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3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous

671 points by BirAdam 4y ago

stan_kirdey 4y ago
amazing read
williamDafoe 4y ago
Had a PC custom rebuilt in 1998 for $1200 just to run a voodoo2 and play Half-Life 1 and Tomb Raider 1. Also Unreal tournament GOTY Edition. Happy days. Only needed a Celeron 400 mhz chip. But 3dfx did not get the best engineers from SGI and they were doomed to fail eventually. The best engineers founded NVidia ... Got a Riva TNT2 in 2000 and forgot about 3dfx ...
rjmunro 4y ago
I find the way this article converts money for inflation really annoying. $70 million in 2000 is not "$121,613,821.14 in 2023", it's "about $120 million in 2023". The number is changing at about 7c/second. Those 14 cents are no value whatsoever.
EricE 4y ago
I still have my Voodoo 2 - I just moved and stumbled on it recently while unpacking. What an era.
kleer001 4y ago
[flagged]
- jdboyd 4y ago
  On Chrome 110 on Ubuntu 22.04, both arrow keys and page up/down work for me.
- saghm 4y ago
  They work for me (Firefox on Arch Linux). Maybe they're using JavaScript for it somehow, and you have it disabled?
ddeck 4y ago
>On the 15th of December in 2000, NVIDIA announced that they would acquire 3dfx Interactive’s assets for $70 million ($121,613,821.14 in 2023) and 1 million shares of common stock. Those million shares are worth about $5.7 billion today ($238 stock, 1:24 cumulative split since then).
- nerpderp82 4y ago
  Heh, I owned 3dfx stock when they folded. I saw 0$ of that transaction.
  - djmips 4y ago
    Pretty sneaky huh?
    - cowsandmilk 4y ago
      What’s sneaky? The company was going bankrupt and the deal was approved by shareholders. When you go bankrupt or dissolve, creditors get paid before shareholders. That someone owned shares and saw nothing is how bankruptcy works (and should work).
      - wildermuthn 4y ago
        It feels sneaky because in these deals someone always seems to get rich except those who who were teased into investing their time (employees with “equity”) or invested with small-money (stockholders) rather than big-money (VCs, banks). I have no idea about the particulars of this deal, so maybe no individual got rich off the deal, and VCs/banks only recouped a portion of their investment. But in my experience, usually a failure still sends up as a success for those who are in a position to negotiate a deal. In other words, Nvidia didn’t do this deal out of the kindness of their hearts — there was still something of value to them that they paid for, and I’d be quite surprised if the board of 3dfx didn’t find a way to capture some of that value personally. Saying that “creditors get paid before shareholders” doesn’t capture the full story of most of these sales, where some equity owners are special and some aren’t.
cronix 4y ago
Nice trip down memory lane. I still remember when I popped the 3dfx in and played quake, after playing quake on some ATI or Matrox I had (and a hell of a lot of other games before that lol). It was a transformative experience. I was stunned at how smooth everything was. It was beautiful. It was more incredible than going from 320x200x16(colors) to 640x480x256 and then 1024x768x16.8M, which were all quite marvelous increments. I think Moore's Law was just more visible in the early days. You really felt each iterative change. Going from "PC Speaker" to an Adlib was also a massive transformation.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Adlib forgot it even existed but you are correct. These were generational leaps in PC gaming.
- greggsy 4y ago
  Interestingly, the transistor density of GPUs has been following a roughly logarithmic curve since 2000, compared to the linear increase in x86 processors [1]. I totally agree that the incremental innovations observed in earlier GPU platforms felt much, much more ‘obvious’ though. It’s as if the ‘wow factor’ of graphics hardware doesn’t scale at the same rate as density. Or perhaps releases were more spread out than they are today (compared to the annual release cycle expected today) making the jumps more obvious. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-NVIDIA-graphics-cards-and-Intel-x86-CPUs-in-single-and-double-precision_fig3_266658154 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-NVIDIA-gra...
  - Taniwha 4y ago
    I was designing Mac graphics accelerators in the early 90s, one thing I learned is that perceived performance follows a sort of S curve, there's an area where everything is terribly slow and any change is good but it's slow, then you hit the curve every performance increase is obvious, wonderful, makes new stuff possible - that's where you start selling big if you're leading the pack, then you hit an area where performance is "good enough", double the performance and the perceived increase is far less - now you're fighting for "cheapest", not so good for your company. That was for 2D, bigger faster 3D enables new sorts of games so that market has been growing for far longer.
mk_stjames 4y ago
The retail box design [1] of the Voodoo 3 2000 is still burned into my memory even after 23 years. The purple woman's face, 6 million triangles per second... just, sold. 1999 was just an amazing time. [1]: https://archive.ph/BNLiX/f3757388e1ee7008f0bad22261c625f1dcfe0e9e.webp https://archive.ph/BNLiX/f3757388e1ee7008f0bad22261c625f1dcf...
- user_named 4y ago
  Same
- egeozcan 4y ago
  My brand-new Voodoo graphics card in its shiny package was the only thing I took with me as a teenager when I was leaving the flat in a hurry after the big earthquake in 1999[0]. I remember noticing the missing silhouettes of distant buildings with some fires burning behind where they used to stand and thinking, oh boy we surely won't have electricity soon. You tend to have different priorities in those ages, I guess. It's a dark memory, sure, but probably the packaging somehow made me get attached to a "stupid computer part" (not my words) and that's interesting. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake
- rayiner 4y ago
  1999 was such a good tech year.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  The design of their second logo (the one in that image) held up pretty well.
  - moosedev 4y ago
    In retrospect, it reminds me of the Amazon logo [0]. The orange swoopy thing evokes the Amazon A-to-Z "smile" (2000 onwards, although they had a more generic orange swoopy thing before that). Never noticed that similarity before. I also had a Voodoo 3 with that box design back then, but different colors (Voodoo 3 3000 model). Actually still have the card... [0] https://blog.logomyway.com/history-amazon-logo-design/ https://blog.logomyway.com/history-amazon-logo-design/
wolpoli 4y ago
>Interestingly, 20 years later, the 3dfx Rampage was tested and found lacking against the NVIDIA GeForce 256 which would have been its competition had the Rampage been released. Does anyone know where I could find out more about this? The prevailing narrative for many years has been that the Rampage GPU would have provided a technological edge for a few years.
- randomifcpfan 4y ago
  A quick web search finds: https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-rampage-gpu-performance-revealed-in-a-book-20-years-later https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-rampage-gpu-performance-re... But you could argue that the Rampage drivers weren’t optimized.
  - wolpoli 4y ago
    Thanks! I would argue that the drivers weren't optimized because the specification on the Spectre 1000 (Rampage) is roughly at the GeForce 2 GTS level.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  I also found that part interesting. Last time I read about the rampage was about a decade ago, I even saw a video showing the prototype, but just the card itself because "nobody has any drivers for it". Apparently they must have been found somewhere by now. Some fun stuff to research for a Sunday I guess. :-)
ChuckMcM 4y ago
My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it. Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun. In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work. Sigh.
- datpiff 4y ago
  > he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering mode How does this relate to the NV-1? I thought it used quads instead of triangles. Did it do accelerated NURBs as well?
  - rasz 4y ago
    reminds me of PowerVR main selling point being tiled rendering, but they tried pushing some proprietary "infinite planes" BS https://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php https://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php "Thanks to volumes defined by infinite planes, shadows and lights can be cast from any object over any surface."
    - datpiff 4y ago
      If it was marketing they didn't seem to do a great job... Very little online except for mentions of "NURBS", and this thread. It's not intuitively obvious to me how a rasterizer accelerator would render NURBS surfaces at all (edit: without just approximating the surface with triangles/quads in software, which any competing card could also do)
4RealFreedom 4y ago
I remember getting my first Voodoo card. After playing games, I couldn't stand software rendering anymore. Purchased a Voodoo 2 when they came out. Reminds me of Unreal, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Thief, Mechwarrior 2 - so many fun older games! My next card was a nvidia tnt2. I've owned nvidia cards ever since.
- creinhardt 4y ago
  Dang, hadn't thought about Shogo since playing a demo a loooong time ago. Thanks for triggering a good memory!
M4v3R 4y ago
I have fond memories of playing Quake 2 for some time and then buying a Voodoo card. It suddenly looked like a totally different game. It wasn’t just the resolution and texture filtering - Quake 2 in GL mode used a totally different, dynamic lightning system and back then it was simply stunning. Comparison pics: https://www.marky.ca/3d/quake2/compare/content.html https://www.marky.ca/3d/quake2/compare/content.html
