alive when I bought the card.... some minor regret due to seeing the surplus closeouts of Voodoo 4 4500 being as cheap a few months later in spring the next year. Although since I was a bargain bin gamer, I would have had even more trouble getting the older glide stuff to run.

edit: Heh, there we go, March 2nd 2000 capture of outpost.com (Despite wikipedias inference that Frys introduced the outpost.com domain, it was in use before that) look down the right hand side, V3 2000 for 94.95 https://web.archive.org/web/20000302032 ... site=NA:NA unfortunately it's all server generated pages so hard to see more than that.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2024-09-09, 08:13:

I think at the time I went thru several cards quick because I was trying to get a good Quake3 experience on my P2-400. I was disappointed with my Banshee and upgraded to a Voodoo3 but that made almost no difference. Still disappointed, I tried a GeForce2MX and that made all the difference in the world. Offloading T&L from the CPU made Quake3 shine. I was sad to lose the glide support for games like Descent2 but that was progress.

I was surprised how quickly 3dfx folded and it felt like Nvidia bought them just to crush the competition.

As far as I am aware, that's pretty much the only reason that Nvidia did buy them. What else did they get?
The use of the SLI acronym? I guess...but they changed even the usage of that.
What other IP did they buy that they have used?
I'm sure there is some under the hood tech or terminology somewhere, but nothing big or obvious that I'm aware of.

It felt a bit worrying, GPU producers became less and less over the years and by 2002 you just had ATI and Nvidia (realistically) in the long run it stifled the market.
I also felt grateful, i was able to use a V2 in SLI from 98 to late 2002, it was an insane long time back then but i had to move on.

I bought a voodoo 3 2000 pci card in early 2000 for a Pentium mmx system, overkill I know but it was a good system nonetheless for a broke college student until I had to sell it to pay a college bill. While there were faster cards by far on the market something about the image output from that voodoo 3 felt right and looked exceptionally pleasant to my eye. That's a subjective observation not everyone will agree with. With what seemed the absolute coolest packaging it felt like 3dfx was a living legend. It was widely known that something was very wrong with 3dfx in its last few years. What now appears to be window dressing hiding an underwhelming product lineup at the time made great promises to their customers. Then when I heard that Nvidia was purchasing the company I had hoped that they would somehow carry on the voodoo line. Obviously this didn't happen and as I moved on to other 3d cards. First a permedia2 because I was broke and it was about 20 dollars on clearance, then an ati Radeon which broke my systems BIOS somehow. Finally I settled on Nvidia cards and stuck with them on my new systems since. 3dfx was like other tech businesses that failed, a great product but management refused to keep up with progress and that great product fell behind.

sydres wrote on 2024-09-16, 01:19:

I bought a voodoo 3 2000 pci card in early 2000 for a Pentium mmx system, overkill I know but it was a good system nonetheless for a broke college student until I had to sell it to pay a college bill. While there were faster cards by far on the market something about the image output from that voodoo 3 felt right and looked exceptionally pleasant to my eye. That's a subjective observation not everyone will agree with. With what seemed the absolute coolest packaging it felt like 3dfx was a living legend. It was widely known that something was very wrong with 3dfx in its last few years. What now appears to be window dressing hiding an underwhelming product lineup at the time made great promises to their customers. Then when I heard that Nvidia was purchasing the company I had hoped that they would somehow carry on the voodoo line. Obviously this didn't happen and as I moved on to other 3d cards. First a permedia2 because I was broke and it was about 20 dollars on clearance, then an ati Radeon which broke my systems BIOS somehow. Finally I settled on Nvidia cards and stuck with them on my new systems since. 3dfx was like other tech businesses that failed, a great product but management refused to keep up with progress and that great product fell behind.

The Voodoo 3 had AMAZING 2D quality and fantastic dos compatibility. Most TNT cards at the time output garbage VGA compared to Voodoo 3. Most people don't realize this, but it is what it is.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-09-16, 11:48:

The Voodoo 3 had AMAZING 2D quality and fantastic dos compatibility. Most TNT cards at the time output garbage VGA compared to Voodoo 3. Most people don't realize this, but it is what it is.

I love my Voodoo 3 3000 for DOS games. I didn't generally think about compatibility, but now that you mention it, I do recall having fewer issues with it and DOS game than with whatever card I had before that (either a Cirrus Logic or some ATI Mach), and UNIVBE just worked most of the time.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-09-16, 11:48:

The Voodoo 3 had AMAZING 2D quality and fantastic dos compatibility. Most TNT cards at the time output garbage VGA compared to Voodoo 3. Most people don't realize this, but it is what it is.

The image quality of Nvidia cards varied greatly depending on the manufacturer. Most low-end brands used crappy components, which resulted in blurry, washed out visuals. In contrast, all Voodoo 3 cards were manufactured in-house, and having recently acquired STB, their image quality was of course top notch.

From my experience, Nvidia didn't really start caring about image quality until the GeForce FX line. For comparison, all ATi cards (even the cheap Rage XL and Radeon 9250) had consistently good image quality.

I wouldn't overstate V3's dos compatibility. Voodoo 3 and friends all had 15bpp issues (i.e. some of Probe's DOS games, GTA, Final Unity, etc). The TV-out can't do VGA modes well. Some users see Keen in piss vision

Also it still has a video filter that applies to 3d, so the VGA signal output quality advantage becomes moot for 3d gaming. "22-bit" is cope.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-09-09, 05:40:

I honestly disagree with the sentiment that Voodoo 3 was late and slow, it was everything I wanted and expected it to be. I could run Freespace 2 in 1024x768. 32-bit gaming was a joke. It was an absolutely fantastic card with great backwards compatibility with the glide library. I really don't know what people wanted. People are still falling for the same dumb Incoming 32bit benchmark...

In fact, I would go as far as saying Voodoo3 cards were the last to be competitive in terms of raw speed compared to nVIDIA's offerings at the time.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-16, 12:25:

appiah4 wrote on 2024-09-16, 11:48:

The Voodoo 3 had AMAZING 2D quality and fantastic dos compatibility. Most TNT cards at the time output garbage VGA compared to Voodoo 3. Most people don't realize this, but it is what it is.

The image quality of Nvidia cards varied greatly depending on the manufacturer. Most low-end brands used crappy components, which resulted in blurry, washed out visuals. In contrast, all Voodoo 3 cards were manufactured in-house, and having recently acquired STB, their image quality was of course top notch.

From my experience, Nvidia didn't really start caring about image quality until the GeForce FX line. For comparison, all ATi cards (even the cheap Rage XL and Radeon 9250) had consistently good image quality.

Not really true. I have an Evilking Voodoo3 3000 PCI made by Powercolor (dated early year 00) and it doesn't look as sharp as an OEM equivalent from 3dfx. Granted, these were more common in Asia but they were still manufactured by third parties nonetheless.

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2024-10-06, 14:59:

Not really true. I have an Evilking Voodoo3 3000 PCI made by Powercolor (dated early year 00) and it doesn't look as sharp as an OEM equivalent from 3dfx. Granted, these were more common in Asia but they were still manufactured by third parties nonetheless.

Yeah, I heard about those recently. They weren't exactly common in Europe (I certainly don't remember ever seeing any ads for them) but it does seem that they were sold in other places.

Let me rephrase my previous statement then: about 90% of the Voodoo 3 cards were made in-house and therefore have excellent image quality.