16 ms·

The 3dfx Voodoo1

476 points by fafner 8y ago

blt 8y ago
My first 3D accelerator was a Voodoo2, first used on Quake 2. The cast light from the moving rocket on the floor is unforgettable.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  The difference from software-rendered Quake 2 to hardware rendering was massive, not least because of the colored lighting. In some places, it definitely bordered on overkill.
  - blt 8y ago
    game developers cannot help themselves, after colored lighting they moved on to SSAA and bloom...
itgoon 8y ago
The Voodoo was, very literally, a game-changer. The difference in quality between Quake and GLQuake was astounding. Just a few seconds of gameplay was enough to get someone to make the purchase.
- xenospn 8y ago
  Same with PC speaker vs SoundBlaster.
  - BuckRogers 8y ago
    If you only had or experienced IBM-compatible PCs. If you started on a Commodore or Amiga, the PC speaker to Sound Blaster/Adlib shift was more akin to just catching up. I wasn't completely happy until the 486 era because of this. The Voodoo1 4MB which I had back then as well, was unprecedented. I agree that the Sound Blaster was great (in isolation against older x86 PCs), but 3dfx was the first standout example of the fruit in the IBM-compatible space, and a clear demonstration in the gaming sense as to why it took over the market.
    - armitron 8y ago
      The first standout example was VGA and games that fully took advantage of it. I was an Amiga user but AGA was too little too late and architecturally a disaster for certain games (DOOM, Quake). Even games like Monkey Island and Indiana Jones were a lot better on VGA than Amiga. The game that did it for me was Privateer vs Elite II. I had to get a PC after I saw it. It was crystal clear the Amiga could not compete.
  - mhd 8y ago
    I think the equivalent of the Voodoo in the soundcards-space would've been the Gravis Ultrasound. In both the evolutionary and soon-to-be-forgotten sense. PC Speaker vs. Soundblaster is more EGA vs VGA, something much more profound. And beneficiary to the gaming space, as opposed to early 3D, which basically ruined all the things for quite a while...
    - armitron 8y ago
      Not even close. PC Speaker vs Soundblaster is Hercules (monochrome) vs VGA. You could never go back, same as 3dfx. GUS was better than sb pro/sb 16 but a lot of games didn't take advantage of it and once AWE32/64 arrived, GUS was dead in the water.
      - mhd 8y ago
        Going back to 2D was my sincerest wish back then, when they tried shoehorning everything into 3D. There was no reason back then for having e.g. jump and runs, adventures or RTS games in 3D. It worked fine enough for FPS, which is why that genre dominated so much back then. And yeah, I knew that the GUS only enjoyed a very short-lived popularity, just like Voodoo cards when the Geforces etc. showed up. Okay, maybe the popularity at its height wasn't quite equal, but the next 3D fads are quite a few steps down (e.g. PowerVR or the first Matroxes).
- Crinus 8y ago
  The two main issues that GLQuake has over software one are that the textures are squashed down to the nearest power-of-two and lightmaps are clamped in the "0..100%" range whereas the software rasterizer has a (sort of) "0..200%" range. You can see this in the comparisons in the site where bright areas are dulled. Modern source ports have fixed both issues though (FWIW i recommend Quakespasm)
dev_dull 8y ago
Fabien can you tell me how your website is generated? It’s very readable.
- julianlam 8y ago
  ... generated? It's just HTML.
  - starpilot 8y ago
    Is that a js framework?
    - fabiensanglard 8y ago
      No. I dislike JavaScript. Because it bloats pages, slowdowns page loading and you always need libraries to do the smallest thing. I try to avoid JavaScript as much as possible. There is some on this page to flip the screenshots and that annoyed me.
      - carey 8y ago
        You should be able to do something with labels, CSS sibling selectors, and the :checked pseudo-class if it matters to you. I found an example at https://codepen.io/ancaspatariu/pen/WpQYOP https://codepen.io/ancaspatariu/pen/WpQYOP which does quite a lot more than you’d need.
        fabiensanglard 8y ago
        My hero :) !
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    Doesn't mean they literally hand-code every HTML file on the site. That would be highly unlikely since you'd have to change every file any time you update, say, the navbar. For example, google "static site generator".
  - 8y ago
pault 8y ago
I remember the first time someone told me about a card that you could put in your computer that would make quake run faster. It sounded so strange and exotic. Then I saw the screen caps with all their anti aliased glory and was devastated that I could never afford it on a movie theater clerk's salary.
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  On many computers it did not run faster just differently. Regular quake and glquake were two totally different programs.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    How would it not run faster, given that otherwise CPU had to shoulder the rendering entirely, in addition to everything else? Even high-end CPUs at the time would struggle with that, especially with resolution and bit depth being equal. IIRC the original Quake didn't even allow more than 256 colors in software rendering for this purpose, and even then I recall having to run it in weird resolutions like 400x300 to get framerates comparable to what Voodoo owners had for 640x480x16bit.
    - ahje 8y ago
      The Voodoo was the indisputable king of 3D accellerators back then. Not everyone was running GLquake with a Voodoo card in their PC though. I had an S3 Virge in my PC at the time. It was quite possible to get GLQuake running using a Direct3D to OpenGL wrapper, but damn it was slow. It sure looked better than regular Quake, but it wasn't really noticeably faster than software rendering.
  - rasz 8y ago
    Afaik there is no CPU where software Quake would run faster at same resolution as GLQuake on 3dfx.
    - Zardoz84 8y ago
tmountain 8y ago
Blast from the past. I have extremely fond memories of moving into my first apartment in 1999 and having friends come over to play Quake on the “voodoo box”. I had three PCs, a 10BASE-T LAN, and one machine that had been upgraded to a 3dfx card. We would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to play on the 3dfx box and spend many an all nighter playing till the sun came up. Those were the days...
- tracer4201 8y ago
  I’m pretty sure 1999 summer I spent playing Quake III Arena all day every day (the full game or demo) on my @Home broadband connection.
  - starpilot 8y ago
    @hoom
- zcid 8y ago
  I still have my original Voodoo card. It's the one piece of computer hardware I've never been willing to throw away. I still remember spending 8 hours downloading the Quake demo and having my mind blown. The only other time that holds a candle to that is when I got the GLQuake version. No other game has ever taken me on a ride like that.
  - jeffbax 8y ago
    Same w/ my Voodoo2. I keep meaning to frame it.
  - speg 8y ago
    I remember screaming when those giant polar bear type creatures would surprise me. It was such a step up over DukeNukem3D..
- eecc 8y ago
  Oh I remember those days; black coax crisscrossing rooms, loose terminators, deciding whether to go on a Quake or a thrash metal spree in the garage.
pselbert 8y ago
I recall purchasing two of these in the late 90s for relatively little money. Both cards could work in conjunction and it radically changed how games looked—really amazing how much of a difference it made. I can distinctly recall the difference in crispness, and how disappointing it was that didn’t apply to everything I used or played (3DS Max, CAD, etc). They were the first thing I ever sold on eBay, sometime around 1999.
- animal531 8y ago
  If I remember correctly they had it so that the one would render the top half of the screen and the other the bottom.
3dfxiter 8y ago
They forgot to mention at the end of the article that 3dfx filed for bankruptcy as they literally became "drunk on their success." Everybody started showing up to work intoxicated. Some investors got left out in the cold.
- fabiensanglard 8y ago
  I would be curious to read the source for this.
jersully72 8y ago
I have a box of 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in storage. No SLI cables but you can make them out of floppy ribbon cables. What should I do with them?
- lsh 8y ago
  There is a niche market for vintage gaming machines, I wouldn't be surprised if you could sell them for a few hundred each.
rasz 8y ago
Computer history museum 3dfx Oral History Panel is fantastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU
rayiner 8y ago
It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then.
- blt 8y ago
  we hit the energy per mm^2 limit.
  - corysama 8y ago
    Right around 2002. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
  - andrepd 8y ago
    Not quite ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
    - chewxy 8y ago
      And once we hit that limit we can still go further, by rethinking the way we program such that program applications are reversible. Hence I'm not too worried
  - amelius 8y ago
    More importantly, we reached the point where the average consumer can do most of the things they need a PC for.
- derefr 8y ago
  The obvious comparison to the GPU arms race is the VR hardware arms race. Same number of companies rising and falling in about the same period. Carmack is at the forefront of both, too.
chongli 8y ago
Wow, the lack of gamma correction in the Voodoo1 screenshot completely ruins the mood of the game.
- jeffbax 8y ago
  Fortunately modern Quake engines handle making it look closer to the software renderer in those regards...
tom_ 8y ago
My claim to fame is that the only Voodoo card I've ever owned was a Voodoo 5 6000. I picked it up in the early 2000s during a pre-closure clearout at my then-employer, a UK video games developer. The sheer size of the thing made me LOL, that and the number of fans and the additional power connector. Then I noticed it was a 3dfx - oh, hey! I could play that Glide-based motorbike game, that I remembered enjoying at a friend's house a few years previously. The game wasn't as good as I remembered. I threw the card away.
- rasz 8y ago
  at least you didnt throw away Voodoo5 9000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    I admit it, I felt for it :).
  - rambojazz 8y ago
    Did this card genuinely exist or is it some kind of joke?
    - jhasse 8y ago
      It's an April's fool joke. Voodoo 5 doesn't support DirectX 9 so it can't run Crysis.
    - megablast 8y ago
      Are you serious?
      - rambojazz 8y ago
        Yes. It could have been some kind of prototype I don't know.
biesnecker 8y ago
Such good memories. I spent all of my first few high school job paychecks on a Diamond Monster 3D. In retrospect, adult me says I should have bought $AAPL, but 16-year old me is still pretty sure it was the right decision.