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  Have you played Quake 2 RTX (ray tracing version)? 25 years later it's yet again a quantum leap in the same game!
- 4RealFreedom 4y ago
  I remember playing Quake 2 and colored lighting followed your bullets! I was floored.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  I...totally prefer the SVGA "lower resolution" version, and I remember feeling like that at the time too. The problem was the 3D version looked/looks just plain BLURRY. Something about my brain is able to understand when they see a pixelated video game that it's an artifice, and give it a ton of benefit of the doubt. I can't say it is in any way more realistic, but it feels more IMMERSIVE. Whereas with the higher resolution one, it's an uncanny valley. Everything is too smooth and Barbara Walters-y. Again, this is my memory of how I perceived it at the time, this isn't modern rose coloured glasses because obviously technology has improved dramatically.
  - TOGoS 4y ago
    Same. I have fond memories of first playing Doom on a 386 with the resolution set to extra low (approximately halving 320x200). The space between the pixels gives your imagination something to do. Sort of like how you can make a room look better by turning off the ceiling lights and just having a small lamp on your desk. I kind of think even if we get 120fps perfectly raytraced VR, it'll never be able to quite achieve the big pixel immersion experience.
userbinator 4y ago
Not too long ago someone recreated a Voodoo5 6000: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960140 The (leaked?) datasheets and miscellaneous information for the GPUs seem to be widely available, but that's still quite impressive for a single person; on a similar level to making your own motherboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > on a similar level to making your own motherboard How hard would it be to make a motherboard from that era?
carabiner 4y ago
typo: loose/lose
exabrial 4y ago
800mb/s 23+ years ago is absolutely bezerk. I remember being in high school and seeing the butter smooth high frame rates (for the time) being like wow.
Teslazar 4y ago
A few more historical bits that might be interesting. Brian Hook was the 3dfx engineer who was the original architect of Glide. He went on to work for id Software in 1997. Michael Abrash wrote the first 3d hardware support for Quake, while working for id Software, but it wasn't for 3dfx it was for the Rendition Verite 1000 and released as vQuake. John Carmack was, of course, the lead programmer of Quake. Hook, Abrash, and Carmack ended up working at the same company again at Oculus VR (and then Meta).
- js2 4y ago
  1998 interview with Hook: https://www.quakewiki.net/profile-retro-interview-brian-hook/ https://www.quakewiki.net/profile-retro-interview-brian-hook...
- burnte 4y ago
  I BOUGHT a Verite card because of vQuake, and it wasn't worth it. When I moved to a Voodoo3 it was amazing.
djmips 4y ago
This is a really great retrospective on 3dfx from four of the founders. 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell (Computer History Museum) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU
- hnarayanan 4y ago
  This is so very good and even more engaging than the article.
  - muro 4y ago
    The article has a weird writing style, something is off. Maybe it feels like a high school essay?
    - hnarayanan 4y ago
      It does, doesn't it? It just feels very abrupt.
- minimaul 4y ago
  I really recommend sitting down and listening to this - it's a very good cover of 3DFX from start to finish (and I feel like it was probably one of the primary sources for this article).
  - hnarayanan 4y ago
    Yes, it looks like the article was very heavily sourced from this.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>Voodoo Graphics and GLide were the standard in the PC graphics space for a time. 3dfx created an industry that is going strong today, and that industry has affected far more than just gaming. GPUs now power multiple functions in our computers, and they enable AI work as well. >This tale brings up many “what ifs.” What if 3dfx had realized early on that GPUs were excellent general purpose linear algebra computers, and had incorporated GPGPU functionality into GLide in the late 90s? Given its SGI roots, this is not implausible. And given how NVidia still has a near stranglehold on the GPGPU market today, it’s also plausible that this would have kept 3dfx alive.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- monocasa 4y ago
  I don't think so. Part of what made consumer GPUs viable at that gate count was their laser like precision on their specific rasterization workloads. More general linear algebra solutions wouldn't have been viable on the marketplace. You wouldn't see the viability of more general hardware until the bro layer 90s advent of register combiner hardware.
- aldrich 4y ago
  History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released. Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably: - The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tr25202.pdf http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tr2520... - The pitch deck: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tritechpyramid3dpresentation.pdf http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tritec... - The hardware reference manual: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/vs203_103.pdf http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/vs203_... (shows even more internals!) (As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys Oy were all related here.) They unfortunately busted before they could release anything, due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets were bought by ATI. As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and data buses. It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making sacrifices (quality, programmability) there, which made sense at the time. I do think they would've been pretty late to switch to the whole programmable pipeline show, for to that reason alone. But who knows! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU
hnbear 4y ago
I had a PowerMac 6500/300 back in my mid-teens as my first computer. To play games I later bought a PC Voodoo 3 which you could flash with a Mac-version ROM. Much cheaper than buying an actual Max version. Unreal was incredible. The whole card was incredible. Later I put a Linux distro on the computer too, and I needed a custom patch to the kernel (2.2.18, I think) to get the Voodoo drivers working for accelerated 2D and 3D rather than the software frame buffer. It was incredible to see a Gnome 1.4 or KDE 2 desktop in high res perform really well. It was also pretty buggy. Due to experimental drivers in both Linux and Mac, I assume. The weirdest was that sometimes a bug in Linux would dump whatever was in memory on the screen, which softly after booting from Mac to Linux could result in Mac OS 9 windows appearing on a Linux desktop. You obviously couldn’t interact, it would happen in a kernel panic type event where the computer would freeze with an odd mix of stuff on the screen. Was a fun intro to Linux, not getting a nice windowing environment till after I’d learnt to patch and compile a kernel. Back then it was normal to play with more OSs it seems like. That computer had Mac, Linux, BeOS and more on it.
rl3 4y ago
I'm just here to post old 3dfx commercials: 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 The print ads were similarly incredible: http://www.x86-secret.com/pics/divers/v56k/histo/1999/commerce.jpg http://www.x86-secret.com/pics/divers/v56k/histo/1999/commer... https://www.purepc.pl/files/Image/artykul_zdjecia/2012/3DFX_Historia/3dfx_commercial_2.png https://www.purepc.pl/files/Image/artykul_zdjecia/2012/3DFX_... https://fcdn.me/813/97f/3d-pc-accelerators-blow-dryer-ee8eb65e66951f63248c5f4881.jpg https://fcdn.me/813/97f/3d-pc-accelerators-blow-dryer-ee8eb6...
- ngcazz 4y ago
  I liked the first advert. The world hunger one though really rubbed me the wrong way.
  - rl3 4y ago
    Well, I think it was taking a swipe at a particular brand of insincere feel-good corporate bullshit marketing that was fairly prevalent at the time. Faceless conglomerates trying to manage their image such that they appeared to be benevolent world citizens—not ruthless plunderers. That is opposed to say, today's brand of insincere feel-good corporate bullshit marketing.
    - a3w 4y ago
      They were making fun of greenwashing. Fun still does have its place in personal development, say most guides to the current climate catastrophe for human beings. But right now, I too wish we would have a more liveable planet instead of perfect entertainment in polluting, air-conditioned cities. But I studied the wrong topic for me to actually thrive in the former, and not the latter environment.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- 4y ago
jvolkman 4y ago
I still remember installing a Voodoo and playing glquake. It was so amazing after relative disappointments like the S3 Virge. Lots of nostalgia for that period. The article touches on this a bit, but one of the quirky things about the original Voodoo and Voodoo 2 were that they lacked 2D entirely. You had to use a short VGA passthrough cable to some other 2D card. This also meant that they only supported fullscreen 3D, since 2D output was completely bypassed while the 3dfx card was in use. The Voodoo 3 finally came with 2D, but I think I jumped ship to Nvidia by then.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  I think Voodoo Banshee was a full blown 2d+3d solution that was released before Voodoo 3. Don't take my word for it, though
  - smcl 4y ago
    And the Voodoo Rush was a 2D/3D card that came out a little before that (August 1997, compared to the Banshee in late-1998). I didn't own either, mind, my only 3dfx card was a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI :D
    - beebeepka 4y ago
      Ah, you're absolutely right. Forgot about the Voodoo Rush. I was a poor kid and couldn't afford either.
      - smcl 4y ago
