4 ms·

Still fondly remember my passively-cooled! Voodoo 3, their rendering stack was top quality. Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Times change fast...

k__ 9y ago
Hehe, all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. A friend of mine even got a Voodoo 5500 and we tried to get Quake 3 Arena so tuned that we couldn't see any pixels anymore. I was the first one with a GeForce 2MX, which worked quite well and long considering it was the budget version of the gf2. If I look at the performance indexes, the Voodoo 5500 wasn't very much better than the GF2MX.
- IndrekR 9y ago
  And there was simple resistor resolder hack to make GeForce 2MX think it is Quadro. It was very useless and very cool at the same time. Few people got into hardware hacking (read electronics engineering) thanks to this little and yet very positive soldering experience.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    I remember in the same era, carefully shorting a blown fuse on the package of my Athlon using a graphite pencil, so that I could overclock it. I heated my apartment with that PC.
  - Zardoz84 9y ago
    and the GF2 MX with DDR ram, can move Doom 3 at a barely playable FPS, if you downgrade the game textures. I played the whole game with these GPU.
- ksec 9y ago
  >all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. Mostly becoz many games were better on Glide then OpnenGL
justin66 9y ago
> Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Nvidia was never really feeble. Even when 3Dfx was shocking everyone with their raw throughput and had a bit of a moat (until DirectX stopped sucking) with the Glide API, Nvidia got their foot in the door with 32-bit rendering and decent OpenGL. 3Dfx made sense for a lot of us - anyone using Quake would get it if they could, since raw performance mattered a lot and you don't suffer too much for only having 16-bit rendering of all those shades of brown - but with anything later than the original Voodoo, you felt like you were making a bit of a trade-off. I've still got a Voodoo 3, I think. No telling if it actually works, but it was the only add-on card I've ever had that warped with time. Poor heat sink design and/or not enough layers on the PCB, I guess.
- specialist 9y ago
  IIRC, which is a poor bet, I probably choose NVidia over 3dfx because of the OpenGL drivers. I was doing CAD, VRML, OpenGL stuff thru the 90s.
  - justin66 9y ago
    If your card was anything with "Geforce" in the name that was certainly the best choice. Even before the Geforce era, 3dfx never had anything except problematic OpenGL "mini drivers" which worked okay with Quake-based games but not much else.

k__ 9y ago

Hehe, all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. A friend of mine even got a Voodoo 5500 and we tried to get Quake 3 Arena so tuned that we couldn't see any pixels anymore. I was the first one with a GeForce 2MX, which worked quite well and long considering it was the budget version of the gf2. If I look at the performance indexes, the Voodoo 5500 wasn't very much better than the GF2MX.

IndrekR 9y ago
And there was simple resistor resolder hack to make GeForce 2MX think it is Quadro. It was very useless and very cool at the same time. Few people got into hardware hacking (read electronics engineering) thanks to this little and yet very positive soldering experience.
- sevensor 9y ago
  I remember in the same era, carefully shorting a blown fuse on the package of my Athlon using a graphite pencil, so that I could overclock it. I heated my apartment with that PC.
- Zardoz84 9y ago
  and the GF2 MX with DDR ram, can move Doom 3 at a barely playable FPS, if you downgrade the game textures. I played the whole game with these GPU.
ksec 9y ago
>all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. Mostly becoz many games were better on Glide then OpnenGL

justin66 9y ago

> Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Nvidia was never really feeble. Even when 3Dfx was shocking everyone with their raw throughput and had a bit of a moat (until DirectX stopped sucking) with the Glide API, Nvidia got their foot in the door with 32-bit rendering and decent OpenGL. 3Dfx made sense for a lot of us - anyone using Quake would get it if they could, since raw performance mattered a lot and you don't suffer too much for only having 16-bit rendering of all those shades of brown - but with anything later than the original Voodoo, you felt like you were making a bit of a trade-off. I've still got a Voodoo 3, I think. No telling if it actually works, but it was the only add-on card I've ever had that warped with time. Poor heat sink design and/or not enough layers on the PCB, I guess.

specialist 9y ago
IIRC, which is a poor bet, I probably choose NVidia over 3dfx because of the OpenGL drivers. I was doing CAD, VRML, OpenGL stuff thru the 90s.
- justin66 9y ago
  If your card was anything with "Geforce" in the name that was certainly the best choice. Even before the Geforce era, 3dfx never had anything except problematic OpenGL "mini drivers" which worked okay with Quake-based games but not much else.