- craz8 8y ago
  At least you didn’t by TDFX stock, like I did!
davesque 8y ago
I had a Diamond Voodoo card. When I first fired it up on GLQuake, it absolutely blew my 16 year old mind.
Zenst 8y ago
My flatmate owned a Voodoo2, was impressive though the market soon caught up and and when the following year I did get myself a 3500, after a month I sold it and got a Matrox G400Max as it did the 3D level I needed (more so the less demanding games of the time). But more so, the colour gamut was so much sharper and stood out on a CRT of the time. I was curious so I had a dig on the specs to relive the decision of the time and can see the Matrox did 32bit colour whilst the 3500 was 24bit. Not seen any comparisons in performance but I certainly had no complaints and was happier with the G400Max on many levels (2nd monitor - no problem). [EDIT ADD] This looks worth a watch for nostalgia circa 1999 graphics cards and compares the G400MAX, 3DFX 3500 and the TNT2 Ultra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4LvoGQ2lgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4LvoGQ2lgI
- bla3 8y ago
  24bit and 32bit both have 8bit per RGB color channel, the extra 8 bit are either alpha (for textures) or padding (for performance). All other things being equal, colors should look the same on both.
  - michaelgrafl 8y ago
    If I remember correctly Matrox cards had the best video output quality through D-Sub at that time, which might be what your post's parent might have referred to.
    - Zenst 8y ago
      Yes, I was trying to quantify it from experience over just saying it was the best. They sure was and some would say, still has an edge, though some still prefer CRT's as well.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Yes, but keep in mind that monitors of the time were analog devices. Matrox was well known for higher quality at the time. It was visible even just with black text on a white background. Basically their implementation of moving from pixels to the analog signal was better. Less artifacts, less shadows, better colors, better frame to frame stability, etc.
kken 8y ago
Nice article. I would be interested in learning more about the rendering pipeline. Is anybody aware of a more detailed description? Or an online datasheet? Btw - already EDO DRAM favours reading entire memory blocks/lines. My suspicion is that the trick in increausing memory bandwidth is not only based on interleaving, but also on block transfers with on-chip caching. Especially critical for texture reads. The Voodoo is a nice example of how much execution matters. They were not the only ones to follow this path back then, but by only concentrating on the core functionality they managed to beat all others to the market without compromise. (Compare to S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, Nvidia NV1, Tseng, NEC and many others)
- fabiensanglard 8y ago
  The datasheet (i assume you mean the register mapping) is linked at the bottom of the article.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
Maybe it was the voodoo 2, but I seem to recall that 3dfx cards could render into a chroma-keyed window, not just full screens. In any case the main problem with them was they made your 2D desktop look like junk for the 99% of the time you were not playing Quake, due to the extra analog-digital-analog conversion.
- corysama 8y ago
  One of the best features of the Voodoos was that they were a cheap, early-adopter way to get dual monitor debugging. Full-screen debugger on one monitor. Full-screen game in a breakpoint on the other.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  Voodoo 1 and 2 were simple analog VGA pass-thru, they'd take over the VGA output when in use. I don't think the VGA input was even wired to anything other than the pass-thru switch, you may be thinking of something else. There was no such conversion.
- rasz 8y ago
  Afair it was the terrible Voodoo Rush that could render into a window. There was no analog-digital-analog conversion, it was straight analog pass-thru, either using a mechanical Relays or special video switching muxes. Slight signal degradation was due to additional cables and connectors.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  The pass-through from your regular VGA was just connected to a relay that was switched to the Voodoo's video DAC when in use, and pass-through otherwise. Switching back and forth would create the typical breaker sound. There was no digitizing, chromakeying, or genlock going on. Still, signal quality could be worse b/c analog.
- shdon 8y ago
  This was done my some MPEG decoder cards, like the Sigma Designs RealMagic. The Voodoo didn't process the input VGA signal itself in any way. Image quality suffered slightly simply because the signal had to travel further and through a few more components, but there was no significant degradation of the kind you describe.
almost_usual 8y ago
I haven’t thought about my Voodoo card in a long time, good memories
BuckRogers 8y ago
Being 14 years old and getting to experience and see it evolve first-hand with a Commodore (at home), the Apple II (at school) and 286, 386, 486 and Pentium era with a Diamond Multimedia 3dfx Voodoo card was amazing. People who missed it either being busy with other things in life or weren't born yet, believe me, as a technologist being there from the beginning of the home computer market till about 2000 was amazing. One thing I'm very thankful for in life. It hasn't been the same since around the turn of the century, the magic and mystery is not like it was with PCs or game consoles in decades prior. The advancements were just leaps and bounds every few years. It sparked your imagination more than things today, because creativity for some reason reduced without technical limitations. Today, within any reasonable definition, an artist's vision can be fulfilled. There's really nothing left for the end user to imagine or fill in the gaps (think Zork). Not to be crass but this is a relatable example for many I'm sure- it's no different than finding a Playboy magazine back then, as opposed to extreme, explicit hardcore websites today. There's no mystery at all there, and it's not really an upgrade from your imagination being used at least a little bit. I've actually rediscovered books because most media today (as in movies and sitcoms, not THAT sort of media) is so poor quality. It's really all about the writing, and I struggle to find games and films that are at the 20th century or prior quality level. Books can be exquisite entertainment, and leave plenty for your imagination to run free with. Which for me, is what it's all about. That's the joyful part to entertainment, or at least a part of it that I find critical.
- codegrappler 8y ago
  Thank you for putting into words something that’s been difficult for me to articulate!
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  Not to be crass but this is a relatable example for many I'm sure- it's no different than finding a Playboy magazine back then, as opposed to extreme, explicit hardcore websites today. Never mind the pictorials, the depressing thing about finding a Playboy issue from the 1960s era is the sheer literacy of the thing. You really could read it for the articles back then.
- GuiA 8y ago
jordache 8y ago
how about an article on the 3dlabs glint 500tx? I lusted for one of those to run my 3d software...
rasz 8y ago
Loving those early 3d hardware retrospections. Some corrections: >they started they own company typo >EOM'es only leverage on the cards they produced was the RAM they selected (EDO vs DRAM), the color of the resin and the physical layout of the chips. Pretty much everything else was standardized. - EDO is DRAM, EDO vs FPM? I didnt know that, always assumed every V1 shipped with EDO, just like every card on your pictures is EDO. - video signal switching was also up to the vendor (relay/mux) - and one of the cards has TV encoder section with TV out, pretty neat selling point >It is not specified if the bus used address multiplexing or if the data and address lines were shared. Drawing it non-multiplex and non-shared makes things easier to understand. You are addressing 512 kB, but datapath is 16 bit/2 Byte wide, so we only need 18 bit address bus. As for multiplexing thats not how DRAM addressing works IRL (understandable misconception/simplification for non EEs). Row/Column address lines are multiplexed, meaning we are down to 9 address pins +OE/WE. Comes down to ~110 pins assuming full 4 way interleaving. Seems doable with >200pin ASICs. >21-bit address generates two 20-bit where the least significant bit is discarded to read/write two consecutive pixels. still too many bits, 2MB at 4 byte granularity is 19 overall, 18 per 1MB bank >TMU was able to perform per-fragment w-divide This was a HUGE deal at the time, and achieved by doing serious low level optimizations/tricks (lookup tables/approximation if I remember Oral Panel correctly). 3dfx engineers were big fans of good enough hacks vs slow but correct way of doing things. Another one was color dithering, too bad you didnt mention "24-bit color dithering to native 16-bit RGB buffer using 4x4 or 2x2 ordered dither matrix" - this is the reason straight ram dump screenshots from Voodoo1 dont really look the same as on directly connected monitor. 3dfx called it ~22bit color, it was noticably better than Nvidias pure 16bit. Btw afaik Quake pushed somewhere between 500-1000 polygons per frame, earlier games like Actua Soccer rarely went up to 500 with fatal consequences of single digit framerate on S3 Virge. You might enjoy Profiling Of 3 Games Running On The S3 ViRGE Chip http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~bjohanso/index-virge-study.html http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~bjohanso/index-virge-study...
jugg1es 8y ago
I still remember getting my first 3dfx card. Mowed lawns all summer to save up to get a Voodoo.
Lapsa 8y ago
Oh the nostalgia... Had one.
ct520 8y ago
Ahh man I remember GL quake dropping and before the voodoo, or Riva 128 I had the ... Matrox Mystique 4mb!!! Was amazed and also sorely dissatisfied. Thus began the video card race/upgrade journey. Voodoo, Riva 128, tnt, voodoo2, lol don’t forget that power VR, what an amazing time to live
- smcl 8y ago
  That PowerVR card - was it the Kyro or Kyro 2 or is there another one?
  - rasz 8y ago
    PCX was first http://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php http://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php
    - smcl 8y ago
      Cool! Thanks this looks interesting
manav 8y ago
I remember the Voodoo 2 SLI. I know it stands for something slightly different now but at least its a small remnant of that past. I wonder if nvidia actually got much ip out of the acquisition.
- tntn 8y ago
  I've heard that GeForce fx was designed by ex-3dfx employees.
- bitwize 8y ago