        Oh me too - my motherboard had no AGP slot (hence the V3 2000 PCI). If I was smart I would've saved up for a few months, bought a more future-proof motherboard (I was on the dying Socket 7 platform, with an AMD K6-2 466MHz) and I would've had a nice little setup that would've kept me going for a while. But I was an impatient kid, and I wanted to play Quake 3 and ended up doing piecemeal upgrades over the next few years that ultimately cost me more overall :D
  - vikingerik 4y ago
harel 4y ago
I was managing a CD-Rom shop when the Voodoo was a thing. We bought one for the store's 486DX computer and I remember the before and after shock of playing Tomb Raider and demoing it to shoppers. It felt like "The Future"...
bottlepalm 4y ago
Man the first 3dfx was such a mind blowing experience. There was nothing like it at them time. Games went from a rough pixelated mess to super smooth and sharp. PS1 and N64 had an edge over PC graphics in the 90s, 3dfx turned the tables.
- bennysonething 4y ago
  This wasn't my experience. I bought a voodoo 3 , playing quake 1 and quake 2 was just disappointing, at the time it just felt like Goldeneye was next gen compared to those flagship pc games. I desperately wanted it to be a step up. It didn't feel like it. Also it's sort of odd to me that quake two is seen as revolutionary. In my opinion Goldeneye blows it out of the water and it was released in the same year. Edit, obviously this is all subjective, and it's about fond memories! :)
  - bottlepalm 4y ago
    Goldeneye levels are very simple, boxy, and low poly count. Quake 1 levels were far more complex and impressive than Goldeneye. Though pixelated and low res which is what 3dfx revolutionized with their Voodoo 1.
app4soft 4y ago
> Voodoo2, Diamond Monster 3D, image from [Russian site] Why the heck this image claimed being taken from [Russian site] if that image is from Buyee?[0] [0] https://buyee.jp/mercari/item/m78940760663 https://buyee.jp/mercari/item/m78940760663
BruceEel 4y ago
Also worth mentioning, the 3dfx Voodoo SDK, docs and examples. For those like me (zero previous experience with 3D API's) it was a lot of fun to play with. And! Still available today: DOSBox-X has Voodoo1 support built-in (or host pass-through glide support), Open Watcom C++ works well in DOSBox and will compile most examples.
- christkv 4y ago
  Otherwise pcem also has full voodoo support.
tablespoon 4y ago
> Gordon Campbell grew up in Minnesota, and as there wasn’t a market for technology there at the time, he felt he needed to go to Silicon Valley in 1976. That seems like a bit of anachronistic Silicon Valley mythology. Wasn't Minnesota something like the "Silicon Valley" of mainframes at the time? There were several then-major computer companies there: CDC, Cray, Honeywell, IBM, Univac, etc.
Neil44 4y ago
I remember the audible ‘clunk’ of the relays snapping in on those old pass through cards. Always the sound of a good time. Remember seeing a guy at a lan party carrying his whole box by the pass through cable one too, that made a few people wince.
- jeffybefffy519 4y ago
  That is wild, but can totally imagine it as the pass thru cable was chunky.
drKarl 4y ago
I got the 3dfx Voodoo which required a 2D card! Later on I got a Nvidia Riva TNT! It's been a long way, now I have an RTX 4090...
Seanambers 4y ago
3DFX was basically the shit in mid late 90s. First time seeing Quake in OpenGL was insane - before that all games were rendered in software.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Nope, the blitter engine on Amiga, tile engine on consoles like Nintendo and Sega, the early GPUs on arcades like TMS34010, glide on 3Dfx. Quake used miniGL, not full OpenGL.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    I guess they're specifically referring to textured polygon-based 3D graphics. There were a few earlier attempts that failed for one reason or another, mostly poor performance. I think there was a French accelerator card that I can't remember the name of right now.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Quake had a Glide renderer. But those are examples on 2D acceleration. There were equivalents on PC too.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      There is enough 3D over here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64 All predate 3dfx Voodoo launch in October 7, 1996.
      - anthk 4y ago
        - PSX: Ahem, more than an GPU, simple integer based rasterizer. - Saturn: It did quads. - The N64 was an SGI machine made into a desktop. OK, not much earlier than the VooDoo.
nix23 4y ago
Playing Wizardry8 right now (on wine with the glide patches).
jahnu 4y ago
While I was at university in Derby, England, I got a sneak preview of a prototype of the first consumer 3dfx card. This was at a gfx card company called DataPath I was doing some contract work via another company. The day I saw it working I started saving so I could buy one the instant it was available. I had quite the advantage at Quake LAN parties for a short while :)
casenmgreen 4y ago
> The company endured litigation for securities fraud for quite sometime, declared bankruptcy in December of 1994, and became Aureal Semiconductor Inc on the 9th of September in 1995. This company would also go bankrupt and later be acquired by Creative. Aureal produced revolutionary audio cards, with real 3D audio - and I mean real. Close your eyes and you would track the sounds in the space around you with your eyes, from your hearing. It changed everything. I played HL with this, and CS too. I may be wrong, but my understanding is Creative sued them into bankruptcy, bought what remained, and never used that technology. I have never forgiven Creative for this.
- 4RealFreedom 4y ago
  I remember it like that, too. It wasn't a product war, it was a war of court battles. Creative had more money and was able to chip away at Aureal through litigation and caused their collapse.
jaimex2 4y ago
I just remember glide being that annoying thing you had to wrap to get the original n64 emulator working.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Because the original emulator required a 3dfx chip. The N64 was based on an SGI chip, which coincidentally was quite similar, so it was easy to translate to glide calls.
Genbox 4y ago
Back in the day I bought a Savage 3D graphics card (1998) over the Voodoo 2 Banshee because the price vs. value was much better. At that time, 3Dfx was known for it's 3D performance, but was still clunky on the 2D part, especially considering the Matrox G400 GPU which had dual VGA, amazing color correction and software support everywhere. It went so fast going from having no 3D acceleration to having more 3D accelleration than you could imagine. It died fast too when ATI and NVIDIA became the only ones left, which is still true to this day.
OnlyMortal 4y ago
My first card was a Voodoo 1 - for the Mac. The difference it made to Quake was dramatic. When the Voodoo 2 came out, I couldn’t find a vendor selling them for the Mac. I’m not even sure anyone did. I bought a Voodoo 2 card that worked with a patched version of Mesa but it was slow. I managed to find a driver on some peer sharing thing (Hotline??). I’ve no idea of its origin but it worked fine.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
johnny_canuck 4y ago
I love reading about 3dfx as their hardware had a great deal of impact on my preteen years (gaming night and day). I'm always amazed to read how small some of these 90s tech companies were.
unxdfa 4y ago
I remember these days. I spent a lot of time buying GPUs and eating ramen. Unreal Tournament 99 on a Voodoo 3 3000 was the peak for me. Now I have an Intel iGPU and don’t care. And I can afford to eat better :)
pentagrama 4y ago
Oh, I remember installing my Diamond Monster 2 video card as a kid, with high expectations of this thing called 3dfx and the Voodoo chip built in. The first game that I launched was Need for Speed 2 SE, who supported 3dfx, and oh boy o boy, the difference was night and day, it blew my mind at the time. The textures, shadows, look and feel overall was the best thing that I ever seen. It also has exclusive features for 3dfx like bugs splatters on the screen in some parts. A leap forward on gaming to my teenager eyes at the end of the 90s.
mikezirak 4y ago
[flagged]
pcdoodle 4y ago
I think what really did it for me and my friends at that time was we could have a better graphics at home that what was available at most arcades at the time. Need for Speed 3 was the killer app for us, Playing over a DB9 serial link or directly calling each others house (and arguing about who was going to call who because the ringers were still on in the parents bedroom and the pickup was after the 1st ring).
ErneX 4y ago
I had one the 1st Voodoo cards, it was a Diamond. When you ran a game that supported it you could hear the mechanical relay switching from the regular video card to the Voodoo.
ReptileMan 4y ago
And glide is the only 3d accelerator that made diablo 2 look good. To this day.
Maxburn 4y ago
My love for the Voodoo 2 knows no bounds, it was the start of a beautiful thing for me.
tiffanyh 4y ago
In 1998, Tom’s Hardware had a long article on “NVIDIA vs 3DFX - The Wind Of Change“ https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html It’s a great article that predicted a lot of things. Side note: love that an article 25-years old is still accessible.
bentt 4y ago
I loved my 3DFX cards but there was a moment where I realized that a Nvidia Riva TNT would properly accelerate OpenGL 3d applications (3dsmax in my case) and it was over. 3DFX didn't implement OpenGL properly at the time. It always felt like something was broken if you were outside of Glide.
antiterra 4y ago
The 2D/3D Voodoo Rush performed so poorly that there was an offer to return the 3D daughterboard in order to get a proper standalone Voodoo card. You could still use what remained of the card for 2D. I did this and they sent me a retail Diamond Monster 3D. I thought I was buying something better than a Voodoo and got it at release before there were any reviews. Lesson learned.
