My 1st 3D card was S3 Virge/DX 2MB, which replaced 1MB Trio64V+. Not many games playable and many from them with screen bugs (famous not working smoke). Later was enhanced to 4MB of memory - that enabled option showing background stars done by texturing in wing commander prophecy. It was only one visible bonus of increasing memory on Virge (you could use higher resolution, but virge was slow even at 320x240).
Later was replaced by S3 Savage 3D - good card, if you didnt cared about some freezes and lot of testing in S3 Tweak, for finding working driver profile (in Q2/Quake3 you had to disable agp texturing to avoid freezes for example). Around 2000 was savage replaced by Savage 2000 - sadly some games required T&L and didnt worked.... Luckily after about 6 months died TV Out and i got GeForce 2MX as replacement (Savage cards was not available anymore). Since then staying with Nvidia (FX5600, FX5900XT, 6600GT, GTS250, GTX550Ti, GTX 660) and collecting everything else, when its outdated and cheap.....

Darkman wrote:

the PC I had at the time , a Pentium Pro with 32MB of RAM (later 64) had no 3D acceleration at all , I was running games like Tomb Raider II and Thief in software mode , though surprisingly it mostly ran decently.

How unusual. Was that a decommissioned server or workstation?

I was using an Am5x86 'til the end of 1998. It had a Matrox Mystique. I did not play any 3D games. Survival was easy for me. Post Dec 1998, I was using a dual PII-400 with a Permedia2 in NT4. I had no desire to play games. Recently, I have been setting up various systems from the past. Not having anything to do with them, I have begun experimenting with 3D games and graphics acceleration. It seems that for pre-1999 games and with pre-PII systems, a Voodoo card really simplifies playability.

PeterLI wrote:

(...) I tried a Voodoo2 recently but it is a PITA IMO. Just too much work to get it to work.(...)

feipoa wrote:

(...) It seems that for pre-1999 games and with pre-PII systems, a Voodoo card really simplifies playability.

feipoa wrote:

I was using an Am5x86 'til the end of 1998. It had a Matrox Mystique. I did not play any 3D games. Survival was easy for me. Post Dec 1998, I was using a dual PII-400 with a Permedia2 in NT4. I had no desire to play games. Recently, I have been setting up various systems from the past. Not having anything to do with them, I have begun experimenting with 3D games and graphics acceleration. It seems that for pre-1999 games and with pre-PII systems, a Voodoo card really simplifies playability.

Recently I have run Final Reality on a Mystique PCI 4MB and it's nice to see that some 3D acceleration are indeed working as everything ran correctly even if not with the best effects quality btw. 😀

Hate to break it to you guys but I was only just born in 1998. I didn't have a late 90's to survive, really. I only started becoming conscious of my actions around 2002. At least, that's as far back as I can remember clearly. The main reason I am so interested in vintage computing today is because, interestingly enough, it's still what I grew up with, in a sense. I had hand-me-down machines. First a 200MHz MMX with 8MB EDO RAM, then a Vaio with a 166MHz MMX and 16MB RAM, then an Optiplex GX1 tower with a PII-350, 128MB RAM and Windows XP -- we didn't figure out till much later that the monitor I used at the time was killing my video cards. That was until very late 2005, when I got a cast-off Prescott Pentium 4. I don't have my very first machines anymore, but I do have the means by which I *might* get them back, so I will at some point see about going all the way back to Illinois to grab them. That will have amazing nostalgia value to me, mostly because they were my very first machines.

That along with the fact that when I was much younger I was still into computers but my experiments were limited to much older, less critical hardware -- stuff that wouldn't end the world if I broke it. That's why I'm into vintage computing. Sadly the earliest machine to come to me in a working state was a 486DX2-66.

I had a Savage 4 and a 500Mhz K6-2, the S3 Driver wasnt good at all but improved later a Lot, so i could play Tons of Games,

I went from P200+mystique to PII 333 + i740, then upgraded to riva TNT, then to riva TNT+V2, then to Geforce.
I nearly didn't use the 3dfx, just unreal, UT and Diablo 2, everything else on the TNT.
Voodoo picture quality, texture quality, was so aweful.
I prefer software mode to early 3D accelerators usually (that bilinera my god ...)
So yeah, surviving 90 without 3Dfx was possible, and actually not necessarily a bad idea.

IMHO of course.

In 1998 I had a 486 DX2/66 (I was 12 at the time), I mostly played Fury 3, Myst, Duke Nukem 3D, Sim City 200 and maybe a bit of Warcraft II.

Then in early-mid 99 I picked up a Pentium 133 with 2mb S3 Trio. This allowed me to play Starcraft and probably not much else. I would have attempted Tribes and HL1 in software mode but way too slow.

For some reason I purchased a new SiS 6326 PCI 4mb thinking it would improve the 3D performance, it really didn't, no OpenGL support (or at least at the time, not sure if it does now) and Direct3D was very slow/poor. I think software mode in HL1 was still faster than Direct3D. Saying this the 6326 did have good video quality and it wasn't a bad card at all for what it could do, just not 3D games. I do think 2d stuff and video performance was better. It was a cheap card.

Then later in 99 or early 2000 I picked up a TNT 2 M64 PCI 32mb (still rocking the Pentium 133) and wow this really opened up a lot of gaming options. Games that "required" a Pentium 2 worked okay on my lowly P133! Quake 3 (slowly but playable), HL1 (again slow but possible), Quake 2, Tribes, UT all kinds of things. It was great. But wow the CPU really couldn't cope.

Late 2000 or early 2001 I picked up a Duron 800 and finally fixed my CPU limitations, seriously good upgrade that was. Still used the TNT2 and it was more than enough for most games.

I didn't pick up a 3dfx card until I purchased a new PowerColor Voodoo 4 AGP for cheap just after 3dfx went out of business. This wasn't used in my main machine (probably had a Geforce 2 at the time) but for my brother/my second PC in a Pentium 2 350MHz. The Voodoo 4 was impressive to me as the 3d quality was really good and it just worked well.

mwdmeyer wrote:

For some reason I purchased a new SiS 6326 PCI 4mb thinking it would improve the 3D performance, it really didn't, no OpenGL support (or at least at the time, not sure if it does now) and Direct3D was very slow/poor. I think software mode in HL1 was still faster than Direct3D.

They never really finished OpenGL for 6326, that is true. But it being slower than software renderer is impossible.

Surviving the 1996-2000 period on my computer *meant* having 3dfx/Glide. Serious motor racing and air combat simulation blossomed during this period and being able to run Glide mode was a real treat. A V1 was my first "crazy money" PC purchase to get a seat on the bus. Then a V2 for most of the late 90's. Finished with a V5 2000ish after a brief experiment with an STB TNT 4200 Velocity card I didn't like (buggy and iffy IQ). But not long after the Voodoo Age had had it's run.