  It stood for "Scan Line Interleave". Basically each voodoo card would be responsible for rendering half the display, alternating scanlines between the cards.
saluki 8y ago
How about the Voodoo3 with the giant blue dongle?
- saluki 8y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/8ilx5e/3dfx_voodoo3_3500_tv_agp_16_mb_sdram_with_dongle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/8ilx5e/3dfx_v...
- shdon 8y ago
  The Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP? I had one of those (after a Voodoo 1 and a Voodoo Banshee) and it was a huge disappointment to me. The whole thing seemed terribly unstable. Heat issues? driver bugs? hardware conflicts? I could never figure it out. On a side note, that blue cable was so incredibly stiff you could probably club somebody over the head with it and it still wouldn't bend.
djmips 8y ago
I was the lead and pretty much only programmer for the Canopus Pure3D. Ours had 12 RAM chips for 6 MB of memory. 2 MB extra Woo hoo! We also featured a Chrontel chip for composite and S-Video output. I wrote our DirectX driver (performance enhancements) and other sundry software for the Pure3D (pictured) and Pure3D II. Pretty cool to think back on those days.
- codezero 8y ago
  I owned one of these and it was wonderful! Wild to find someone who worked on it. I needed it because I needed EverQuest to be high res, and couldn’t do SLI (not enough free pci slots!) so the Pure3D nailed it for me.
- tus87 8y ago
  Please write an extensive blog post about your recollections working in the industry at the time. Seriously.
  - corint 8y ago
    I couldn't agree more!
- shaunxcode 8y ago
  That was my first 3d video card and I am constantly name dropping it when people brag about their current 3d cards!
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  Hah! That is super cool. I think about that card from time to time. The extra 2MB made me feel badass, though I'm not sure any games actually used it, did they? The Pure3D and Pure3D II were the first and last times I ever owned best-in-class graphics hardware. The Rendition-based card I owned previously wasn't half bad, but those early voodoo cards were really revolutionary.
  - rasz 8y ago
    At least one did, "Ultimate Race Pro (3dfx Glide) played in 800x600 resolution with Z-Buffer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4yajgcLA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4yajgcLA8
docker_up 8y ago
When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era. I bought thousands of dollars in stock in the company. I lost it all because unfortunately nVidia ate their lunch because they marketed themselves better. They had full 32-bit color vs 3dfx who had the superior technology but only had 16 or 24 bit color. 3DFX spent a lot of time trying to explain why it didn't matter but in the end it did. It mattered to the gamers at the time, and they basically died and I lost a huge amount of money that took years to pay off. It took me a long time to move over to nVidia because of my hurt ego but they were the superior technology in the long run.
- taneq 8y ago
  32-bit colour is still just 24-bit colour with 8 bits of stencil or whatever (or at least was back when 3dfx was relevant). The only company I know of that was doing higher bit depths was Matrox who had 10-bit colour iirc. I remember back in the day "serious gamers would never use a combined 2D/3D card". Then nVidia came out with their Riva chipset and suddenly 2D graphics cards weren't really a thing any more.
  - eecc 8y ago
    I had a Riva 128, what a piece of crap it was... I used to assemble gaming boxes for friends and delaying delivery a day or two to take a ride on the Dual Voodoo setups. Edit: well, according to Wikipedia it was somewhat competitive although drivers and support for rendering stacks was erratic for a while. I guess that’s what soured me up, and I was probably too n00b to have a clue
    - taneq 8y ago
      Huh... We had a Diamond Viper V330 or something and it was rock solid. Worked fine on everything I threw at it, seemed comparable with a Voodoo 2 in terms of speed/quality. Maybe it was the card vendor rather than the chipset?
- kayamon 8y ago
  There were many reasons why nvidia won, but a higher bit-depth wasn't one of them.
dfischer 8y ago
I remember being obsessed with graphics cards back in the day. My first graphics card i knew of was a 3dfx voodoo. I loaded it up to play Everquest. I vaguely remember going all the way up to a gforce 3 or so trying to get my games running smooth. Because of games I learned what every component in my system did and eventually started coding too. I miss those days :).
kbenson 8y ago
The Voodoo2 was my first 3D video (addon) card. I was working tech support at the local ISP, and a failure on a circuit caused all authentication to fail for dialup customers for a few hours. They called in every off-duty support person they could get to come in and along with the scheduled staff we all (~20 of us) took 3-4 hours answering calls telling many of our 20k customers that yes, we had a major problem, no, we couldn't help them at that time, and hopefully it would be fixed within a couple hours. To thank the support staff, the management/owner offered the choice of a Voodoo2 card or a DVD player (~$200 each IIRC) to every support rep that helped with the load that day. I ended up working for that company three separate times in different positions, leaving for college and coming back, and working for a relative's company for a while and returning again later. It's the wonderful people there and actions like that which keep that company in a special place in my heart. (For those wondering, it's Sonic.net, now Sonic.com, or just Sonic maybe. I'm not sure the official branding, and I have years of history with it being Sonic.net)
p0rkbelly 8y ago
Playing Unreal and coming out of the spaceship at 800x600 on my voodoo2 and 400mhz Pentium II (I was spoiled and got the !2MB version!!!) was still one of the greatest gaming moments of my life
- Zardoz84 8y ago
  Unreal: Return to Napali and Unreal Tournament at 1024x768 on a GeForce 2MX with 32M DDR ram on a K6-2 300MHz. These GPU even could handle Doom 3 (at a barely playable frame rate) at low Res and scaling down textures.
- skocznymroczny 8y ago
  Coming out of the spaceship never did it for me, but the intro in the menu did.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I remember firing up the game just to sit and watch that intro run. Good times.
kabdib 8y ago
A cow-orker of mine mentioned this card a few months before it was actually released. "Transparent water," he would say, wistfully. I wasn't convinced it would be that interesting. We both bought cards. I was convinced. I really wish I'd gotten back into game programming then (I was doing mostly systems stuff, boring things like storage and operating systems). It would have been a lot of fun.
jaequery 8y ago
Someone start a Quake hackernews LAN party! Gosh I miss the Rocket Arena / TF days!
- ismail 8y ago
  Count me in for this, good times. Carting your massive box + monitor To a buddies house and then playing lan games all day!
Nr7 8y ago
I remember the first time I saw that you could walk right up to a wall in a game and the texture didn't become a mess of giant pixels. Sure, it was a mess of blurry pixels instead but still it seemed like (voodoo) magic to young me.
sprash 8y ago
The main reason for the success of 3dfx were drivers that let you talk to bare metal hardware registers instead of dozens of GL abstraction layers. The simplicity of it all is very impressive. This is something programmers absoluteley love. Hence many games supported it and it was very easy to write drivers. Maybe it is time to reimplenent the glide interface in an FPGA ang make a super powered Voodoo card.
- ryacko 8y ago
  I miss software rendering, games with that as an option are the only old games that still run on modern PCs.
  - Crinus 8y ago
    OpenGL games should run fine, some old games that used static sized buffers to hold extensions (like all Quake/Quake2 games that dump the available extension string to the console and the console having a hardcoded buffer for each line) will crash it because of how long the extension string is nowadays, but most drivers have an option to limit the string size (AFAIK Nvidia and AMD drivers check the executable name and do it automatically for known faulty games). For Direct3D games you must use a 32bit color mode otherwise Windows 8.x/10 will force software rendering which is very slow. Even better, use dgVoodoo2 which is a reimplementation of DirectX 1 to 7 (with a some bits of 8) in Direct3D 11 and provides much better compatibility (also gets rid of the Direct3D 7 2048 surface width limitation, making it possible to play games at 2560x1440 and up). For Glide, dgVoodoo2 is also very good and you can "cheat" the game to force higher resolutions than what the game thinks it is running at. I have a lot of old games and everything that isn't DRM encumbered works fine in Windows 10 using dgVoodoo2 and/or some game-specific hacks (Tomb Raider 1 for example is normally a DOS game that you can play using a Glide-enabled build of DOSBox but there was also a Windows version made that used an ancient proprietary 3D API by ATI - someone reimplemented that API and placed extra hacks in there for high resolutions and widescreen support).
    - ryacko 8y ago
      Software rendering will only be slow until everyone has manycore processors with SIMD. The die area of threadripper isn’t far from a GPU’s die area.
ChrisRR 8y ago
Another great article. I read absolutely everything Fabien writes. His Doom and Wolfenstein books make for great reading too.
LeonM 8y ago
Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof! I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable. I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn't very useful back then, so there was no easy way to compare prices. I didn't have a computer of my own yet (I must have been 14 years old or so), so I bought it for our 'family' computer, an IBM P166. I remember getting up super early to put the card in before my dad would wake up. He would certainly have freaked out if he saw that I opened up the expensive computer to put it some gaming thing. Good times.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Haha, this pretty much mirrors my story exactly, except a couple of years later with the Voodoo3. Dad included! Good times.
- ZoomStop 8y ago
  Remember clearly buying my Voodoo Banshee from Babbage's for $250 USD. My high school girlfriend at the time was so annoyed that I would spend so much on something so strange at the time. GLQuake blew my mind, but I was just trying to get Daggerfall to run acceptable more than anything at that point, and run it did.
  - rasz 8y ago
    You probably meant Redguard, Daggerfall sadly lacked any 3d acceleration support.
- time0ut 8y ago
  Ya, this brings back some memories. I also had a Voodoo Banshee. I put it in my AMD K6-2 with 192MB of RAM. This was right around when Windows 98 came out. My friends all had similar rigs. We were on the quest for max frame rate in Halflife, TF1, and original CS. It was a different time back then.