- christkv 4y ago
  I remembered it being jokingly called the Voodoo Rushed.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Mesa had a trick that let it capture the framebuffer off your regular Voodoo card and display it in a window. I did this with my Voodoo 2. It was like having a Voodoo Banshee. Well, maybe not quite like, but my in-window Quake 2 framerates were quite decent.
darkwater 4y ago
Oh, this brings back so many memory from when I actually bought and updated PC hardware every time I had some money saved! I remember having a Matrox Mystique (the one with a... joker or something like that on the box), the 3Dfx Voodoo and also a TNT2. I remember moving from the Mystique to the Voodoo playing Quake and it was one of the biggest "wow" moment of my childhood.
formerly_proven 4y ago
3dfx is another example of "worse is better" or "slope vs intercept". This article doesn't quite spell it out, but as far as I can tell, 3dfx had one GPU architecture that was tweaked from 1995 till their end. It was much better for a few years than what the competitors put out, but the competitors kept iterating. nVidia created several generations of GPUs in the same time frame. 3dfx started higher but had no slope. Everyone else started much lower, but had a lot of slope (nVidia and ATI in particular). Two of these went ahead and started creating a new "fastest ever GPU" every other year for a quarter century, the other tried putting more of the same GPU on bigger boards and folded.
- rasz 4y ago
  One of my favorite facts is about Nvidia release cycle speed. At the peak of nvidia 3dfx war new chips were coming out every 6-9 months: Riva 128 (April 1997) to TNT (June 15, 1998) took 14 months, TNT2 (March 15, 1999) 8 month, GF256 (October 11, 1999) 7 months, GF2 (April 26, 2000) 6 months, | 3dfx dies here |, GF3 (February 27, 2001) 9 months, GF4 (February 6, 2002) 12 months, FX (March 2003) 13 months, etc ... Nvidia had an army of hardware engineers always working on 2 future products in parallel, 3dfx had few people in a room.
- djmips 4y ago
  Yes, I agree wholeheartedly Nvidia had a supercomputer and great hardware design software tools that were a trade secret and basically behind an off limits curtain in the center of their office and it helped them get chips out rapidly and on first turn. First turn means the first silicon coming back is good without requiring fixes and another costly turn. I'd say 3dfx weren't poised to industrialize as well as Nvidia and they just couldn't keep up in the evolutionary race. I'm not sure I understand where your worse is better idiom fits because 3dfx was better and Nvidia was worse but iterated to get better than 3dfx and won the day. Truly if worse was better in this case 3Dfx would still be around? On the other hand triangle based rendering is a case of worse is better and Nvidia learned that and switched course from their early attempts with nurb based primitives.
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
papito 4y ago
Man, I remember I had a crappy Celeron because we were dirt-poor. At some point I finally bought a Voodoo 3, popped it in, and fired up Tomb Raider. I was blown away. The game went from pixelated chop-o-rama to smooth and gorgeous (in those days). I could even play combat simulators like European Air War. Good Times.
29athrowaway 4y ago
And then NVIDIA ate everything.
quelsolaar 4y ago
This story misses some of the details of how Quake cane to support 3Dfx. Carmack had an intrgraph workstation that had openGL at the time and had written a version of Quake for it: GLQuake. This version was shown to 3Dfx, and 3Dfx realized they could imlement a OpenGL drive that only supported the features Carmack had used for his Intergraph port. So a "MiniGL" driver was boarn. This was a huge deal for 3Dfx, and loats of people got their start programing OpenGL using the "MiniGl" subset
severino 4y ago
Funny thing, when I heard about those "3d graphics accelerator" cards in the late 90s, I just thought they were meant to make your 3d games run faster. But Quake II and similar games already ran very fast in my machine. It wasn't until I went to some cybercafe where they had Quake II, among others, installed for network play in computers with one of those 3dfx cards, that I actually saw what an accelerator card could turn a game into, regardless of speed, and I decided that I needed one of those.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  That sounds like a really cool experience. Could you expand further on the differences you saw?
  - severino 4y ago
    Something similar to the first screenshot in the article. Until then, Quake II on software graphics was a cool game for me but a game where you saw pixels everywhere, like every other game at the time. Discrete graphics cards on the other side made the game's graphics take a huge leap forward. It was a quality (and not just speed) I hadn't seen before, so much so that it was almost a different game for me. I guess it was 1999 or so.
  - corysama 4y ago
    Going from low rez, point-sampled to high rez, bilinear filtered (+antialiasing if you are lucky) is a huge quality leap. Basically PlayStation 1 vs PS2.
christkv 4y ago
I could not afford the Voodoo card so I had to settle for a verite based card. In retrospect that chip architecture was way before its time being a risc architecture. To bad it could not compete on raw performance but at least Quake ran great on it.
- djmips 4y ago
  Yes it was intriguing. It was a programmable GPU in a sense. The drivers downloaded micro code for the triangle shading.
uberduper 4y ago
I worked at 3dfx in their final months. I watched as workers from NVIDIA broke down and hauled off a large number of netapp shelves (seemingly without labeling them). 3dfx was run like a frat house. It was fun while I was there, but it wasn't a surprise when they announced they were shutting down.
ben7799 4y ago
Count me in. I was in college when this happened. I remember being a Freshman and Sgi had come to campus for recruiting with all these amazing demos on 6-figure hardware. Then my junior year I had scrounged enough money to get a 3Dfx card and my friends and I were all blown away by it. I didn’t end up going into graphics but remember we did a project for computer graphics and I was able to run my code on the 3Dfx. It was an incredibly exciting time.
- corysama 4y ago
  Same. I was fortunate enough to be able to use one of those hundred thousand dollar SGI’s as a sophomore because of my lab job. So, in my dorm I had a Pentium60 capable of running Quake at 320x240 software rendered. And, in the lab, I could play at 1280x1024(!!!) on the Reality Engine with the same point filtered look. But, then I managed to get a Voodoo1 and my little PC could run Quake at 640x480 bilinear filtered. It was nuts to get such a huge speed up for a fraction of the cost of the base machine. Peak “Pop Moore’s Law” going on at that time.
secalex 4y ago
I can still hear the clunk of the relay switching over to 3D (versus 2D pass-thru) when booting Wing Commander.
fho 4y ago
... that article triggered me hard ... I just hate when the first paragraph is interesting and then they start with something completely different (ie "the guy that did the interesting thing"s life) in the second paragraph ... here ... they just did that four times ...
a3w 4y ago
3dfx Voodoo 3 - ah yes passive cooling, I lost some skin touching an aluminium fin. An active cooler was needed, but easily screwed on.
bee_rider 4y ago
It is always funny to read the comments on this site for a computer history post, you’ll get 1) I remember buying that card with my first paycheck 2) Oh yeah, me and/or my buddy worked on that As someone who was a little kid for most of the 90’s, all I can say is thanks to everyone who worked on the stuff — it was a truly magical time when every time your dad brought you to the computer shops they’d have some new demo set up they could do things that simply were not even imaginable a last time. Plus since I was not even a teenager yet, I didn’t have to learn about the battles between which model of rendering was better, it was just pure magic. Hopefully we’ll speed things up again soon. I’m worried that there may be a generation at some point that doesn’t realize we’re in the future.
fabiensanglard 4y ago
The one game that always puzzled me what Diablo 2. I never saw it run better than on a Voodoo 2. It was butter smooth. I compared it to a TNT2Ultra and maybe an ATI Rage 128 and none of these came even close. To this day, this remains a mystery.
- rasz 4y ago
  Diablo 2 did some weird things. Here is a post about its fake perspective mode https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/ https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/
hatsuseno 4y ago
> All of this meant that the Voodoo Rush was dead on arrival. Interesting this should be my first video card that I bought myself. I do remember there being issues using specific renderer libraries, swapping out glide dll's and that sort of stuff to make certain games work. For a DOA card I sure was happy with it!
russ 4y ago
I remember my dad’s friend joined 3dfx in ‘94 and we became testers for all their prototype cards. Being able to play Virtua Fighter on our PC still ranks as one of the most magical moments I’ve had with technology.
smcl 4y ago
> ATI’s Radeon and NVIDIA’s RIVA TNT2 were now offering higher performance at roughly the same price Minor nitpick - Voodoo 3 and TNT2 weren't competing with Radeon. Among that generation were the 3dfx Voodoo 3, NVidia TNT2, S3 Savage4 and Matrox G400 - ATI's offering around this time was the Rage Fury. The ATI Radeon was part of the next generation, along with the Geforce 256 and S3 Savage 2000. edit: or possibly even the one after that? Wikipedia tells me the Rage Fury MAXX was out around the same time as Geforce 256, and Radeon only showed up around the time of the GeForce 2 family. The MAXX slipped from my memory, it was pretty iirc finicky card (performing badly and having buggy drivers, possibly hardware?) and a bit of a disappointment.

