Radical Vision wrote on 2018-02-12, 12:54:

Shame is 3Dfx did make idiot things that ended up them dead, shame is also S3 did not have the Metal API in more games... Shame is brands like ABIT, Soyo, Aopen did die or are not anymore in the industry in the same way...

While I agree ABIT shut down (and I think so did AOpen), Soyo still produces motherboards for the Asian market only. Couldn't find their Asia site but here's the only boxed link I could find:
https://shopee.ph/SOYO-DRAGON-A320M-Motherboa … 1957.3854520390

Same boards are sold under a new alias, MAXSUN.

My father had a 386SX laptop branded Soyo and it is one of my fondest computing memories as a child/teen. I typed up many semester reports on that thing. The are definitely not around AFAIK, they filed for bankruptcy in late 2000s, and if there is someone using their brand in China for the Asian market they are certainly not the same company; they probably bought the name and are slapping it onto cheap OEM motherboards.

Another brand I really miss is Biostar, they were pretty damn awesome but they have become a lot less relevant and prevalent, and no longer have a distributor where I live (I think).

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

It wasn't easy to attach to the "22bit train" if people actually could only "see" 16bit or 32bit in games;

People buying new card couldnt see squat, all they had at home was some S3 Trio or worse an ISA card in the old system. Most didnt even know what >20 fps felt like in a game. All they had was marketing in game/hardware magazines, salesmen pushing own sales quotas, and friends arguing for whatever they got sold on. Nvidia scam worked by pushing "32bit is important" narrative while their own cards were unable to play games in 32bit with playable framerates 😀. 32bit mode tanked fps by >half on TNT and ~1/3 on TNT2 (less on TNT2 Ultra), You had a choice of 16bit at higher resolution, or playable 32bit at 640x480. https://www.anandtech.com/show/378/5

The other fact was Nvidia 16bit rendering looked really bad, and propagating this "32bit is important" lie often equated 16bit rendering with this peculiar bad Nvidia look.

3dfx failed to send strong enough message to separate itself from this '16bit looks like poop' stigma. They also failed to anticipate this marketing angle and implement pointless box ticking 32bit framebuffer in hardware as a showcase option just to demonstrate no difference in rendered output on their hardware. It would only cost just a little bit of performance, because unlike nvidias tnt/tnt2 voodoo3 did all the math at higher bit depths internally. 16bit was a ram size optimization mainly, saving ~1MB of framebuffer (important at the time of 16MB cards), it merely saved ~120MB/s of its >2000MB/s ram bandwidth (stupid and unimportant).
Another option would be implementing dither filter in the driver framebuffer read-back routine in 32bit mode. Call it some catchy hybercolorcompression marketing wank name and there you go, checkbox ticked, screenshots look good out of the box.

3dfx was all about those clever "where it counts" optimizations, but failed to properly advertise them.

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

also I remember testing the "22bit option" and trying running Quake3 and the differences were really far from visible. The 32bit internal tech of the Kyro2 compared to that was like another planet.

you could even say it was like from the future, 2 years in the future exactly 😁
Kind of not applicable to a card released in April of 1999. In 1999 Voodoo3 "16bit" output looked like TNT2 32bit while running at TNT2 16bit speeds.

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

About the Motion Compensation, it is true that a Pentium II high

I dont know what the lowest bar is for software rendering, but overclocked Celeron was definitely enough.
Celeron 300A@450 on 440BX will play all DVDs with no sweat in pure software mode. $90 CPU from 1998.
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9812/31 … .idg/index.html
>Celeron 333-MHz and "300a" 300-MHz models for $107 and $90
>Slot 1 Celeron-333 was listed at $115, down from $159, and the 300a version was listed at $94, down from $138
https://www.theregister.com/1999/02/08/amd_to_call_k63/
>K6-2/300 will cost $65, the K6-2/333 $75, the K6-2/350 $90, the K6-2/366 $96, the K6-2/380 $123, the K6-2/400 $138
>K6-2/450, now officially launched, $210

August 1998:
K6-2 350 MHz announced at $300 http://www.cpushack.com/CIC/announce/1998/k6-2-350.html
Celeron 300A announced at $149 http://www.cpushack.com/CIC/announce/1998/pentII-450.html
February 1999:
K6-2 450 MHz announced at $200 http://www.cpushack.com/CIC/announce/1999/k6-2-450.html

You had to be locked into Socket7 ecosystem, uninformed, positively insane or an extreme cheapskate (I can "save" $30 on the motherboard!!1) to buy AMD at the time.

