4 ms·

Yeah, I was a pretty serious PC gamer (Quake/Q2/Q3) back during the rise and fall of 3dfx. Pretty much everyone I knew went from software rendering to 3dfx-chi

Yeah, I was a pretty serious PC gamer (Quake/Q2/Q3) back during the rise and fall of 3dfx. Pretty much everyone I knew went from software rendering to 3dfx-chipset cards but then jumped ship when the Riva TNT2 cards came out, primarily because they just produced much better visuals due to support for 32-bit color while the 3dfx offerings were all limited to 16-bit. There was still a bit of a split in the market back then between those who went TNT2 (amazing, at the time, image quality) and those who went to the Voodoo3 (good raw speed, but limited to 16-bit color and thus noticeable banding artifacts)... 3dfx still held on to a bit of a niche there for a while longer, but then once the GeForce and GeForce 2 came out 3dfx was just dead in the water with nothing that could compete anywhere on the performance versus image quality axes.

rasz 9y ago
Color depth was never the problem, 3dfx used dithering comparable to ~22bit depth (according to company itself). https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=36548 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=36548 Texture memory capacity, texture size limit (256x256!) and lack of s3tc/DXT1 compression were the real culprit. TNT shipped with 16MB, in TNT2 32MB came standard. Texture quality played the biggest role in perceived visual difference. Not to mention TNT performance went 1/2 down in 32bit mode, TNT2 fared only slightly better. Quality is great, until you learn both Nvidia and ATI repeatedly cheated in benchmarks and games dropping quality below old 3dfx limits. ATI Quake 3 was quite dramatic: https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-quake-iii https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-...