671 points by BirAdam 4y ago

amazing read

Had a PC custom rebuilt in 1998 for $1200 just to run a voodoo2 and play Half-Life 1 and Tomb Raider 1. Also Unreal tournament GOTY Edition. Happy days. Only needed a Celeron 400 mhz chip. But 3dfx did not get the best engineers from SGI and they were doomed to fail eventually. The best engineers founded NVidia ... Got a Riva TNT2 in 2000 and forgot about 3dfx ...

rjmunro 4y ago

I find the way this article converts money for inflation really annoying. $70 million in 2000 is not "$121,613,821.14 in 2023", it's "about $120 million in 2023". The number is changing at about 7c/second. Those 14 cents are no value whatsoever.

EricE 4y ago

I still have my Voodoo 2 - I just moved and stumbled on it recently while unpacking. What an era.

kleer001 4y ago

[flagged]

jdboyd 4y ago
On Chrome 110 on Ubuntu 22.04, both arrow keys and page up/down work for me.
saghm 4y ago
They work for me (Firefox on Arch Linux). Maybe they're using JavaScript for it somehow, and you have it disabled?

ddeck 4y ago

>On the 15th of December in 2000, NVIDIA announced that they would acquire 3dfx Interactive’s assets for $70 million ($121,613,821.14 in 2023) and 1 million shares of common stock. Those million shares are worth about $5.7 billion today ($238 stock, 1:24 cumulative split since then).

nerpderp82 4y ago
Heh, I owned 3dfx stock when they folded. I saw 0$ of that transaction.
- djmips 4y ago
  Pretty sneaky huh?
  - cowsandmilk 4y ago
    What’s sneaky? The company was going bankrupt and the deal was approved by shareholders. When you go bankrupt or dissolve, creditors get paid before shareholders. That someone owned shares and saw nothing is how bankruptcy works (and should work).
    - wildermuthn 4y ago
      It feels sneaky because in these deals someone always seems to get rich except those who who were teased into investing their time (employees with “equity”) or invested with small-money (stockholders) rather than big-money (VCs, banks). I have no idea about the particulars of this deal, so maybe no individual got rich off the deal, and VCs/banks only recouped a portion of their investment. But in my experience, usually a failure still sends up as a success for those who are in a position to negotiate a deal. In other words, Nvidia didn’t do this deal out of the kindness of their hearts — there was still something of value to them that they paid for, and I’d be quite surprised if the board of 3dfx didn’t find a way to capture some of that value personally. Saying that “creditors get paid before shareholders” doesn’t capture the full story of most of these sales, where some equity owners are special and some aren’t.

cronix 4y ago

Nice trip down memory lane. I still remember when I popped the 3dfx in and played quake, after playing quake on some ATI or Matrox I had (and a hell of a lot of other games before that lol). It was a transformative experience. I was stunned at how smooth everything was. It was beautiful. It was more incredible than going from 320x200x16(colors) to 640x480x256 and then 1024x768x16.8M, which were all quite marvelous increments. I think Moore's Law was just more visible in the early days. You really felt each iterative change. Going from "PC Speaker" to an Adlib was also a massive transformation.

kyriakos 4y ago
Adlib forgot it even existed but you are correct. These were generational leaps in PC gaming.
greggsy 4y ago
Interestingly, the transistor density of GPUs has been following a roughly logarithmic curve since 2000, compared to the linear increase in x86 processors [1]. I totally agree that the incremental innovations observed in earlier GPU platforms felt much, much more ‘obvious’ though. It’s as if the ‘wow factor’ of graphics hardware doesn’t scale at the same rate as density. Or perhaps releases were more spread out than they are today (compared to the annual release cycle expected today) making the jumps more obvious. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-NVIDIA-graphics-cards-and-Intel-x86-CPUs-in-single-and-double-precision_fig3_266658154 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-NVIDIA-gra...
- Taniwha 4y ago
  I was designing Mac graphics accelerators in the early 90s, one thing I learned is that perceived performance follows a sort of S curve, there's an area where everything is terribly slow and any change is good but it's slow, then you hit the curve every performance increase is obvious, wonderful, makes new stuff possible - that's where you start selling big if you're leading the pack, then you hit an area where performance is "good enough", double the performance and the perceived increase is far less - now you're fighting for "cheapest", not so good for your company. That was for 2D, bigger faster 3D enables new sorts of games so that market has been growing for far longer.

mk_stjames 4y ago

The retail box design [1] of the Voodoo 3 2000 is still burned into my memory even after 23 years. The purple woman's face, 6 million triangles per second... just, sold. 1999 was just an amazing time. [1]: https://archive.ph/BNLiX/f3757388e1ee7008f0bad22261c625f1dcfe0e9e.webp https://archive.ph/BNLiX/f3757388e1ee7008f0bad22261c625f1dcf...

user_named 4y ago
Same
egeozcan 4y ago
My brand-new Voodoo graphics card in its shiny package was the only thing I took with me as a teenager when I was leaving the flat in a hurry after the big earthquake in 1999[0]. I remember noticing the missing silhouettes of distant buildings with some fires burning behind where they used to stand and thinking, oh boy we surely won't have electricity soon. You tend to have different priorities in those ages, I guess. It's a dark memory, sure, but probably the packaging somehow made me get attached to a "stupid computer part" (not my words) and that's interesting. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake
rayiner 4y ago
1999 was such a good tech year.
dehrmann 4y ago
The design of their second logo (the one in that image) held up pretty well.
- moosedev 4y ago
  In retrospect, it reminds me of the Amazon logo [0]. The orange swoopy thing evokes the Amazon A-to-Z "smile" (2000 onwards, although they had a more generic orange swoopy thing before that). Never noticed that similarity before. I also had a Voodoo 3 with that box design back then, but different colors (Voodoo 3 3000 model). Actually still have the card... [0] https://blog.logomyway.com/history-amazon-logo-design/ https://blog.logomyway.com/history-amazon-logo-design/

wolpoli 4y ago

>Interestingly, 20 years later, the 3dfx Rampage was tested and found lacking against the NVIDIA GeForce 256 which would have been its competition had the Rampage been released. Does anyone know where I could find out more about this? The prevailing narrative for many years has been that the Rampage GPU would have provided a technological edge for a few years.

randomifcpfan 4y ago
A quick web search finds: https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-rampage-gpu-performance-revealed-in-a-book-20-years-later https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-rampage-gpu-performance-re... But you could argue that the Rampage drivers weren’t optimized.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  Thanks! I would argue that the drivers weren't optimized because the specification on the Spectre 1000 (Rampage) is roughly at the GeForce 2 GTS level.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
I also found that part interesting. Last time I read about the rampage was about a decade ago, I even saw a video showing the prototype, but just the card itself because "nobody has any drivers for it". Apparently they must have been found somewhere by now. Some fun stuff to research for a Sunday I guess. :-)

ChuckMcM 4y ago

My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it. Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun. In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work. Sigh.

datpiff 4y ago
> he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering mode How does this relate to the NV-1? I thought it used quads instead of triangles. Did it do accelerated NURBs as well?
- rasz 4y ago
  reminds me of PowerVR main selling point being tiled rendering, but they tried pushing some proprietary "infinite planes" BS https://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php https://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php "Thanks to volumes defined by infinite planes, shadows and lights can be cast from any object over any surface."
  - datpiff 4y ago
    If it was marketing they didn't seem to do a great job... Very little online except for mentions of "NURBS", and this thread. It's not intuitively obvious to me how a rasterizer accelerator would render NURBS surfaces at all (edit: without just approximating the surface with triangles/quads in software, which any competing card could also do)

4RealFreedom 4y ago

I remember getting my first Voodoo card. After playing games, I couldn't stand software rendering anymore. Purchased a Voodoo 2 when they came out. Reminds me of Unreal, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Thief, Mechwarrior 2 - so many fun older games! My next card was a nvidia tnt2. I've owned nvidia cards ever since.

creinhardt 4y ago
Dang, hadn't thought about Shogo since playing a demo a loooong time ago. Thanks for triggering a good memory!