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

I tried many solutions

but you already confessed to owning low end "K6-2 350". You absolutely needed >$100 in hardware to play DVD because you decided not to spend that $100 for a better CPU 😀

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

even hardware decoders PCI ones I still own, at the end the best tech on gpu was the one on ATi chipset that since the Rage 128 Pro and Rage Mobility introduced both the Motion Compensation and IDCT

again would love to see different video acceleration solutions impact on CPU usage. I know that Rage Pro with MC is useless when combined with Pentium 2 300MHz.

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 09:48:

People buying new card couldnt see squat, all they had at home was some S3 Trio or worse an ISA card in the old system. Most did […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

It wasn't easy to attach to the "22bit train" if people actually could only "see" 16bit or 32bit in games;

People buying new card couldnt see squat, all they had at home was some S3 Trio or worse an ISA card in the old system. Most didnt even know what >20 fps felt like in a game. All they had was marketing in game/hardware magazines, salesmen pushing own sales quotas, and friends arguing for whatever they got sold on. Nvidia scam worked by pushing "32bit is important" narrative while their own cards were unable to play games in 32bit with playable framerates 😀. 32bit mode tanked fps by >half on TNT and ~1/3 on TNT2 (less on TNT2 Ultra), You had a choice of 16bit at higher resolution, or playable 32bit at 640x480. https://www.anandtech.com/show/378/5

The other fact was Nvidia 16bit rendering looked really bad, and propagating this "32bit is important" lie often equated 16bit rendering with this peculiar bad Nvidia look.

3dfx failed to send strong enough message to separate itself from this '16bit looks like poop' stigma. They also failed to anticipate this marketing angle and implement pointless box ticking 32bit framebuffer in hardware as a showcase option just to demonstrate no difference in rendered output on their hardware. It would only cost just a little bit of performance, because unlike nvidias tnt/tnt2 voodoo3 did all the math at higher bit depths internally. 16bit was a ram size optimization mainly, saving ~1MB of framebuffer (important at the time of 16MB cards), it merely saved ~120MB/s of its >2000MB/s ram bandwidth (stupid and unimportant).
Another option would be implementing dither filter in the driver framebuffer read-back routine in 32bit mode. Call it some catchy hybercolorcompression marketing wank name and there you go, checkbox ticked, screenshots look good out of the box.

3dfx was all about those clever "where it counts" optimizations, but failed to properly advertise them.

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

also I remember testing the "22bit option" and trying running Quake3 and the differences were really far from visible. The 32bit internal tech of the Kyro2 compared to that was like another planet.

you could even say it was like from the future, 2 years in the future exactly 😁
Kind of not applicable to a card released in April of 1999. In 1999 Voodoo3 "16bit" output looked like TNT2 32bit while running at TNT2 16bit speeds.

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

About the Motion Compensation, it is true that a Pentium II high

I dont know what the lowest bar is for software rendering, but overclocked Celeron was definitely enough.
Celeron 300A@450 on 440BX will play all DVDs with no sweat in pure software mode. $90 CPU from 1998.
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9812/31 … .idg/index.html
>Celeron 333-MHz and "300a" 300-MHz models for $107 and $90
>Slot 1 Celeron-333 was listed at $115, down from $159, and the 300a version was listed at $94, down from $138
https://www.theregister.com/1999/02/08/amd_to_call_k63/
>K6-2/300 will cost $65, the K6-2/333 $75, the K6-2/350 $90, the K6-2/366 $96, the K6-2/380 $123, the K6-2/400 $138
>K6-2/450, now officially launched, $210

August 1998:
K6-2 350 MHz announced at $300 http://www.cpushack.com/CIC/announce/1998/k6-2-350.html
Celeron 300A announced at $149 http://www.cpushack.com/CIC/announce/1998/pentII-450.html
February 1999:
K6-2 450 MHz announced at $200 http://www.cpushack.com/CIC/announce/1999/k6-2-450.html

You had to be locked into Socket7 ecosystem, uninformed, positively insane or an extreme cheapskate (I can "save" $30 on the motherboard!!1) to buy AMD at the time.

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

I tried many solutions

but you already confessed to owning low end "K6-2 350". You absolutely needed >$100 in hardware to play DVD because you decided not to spend that $100 for a better CPU 😀

386SX wrote on 2021-05-10, 09:57:

even hardware decoders PCI ones I still own, at the end the best tech on gpu was the one on ATi chipset that since the Rage 128 Pro and Rage Mobility introduced both the Motion Compensation and IDCT

again would love to see different video acceleration solutions impact on CPU usage. I know that Rage Pro with MC is useless when combined with Pentium 2 300MHz.

