Can Trident 8900CL be considered a deccelerator? 😁

Anyway, my first accelerator card was an ATi 3D Rage (4MB) followed by a TNT2 with 8MB manufactured by Leadtek. Very good card.

The first 3D "accelerator" I ever used was an ATI 3D Rage, which came with copies of Mechwarrior 2 and a VR Soccer game. That card actually had more problems than it did features - it wouldn't run some VESA games like Warcraft 2, and it actually fried a few monitors in its day.

After that, I didn't bother with 3D cards until the Voodoo 2's started coming out and games were starting to require hardware acceleration (around the time of Quake 2, I recall).

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

Can Trident 8900CL be considered a deccelerator? 😁

No, I'm afraid it was more like a hand-brake. 🤣

I had an ATI Rage, also. The difference between Q2 software mode and Q2 open gl was shocking (at least for me at that time)... until I bought a Voodoo Banshee and Unreal (not the best card, but a true improvement).

Later, a Voodoo 3, and then nVidias.

PowerVR PCX1 (Apocalypse 3D) then PowerVR PCX2 (Matrox M3D) were my first two.

OEM S3 Virge 1MB with 1MB 'upgrade', Miro 3D (S3 Virge 4MB RAM, extremely crisp TV Out), Gigabyte 'Starfighter' i740 8mb, Gigabyte Voodoo Banshee 16MB, S3 Savage3D and 2000, NV TnT, NV Gf256 and many many more inbetween, before and after. I played with the Voodoo II, III and the PowerVR stuff too but was more interested with their arcade (San Francisco Rush) and console (Dreamcast) revisions.

Never did think that much of the early 3D cards. I had a 486 DX4/100 up until 1998 with a Cirrus Logic video card with 2mb VRAM and it played everything I wanted to play.

I think I remember downloading a beta or demo copy of Half-Life and being unable to play it which is when I really knew that I needed to build a new computer.....but luckily I went into the AF in Dec 1998 and didn't finish Tech School until May of 1999, so I didn't have to worry about how old my computer was for 6 months. 😀

2 weeks before I left Tech School I ordered a K63-400, Soyo SY5EMA, 512mb ram and a TNT1. Parts arrived at my parent's house the day before I was leaving to go to the UK so I had to quickly put everything together. Heck even got Redhat 6 and 98 installed the same day!. So got the computer assembled and packed ready to be shipped. (I even bought Half-Life that same week and installed it on my parent's new Compaq with a K62-350?, ATI Rage card. I think I remember having to use a wrapper since for some odd reason the game wouldn't work out of the box.)

So when I got to the UK I finally was able to play around with my new computer and experience the wonders of 3D Acceleration.

I didn't bother with 3D Accelerators before because I was never one to care for the super high resolutions or the few extra effects when all I really cared about was the gameplay, also the fact that most of the games requiring a Voodoo card I wasn't interested in anyway.

I did get a Voodoo 3 AGP card from a friend in 2000/2001? but I never got around to using it so it sat around until.....last week (and it still works!) when I decided to slap it into a Dual P300E Compaq Workstation SP700 I found at work. Going to turn that into a Windows 98/NT4 compatibility testing machine for game testing and glide testing.

hah! I had to tweak the HL Day One beta with a hacked i740 MiniGL taken from an SDK

Hah! I got voodoo graphics for christmas 1997 and I was really stunned by it's performance. I had P-133 back then and one of the first games I've tried was Toca Racing. It was absolutely amazing. It was perfectly fluid, lights reflecting from wet surfaces...whereas software mode was totally unplayable (<5fps). Later when voodoo3 was announced, I chose TNT2 Ultra instead. Just to make sure glide still worked, I added a voodoo2 that was on sale (v3 was already out, so I got it cheap). I must say I never regretted my decision. TNT2 was an amazing card (still works in my backup computer), it played all the games until 2002 without much problems. Voodoo2 was there for backwards compatibility, I had it connected to the VGA input of my monitor (TNT2 used BNC inputs on my Iiyama 450 😁). Interestingly enough, I played through entire X-Wing Alliance on voodoo2, not TNT. In 2002 I switched from "green" to "red" camp with ati9000pro and still using ati 😀
(although for dx10 cards, neither are really impressive except for the top models...perhaps it's time to switch again, ati drivers are beginning to disappoint me...)

i didnt cared much about the early 3d de/accelerators but my dream was a S3 VIRGE since i saw a screenshot of the accelerated version of terminal velocity in a gaming magazine. ok i was a child and never had the money for buying one, so i had to use my 486 DX2/80 with a 1mb SPEA V7-VEGA PLUS card until 1998.
one year earlier a frind of mine buyed a DIAMOND MONSTER 3D. this was the first time i saw 3DFX games (NICE2 demo and GTA) in action and simply was blown away!
my next system was a P2-450 with a ATI RAGE PRO TURBO, the first AGP card from ATI i think. well it had real bad image quality, bad drivers and even worse performance. i had to play UNREAL with software renderer because the card didnt support opengl and direct3d was not working...
this was the time i decided never buying a ATI card again.
after i got a job i buyed two 3D BLASTER VOODOO2 from my first earned money. later i switched the ATI card with NVIDIAs TNT2 ULTRA and was a fanboy from there on. 😀

Ah.... The good old days..... *wipes tears*

Fast-forward to 1999. I did not bother with Voodoo3 because I believed a TNT2/Voodoo2 combo was the best. I did not even bother with Voodoo5 --and that turned out to be my biggest regret, because V5 is the only card to enable FSAA in GLide games like Deus EX and Ultima IX (U9's Direct3D support was still shitty at that time).