M4v3R 4y ago

I have fond memories of playing Quake 2 for some time and then buying a Voodoo card. It suddenly looked like a totally different game. It wasn’t just the resolution and texture filtering - Quake 2 in GL mode used a totally different, dynamic lightning system and back then it was simply stunning. Comparison pics: https://www.marky.ca/3d/quake2/compare/content.html https://www.marky.ca/3d/quake2/compare/content.html

johnwalkr 4y ago
Have you played Quake 2 RTX (ray tracing version)? 25 years later it's yet again a quantum leap in the same game!
4RealFreedom 4y ago
I remember playing Quake 2 and colored lighting followed your bullets! I was floored.
deanCommie 4y ago
I...totally prefer the SVGA "lower resolution" version, and I remember feeling like that at the time too. The problem was the 3D version looked/looks just plain BLURRY. Something about my brain is able to understand when they see a pixelated video game that it's an artifice, and give it a ton of benefit of the doubt. I can't say it is in any way more realistic, but it feels more IMMERSIVE. Whereas with the higher resolution one, it's an uncanny valley. Everything is too smooth and Barbara Walters-y. Again, this is my memory of how I perceived it at the time, this isn't modern rose coloured glasses because obviously technology has improved dramatically.
- TOGoS 4y ago
  Same. I have fond memories of first playing Doom on a 386 with the resolution set to extra low (approximately halving 320x200). The space between the pixels gives your imagination something to do. Sort of like how you can make a room look better by turning off the ceiling lights and just having a small lamp on your desk. I kind of think even if we get 120fps perfectly raytraced VR, it'll never be able to quite achieve the big pixel immersion experience.

userbinator 4y ago

Not too long ago someone recreated a Voodoo5 6000: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960140 The (leaked?) datasheets and miscellaneous information for the GPUs seem to be widely available, but that's still quite impressive for a single person; on a similar level to making your own motherboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829

dehrmann 4y ago
> on a similar level to making your own motherboard How hard would it be to make a motherboard from that era?

carabiner 4y ago

typo: loose/lose

exabrial 4y ago

800mb/s 23+ years ago is absolutely bezerk. I remember being in high school and seeing the butter smooth high frame rates (for the time) being like wow.

Teslazar 4y ago

A few more historical bits that might be interesting. Brian Hook was the 3dfx engineer who was the original architect of Glide. He went on to work for id Software in 1997. Michael Abrash wrote the first 3d hardware support for Quake, while working for id Software, but it wasn't for 3dfx it was for the Rendition Verite 1000 and released as vQuake. John Carmack was, of course, the lead programmer of Quake. Hook, Abrash, and Carmack ended up working at the same company again at Oculus VR (and then Meta).

js2 4y ago
1998 interview with Hook: https://www.quakewiki.net/profile-retro-interview-brian-hook/ https://www.quakewiki.net/profile-retro-interview-brian-hook...
burnte 4y ago
I BOUGHT a Verite card because of vQuake, and it wasn't worth it. When I moved to a Voodoo3 it was amazing.

djmips 4y ago

This is a really great retrospective on 3dfx from four of the founders. 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell (Computer History Museum) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU

hnarayanan 4y ago
This is so very good and even more engaging than the article.
- muro 4y ago
  The article has a weird writing style, something is off. Maybe it feels like a high school essay?
  - hnarayanan 4y ago
    It does, doesn't it? It just feels very abrupt.
minimaul 4y ago
I really recommend sitting down and listening to this - it's a very good cover of 3DFX from start to finish (and I feel like it was probably one of the primary sources for this article).
- hnarayanan 4y ago
  Yes, it looks like the article was very heavily sourced from this.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

>Voodoo Graphics and GLide were the standard in the PC graphics space for a time. 3dfx created an industry that is going strong today, and that industry has affected far more than just gaming. GPUs now power multiple functions in our computers, and they enable AI work as well. >This tale brings up many “what ifs.” What if 3dfx had realized early on that GPUs were excellent general purpose linear algebra computers, and had incorporated GPGPU functionality into GLide in the late 90s? Given its SGI roots, this is not implausible. And given how NVidia still has a near stranglehold on the GPGPU market today, it’s also plausible that this would have kept 3dfx alive.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
monocasa 4y ago
I don't think so. Part of what made consumer GPUs viable at that gate count was their laser like precision on their specific rasterization workloads. More general linear algebra solutions wouldn't have been viable on the marketplace. You wouldn't see the viability of more general hardware until the bro layer 90s advent of register combiner hardware.
aldrich 4y ago
History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released. Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably: - The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tr25202.pdf http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tr2520... - The pitch deck: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tritechpyramid3dpresentation.pdf http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tritec... - The hardware reference manual: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/vs203_103.pdf http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/vs203_... (shows even more internals!) (As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys Oy were all related here.) They unfortunately busted before they could release anything, due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets were bought by ATI. As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and data buses. It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making sacrifices (quality, programmability) there, which made sense at the time. I do think they would've been pretty late to switch to the whole programmable pipeline show, for to that reason alone. But who knows! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU

hnbear 4y ago

I had a PowerMac 6500/300 back in my mid-teens as my first computer. To play games I later bought a PC Voodoo 3 which you could flash with a Mac-version ROM. Much cheaper than buying an actual Max version. Unreal was incredible. The whole card was incredible. Later I put a Linux distro on the computer too, and I needed a custom patch to the kernel (2.2.18, I think) to get the Voodoo drivers working for accelerated 2D and 3D rather than the software frame buffer. It was incredible to see a Gnome 1.4 or KDE 2 desktop in high res perform really well. It was also pretty buggy. Due to experimental drivers in both Linux and Mac, I assume. The weirdest was that sometimes a bug in Linux would dump whatever was in memory on the screen, which softly after booting from Mac to Linux could result in Mac OS 9 windows appearing on a Linux desktop. You obviously couldn’t interact, it would happen in a kernel panic type event where the computer would freeze with an odd mix of stuff on the screen. Was a fun intro to Linux, not getting a nice windowing environment till after I’d learnt to patch and compile a kernel. Back then it was normal to play with more OSs it seems like. That computer had Mac, Linux, BeOS and more on it.

rl3 4y ago

I'm just here to post old 3dfx commercials: 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 The print ads were similarly incredible: http://www.x86-secret.com/pics/divers/v56k/histo/1999/commerce.jpg http://www.x86-secret.com/pics/divers/v56k/histo/1999/commer... https://www.purepc.pl/files/Image/artykul_zdjecia/2012/3DFX_Historia/3dfx_commercial_2.png https://www.purepc.pl/files/Image/artykul_zdjecia/2012/3DFX_... https://fcdn.me/813/97f/3d-pc-accelerators-blow-dryer-ee8eb65e66951f63248c5f4881.jpg https://fcdn.me/813/97f/3d-pc-accelerators-blow-dryer-ee8eb6...

ngcazz 4y ago
I liked the first advert. The world hunger one though really rubbed me the wrong way.
- rl3 4y ago
  Well, I think it was taking a swipe at a particular brand of insincere feel-good corporate bullshit marketing that was fairly prevalent at the time. Faceless conglomerates trying to manage their image such that they appeared to be benevolent world citizens—not ruthless plunderers. That is opposed to say, today's brand of insincere feel-good corporate bullshit marketing.
  - a3w 4y ago
    They were making fun of greenwashing. Fun still does have its place in personal development, say most guides to the current climate catastrophe for human beings. But right now, I too wish we would have a more liveable planet instead of perfect entertainment in polluting, air-conditioned cities. But I studied the wrong topic for me to actually thrive in the former, and not the latter environment.
  - deleted 4y ago
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jvolkman 4y ago

I still remember installing a Voodoo and playing glquake. It was so amazing after relative disappointments like the S3 Virge. Lots of nostalgia for that period. The article touches on this a bit, but one of the quirky things about the original Voodoo and Voodoo 2 were that they lacked 2D entirely. You had to use a short VGA passthrough cable to some other 2D card. This also meant that they only supported fullscreen 3D, since 2D output was completely bypassed while the 3dfx card was in use. The Voodoo 3 finally came with 2D, but I think I jumped ship to Nvidia by then.