About the 16bit vs 32bit I'd agree with most things, but as said if it wasn't that different visually (and I'd agree for the common gamer of those times) a company that had various competitors out there that was accelerating "a lot" their offer on the market, had to think "maybe beside how much is important or not, it's about time to implement 32bit in some way because on this point everyone are already implementing their chips". Also the logic of having the chip freq connected to the mem freq has to be solved because it might have been useful to have 183Mhz chips with 166Mhz rams or even faster.
The Kyro2 32bit color tech ok was a future thing but I suppose not that "futuristic" and had more sense in the Voodoo3 years that not when most games and people actually were already playing @ 32bit (even if older 16bit game did benefit a lot from that). But as also talked in the interview, when the company is wealthy and have lot of resources can survive to a bad period (like missing a gpu generation timeline) and I imagine the STB thing introduced such situation in which maybe the next chip had to work "in defence" of the competitors. But at that point Voodoo3 needed some features more to show having similar things to competitors not only the brand and the frame rate differences that in the review was ALWAYS underlined that "thank to the 16 bit only...".
Even Savage4 had if I'm correct 32bit and Motion Compensation and even if I didn't remember if only on paper also a sort of FSAA. It didn't matter that much at which frame rate.. it was not a bad solution compared to their prices.

About the Motion Compensation, imho it has never been "useless" because the cpu always did benefit from that and if not that much visible in a full screen sceneario it would be in a multitasking one. But let's consider another thing, if you wanted to play DVD on computer you still needed a full version dvd sw player and on the quality side as already said the CPU only decoding wasn't exactly "quality oriented" but more "speed optimized" using MMX, 3DNow! and/or SSE. When we bought the K6-2 350 built new PC it was probably late 98 early 99 and it was a middle-end still quite expensive choice with its 64MB of PC100 ram. It was a full ATX already built PC and obviously if I had to come back to those years I'd have bought any second hand Pentium 200 MMX with any Voodoo1/Banshee card saving money from such system that was not necessary at all for Win 98 tasks.
But sure thing was that with the Voodoo3 and this cpu it couldn't decode MPEG2 stream cause the V3 chip had only a basic acceleration in the quite intensive task and I remember only with some tweaks few sw player could decode MPEG2 full frame but not nearly as smooth or as good like an ATi solution or a Sigma Design hw decoding that came with their own full player (and with later updates for modern DVDs).
If I remember correctly in those times a middle end pc without acceleration might play those MPEG2 at full cpu usage, with motion compensation it might have goes down to 60% occupation and adding IDCT hw stage it might arrive to 30-40% or something like that. With the hw decoders instead if I remember correctly it was around 15-20% of cpu usage sometimes higher sometimes lower probably for the mainboard communications from PCI to IDE etc..

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-09, 14:11:

Well, not quite... In my country (and in my city in particular) things were a "little" bit different. Intel parts/combos (even Celerons) were EXTREMELY expensive and completely out of reach for most people, not to mention that the Celeron 300A was probably unavailable most of the time - we only had a few small local retailers and the PC parts they had for sale were very limited.

Where was that? New Zealand? For reference my Eastern European post Soviet occupation country had no availability problems.

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-09, 14:11:

I myself upgraded to an AMD K6-2 500 MHz in the Spring of 2000 (yes, I was poor)

$45 CPU delivering $45 worth of performance
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/600-mhz- … et-7,210-7.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/performa … uide,213-5.html AMD K6-2 500 MHz delivering 2/3 of Celeron 366 performance, when AMD uses GeForce and Celeron is paired with worst possible Intel integrated graphics chipset. And this is even before any celeron overclocking.

300A was $65 in January 2000 https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2000/01 … 0a-or-not-300a/ before they all ran out, $65-70 was Intels lowest price point in 1999-2000 moving from 300 to 366MHz Celerons https://www.edn.com/intel-plans-unscheduled-c … =relatedcontent

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-09, 14:11:

, and I distinctly remember a few very specific things: - the cheapest Intel combo alternative was almost twice the price that […]
Show full quote

, and I distinctly remember a few very specific things:
- the cheapest Intel combo alternative was almost twice the price that I paid for the K6-2 500 combo.
- all the AMD options were at the top of the A4 page (being cheaper/sorted by price in ascending order), while all Intel parts were at the bottom (there were no Athlon parts in my neck of the woods yet).
- the most expensive Intel combo on that price list was based on a 750 MHz Coppermine and had an absolutely INSANE price (I think somewhere around 10x - 15x the price I paid for my K6-2 combo).