As for early "Voodoo 1"-era games, I think the one with the best gameplay is still Tomb Raider. Yup, there were a lot of games that supported Voodoo (and Rendition) during that era, but they mostly have less than mediocre gameplay like the arcadish Independence Day and Die Hard Trilogy.

However, game that really convinced me to buy a Voodoo is EF 2000 V2.0. While most other 3D-accelerated games were craps (Scorched Planet and Whiplash come to mind....), EF2000 V2.0 was among the first serious games that supports 3D acceleration (others being Mechwarrior 2 and Sabre Ace, but the latter is shitty). About a couple years later, Jane's Combat Simulation follows with Jane's Longbow 2 and Jane's F-15 that exclusively support Voodoo.

I just wonder though: what games convinced you to get into 3D accelerator mania during those days?

i bought a matrox mystique not really for its 3d
but at the time i had a cirrus logic 256k vid card and the recommended spec to pair with a v1 was a 2mb card so i got the mystique because it was the 2nd fastest 2d card about (2.5% slower + hlaf the price of the millenium)

ps: you can run duesex + unreal with fsaa in glide mode with zeckensacks wrapper

pps: if you loved ef2000 try f22 total air war (both made by d.i.d)

ppps: tombraider mystique edition was one of the few games to look dammed good on the mystique

pps: both longbow 2 + f15 have d3d patches

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I just wonder though: what games convinced you to get into 3D accelerator mania during those days?

Rebel Moon Rising.

But that was a Verite game from 1995, and that only convinced me.

I stayed away from Voodoo for a while since their marketing was aggressively, SEGA like. It wasn't until the Monster 3D II's release that I got one of those.

Davros wrote:

ps: you can run duesex + unreal with fsaa in glide mode with zeckensacks wrapper

Wrappers don't count since they were barely existent and crappy in the day. Deus Ex did have a Direct3D Renderer, though. Ran fine on my Geforce2.

I also intensely followed the Verite hardware. I wanted the Creative 3D Blaster PCI for the longest time. But I couldn't afford anything for years.

I used a hopped-up AMD 5x86 @ 160 on a VLB mobo with S3-968 until late 1997. I was supremely bummed out when X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter wouldn't run on the 486. It just crashed when the actual mission was loading. I guess they used some Pentium-specific instructions? I managed to save up some money finally and did one huge overhaul. I went from that old, once-quite-glorious rig to a Pentium II 266, 64MB RAM, Mystique 220, PCI sound card, and Voodoo1. It was basically the best money could buy at the time. Talk about one heck of a speed boost.

I actually started out with a STB Nitro 3D (a Virge GX), but it locked up all the time on me. Even just at the Windows 95 desktop. Some sort of incompatibility with Supermicro P6 boards I guess. The Mystique was better anyway.

I remember downloading demos before I could run them. Stuff like Hexen 2, GLQuake, etc. Jedi Knight reinvented the FPS that year, Unreal arrived early '98 and then Half Life that fall. OMG!!! That was one hell of a ride. Oh the days when 3D gaming was fresh and new types of games were being created monthly. 😀

Myth. Quake 2. Jedi Knight. 3Dfx demos. Wing Commander Prophecy. X-Wing Alliance. Need for Speed III... hehe

leileilol wrote:

Rebel Moon Rising.

But that was a Verite game from 1995, and that only convinced me.

That made me laugh...
it didnt use an accellerator (it looked like it did) but it was the first game to take advantage of mmx to do 16bit lighting ect

Actually you're only partially correct. Rebel Moon was a DOS game compiled specifically for the Rendition Verite 1000 AKA the Creative 3D Blaster PCI and it looked pretty good in SVGA. Rebel Moon Rising on the other hand was the game you described and it looked as bad as it played. There were already a few titles that used MMX but RMR was the first Intel Inside MMX launch title.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Moon_Rising

I got a 3D card rather late. My first one was an used Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 8MB card which I bought from a friend in spring 2000. Main reason was that I wanted to play the pretty version of Redguard and games in general started to require it.

Got a comp with an AGP slot in early 2001, and then a Siluro Geforce 2 mx. The next year I changed to a Geforce 3, which I kept for 4 years. Didn't get a new card until last year, in which I got a Radeon X1600 Pro.

I did have a strong interest in the Permedia chipset, though, cause there was an Amiga graphic card with the Permedia chipset on it (and I was mainly an Amiga user until late 1999), but there were no interesting software for it, so I never bought it.

My first taste of 3d acceleration was the diamond stealth 3d 2000. I think the only accelerated game I played with it was forsaken, and that drew black boxes around all of the projectiles (sucked). Much later I upgraded to a Maxi Gamer Phoenix (banshee), which was awesome! Quake 2 and Starsiege tribes rocked my world back then and like KAN, "upgrading" to a TNT2 was a stupid decision in retrospect (tribes ran best on glide).

I've got a small collection of early 3d cards - powervr, rendition, NV1, 3dfx, etc. They're interesting to me because each is fairly different from another technology wise. It's also neat when you find the "best" version of a game runs on an obscure 3d accelerator that nobody has and isn't produced anymore.

The only 3D accelerated version of Terminal Velocity is for S3 Virge. That's what the Stealth 3D 2000 uses. It actually runs pretty good! 😀 I tried it out about a year ago.