When Quake2 was released, it supported:

ATI Rage Pro
3dfx Voodoo Graphics
Intergraph Realizm
nVidia RIVA128
PowerVR PCX2
Rendition V2200

Back then, there was a lot of preference for the Voodoo cards because they were fast, supported paletted textures, had blending functions (many 3d cards of its time had trouble doing anything other than alpha blending), and have hardware gamma correction (which 3dfx's own drivers pump gamma up by default, so Quake2 in 3d acceleration looked relatively brighter on 3dfx than the others.) It did look more washed out and blurry however.

A Voodoo2's a faster V1 with an additional texture mapping unit which allows multitexturing, and some 2MB more framebuffer memory (allowing 800x600 and some 1024x768), and/or 2MB more texture memory, along with SLI which allows to double the frame buffer memory for extra (interlaced) performance with another Voodoo2.

A Canopus Pure3D has a reason to be more expensive for certain unique features and differences to other Voodoos. 😀

in my honest opinion look for a geforce 2 gts. Can be found cheap and will cover most mid90s to early 2000's gaming. If you get into the hobby I promise it wont be the only card in your collection but i think a good place to start. Voodoo 1 or voodoo 2 would be period correct. Or play in software mode on s3 virge for even more nostalgia 🤣

Canopus cards were premium items, so they command a premium price. That being said, most people used the regular Voodoo cards cause that's what was available in stores. If you really want to be awesome though, you try to get your hands on a Quantum 3D card. I had one of those for a brief time and they were custom designs, the cream of the crop, for 3D cards. Their MSRP was several hundred a pop and were basically two Voodoo GPUs in a single card, with a huge pile of VRAM. They require a full-size case and a robust PSU, so most couldn't use them, even if they could afford one. I was barely able to fit one into the OEM Compaq I had at the time.

I mainly use TNT2 M64 or some form of Geforce MX and they work perfectly.

Pretty much what leileilol said. The Canopus Pure 3D card you mentioned also came as a 6MB version instead of the standard 4MB (or perhaps it was released solely as a 6MB? I forget.), which performed a bit better and allowed for higher resolution textures. In any case, none of the 1997 cards perform that well in Quake 2 by today's standards, you might be disappointed. In the first few months following its release, a lot of new video chips were released that completely blew the preceding generation of 3D chips, Voodoo 2 and TNT being the more important ones. Voodoo 2 alone can be roughly 3 times faster than the original Voodoo at the same resolution in Quake 2.

Unfortunately, retro hardware has become expensive, 3Dfx cards especially so, although the original Voodoo is still somewhat affordable if you want to look for one.

Getting a Voodoo Banshee could be an alternative:

- Some games' glide/GL renderers behave the same way it'd do to a Voodoo Graphics with regards to having one TMU (i.e. brighter Half-Life and Unreal)
- Not as marketing pushed as the card before (Voodoo2) or after (Voodoo3) so the cult attachment isn't as strong = lower $$$.
- It's not a Rush 😀

Finding a PCI banshee cheap is no easy task

Just out of curiousity I searched canopus pure3d on ebay and there's some guy in Russia that wants $6000 Canadian. 🤣

Any card that has a decent OpenGL driver support. If you want a cheap card for Quake 2 look no further than the GeForce2 MX, GeForce4 MX or Geforce FX lines.

But was the Voodoo Rush that bad? Of course I know like some 3dfx "solutions", it wasn't anymore a good idea being an old hardware concept while every others were making single chip products but I wonder if such card had or not some positive side after all.

In 1997, I played Quake 2 on a Riva 128... in Software Mode. The OpenGL drivers didn't release until later in the year.

A month or two ago I actually beat Quake 2 again on a Pentium 233 MMX with a Riva 128, to recreate my childhood not unlike you. At 640x480 I was getting about 22ish FPS in Demo1, and I'm pretty sure framerates were falling into the teens when the action was especially hectic. Goosing the Pentium up to 2.5x100 FSB and pairing it with some PC100 SDRAM got me up to 30 FPS on Demo1, and things felt like less of a slideshow during heavy action. But only marginally. That was pretty much the authentic 1997 experience.

Graphics cards in 1997 were seriously CPU bottlenecked. Pentium II 300's I think were basically the best CPU you could possibly buy, and gave them a lot more headroom over an MMX. But you paid for them back in the day. I'm actually looking at an old issue of CGW, Dec 1997, and they have a Dell with a PII 300, Riva 128 and AWE 64 retailing for about $3,600. Probably something like 6 grand when you account for inflation.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2022-02-08, 04:20:

Finding a PCI banshee cheap is no easy task

I guess everyone's definition of cheap is different, mine is $25 usd (actually it might be more $10 - $15 ) so pretty much impossible but someone elses might be $70 which is quite do able.

386SX wrote on 2022-02-08, 10:26:

But was the Voodoo Rush that bad? Of course I know like some 3dfx "solutions", it wasn't anymore a good idea being an old hardware concept while every others were making single chip products but I wonder if such card had or not some positive side after all.

Well, I had Rush in 1998. It was significantly slower than regular 4 meg Voodoo card and its 2D performance was also quite bad comparing to eg Riva 128 or TnT (switching to TnT gave me 30% better performance in Build games). Plus there were some compatibility issues with early glide games.

It's possibile that some very slow CPUs like early Pentiums and K5 might benefit from hardware triangle setup, but I'm afraid that framerate won't be enjoyable... And DOS performance will be bad for sure...

sofakng wrote on 2022-02-07, 01:11:

What 3D accelerators were available when Quake 2 was released? […]
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What 3D accelerators were available when Quake 2 was released?

I'm trying to remember what card I had back in 1997 (?) so I can recreate a bit of my childhood. For some reason I think it was a Canopus Pure3D but they are selling for INSANE prices on eBay...

What would be considered the best 3D accelerator for that generation? I'm pretty sure I want a Voodoo-series since that is what I remember but I'm not sure if a Voodoo 2 is the same as a Voodoo 1 (Canopus Pure3D) except faster?

(EDIT: Yikes! It looks like Voodoo 2 cards are pretty darn expensive too... Ugh!)

What CPU and motherboard do you have? If you have at least Pentium Ii or Celeron Mendocino (preferably 300+) , then Riva TnT might be a good option. It's almost period correct and Q2 should run fine on it in 1024x768.

A lot of the nvidia suggestions miss that it won't satisfy the OP's particular nostalgia from having possibly used a Voodoo card. Quake2 looks significantly different (and darker) on nVidia hardware to the point you could just use a modern desktop PC to get the same end result (with way less nvidia blurriness and driver issues).
There's also the YMMV of Quake2 looking worse from a higher framerate that 1997 hasn't seen - all that smoothening becomes uncanny and you'll easily notice your movement drifting more.

FWIW the nVidia RIVA128 has extremely noticeable blending precision loss regarding the lightmaps and doesn't handle non-square textures well, which were fixed on the TNT since.