Price anchoring and false equivalency fallacies. You saw absolute dog K6 233 at the top of cheapest crap list and associated it with some kind of thrift potential. You looked at the bottom with Pentium 3 chips and dismissed Intel outright. You later compared K6 500MHz with Celeron 500MHz and arrived at the conclusion it was a 30-50% price deal.

When buying my first PC I decided to spend exactly $40 for CPU/motherboard combo, was enough for 386DX40. My well meaning computer literate friend tried to talk me into $50 486SX33 on a VLB motherboard. My reaction was 'No way, $10 is a large pizza!'. Then Doom came out and there I was playing at 6-8fps ....

They are not THAT Good, just a special thing. Rendition Verite had better Quake port. Tomb Raider had also other and better ports. If we talk about DOS. In Windows, there were an early time where Glide ruled, but in reality majority of good games got a DX/OGL version early on. And now we have wrappers. Sooo where is the real beef.... Nostalgia.

Well I sold my Voodoo and voodoo 2 cards just because people were buying them ca. 100EUR a piece. Now thinking of also selling my Gravis Ultrasounds. Just do not like to hold too much money laying around, that I really do not use that often, and I am not a collector, just need some real DOS computers.

386SX wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:04:

Even Savage4 had if I'm correct 32bit and Motion Compensation and even if I didn't remember if only on paper also a sort of FSAA. It didn't matter that much at which frame rate.. it was not a bad solution compared to their prices.

Savage4 is a perfect example, its another scam on the uninformed. Fantastic on paper, all those features
32-bit true color
2000x2000 textures
texture compression
AGP 4X
Motion compensation

and a $80-100 price point, similar to cheapest voodoo3 2000s. Looks fantastic until you decide to play a game and https://www.anandtech.com/show/291/12 https://www.anandtech.com/show/402/7

but those stupid bullet points sold crap to price conscious public. You had to be in the know to pick correct hardware.

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:19:

Where was that? New Zealand? For reference my Eastern European post Soviet occupation country had no availability problems.

Also Eastern European post Soviet occupation country, the only country that actually spilled blood during the Eastern European revolutions (let's see how good your history knowledge is). 😀

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:19:

Price anchoring and false equivalency fallacies. You saw absolute dog K6 233 at the top of cheapest crap list and associated it with some kind of thrift potential. You looked at the bottom with Pentium 3 chips and dismissed Intel outright. You later compared K6 500MHz with Celeron 500MHz and arrived at the conclusion it was a 30-50% price deal.

Ehm, no: cheapest AMD PC was half the price of the cheapest Intel PC. It's that simple. No fallacies, no purchase bias, no nothing 😀

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:19:

When buying my first PC I decided to spend exactly $40 for CPU/motherboard combo, was enough for 386DX40. My well meaning computer literate friend tried to talk me into $50 486SX33 on a VLB motherboard. My reaction was '$10 is a large pizza!'. Then Doom came out and there I was playing at 6-8fps ....

$10 for a pizza before the turn of the century, in Eastern Europe (I presume Poland by your nickname)? Damn, that must've been quite a large Pizza. 😁

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 09:48:

You had to be locked into Socket7 ecosystem, uninformed, positively insane or an extreme cheapskate (I can "save" $30 on the motherboard!!1) to buy AMD at the time.

See my previous post 😀
The truth of the matter is that for quite a few people the Celeron was most likely NOT an option.
At least for me it definitely wasn't. As I stated previously, when I upgraded in 2000, the cheapest Intel system in my town was twice the price I paid for the K6-2 500. That's far from the "saving $30" argument.

It's a mistake to try and look at this whole situation from a modern perspective. Even though my family was far from rich, my single mother tried her best to buy me a PC as early as possible and she managed to do so at the end of 1998, when she bought me a Pentium MMX 166. Fun fact: the Celeron 300A would've been readily available during that time in other parts of the world, but not where I lived. And even if it had been, for sure the price in my town would've been MUCH higher than that of the MMX. During that day and age, in my country, owning a PC (ANY PC!) was almost equivalent to owning a car. Nobody thought about the performance, nobody cared if you had an Intel, an AMD or a Cyrix. 😀 Simply owning a PC was mind blowing in and of itself.