mpalfrey 8y ago
I had a Voodoo Banshee (combined 2d/3d card). It wasn't as good as a V2 but was OK for me back in the day. I then moved to NVidia predominantly (TNT2 Ultra), although I did pick up a cheap V5 5500 which I ran for a bit. Like other's have said, it was a fun time to be involved with PC gaming. Unfortunately life has got in the way since, although I do spend time on Vogons looking at old systems and wondering if I should build a couple of retro machines!
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  You definitely should. I have a 486 DX4/100 running DOS / Win3.1 and a Slot A Athlon 650MHz with a GeForce MX440 running 98. So much fun reliving my youth in DOOM, Red Alert, and Half-Life! If you need justification you can tell yourself that these machines will only go up in value. Works for me ;)
pgt 8y ago
The 3dfx Voodoo1 was the first hardware I bought with my own money to put in my 200Mhz AMD K6 machine, which I kept cool with two industrial fans. I paid R450 (~$30) for my Voodoo1 and have fond memories of multiplayer Half-Life 1 and Alien vs. Predator (AVP1) with friends.
- daneyh 8y ago
  awww man those were the days!!
pjmlp 8y ago
I was quite sad to exchange my newly bought 3dfx card by a NVidia TNT one due to PCI connection issues on my motherboard, specially since I was looking forward to play with Glide.
danmaz74 8y ago
I couldn't afford a Voodoo at the time, but I was so fascinated that I bought a S3 Virge, which really underwhelmed me. Then Nnvidia came along, and I remember wishing I had money to invest on it early on. Wished I could go back and do it :D
sureaboutthis 8y ago
I want to say I still have this in my basement in a box. I also want to say I have this in my old workstation computer and it still works, sitting in my basement.
vgoh1 8y ago
I collect vintage electronics, mostly computers and gaming consoles. The Voodoo cards are considered quite collectable because of their GLIDE API. There is a decent stack of games that will ONLY run on Voodoo cards, or will only support Voodoo natively, which matters to a lot of collectors. Back then, a good eye could sometimes identify a card just by looking at the game. For one, for a brief period, games were only made to run on specific cards, so you could narrow it down just by what game is playing. Also, the artifacts would give them each a different look. Some were grainy, washed out, etc. The Voodoo 1 cards would stand out by the artifact that I can only describe as what looked like faint artificial scan lines. They are really special cards, and two of my vintage computers were built around a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, meaning, I started with the cards, and knew I had to build a PC to run them optimally.
- Crinus 8y ago
  They are already collector's items? :-/ For quite some time i wanted to buy one to play around with Glide (on a real machine) but i postponed it since it also requires building a full desktop and i do not have space at my current place :-P. Perhaps i should try and find a couple of those before they disappear.
- StrictDabbler 8y ago
  The Voodoo cards had that odd glossy, liquid look that made the surfaces of objects seem deeply physical. The ADCs (EDIT: RAMDACs, of course) that they were using did an odd sort of "poor man's antialiasing" and running any games from that era on modern equipment is a shocking exercise in explicitly defined pixels.
jonplackett 8y ago
I wanted a 3DFX card so bad in 1998 but I'd already convinced my dad to pay extra for a Matrox Mystique 3D card (which didn't support openGL) and he just couldn't get his head around why i now also needed another 3D card add-on. Even seeing the names of all those cards brings back so many memories.
samlittlewood 8y ago
I was working on 3D rendering and games around this time - pretty much all the PC cards were burdened with terrible CPU->GPU interfaces. The handshaking, setup calculations and register wrangling was such that below a certain triangle size, it would have been quicker for the CPU to just draw the pixels itself. Some cards (Um, Oak?) required per-scanline setup. I got one of these cards - confirmed it was indeed hella fast (even for large meshes of small triangles), and then dropped into SoftICE a few times, winding up at this code: https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-sezero/glide2x/sst1/glide/src/xdraw.asm https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-sezero/glid... My thoughts were - "Wow, somebody gets it!" - Very tight triangle setup, and a simple PCI register layout that means that the setup code just writes the gradients out to a block - the last write pushes the triangle into the huge on-card FIFO. That performance, along with the simplicity of glide, made it a a no-brainer to drop all other card support and focus on that exclusively.
alvalentini 8y ago
Oh dear. Little tear streaming down my face.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
3dfx had some rather infamous commercials for their Voodoo line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOYoZGoXsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOYoZGoXsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qp2TUNEFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qp2TUNEFY
ben7799 8y ago
Fond memories of these cards for me. I bought one my junior year of college as a CS major. I had some good internships and that year I had some money. Instead of a car I had built a Pentium MMX 200Mhz box with Diamond Stealth card & 16MB ram. Pretty hot machine among my friends at that time... when the Voodoo 1 became available I was able to get one and it's performance was mind blowing at the time, even though I had access to SGI machines and such on campus that had way more impressive demos on them. My senior year of college I took an Open GL course and did a bunch of my projects in linux with the Voodoo 3D drivers. Cool stuff. Played a lot of quake too, I remember writing a program to render the quake characters on my own as one of my projects. The data model formats were open source IIRC so it wasn't too hard to read in the data. Very cool since we didn't have any good 3D tools to build our own models. I remember playing AH-64 Longbow or something on it too.. some of the flight sims were amazing at that point right before flight sim popularity tanked at the same time the remaining programs got unbelievably complex. Voodoo was kind of a pain the neck in day to day usage. In 1999 I built a new machine and went to an NVIDIA Riva TNT and then later that year got a GeForce 256 when those came out. Kind of the end of my heyday of PC gaming.. the combination of working on computers all day + games at the time still requiring a lot of debugging to get them to work well wore me out.
CoryOndrejka 8y ago
Oh, memories. We built a custom arcade board based on SLI Voodoo1, mips r5k, and custom jpeg decompression in hardware to do Magic the Gathering: Armageddon. https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss We wanted to run at highrez (640x480 vga) at 60hz with tons of animating sprites on screen and realized nothing had the fill rate we needed. Rather than changing the game design, we kept looking and met the 3Dfx team when they had barely taped out the Voodoo1. We gambled that SLI would work and started designing the hardware and adapting the game to an early alpha of Glide. We prototyped on SLI cards running on Windows NT and pentium pros. In parallel, Atari Ganes built Voodoo1-based hardware to replace Zoid. Mace and War shipped on that hardware.
- ido 8y ago
  Interesting! I didn't realise SLI was available before the Voodoo2.
guai888 8y ago
This brings back the memory. I was working for a tiny company in Taiwan at that time. We had been producing VGA cards for a while at that time. An IC distributor brought us a demo board of Voodoo 3D (V1) card. I ran the demo and told my boss that it was the best 3D graphic that I have ever seen. My boss just decided to run with it. Back in those days, VGA card vendor standard practice was to modify the reference in two way. 1. Modify the layout so it can accommodate many different memory chips. If your board can use cheaper memory chip, you will have better profit ( often mean chip which did meet standard memory testing, but still usable with some effort in layout and hardware design) 2. Modify the driver so you have a better benchmark score. Since we were a tiny company with not many resources so we decided to just manufacture the reference design. This decision enables us to be the first one in Taiwan to ship the product. I cold call 50 companies in Europe. I did not have much success at first since distributors in Europe were not convinced that 3D card can sell. Internet was slow back then, we were still using dialup modem and sending video capture was not an option. I finally got a break when I called the 42nd company on the list: Guillemot (France). Guillemot got their start in PC gaming sound card so they were already interested in the 3D card. Guillemot was talking to Orchid Technology but they need a lower price than what Orchid can offer. Since all other Taiwanese makers were still evaluating or in the development process, we got the business because our price is US$50 lower than Orchid and able to ship right away.
mrbill 8y ago
I was one of the poor folks who could only afford the Matrox m3d (aka PowerVR PCX2), which shuffled video data to and from the 3d accelerator over the PCI bus, and was therefore slow as crud.. but, I had GL Quake! http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php
Exuma 7y ago
I used to draw the 3dfx logo all over my trapper keeper using white out. Good old 90s days
cmroanirgo 7y ago
I worked with all of the cards mentioned in the article. It was a pretty sweet time, where the card manufacturers would happily send out a reference card. Some things the article did seem to miss out on: - You could have two Voodoo's in your PC for extra throughput (I can't remember the numbers). I seem to recall there was a ribbon cable between the two boards... - The reason 3dfx ultimately failed was due to hefty lawsuits ongoing with NVidia about IP theft and headhunting the 3dfx staff. During this time there was a mailing list (can't remember it's name) that existed and a lot of game devs operated in it, mainly around DirectX (v1 onwwards), but it was in existence much before that. All the card manufacturers were on it that I recall. One day John Carmack posted a comment (I'm paraphrasing somewhat) how rubbish DirectX and Direct3D was. A month or so later glquake was available. I think it was about 12-18months later Unreal (the game... before the engine) was announced as a demo on this list and we all thought: Awesome -- who the * are these guys!? I'd like to say 'Good times' were had, but seriously, I burnt out due to the insansely fast changing pace of 3D dev during those times.