beebeepka 4y ago
I think Voodoo Banshee was a full blown 2d+3d solution that was released before Voodoo 3. Don't take my word for it, though
- smcl 4y ago
  And the Voodoo Rush was a 2D/3D card that came out a little before that (August 1997, compared to the Banshee in late-1998). I didn't own either, mind, my only 3dfx card was a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI :D
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    Ah, you're absolutely right. Forgot about the Voodoo Rush. I was a poor kid and couldn't afford either.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Oh me too - my motherboard had no AGP slot (hence the V3 2000 PCI). If I was smart I would've saved up for a few months, bought a more future-proof motherboard (I was on the dying Socket 7 platform, with an AMD K6-2 466MHz) and I would've had a nice little setup that would've kept me going for a while. But I was an impatient kid, and I wanted to play Quake 3 and ended up doing piecemeal upgrades over the next few years that ultimately cost me more overall :D
- vikingerik 4y ago

harel 4y ago

I was managing a CD-Rom shop when the Voodoo was a thing. We bought one for the store's 486DX computer and I remember the before and after shock of playing Tomb Raider and demoing it to shoppers. It felt like "The Future"...

bottlepalm 4y ago

Man the first 3dfx was such a mind blowing experience. There was nothing like it at them time. Games went from a rough pixelated mess to super smooth and sharp. PS1 and N64 had an edge over PC graphics in the 90s, 3dfx turned the tables.

bennysonething 4y ago
This wasn't my experience. I bought a voodoo 3 , playing quake 1 and quake 2 was just disappointing, at the time it just felt like Goldeneye was next gen compared to those flagship pc games. I desperately wanted it to be a step up. It didn't feel like it. Also it's sort of odd to me that quake two is seen as revolutionary. In my opinion Goldeneye blows it out of the water and it was released in the same year. Edit, obviously this is all subjective, and it's about fond memories! :)
- bottlepalm 4y ago
  Goldeneye levels are very simple, boxy, and low poly count. Quake 1 levels were far more complex and impressive than Goldeneye. Though pixelated and low res which is what 3dfx revolutionized with their Voodoo 1.

app4soft 4y ago

> Voodoo2, Diamond Monster 3D, image from [Russian site] Why the heck this image claimed being taken from [Russian site] if that image is from Buyee?[0] [0] https://buyee.jp/mercari/item/m78940760663 https://buyee.jp/mercari/item/m78940760663

BruceEel 4y ago

Also worth mentioning, the 3dfx Voodoo SDK, docs and examples. For those like me (zero previous experience with 3D API's) it was a lot of fun to play with. And! Still available today: DOSBox-X has Voodoo1 support built-in (or host pass-through glide support), Open Watcom C++ works well in DOSBox and will compile most examples.

christkv 4y ago
Otherwise pcem also has full voodoo support.

tablespoon 4y ago

> Gordon Campbell grew up in Minnesota, and as there wasn’t a market for technology there at the time, he felt he needed to go to Silicon Valley in 1976. That seems like a bit of anachronistic Silicon Valley mythology. Wasn't Minnesota something like the "Silicon Valley" of mainframes at the time? There were several then-major computer companies there: CDC, Cray, Honeywell, IBM, Univac, etc.

Neil44 4y ago

I remember the audible ‘clunk’ of the relays snapping in on those old pass through cards. Always the sound of a good time. Remember seeing a guy at a lan party carrying his whole box by the pass through cable one too, that made a few people wince.

jeffybefffy519 4y ago
That is wild, but can totally imagine it as the pass thru cable was chunky.

drKarl 4y ago

I got the 3dfx Voodoo which required a 2D card! Later on I got a Nvidia Riva TNT! It's been a long way, now I have an RTX 4090...

Seanambers 4y ago

3DFX was basically the shit in mid late 90s. First time seeing Quake in OpenGL was insane - before that all games were rendered in software.

pjmlp 4y ago
Nope, the blitter engine on Amiga, tile engine on consoles like Nintendo and Sega, the early GPUs on arcades like TMS34010, glide on 3Dfx. Quake used miniGL, not full OpenGL.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  I guess they're specifically referring to textured polygon-based 3D graphics. There were a few earlier attempts that failed for one reason or another, mostly poor performance. I think there was a French accelerator card that I can't remember the name of right now.
- anthk 4y ago
  Quake had a Glide renderer. But those are examples on 2D acceleration. There were equivalents on PC too.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    There is enough 3D over here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64 All predate 3dfx Voodoo launch in October 7, 1996.
    - anthk 4y ago
      - PSX: Ahem, more than an GPU, simple integer based rasterizer. - Saturn: It did quads. - The N64 was an SGI machine made into a desktop. OK, not much earlier than the VooDoo.

nix23 4y ago

Playing Wizardry8 right now (on wine with the glide patches).

jahnu 4y ago

While I was at university in Derby, England, I got a sneak preview of a prototype of the first consumer 3dfx card. This was at a gfx card company called DataPath I was doing some contract work via another company. The day I saw it working I started saving so I could buy one the instant it was available. I had quite the advantage at Quake LAN parties for a short while :)

casenmgreen 4y ago

> The company endured litigation for securities fraud for quite sometime, declared bankruptcy in December of 1994, and became Aureal Semiconductor Inc on the 9th of September in 1995. This company would also go bankrupt and later be acquired by Creative. Aureal produced revolutionary audio cards, with real 3D audio - and I mean real. Close your eyes and you would track the sounds in the space around you with your eyes, from your hearing. It changed everything. I played HL with this, and CS too. I may be wrong, but my understanding is Creative sued them into bankruptcy, bought what remained, and never used that technology. I have never forgiven Creative for this.

4RealFreedom 4y ago
I remember it like that, too. It wasn't a product war, it was a war of court battles. Creative had more money and was able to chip away at Aureal through litigation and caused their collapse.

jaimex2 4y ago

I just remember glide being that annoying thing you had to wrap to get the original n64 emulator working.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
Because the original emulator required a 3dfx chip. The N64 was based on an SGI chip, which coincidentally was quite similar, so it was easy to translate to glide calls.

Genbox 4y ago

Back in the day I bought a Savage 3D graphics card (1998) over the Voodoo 2 Banshee because the price vs. value was much better. At that time, 3Dfx was known for it's 3D performance, but was still clunky on the 2D part, especially considering the Matrox G400 GPU which had dual VGA, amazing color correction and software support everywhere. It went so fast going from having no 3D acceleration to having more 3D accelleration than you could imagine. It died fast too when ATI and NVIDIA became the only ones left, which is still true to this day.

OnlyMortal 4y ago

My first card was a Voodoo 1 - for the Mac. The difference it made to Quake was dramatic. When the Voodoo 2 came out, I couldn’t find a vendor selling them for the Mac. I’m not even sure anyone did. I bought a Voodoo 2 card that worked with a patched version of Mesa but it was slow. I managed to find a driver on some peer sharing thing (Hotline??). I’ve no idea of its origin but it worked fine.

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johnny_canuck 4y ago

I love reading about 3dfx as their hardware had a great deal of impact on my preteen years (gaming night and day). I'm always amazed to read how small some of these 90s tech companies were.

unxdfa 4y ago

I remember these days. I spent a lot of time buying GPUs and eating ramen. Unreal Tournament 99 on a Voodoo 3 3000 was the peak for me. Now I have an Intel iGPU and don’t care. And I can afford to eat better :)

pentagrama 4y ago

Oh, I remember installing my Diamond Monster 2 video card as a kid, with high expectations of this thing called 3dfx and the Voodoo chip built in. The first game that I launched was Need for Speed 2 SE, who supported 3dfx, and oh boy o boy, the difference was night and day, it blew my mind at the time. The textures, shadows, look and feel overall was the best thing that I ever seen. It also has exclusive features for 3dfx like bugs splatters on the screen in some parts. A leap forward on gaming to my teenager eyes at the end of the 90s.

mikezirak 4y ago

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pcdoodle 4y ago

I think what really did it for me and my friends at that time was we could have a better graphics at home that what was available at most arcades at the time. Need for Speed 3 was the killer app for us, Playing over a DB9 serial link or directly calling each others house (and arguing about who was going to call who because the ringers were still on in the parents bedroom and the pickup was after the 1st ring).

ErneX 4y ago

I had one the 1st Voodoo cards, it was a Diamond. When you ran a game that supported it you could hear the mechanical relay switching from the regular video card to the Voodoo.