And, of course, being uninformed (particularly during those days) wouldn't have been a crime either. As I said, looking at the matter from a modern perspective (or from the perspective of someone who was maybe more privileged than others) is simply wrong. Either way, those early days and having a PC at the age of 14 (even if it wasn't based on the almighty Celeron 300A) gave me a head start so that, by the time I was 20, I was already working in this field. The fact that I now handle infrastructures that sustain 30+ billion requests per month is a direct consequence of that early head start - even if it was with a puny P MMX & a K6-2 😉

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:44:

Savage4 is a perfect example, its another scam on the uninformed. Fantastic on paper, all those features 32-bit true color 2000 […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:04:

Even Savage4 had if I'm correct 32bit and Motion Compensation and even if I didn't remember if only on paper also a sort of FSAA. It didn't matter that much at which frame rate.. it was not a bad solution compared to their prices.

Savage4 is a perfect example, its another scam on the uninformed. Fantastic on paper, all those features
32-bit true color
2000x2000 textures
texture compression
AGP 4X
Motion compensation

and a $80-100 price point, similar to cheapest voodoo3 2000s. Looks fantastic until you decide to play a game and https://www.anandtech.com/show/291/12 https://www.anandtech.com/show/402/7

but those stupid bullet points sold crap to price conscious public. You had to be in the know to pick correct hardware.

When I bought the just released Voodoo3 2000 it was a bit on the expensive side at least here in EU. Sort of what nowdays would feel like 250 euros back than probably like comparable to 130$ at that time before Euro translation. I remember that I was suggested the Voodoo1 option but I obviously thought "the latest the better"... At the end from a price/game performance point of view any Banshee or any Voodoo2 8MB or any Savage3D/4 or even a TNT would have been a more than enough choice for better price and mostly same features.
There were already older or modern alternative cards compared to the Voodoo3 that maybe were -10fps slower but costed less and more than enough IMHO obviously. Not everyone needed 1280x1024 gaming like tested in reviews.
But still, feature list even when not used or useful, had quite an impact in that specific period.

There is a certain period between 1996 and 1998 (inclusive) before Direct3D and OpenGL IHV drivers matured enough when Glide was your go-to API for 3D games. Many of those games did not end up eventually getting Direct3D or OpenGL renderers, or in some cases those renderers are inferior in some ways. As a result, if you want to re-experience that period fully, you probably want a Voodoo card even if you don't really need one per se.

I never got the Voodoo 1. At the time I had a Pentium 133 and could not persuade my parents to buy me one, so I experienced a big number of games from that era on software rendering. Only in summer 1998 I upgraded to a Voodoo 2 8MB, and it was an eye opener. In 2000 I went with a Voodoo 3 3000 instead of a TNT 2 and I never regretted it. I had one friend who made fun of me and boasted about 32-bit graphics, and when I went over to his place his games ran like ass in 32-bit color. Moreover, to this day I can't really honestly and 100% certainly tell you that 3dfx's 22-bit rendering claim was a valid approximation of their image quality, but I can tell you 100% certainly that Voodoo 3's 16-bit rendering with its 2x2 box filtering was a million times better than the TNT2.

I never had the Voodoo1 too back in those time cause I still had the 80386 computer until late 98. But looking back how many cards, how many components had no sense when alternative ones already could do whatever in the short time period was needed. Considering the games I was playing in those times (latest 2.5D games and Directx6/Glide ones) a Banshee might have been a better choice but many games had also D3D/OGL api support that was slower for sure, but began to accelerate until the point the difference was easily zero on the feature side and considering the next generation GPU also on the speed side.

But just to be clear, I still have great memories of what 3dfx cards meant in those times, I remember I wanted so much a computer with a Voodoo1 but I could not and when we went much later for a new computer (the single desktop we bought new "already built" ever and never again) we went for that K6-2 that didn't last much long after the Voodoo3 choice. I ended up selling it probably two years later I don't remember after trying even the K6-2 550Mhz upgrade (another error..200Mhz of never seen differences) and finally went for a Socket A Duron 750 based mainboard which I began to assemble myself for each component. It was like another planet obviously. I think for the vga I went for a Geforce2 MX at that point, the original one. I still have that card. Cheap PCB build but a solid performer in FPS (less in VGA output quality).

GeForce2MX was my card after the Voodoo 3 as well, although mine was the MX400. One year later I upgraded to a Pentium III and GeForce 2 Ti and passed my MX to my sister. She played many hours of Dungeon Keeper 2 on it.

Funny thing is, I never again had an Intel CPU or an nVidia graphics card in my daily PC after that.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-11, 13:27:

GeForce2MX was my card after the Voodoo 3 as well, although mine was the MX400. One year later I upgraded to a GeForce 2 Ti and passed my MX to my sister. She played many hours of Dungeon Keeper 2 on it.