476 points by fafner 8y ago

blt 8y ago

My first 3D accelerator was a Voodoo2, first used on Quake 2. The cast light from the moving rocket on the floor is unforgettable.

KozmoNau7 8y ago
The difference from software-rendered Quake 2 to hardware rendering was massive, not least because of the colored lighting. In some places, it definitely bordered on overkill.
- blt 8y ago
  game developers cannot help themselves, after colored lighting they moved on to SSAA and bloom...

itgoon 8y ago

The Voodoo was, very literally, a game-changer. The difference in quality between Quake and GLQuake was astounding. Just a few seconds of gameplay was enough to get someone to make the purchase.

xenospn 8y ago
Same with PC speaker vs SoundBlaster.
- BuckRogers 8y ago
  If you only had or experienced IBM-compatible PCs. If you started on a Commodore or Amiga, the PC speaker to Sound Blaster/Adlib shift was more akin to just catching up. I wasn't completely happy until the 486 era because of this. The Voodoo1 4MB which I had back then as well, was unprecedented. I agree that the Sound Blaster was great (in isolation against older x86 PCs), but 3dfx was the first standout example of the fruit in the IBM-compatible space, and a clear demonstration in the gaming sense as to why it took over the market.
  - armitron 8y ago
    The first standout example was VGA and games that fully took advantage of it. I was an Amiga user but AGA was too little too late and architecturally a disaster for certain games (DOOM, Quake). Even games like Monkey Island and Indiana Jones were a lot better on VGA than Amiga. The game that did it for me was Privateer vs Elite II. I had to get a PC after I saw it. It was crystal clear the Amiga could not compete.
- mhd 8y ago
  I think the equivalent of the Voodoo in the soundcards-space would've been the Gravis Ultrasound. In both the evolutionary and soon-to-be-forgotten sense. PC Speaker vs. Soundblaster is more EGA vs VGA, something much more profound. And beneficiary to the gaming space, as opposed to early 3D, which basically ruined all the things for quite a while...
  - armitron 8y ago
    Not even close. PC Speaker vs Soundblaster is Hercules (monochrome) vs VGA. You could never go back, same as 3dfx. GUS was better than sb pro/sb 16 but a lot of games didn't take advantage of it and once AWE32/64 arrived, GUS was dead in the water.
    - mhd 8y ago
      Going back to 2D was my sincerest wish back then, when they tried shoehorning everything into 3D. There was no reason back then for having e.g. jump and runs, adventures or RTS games in 3D. It worked fine enough for FPS, which is why that genre dominated so much back then. And yeah, I knew that the GUS only enjoyed a very short-lived popularity, just like Voodoo cards when the Geforces etc. showed up. Okay, maybe the popularity at its height wasn't quite equal, but the next 3D fads are quite a few steps down (e.g. PowerVR or the first Matroxes).
Crinus 8y ago
The two main issues that GLQuake has over software one are that the textures are squashed down to the nearest power-of-two and lightmaps are clamped in the "0..100%" range whereas the software rasterizer has a (sort of) "0..200%" range. You can see this in the comparisons in the site where bright areas are dulled. Modern source ports have fixed both issues though (FWIW i recommend Quakespasm)

dev_dull 8y ago

Fabien can you tell me how your website is generated? It’s very readable.

julianlam 8y ago
... generated? It's just HTML.
- starpilot 8y ago
  Is that a js framework?
  - fabiensanglard 8y ago
    No. I dislike JavaScript. Because it bloats pages, slowdowns page loading and you always need libraries to do the smallest thing. I try to avoid JavaScript as much as possible. There is some on this page to flip the screenshots and that annoyed me.
    - carey 8y ago
      You should be able to do something with labels, CSS sibling selectors, and the :checked pseudo-class if it matters to you. I found an example at https://codepen.io/ancaspatariu/pen/WpQYOP https://codepen.io/ancaspatariu/pen/WpQYOP which does quite a lot more than you’d need.
      - fabiensanglard 8y ago
        My hero :) !
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  Doesn't mean they literally hand-code every HTML file on the site. That would be highly unlikely since you'd have to change every file any time you update, say, the navbar. For example, google "static site generator".
- 8y ago

pault 8y ago

I remember the first time someone told me about a card that you could put in your computer that would make quake run faster. It sounded so strange and exotic. Then I saw the screen caps with all their anti aliased glory and was devastated that I could never afford it on a movie theater clerk's salary.

shereadsthenews 8y ago
On many computers it did not run faster just differently. Regular quake and glquake were two totally different programs.
- int_19h 8y ago
  How would it not run faster, given that otherwise CPU had to shoulder the rendering entirely, in addition to everything else? Even high-end CPUs at the time would struggle with that, especially with resolution and bit depth being equal. IIRC the original Quake didn't even allow more than 256 colors in software rendering for this purpose, and even then I recall having to run it in weird resolutions like 400x300 to get framerates comparable to what Voodoo owners had for 640x480x16bit.
  - ahje 8y ago
    The Voodoo was the indisputable king of 3D accellerators back then. Not everyone was running GLquake with a Voodoo card in their PC though. I had an S3 Virge in my PC at the time. It was quite possible to get GLQuake running using a Direct3D to OpenGL wrapper, but damn it was slow. It sure looked better than regular Quake, but it wasn't really noticeably faster than software rendering.
- rasz 8y ago
  Afaik there is no CPU where software Quake would run faster at same resolution as GLQuake on 3dfx.
  - Zardoz84 8y ago

tmountain 8y ago

Blast from the past. I have extremely fond memories of moving into my first apartment in 1999 and having friends come over to play Quake on the “voodoo box”. I had three PCs, a 10BASE-T LAN, and one machine that had been upgraded to a 3dfx card. We would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to play on the 3dfx box and spend many an all nighter playing till the sun came up. Those were the days...

tracer4201 8y ago
I’m pretty sure 1999 summer I spent playing Quake III Arena all day every day (the full game or demo) on my @Home broadband connection.
- starpilot 8y ago
  @hoom
zcid 8y ago
I still have my original Voodoo card. It's the one piece of computer hardware I've never been willing to throw away. I still remember spending 8 hours downloading the Quake demo and having my mind blown. The only other time that holds a candle to that is when I got the GLQuake version. No other game has ever taken me on a ride like that.
- jeffbax 8y ago
  Same w/ my Voodoo2. I keep meaning to frame it.
- speg 8y ago
  I remember screaming when those giant polar bear type creatures would surprise me. It was such a step up over DukeNukem3D..
eecc 8y ago
Oh I remember those days; black coax crisscrossing rooms, loose terminators, deciding whether to go on a Quake or a thrash metal spree in the garage.

pselbert 8y ago

I recall purchasing two of these in the late 90s for relatively little money. Both cards could work in conjunction and it radically changed how games looked—really amazing how much of a difference it made. I can distinctly recall the difference in crispness, and how disappointing it was that didn’t apply to everything I used or played (3DS Max, CAD, etc). They were the first thing I ever sold on eBay, sometime around 1999.

animal531 8y ago
If I remember correctly they had it so that the one would render the top half of the screen and the other the bottom.

3dfxiter 8y ago

They forgot to mention at the end of the article that 3dfx filed for bankruptcy as they literally became "drunk on their success." Everybody started showing up to work intoxicated. Some investors got left out in the cold.

fabiensanglard 8y ago
I would be curious to read the source for this.

jersully72 8y ago

I have a box of 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in storage. No SLI cables but you can make them out of floppy ribbon cables. What should I do with them?

lsh 8y ago
There is a niche market for vintage gaming machines, I wouldn't be surprised if you could sell them for a few hundred each.

rasz 8y ago

Computer history museum 3dfx Oral History Panel is fantastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU

rayiner 8y ago

It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then.

blt 8y ago
we hit the energy per mm^2 limit.
- corysama 8y ago
  Right around 2002. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
- andrepd 8y ago
  Not quite ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
  - chewxy 8y ago
    And once we hit that limit we can still go further, by rethinking the way we program such that program applications are reversible. Hence I'm not too worried
- amelius 8y ago
  More importantly, we reached the point where the average consumer can do most of the things they need a PC for.
derefr 8y ago
The obvious comparison to the GPU arms race is the VR hardware arms race. Same number of companies rising and falling in about the same period. Carmack is at the forefront of both, too.

chongli 8y ago

Wow, the lack of gamma correction in the Voodoo1 screenshot completely ruins the mood of the game.

jeffbax 8y ago
Fortunately modern Quake engines handle making it look closer to the software renderer in those regards...

tom_ 8y ago

My claim to fame is that the only Voodoo card I've ever owned was a Voodoo 5 6000. I picked it up in the early 2000s during a pre-closure clearout at my then-employer, a UK video games developer. The sheer size of the thing made me LOL, that and the number of fans and the additional power connector. Then I noticed it was a 3dfx - oh, hey! I could play that Glide-based motorbike game, that I remembered enjoying at a friend's house a few years previously. The game wasn't as good as I remembered. I threw the card away.

rasz 8y ago
at least you didnt throw away Voodoo5 9000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  I admit it, I felt for it :).
- rambojazz 8y ago
  Did this card genuinely exist or is it some kind of joke?
  - jhasse 8y ago
    It's an April's fool joke. Voodoo 5 doesn't support DirectX 9 so it can't run Crysis.
  - megablast 8y ago
    Are you serious?
    - rambojazz 8y ago
      Yes. It could have been some kind of prototype I don't know.

biesnecker 8y ago

Such good memories. I spent all of my first few high school job paychecks on a Diamond Monster 3D. In retrospect, adult me says I should have bought $AAPL, but 16-year old me is still pretty sure it was the right decision.

craz8 8y ago
At least you didn’t by TDFX stock, like I did!

davesque 8y ago

I had a Diamond Voodoo card. When I first fired it up on GLQuake, it absolutely blew my 16 year old mind.

Zenst 8y ago

My flatmate owned a Voodoo2, was impressive though the market soon caught up and and when the following year I did get myself a 3500, after a month I sold it and got a Matrox G400Max as it did the 3D level I needed (more so the less demanding games of the time). But more so, the colour gamut was so much sharper and stood out on a CRT of the time. I was curious so I had a dig on the specs to relive the decision of the time and can see the Matrox did 32bit colour whilst the 3500 was 24bit. Not seen any comparisons in performance but I certainly had no complaints and was happier with the G400Max on many levels (2nd monitor - no problem). [EDIT ADD] This looks worth a watch for nostalgia circa 1999 graphics cards and compares the G400MAX, 3DFX 3500 and the TNT2 Ultra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4LvoGQ2lgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4LvoGQ2lgI

bla3 8y ago
24bit and 32bit both have 8bit per RGB color channel, the extra 8 bit are either alpha (for textures) or padding (for performance). All other things being equal, colors should look the same on both.
- michaelgrafl 8y ago
  If I remember correctly Matrox cards had the best video output quality through D-Sub at that time, which might be what your post's parent might have referred to.
  - Zenst 8y ago
    Yes, I was trying to quantify it from experience over just saying it was the best. They sure was and some would say, still has an edge, though some still prefer CRT's as well.
- sliken 8y ago
  Yes, but keep in mind that monitors of the time were analog devices. Matrox was well known for higher quality at the time. It was visible even just with black text on a white background. Basically their implementation of moving from pixels to the analog signal was better. Less artifacts, less shadows, better colors, better frame to frame stability, etc.

kken 8y ago

Nice article. I would be interested in learning more about the rendering pipeline. Is anybody aware of a more detailed description? Or an online datasheet? Btw - already EDO DRAM favours reading entire memory blocks/lines. My suspicion is that the trick in increausing memory bandwidth is not only based on interleaving, but also on block transfers with on-chip caching. Especially critical for texture reads. The Voodoo is a nice example of how much execution matters. They were not the only ones to follow this path back then, but by only concentrating on the core functionality they managed to beat all others to the market without compromise. (Compare to S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, Nvidia NV1, Tseng, NEC and many others)

fabiensanglard 8y ago
The datasheet (i assume you mean the register mapping) is linked at the bottom of the article.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

Maybe it was the voodoo 2, but I seem to recall that 3dfx cards could render into a chroma-keyed window, not just full screens. In any case the main problem with them was they made your 2D desktop look like junk for the 99% of the time you were not playing Quake, due to the extra analog-digital-analog conversion.

corysama 8y ago
One of the best features of the Voodoos was that they were a cheap, early-adopter way to get dual monitor debugging. Full-screen debugger on one monitor. Full-screen game in a breakpoint on the other.
newnewpdro 8y ago
Voodoo 1 and 2 were simple analog VGA pass-thru, they'd take over the VGA output when in use. I don't think the VGA input was even wired to anything other than the pass-thru switch, you may be thinking of something else. There was no such conversion.
rasz 8y ago
Afair it was the terrible Voodoo Rush that could render into a window. There was no analog-digital-analog conversion, it was straight analog pass-thru, either using a mechanical Relays or special video switching muxes. Slight signal degradation was due to additional cables and connectors.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
The pass-through from your regular VGA was just connected to a relay that was switched to the Voodoo's video DAC when in use, and pass-through otherwise. Switching back and forth would create the typical breaker sound. There was no digitizing, chromakeying, or genlock going on. Still, signal quality could be worse b/c analog.
shdon 8y ago
This was done my some MPEG decoder cards, like the Sigma Designs RealMagic. The Voodoo didn't process the input VGA signal itself in any way. Image quality suffered slightly simply because the signal had to travel further and through a few more components, but there was no significant degradation of the kind you describe.

almost_usual 8y ago

I haven’t thought about my Voodoo card in a long time, good memories

BuckRogers 8y ago

Being 14 years old and getting to experience and see it evolve first-hand with a Commodore (at home), the Apple II (at school) and 286, 386, 486 and Pentium era with a Diamond Multimedia 3dfx Voodoo card was amazing. People who missed it either being busy with other things in life or weren't born yet, believe me, as a technologist being there from the beginning of the home computer market till about 2000 was amazing. One thing I'm very thankful for in life. It hasn't been the same since around the turn of the century, the magic and mystery is not like it was with PCs or game consoles in decades prior. The advancements were just leaps and bounds every few years. It sparked your imagination more than things today, because creativity for some reason reduced without technical limitations. Today, within any reasonable definition, an artist's vision can be fulfilled. There's really nothing left for the end user to imagine or fill in the gaps (think Zork). Not to be crass but this is a relatable example for many I'm sure- it's no different than finding a Playboy magazine back then, as opposed to extreme, explicit hardcore websites today. There's no mystery at all there, and it's not really an upgrade from your imagination being used at least a little bit. I've actually rediscovered books because most media today (as in movies and sitcoms, not THAT sort of media) is so poor quality. It's really all about the writing, and I struggle to find games and films that are at the 20th century or prior quality level. Books can be exquisite entertainment, and leave plenty for your imagination to run free with. Which for me, is what it's all about. That's the joyful part to entertainment, or at least a part of it that I find critical.

codegrappler 8y ago
Thank you for putting into words something that’s been difficult for me to articulate!
CamperBob2 8y ago
Not to be crass but this is a relatable example for many I'm sure- it's no different than finding a Playboy magazine back then, as opposed to extreme, explicit hardcore websites today. Never mind the pictorials, the depressing thing about finding a Playboy issue from the 1960s era is the sheer literacy of the thing. You really could read it for the articles back then.
GuiA 8y ago

jordache 8y ago

how about an article on the 3dlabs glint 500tx? I lusted for one of those to run my 3d software...

rasz 8y ago

Loving those early 3d hardware retrospections. Some corrections: >they started they own company typo >EOM'es only leverage on the cards they produced was the RAM they selected (EDO vs DRAM), the color of the resin and the physical layout of the chips. Pretty much everything else was standardized. - EDO is DRAM, EDO vs FPM? I didnt know that, always assumed every V1 shipped with EDO, just like every card on your pictures is EDO. - video signal switching was also up to the vendor (relay/mux) - and one of the cards has TV encoder section with TV out, pretty neat selling point >It is not specified if the bus used address multiplexing or if the data and address lines were shared. Drawing it non-multiplex and non-shared makes things easier to understand. You are addressing 512 kB, but datapath is 16 bit/2 Byte wide, so we only need 18 bit address bus. As for multiplexing thats not how DRAM addressing works IRL (understandable misconception/simplification for non EEs). Row/Column address lines are multiplexed, meaning we are down to 9 address pins +OE/WE. Comes down to ~110 pins assuming full 4 way interleaving. Seems doable with >200pin ASICs. >21-bit address generates two 20-bit where the least significant bit is discarded to read/write two consecutive pixels. still too many bits, 2MB at 4 byte granularity is 19 overall, 18 per 1MB bank >TMU was able to perform per-fragment w-divide This was a HUGE deal at the time, and achieved by doing serious low level optimizations/tricks (lookup tables/approximation if I remember Oral Panel correctly). 3dfx engineers were big fans of good enough hacks vs slow but correct way of doing things. Another one was color dithering, too bad you didnt mention "24-bit color dithering to native 16-bit RGB buffer using 4x4 or 2x2 ordered dither matrix" - this is the reason straight ram dump screenshots from Voodoo1 dont really look the same as on directly connected monitor. 3dfx called it ~22bit color, it was noticably better than Nvidias pure 16bit. Btw afaik Quake pushed somewhere between 500-1000 polygons per frame, earlier games like Actua Soccer rarely went up to 500 with fatal consequences of single digit framerate on S3 Virge. You might enjoy Profiling Of 3 Games Running On The S3 ViRGE Chip http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~bjohanso/index-virge-study.html http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~bjohanso/index-virge-study...

jugg1es 8y ago

I still remember getting my first 3dfx card. Mowed lawns all summer to save up to get a Voodoo.