After the Geforce2 MX I remember I read a lot about the Kyro II and what it meant as a new player on the market so I had to have one once they began to be a bit cheaper and I still own that one too. Old 16bit games basically really could looks like 32bit ones and the best example was the game Thief II. I remember it was immediately visible in the dark enviroment of that game how much every light had all the colors and no classic 16bit effects "problems". Not that it was that important at that time but still was an impressive thing along with their tech itself, I already went for the Athlon 1100 too and then the Athlon XP 1800+. Later cards were the Radeon 8500 LE and the Radeon 9500 Pro"L" memory. 😁
But my upgrade passion was about to end with the switch to x64 tech. The last PC I upgraded as modern one has been an Athlon 64 3500 with a Radeon X1800 XL. It was a fast middle end machine when I built that and yet many games had difficulties running smooth at high details.. I sold that config soon and switched to old notebooks, then netbooks, then collecting retro hardware and still nowdays I use retro hardware for daily machine. 😀

386SX wrote on 2021-05-11, 13:33:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-11, 13:27:

GeForce2MX was my card after the Voodoo 3 as well, although mine was the MX400. One year later I upgraded to a GeForce 2 Ti and passed my MX to my sister. She played many hours of Dungeon Keeper 2 on it.

After the Geforce2 MX I remember I read a lot about the Kyro II and what it meant as a new player on the market so I had to have one once they began to be a bit cheaper and I still own that one too. Old 16bit games basically really could looks like 32bit ones and the best example was the game Thief II. I remember it was immediately visible in the dark enviroment of that game how much every light had all the colors and no classic 16bit effects "problems". Not that it was that important at that time but still was an impressive thing along with their tech itself. Then I went for the Athlon 1100 option, then the Athlon XP 1800+. Later cards were the Radeon 8500 LE and the Radeon 9500 "L" memory. 😁

From the GF2 Ultra I also went on to the Radeon 8500LE, and from that I moved on to 9600PRO, the 9800SE (softmodded to PRO), X1600PRO, HD3850, HD4850, HD7700 and now an RX480 8GB.

Go #TeamRed

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-11, 13:36:

386SX wrote on 2021-05-11, 13:33:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-11, 13:27:

GeForce2MX was my card after the Voodoo 3 as well, although mine was the MX400. One year later I upgraded to a GeForce 2 Ti and passed my MX to my sister. She played many hours of Dungeon Keeper 2 on it.

After the Geforce2 MX I remember I read a lot about the Kyro II and what it meant as a new player on the market so I had to have one once they began to be a bit cheaper and I still own that one too. Old 16bit games basically really could looks like 32bit ones and the best example was the game Thief II. I remember it was immediately visible in the dark enviroment of that game how much every light had all the colors and no classic 16bit effects "problems". Not that it was that important at that time but still was an impressive thing along with their tech itself. Then I went for the Athlon 1100 option, then the Athlon XP 1800+. Later cards were the Radeon 8500 LE and the Radeon 9500 "L" memory. 😁

From the GF2 Ultra I also went on to the Radeon 8500LE, and from that I moved on to 9600PRO, the 9800SE (softmodded to PRO), X1600PRO, HD3850, HD4850, HD7700 and now an RX480 8GB.

Go #TeamRed

The Geforce2 Ultra was so expensive where I lived that I could only read the wonderful results on reviews. In fact I think it has been one of the most expensive cards up that years. That card was impressive for sure in everything, features, speed, frequency.. one of those I wish I had and I could not, like (back then) the Rage Fury Maxx, the Geforce DDR.. those were great times indeed.
I remember buying many tech newspapers with reviews of those cards and read so deeply all the reviews.

I've often wished I could find what prices I was seeing in Nov/Dec 1999 so that I could re-evaluate my low budget upgrade from back then. But there are a few factors that played into me asking for (and getting) a K6-3 instead of a Celeron

1) Finding and carefully comparing benchmarks on hardware review sites was not routine for me at the time. I read them a little bit but didn't put as much weight on them as I would have later on. Internet hardware review sites were immature at the time and it wasn't a given that any particular article was reliable or credible. Many articles from those days sounded like they were written by 15 year olds.

2) The Celeron 300A's fame comes from overclocking, but perhaps partly because of point 1 above, I was not particularly informed about that option. To me a Celeron 300MHz was a 300MHz Celeron.
I was not an overclocker, I knew basically nothing about it at the time and was not comfortable with the idea. If somebody bought me an expensive motherboard+CPU upgrade, the last thing I was going to do was risk frying it.

3) A super-7 upgrade avoided needing to replace the AT case, the power supply, and the 72pin RAM. Keeping my old RAM meant I had to clock it at 66MHz, but I was more accepting of that since I could upgrade it to 100MHz SDRAM later.

4) I had a bias against Celeron and Pentium-2/3 were expensive. I should have taken Celerons more seriously, but I was especially put off by their 66MHz FSB.
I didn't pay close attention to the advantage Celeron had over K6 in 3D (FPU) games. This was about the time I was starting to care more about 3D but I still had a Virge card and wouldn't be upgrading that for another year.

The choice of a K6-3 CPU did inflate the expense quite a bit though. I think the K6-3 450MHz was something like $150. A K6-2 was probably $100 or less. The CPU probably screwed up some of the economics of that upgrade.

I didn't get a 3D accelerator until a year later, and by that time 3dfx was basically dead.
Nowadays I still have that old K6-3 system and I have a Voodoo3 3500, so whenever I get that system back together I'd like to try how it compares (in real games) to the Geforce2 MX I ended up getting.
Voodoo4 would be another interesting experiment on the K6 system since that was on the market when I got the MX, but I'm sure I'll never have one of those.
I wasn't aware until recent times (reading this forum) that 3dfx was good at getting more speed from weaker CPUs like the K6 series.

In my opinion nowdays is a passion/hobby to collect high end retro computer components, but back then I wish I stayed low-end for my configs instead of the usual middle/high end race for the high end upgrade. The K6-2 was an example.. the 350Mhz version I had was good for productivity tasks not FPU related (and not that cheap into built new configs) but when I upgraded to the 550Mhz version I was expecting who knows which jump and instead it was difficult to see differences and ended up to see them with the Duron 750. At the end I survived with a 80386SX-20 based computer from 1995 to 1999 almost and probably should have done similar choices with later configs, like buying second hand components, optimizing old configuration to make game running the same.. here we see great results running demanding games on 486/Pentium computers with 3D accelerators. I wish I pushed each components to its upgrade limits before even thinking changing all.

Still it was interesting to see how fast and how many features were introduced in the CPU/GPU battles. Nowdays I don't care even reading modern reviews. The only thing that might interest me technically would be the Global Illumination rendering and the VR capabilities but everything seems so expensive and yet boring.
At the end retrogaming is enough cause I never have been a serious videogamer and I finished only the games that was worth to concentrate in.. only lately I bought again and finally finished both Thief Gold and Thief II games after twenty years.. 😁 But such innovative and still old style offline games were another world (better imho) compared to the modern ones.

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:49:

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:19:

Where was that? New Zealand? For reference my Eastern European post Soviet occupation country had no availability problems.

Also Eastern European post Soviet occupation country, the only country that actually spilled blood during the Eastern European revolutions (let's see how good your history knowledge is). 😀

would that be blood spilled in 1968 using tanks send by my country by any chance? 🙁 That would put you closer to Germany, I would expect excellent PC components supply in 2000.

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:49:

Ehm, no: cheapest AMD PC was half the price of the cheapest Intel PC. It's that simple. No fallacies, no purchase bias, no nothing 😀

Those cheapest AMD PCs were in the bargain bin for a reason, mainly to clear inventory from obsolete components, they were also half the speed. But K6-2 500 would still be a current AMD part in early 2000. It certainly wasnt the cheapest CPU to get, those would be K6 400 or slower.

I managed to find a local non comprehensive price comparison from September 1999 Komputer Świat magazine (Polish Computer Bild), they only listed random components by the cheapest reputable country wide suppliers. 300A sadly missing, I remember 300A listed at 300zl = $73 in early 1999 by the company I was working for.

dollar:zloty 1:4.1
K6-2 350 $56
Celeron 366 $85
K6-2 400 $96
Celeron 400 $96
K6-3 450 $270 ROFL
Surprisingly chepest motherboard according to this magazine was a $48 Shuttle Slot1 LX 😮 probably old stock clearing sale. https://www.anandtech.com/show/95 not the best deal in the world, unstable at 83MHz.

Japanese prices for comparison https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/ … 0925/p_cpu.html
dollar:yen 1:111
K6-2 350 $45
Celeron 300A $54 socket $56 slot
Celeron 366 $54 socket $72 slot
K6-2 400 $47
Celeron 400 $69
K6-3 450 $150

Another one October 1999 CD-Action, Polish gaming magazine sold with included demo CD

This one is from small local, lets just say less reputable company (listed prices dont include tax hehe) PC-Serwis. They were buying from the company I got my first job at 😀 We were a regional distributor for Asus/Zida/CTX/PC-Chips (oh the amount of returns on those).
Cheapest 440BX motherboard Shuttle HOT-661 $97 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/440bx-mo … view,91-11.html solid cheap pick.
DEALS section has K6-2 350 with AT motherboard (most likely pcchips knowing PC-Serwis) listed at $117 🙁 This is the kind of item price conscious people chose, ensuring future full of instabilities and low performance.