Lapsa 8y ago

Oh the nostalgia... Had one.

ct520 8y ago

Ahh man I remember GL quake dropping and before the voodoo, or Riva 128 I had the ... Matrox Mystique 4mb!!! Was amazed and also sorely dissatisfied. Thus began the video card race/upgrade journey. Voodoo, Riva 128, tnt, voodoo2, lol don’t forget that power VR, what an amazing time to live

smcl 8y ago
That PowerVR card - was it the Kyro or Kyro 2 or is there another one?
- rasz 8y ago
  PCX was first http://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php http://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php
  - smcl 8y ago
    Cool! Thanks this looks interesting

manav 8y ago

I remember the Voodoo 2 SLI. I know it stands for something slightly different now but at least its a small remnant of that past. I wonder if nvidia actually got much ip out of the acquisition.

tntn 8y ago
I've heard that GeForce fx was designed by ex-3dfx employees.
bitwize 8y ago
It stood for "Scan Line Interleave". Basically each voodoo card would be responsible for rendering half the display, alternating scanlines between the cards.

saluki 8y ago

How about the Voodoo3 with the giant blue dongle?

saluki 8y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/8ilx5e/3dfx_voodoo3_3500_tv_agp_16_mb_sdram_with_dongle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/8ilx5e/3dfx_v...
shdon 8y ago
The Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP? I had one of those (after a Voodoo 1 and a Voodoo Banshee) and it was a huge disappointment to me. The whole thing seemed terribly unstable. Heat issues? driver bugs? hardware conflicts? I could never figure it out. On a side note, that blue cable was so incredibly stiff you could probably club somebody over the head with it and it still wouldn't bend.

djmips 8y ago

I was the lead and pretty much only programmer for the Canopus Pure3D. Ours had 12 RAM chips for 6 MB of memory. 2 MB extra Woo hoo! We also featured a Chrontel chip for composite and S-Video output. I wrote our DirectX driver (performance enhancements) and other sundry software for the Pure3D (pictured) and Pure3D II. Pretty cool to think back on those days.

codezero 8y ago
I owned one of these and it was wonderful! Wild to find someone who worked on it. I needed it because I needed EverQuest to be high res, and couldn’t do SLI (not enough free pci slots!) so the Pure3D nailed it for me.
tus87 8y ago
Please write an extensive blog post about your recollections working in the industry at the time. Seriously.
- corint 8y ago
  I couldn't agree more!
shaunxcode 8y ago
That was my first 3d video card and I am constantly name dropping it when people brag about their current 3d cards!
JohnBooty 8y ago
Hah! That is super cool. I think about that card from time to time. The extra 2MB made me feel badass, though I'm not sure any games actually used it, did they? The Pure3D and Pure3D II were the first and last times I ever owned best-in-class graphics hardware. The Rendition-based card I owned previously wasn't half bad, but those early voodoo cards were really revolutionary.
- rasz 8y ago
  At least one did, "Ultimate Race Pro (3dfx Glide) played in 800x600 resolution with Z-Buffer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4yajgcLA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4yajgcLA8

docker_up 8y ago

When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era. I bought thousands of dollars in stock in the company. I lost it all because unfortunately nVidia ate their lunch because they marketed themselves better. They had full 32-bit color vs 3dfx who had the superior technology but only had 16 or 24 bit color. 3DFX spent a lot of time trying to explain why it didn't matter but in the end it did. It mattered to the gamers at the time, and they basically died and I lost a huge amount of money that took years to pay off. It took me a long time to move over to nVidia because of my hurt ego but they were the superior technology in the long run.

taneq 8y ago
32-bit colour is still just 24-bit colour with 8 bits of stencil or whatever (or at least was back when 3dfx was relevant). The only company I know of that was doing higher bit depths was Matrox who had 10-bit colour iirc. I remember back in the day "serious gamers would never use a combined 2D/3D card". Then nVidia came out with their Riva chipset and suddenly 2D graphics cards weren't really a thing any more.
- eecc 8y ago
  I had a Riva 128, what a piece of crap it was... I used to assemble gaming boxes for friends and delaying delivery a day or two to take a ride on the Dual Voodoo setups. Edit: well, according to Wikipedia it was somewhat competitive although drivers and support for rendering stacks was erratic for a while. I guess that’s what soured me up, and I was probably too n00b to have a clue
  - taneq 8y ago
    Huh... We had a Diamond Viper V330 or something and it was rock solid. Worked fine on everything I threw at it, seemed comparable with a Voodoo 2 in terms of speed/quality. Maybe it was the card vendor rather than the chipset?
kayamon 8y ago
There were many reasons why nvidia won, but a higher bit-depth wasn't one of them.

dfischer 8y ago

I remember being obsessed with graphics cards back in the day. My first graphics card i knew of was a 3dfx voodoo. I loaded it up to play Everquest. I vaguely remember going all the way up to a gforce 3 or so trying to get my games running smooth. Because of games I learned what every component in my system did and eventually started coding too. I miss those days :).

kbenson 8y ago

The Voodoo2 was my first 3D video (addon) card. I was working tech support at the local ISP, and a failure on a circuit caused all authentication to fail for dialup customers for a few hours. They called in every off-duty support person they could get to come in and along with the scheduled staff we all (~20 of us) took 3-4 hours answering calls telling many of our 20k customers that yes, we had a major problem, no, we couldn't help them at that time, and hopefully it would be fixed within a couple hours. To thank the support staff, the management/owner offered the choice of a Voodoo2 card or a DVD player (~$200 each IIRC) to every support rep that helped with the load that day. I ended up working for that company three separate times in different positions, leaving for college and coming back, and working for a relative's company for a while and returning again later. It's the wonderful people there and actions like that which keep that company in a special place in my heart. (For those wondering, it's Sonic.net, now Sonic.com, or just Sonic maybe. I'm not sure the official branding, and I have years of history with it being Sonic.net)

p0rkbelly 8y ago

Playing Unreal and coming out of the spaceship at 800x600 on my voodoo2 and 400mhz Pentium II (I was spoiled and got the !2MB version!!!) was still one of the greatest gaming moments of my life

Zardoz84 8y ago
Unreal: Return to Napali and Unreal Tournament at 1024x768 on a GeForce 2MX with 32M DDR ram on a K6-2 300MHz. These GPU even could handle Doom 3 (at a barely playable frame rate) at low Res and scaling down textures.
skocznymroczny 8y ago
Coming out of the spaceship never did it for me, but the intro in the menu did.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I remember firing up the game just to sit and watch that intro run. Good times.

kabdib 8y ago

A cow-orker of mine mentioned this card a few months before it was actually released. "Transparent water," he would say, wistfully. I wasn't convinced it would be that interesting. We both bought cards. I was convinced. I really wish I'd gotten back into game programming then (I was doing mostly systems stuff, boring things like storage and operating systems). It would have been a lot of fun.

jaequery 8y ago

Someone start a Quake hackernews LAN party! Gosh I miss the Rocket Arena / TF days!

ismail 8y ago
Count me in for this, good times. Carting your massive box + monitor To a buddies house and then playing lan games all day!

Nr7 8y ago

I remember the first time I saw that you could walk right up to a wall in a game and the texture didn't become a mess of giant pixels. Sure, it was a mess of blurry pixels instead but still it seemed like (voodoo) magic to young me.

sprash 8y ago

The main reason for the success of 3dfx were drivers that let you talk to bare metal hardware registers instead of dozens of GL abstraction layers. The simplicity of it all is very impressive. This is something programmers absoluteley love. Hence many games supported it and it was very easy to write drivers. Maybe it is time to reimplenent the glide interface in an FPGA ang make a super powered Voodoo card.

ryacko 8y ago
I miss software rendering, games with that as an option are the only old games that still run on modern PCs.
- Crinus 8y ago
  OpenGL games should run fine, some old games that used static sized buffers to hold extensions (like all Quake/Quake2 games that dump the available extension string to the console and the console having a hardcoded buffer for each line) will crash it because of how long the extension string is nowadays, but most drivers have an option to limit the string size (AFAIK Nvidia and AMD drivers check the executable name and do it automatically for known faulty games). For Direct3D games you must use a 32bit color mode otherwise Windows 8.x/10 will force software rendering which is very slow. Even better, use dgVoodoo2 which is a reimplementation of DirectX 1 to 7 (with a some bits of 8) in Direct3D 11 and provides much better compatibility (also gets rid of the Direct3D 7 2048 surface width limitation, making it possible to play games at 2560x1440 and up). For Glide, dgVoodoo2 is also very good and you can "cheat" the game to force higher resolutions than what the game thinks it is running at. I have a lot of old games and everything that isn't DRM encumbered works fine in Windows 10 using dgVoodoo2 and/or some game-specific hacks (Tomb Raider 1 for example is normally a DOS game that you can play using a Glide-enabled build of DOSBox but there was also a Windows version made that used an ancient proprietary 3D API by ATI - someone reimplemented that API and placed extra hacks in there for high resolutions and widescreen support).
  - ryacko 8y ago
    Software rendering will only be slow until everyone has manycore processors with SIMD. The die area of threadripper isn’t far from a GPU’s die area.

ChrisRR 8y ago

Another great article. I read absolutely everything Fabien writes. His Doom and Wolfenstein books make for great reading too.

LeonM 8y ago

Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof! I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable. I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn't very useful back then, so there was no easy way to compare prices. I didn't have a computer of my own yet (I must have been 14 years old or so), so I bought it for our 'family' computer, an IBM P166. I remember getting up super early to put the card in before my dad would wake up. He would certainly have freaked out if he saw that I opened up the expensive computer to put it some gaming thing. Good times.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Haha, this pretty much mirrors my story exactly, except a couple of years later with the Voodoo3. Dad included! Good times.
ZoomStop 8y ago
Remember clearly buying my Voodoo Banshee from Babbage's for $250 USD. My high school girlfriend at the time was so annoyed that I would spend so much on something so strange at the time. GLQuake blew my mind, but I was just trying to get Daggerfall to run acceptable more than anything at that point, and run it did.
- rasz 8y ago
  You probably meant Redguard, Daggerfall sadly lacked any 3d acceleration support.
time0ut 8y ago
Ya, this brings back some memories. I also had a Voodoo Banshee. I put it in my AMD K6-2 with 192MB of RAM. This was right around when Windows 98 came out. My friends all had similar rigs. We were on the quest for max frame rate in Halflife, TF1, and original CS. It was a different time back then.

mpalfrey 8y ago

I had a Voodoo Banshee (combined 2d/3d card). It wasn't as good as a V2 but was OK for me back in the day. I then moved to NVidia predominantly (TNT2 Ultra), although I did pick up a cheap V5 5500 which I ran for a bit. Like other's have said, it was a fun time to be involved with PC gaming. Unfortunately life has got in the way since, although I do spend time on Vogons looking at old systems and wondering if I should build a couple of retro machines!

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
You definitely should. I have a 486 DX4/100 running DOS / Win3.1 and a Slot A Athlon 650MHz with a GeForce MX440 running 98. So much fun reliving my youth in DOOM, Red Alert, and Half-Life! If you need justification you can tell yourself that these machines will only go up in value. Works for me ;)

pgt 8y ago

The 3dfx Voodoo1 was the first hardware I bought with my own money to put in my 200Mhz AMD K6 machine, which I kept cool with two industrial fans. I paid R450 (~$30) for my Voodoo1 and have fond memories of multiplayer Half-Life 1 and Alien vs. Predator (AVP1) with friends.

daneyh 8y ago
awww man those were the days!!

pjmlp 8y ago

I was quite sad to exchange my newly bought 3dfx card by a NVidia TNT one due to PCI connection issues on my motherboard, specially since I was looking forward to play with Glide.

danmaz74 8y ago

I couldn't afford a Voodoo at the time, but I was so fascinated that I bought a S3 Virge, which really underwhelmed me. Then Nnvidia came along, and I remember wishing I had money to invest on it early on. Wished I could go back and do it :D

sureaboutthis 8y ago

I want to say I still have this in my basement in a box. I also want to say I have this in my old workstation computer and it still works, sitting in my basement.

vgoh1 8y ago

I collect vintage electronics, mostly computers and gaming consoles. The Voodoo cards are considered quite collectable because of their GLIDE API. There is a decent stack of games that will ONLY run on Voodoo cards, or will only support Voodoo natively, which matters to a lot of collectors. Back then, a good eye could sometimes identify a card just by looking at the game. For one, for a brief period, games were only made to run on specific cards, so you could narrow it down just by what game is playing. Also, the artifacts would give them each a different look. Some were grainy, washed out, etc. The Voodoo 1 cards would stand out by the artifact that I can only describe as what looked like faint artificial scan lines. They are really special cards, and two of my vintage computers were built around a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, meaning, I started with the cards, and knew I had to build a PC to run them optimally.

Crinus 8y ago
They are already collector's items? :-/ For quite some time i wanted to buy one to play around with Glide (on a real machine) but i postponed it since it also requires building a full desktop and i do not have space at my current place :-P. Perhaps i should try and find a couple of those before they disappear.
StrictDabbler 8y ago
The Voodoo cards had that odd glossy, liquid look that made the surfaces of objects seem deeply physical. The ADCs (EDIT: RAMDACs, of course) that they were using did an odd sort of "poor man's antialiasing" and running any games from that era on modern equipment is a shocking exercise in explicitly defined pixels.

jonplackett 8y ago

I wanted a 3DFX card so bad in 1998 but I'd already convinced my dad to pay extra for a Matrox Mystique 3D card (which didn't support openGL) and he just couldn't get his head around why i now also needed another 3D card add-on. Even seeing the names of all those cards brings back so many memories.

samlittlewood 8y ago

I was working on 3D rendering and games around this time - pretty much all the PC cards were burdened with terrible CPU->GPU interfaces. The handshaking, setup calculations and register wrangling was such that below a certain triangle size, it would have been quicker for the CPU to just draw the pixels itself. Some cards (Um, Oak?) required per-scanline setup. I got one of these cards - confirmed it was indeed hella fast (even for large meshes of small triangles), and then dropped into SoftICE a few times, winding up at this code: https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-sezero/glide2x/sst1/glide/src/xdraw.asm https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-sezero/glid... My thoughts were - "Wow, somebody gets it!" - Very tight triangle setup, and a simple PCI register layout that means that the setup code just writes the gradients out to a block - the last write pushes the triangle into the huge on-card FIFO. That performance, along with the simplicity of glide, made it a a no-brainer to drop all other card support and focus on that exclusively.

alvalentini 8y ago

Oh dear. Little tear streaming down my face.

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

3dfx had some rather infamous commercials for their Voodoo line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOYoZGoXsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOYoZGoXsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qp2TUNEFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qp2TUNEFY

ben7799 8y ago

Fond memories of these cards for me. I bought one my junior year of college as a CS major. I had some good internships and that year I had some money. Instead of a car I had built a Pentium MMX 200Mhz box with Diamond Stealth card & 16MB ram. Pretty hot machine among my friends at that time... when the Voodoo 1 became available I was able to get one and it's performance was mind blowing at the time, even though I had access to SGI machines and such on campus that had way more impressive demos on them. My senior year of college I took an Open GL course and did a bunch of my projects in linux with the Voodoo 3D drivers. Cool stuff. Played a lot of quake too, I remember writing a program to render the quake characters on my own as one of my projects. The data model formats were open source IIRC so it wasn't too hard to read in the data. Very cool since we didn't have any good 3D tools to build our own models. I remember playing AH-64 Longbow or something on it too.. some of the flight sims were amazing at that point right before flight sim popularity tanked at the same time the remaining programs got unbelievably complex. Voodoo was kind of a pain the neck in day to day usage. In 1999 I built a new machine and went to an NVIDIA Riva TNT and then later that year got a GeForce 256 when those came out. Kind of the end of my heyday of PC gaming.. the combination of working on computers all day + games at the time still requiring a lot of debugging to get them to work well wore me out.

CoryOndrejka 8y ago

Oh, memories. We built a custom arcade board based on SLI Voodoo1, mips r5k, and custom jpeg decompression in hardware to do Magic the Gathering: Armageddon. https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss We wanted to run at highrez (640x480 vga) at 60hz with tons of animating sprites on screen and realized nothing had the fill rate we needed. Rather than changing the game design, we kept looking and met the 3Dfx team when they had barely taped out the Voodoo1. We gambled that SLI would work and started designing the hardware and adapting the game to an early alpha of Glide. We prototyped on SLI cards running on Windows NT and pentium pros. In parallel, Atari Ganes built Voodoo1-based hardware to replace Zoid. Mace and War shipped on that hardware.

ido 8y ago
Interesting! I didn't realise SLI was available before the Voodoo2.

guai888 8y ago

This brings back the memory. I was working for a tiny company in Taiwan at that time. We had been producing VGA cards for a while at that time. An IC distributor brought us a demo board of Voodoo 3D (V1) card. I ran the demo and told my boss that it was the best 3D graphic that I have ever seen. My boss just decided to run with it. Back in those days, VGA card vendor standard practice was to modify the reference in two way. 1. Modify the layout so it can accommodate many different memory chips. If your board can use cheaper memory chip, you will have better profit ( often mean chip which did meet standard memory testing, but still usable with some effort in layout and hardware design) 2. Modify the driver so you have a better benchmark score. Since we were a tiny company with not many resources so we decided to just manufacture the reference design. This decision enables us to be the first one in Taiwan to ship the product. I cold call 50 companies in Europe. I did not have much success at first since distributors in Europe were not convinced that 3D card can sell. Internet was slow back then, we were still using dialup modem and sending video capture was not an option. I finally got a break when I called the 42nd company on the list: Guillemot (France). Guillemot got their start in PC gaming sound card so they were already interested in the 3D card. Guillemot was talking to Orchid Technology but they need a lower price than what Orchid can offer. Since all other Taiwanese makers were still evaluating or in the development process, we got the business because our price is US$50 lower than Orchid and able to ship right away.

mrbill 8y ago

I was one of the poor folks who could only afford the Matrox m3d (aka PowerVR PCX2), which shuffled video data to and from the 3d accelerator over the PCI bus, and was therefore slow as crud.. but, I had GL Quake! http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php

Exuma 7y ago

I used to draw the 3dfx logo all over my trapper keeper using white out. Good old 90s days

cmroanirgo 7y ago

I worked with all of the cards mentioned in the article. It was a pretty sweet time, where the card manufacturers would happily send out a reference card. Some things the article did seem to miss out on: - You could have two Voodoo's in your PC for extra throughput (I can't remember the numbers). I seem to recall there was a ribbon cable between the two boards... - The reason 3dfx ultimately failed was due to hefty lawsuits ongoing with NVidia about IP theft and headhunting the 3dfx staff. During this time there was a mailing list (can't remember it's name) that existed and a lot of game devs operated in it, mainly around DirectX (v1 onwwards), but it was in existence much before that. All the card manufacturers were on it that I recall. One day John Carmack posted a comment (I'm paraphrasing somewhat) how rubbish DirectX and Direct3D was. A month or so later glquake was available. I think it was about 12-18months later Unreal (the game... before the engine) was announced as a demo on this list and we all thought: Awesome -- who the * are these guys!? I'd like to say 'Good times' were had, but seriously, I burnt out due to the insansely fast changing pace of 3D dev during those times.