Graphic cards, so we are at least a little on topic:
3dfx Voodoo2 $75 DEALS section
16MB TNT2 M64 $75 DEALS section
cheapest TNT $75
cheapest garbage Savage4 $81
Voodoo3 2000 $120
Voodoo3 3000 $150
cheapest TNT2 $196
TNT2 Ultra $258

Voodoo3 was a no brainer in late 1999, with Voodoo3 2000 being great budget option, and 3000 a top performer at half the price of TNT2Ultra. Not only were they cheapr per fps, but you also got access to Glide games, and top of the line VGA output quality.

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:49:

$10 for a pizza before the turn of the century, in Eastern Europe (I presume Poland by your nickname)? Damn, that must've been quite a large Pizza. 😁

Now that you said it It sure looked weird, so I googled 😀
Pizza Hut 1994 flyer
Exchange 1:23000, average monthly salary in 1994 5-6 millions, $220-270.
large supreme + Coleslaw + bottle of cola = $10, and where is my garlic bread? 🙁

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:49:

the cheapest Intel system in my town was twice the price I paid for the K6-2 500. That's far from the "saving $30" argument.

Surely there was an option of ordering something from a computer magazine ads?

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-11, 11:49:

And, of course, being uninformed (particularly during those days) wouldn't have been a crime either.

hence my confession of ending up with 386 because of pizza 😒

386SX wrote on 2021-05-11, 16:57:

At the end I survived with a 80386SX-20 based computer from 1995 to 1999 almost

similar here, but 386DX40 up to 1998, when I got first job.

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 17:06:

would that be blood spilled in 1968 using tanks send by my country by any chance? 🙁 That would put you closer to Germany, I would expect excellent PC components supply in 2000.

No, my hometown was Galați, Romania.

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 17:06:

Those cheapest AMD PCs were in the bargain bin for a reason, mainly to clear inventory from obsolete components, they were also half the speed. But K6-2 500 would still be a current AMD part in early 2000. It certainly wasnt the cheapest CPU to get, those would be K6 400 or slower.

No, the K6-2 500 was definitely the first on the list (come to think of it, I probably still have that list somewhere at my mother's place - will definitely look for it when I get the chance). To me this was still a good upgrade compared to the Pentium MMX (and it really was, considering my limited options). I think further down the list there were the K6-2 533 / 550 parts and probably also K6-3. As for the Intel parts, I'm pretty sure the cheapest were some late Pentium 2s (don't remember seeing any Celerons, not even newer/faster SKUs).

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 17:06:

I managed to find a local non comprehensive price comparison from September 1999 Komputer Świat magazine (Polish Computer Bild), they only listed random components by the cheapest reputable country wide suppliers. 300A sadly missing, I remember 300A listed at 300zl = $73 in early 1999 by the company I was working for.

Damn, that looks awesome... Sadly, there wasn't anything like that in my town, not by a long shot 😀 Just a black and white sheet of A4 paper with maybe 15 - 20 PC parts in total.

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 17:06:

Now that you said it It sure looked weird, so I googled :) Pizza Hut 1994 flyer https://v.wpimg.pl/QUJDREVGfjQrJiR2eTxzIWh-cCw_Z […]
Show full quote

Now that you said it It sure looked weird, so I googled 😀
Pizza Hut 1994 flyer
Exchange 1:23000, average monthly salary in 1994 5-6 millions, $220-270.
large supreme + Coleslaw + bottle of cola = $10, and where is my garlic bread? 🙁

Ouch! In my hometown there was a great Italian pizzeria in the late '90s/early '00, and I remember paying ~ 20 000 lei for a normal 32 cm pizza (which, at that time, was probably around $1 - $1.5 ).

rasz_pl wrote on 2021-05-11, 17:06:

Surely there was an option of ordering something from a computer magazine ads?

Don't think so, at least not easily anyway. Times were very different back then (in some ways bad, in others... good). I'm sure there were better options for people living in București and other bigger cities, though.

shamino wrote on 2021-05-11, 14:25:

Many articles from those days sounded like they were written by 15 year olds.

Well, Anand Lal Shimpi was fifteen in 1998.😄