ReptileMan 4y ago

And glide is the only 3d accelerator that made diablo 2 look good. To this day.

Maxburn 4y ago

My love for the Voodoo 2 knows no bounds, it was the start of a beautiful thing for me.

tiffanyh 4y ago

In 1998, Tom’s Hardware had a long article on “NVIDIA vs 3DFX - The Wind Of Change“ https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html It’s a great article that predicted a lot of things. Side note: love that an article 25-years old is still accessible.

bentt 4y ago

I loved my 3DFX cards but there was a moment where I realized that a Nvidia Riva TNT would properly accelerate OpenGL 3d applications (3dsmax in my case) and it was over. 3DFX didn't implement OpenGL properly at the time. It always felt like something was broken if you were outside of Glide.

antiterra 4y ago

The 2D/3D Voodoo Rush performed so poorly that there was an offer to return the 3D daughterboard in order to get a proper standalone Voodoo card. You could still use what remained of the card for 2D. I did this and they sent me a retail Diamond Monster 3D. I thought I was buying something better than a Voodoo and got it at release before there were any reviews. Lesson learned.

christkv 4y ago
I remembered it being jokingly called the Voodoo Rushed.
bitwize 4y ago
Mesa had a trick that let it capture the framebuffer off your regular Voodoo card and display it in a window. I did this with my Voodoo 2. It was like having a Voodoo Banshee. Well, maybe not quite like, but my in-window Quake 2 framerates were quite decent.

darkwater 4y ago

Oh, this brings back so many memory from when I actually bought and updated PC hardware every time I had some money saved! I remember having a Matrox Mystique (the one with a... joker or something like that on the box), the 3Dfx Voodoo and also a TNT2. I remember moving from the Mystique to the Voodoo playing Quake and it was one of the biggest "wow" moment of my childhood.

formerly_proven 4y ago

3dfx is another example of "worse is better" or "slope vs intercept". This article doesn't quite spell it out, but as far as I can tell, 3dfx had one GPU architecture that was tweaked from 1995 till their end. It was much better for a few years than what the competitors put out, but the competitors kept iterating. nVidia created several generations of GPUs in the same time frame. 3dfx started higher but had no slope. Everyone else started much lower, but had a lot of slope (nVidia and ATI in particular). Two of these went ahead and started creating a new "fastest ever GPU" every other year for a quarter century, the other tried putting more of the same GPU on bigger boards and folded.

rasz 4y ago
One of my favorite facts is about Nvidia release cycle speed. At the peak of nvidia 3dfx war new chips were coming out every 6-9 months: Riva 128 (April 1997) to TNT (June 15, 1998) took 14 months, TNT2 (March 15, 1999) 8 month, GF256 (October 11, 1999) 7 months, GF2 (April 26, 2000) 6 months, | 3dfx dies here |, GF3 (February 27, 2001) 9 months, GF4 (February 6, 2002) 12 months, FX (March 2003) 13 months, etc ... Nvidia had an army of hardware engineers always working on 2 future products in parallel, 3dfx had few people in a room.
djmips 4y ago
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly Nvidia had a supercomputer and great hardware design software tools that were a trade secret and basically behind an off limits curtain in the center of their office and it helped them get chips out rapidly and on first turn. First turn means the first silicon coming back is good without requiring fixes and another costly turn. I'd say 3dfx weren't poised to industrialize as well as Nvidia and they just couldn't keep up in the evolutionary race. I'm not sure I understand where your worse is better idiom fits because 3dfx was better and Nvidia was worse but iterated to get better than 3dfx and won the day. Truly if worse was better in this case 3Dfx would still be around? On the other hand triangle based rendering is a case of worse is better and Nvidia learned that and switched course from their early attempts with nurb based primitives.
- johnwalkr 4y ago

papito 4y ago

Man, I remember I had a crappy Celeron because we were dirt-poor. At some point I finally bought a Voodoo 3, popped it in, and fired up Tomb Raider. I was blown away. The game went from pixelated chop-o-rama to smooth and gorgeous (in those days). I could even play combat simulators like European Air War. Good Times.

29athrowaway 4y ago

And then NVIDIA ate everything.

quelsolaar 4y ago

This story misses some of the details of how Quake cane to support 3Dfx. Carmack had an intrgraph workstation that had openGL at the time and had written a version of Quake for it: GLQuake. This version was shown to 3Dfx, and 3Dfx realized they could imlement a OpenGL drive that only supported the features Carmack had used for his Intergraph port. So a "MiniGL" driver was boarn. This was a huge deal for 3Dfx, and loats of people got their start programing OpenGL using the "MiniGl" subset

severino 4y ago

Funny thing, when I heard about those "3d graphics accelerator" cards in the late 90s, I just thought they were meant to make your 3d games run faster. But Quake II and similar games already ran very fast in my machine. It wasn't until I went to some cybercafe where they had Quake II, among others, installed for network play in computers with one of those 3dfx cards, that I actually saw what an accelerator card could turn a game into, regardless of speed, and I decided that I needed one of those.

AlecSchueler 4y ago
That sounds like a really cool experience. Could you expand further on the differences you saw?
- severino 4y ago
  Something similar to the first screenshot in the article. Until then, Quake II on software graphics was a cool game for me but a game where you saw pixels everywhere, like every other game at the time. Discrete graphics cards on the other side made the game's graphics take a huge leap forward. It was a quality (and not just speed) I hadn't seen before, so much so that it was almost a different game for me. I guess it was 1999 or so.
- corysama 4y ago
  Going from low rez, point-sampled to high rez, bilinear filtered (+antialiasing if you are lucky) is a huge quality leap. Basically PlayStation 1 vs PS2.

christkv 4y ago

I could not afford the Voodoo card so I had to settle for a verite based card. In retrospect that chip architecture was way before its time being a risc architecture. To bad it could not compete on raw performance but at least Quake ran great on it.

djmips 4y ago
Yes it was intriguing. It was a programmable GPU in a sense. The drivers downloaded micro code for the triangle shading.

uberduper 4y ago

I worked at 3dfx in their final months. I watched as workers from NVIDIA broke down and hauled off a large number of netapp shelves (seemingly without labeling them). 3dfx was run like a frat house. It was fun while I was there, but it wasn't a surprise when they announced they were shutting down.

ben7799 4y ago

Count me in. I was in college when this happened. I remember being a Freshman and Sgi had come to campus for recruiting with all these amazing demos on 6-figure hardware. Then my junior year I had scrounged enough money to get a 3Dfx card and my friends and I were all blown away by it. I didn’t end up going into graphics but remember we did a project for computer graphics and I was able to run my code on the 3Dfx. It was an incredibly exciting time.

corysama 4y ago
Same. I was fortunate enough to be able to use one of those hundred thousand dollar SGI’s as a sophomore because of my lab job. So, in my dorm I had a Pentium60 capable of running Quake at 320x240 software rendered. And, in the lab, I could play at 1280x1024(!!!) on the Reality Engine with the same point filtered look. But, then I managed to get a Voodoo1 and my little PC could run Quake at 640x480 bilinear filtered. It was nuts to get such a huge speed up for a fraction of the cost of the base machine. Peak “Pop Moore’s Law” going on at that time.

secalex 4y ago

I can still hear the clunk of the relay switching over to 3D (versus 2D pass-thru) when booting Wing Commander.

fho 4y ago

... that article triggered me hard ... I just hate when the first paragraph is interesting and then they start with something completely different (ie "the guy that did the interesting thing"s life) in the second paragraph ... here ... they just did that four times ...

a3w 4y ago

3dfx Voodoo 3 - ah yes passive cooling, I lost some skin touching an aluminium fin. An active cooler was needed, but easily screwed on.

bee_rider 4y ago

It is always funny to read the comments on this site for a computer history post, you’ll get 1) I remember buying that card with my first paycheck 2) Oh yeah, me and/or my buddy worked on that As someone who was a little kid for most of the 90’s, all I can say is thanks to everyone who worked on the stuff — it was a truly magical time when every time your dad brought you to the computer shops they’d have some new demo set up they could do things that simply were not even imaginable a last time. Plus since I was not even a teenager yet, I didn’t have to learn about the battles between which model of rendering was better, it was just pure magic. Hopefully we’ll speed things up again soon. I’m worried that there may be a generation at some point that doesn’t realize we’re in the future.

fabiensanglard 4y ago

The one game that always puzzled me what Diablo 2. I never saw it run better than on a Voodoo 2. It was butter smooth. I compared it to a TNT2Ultra and maybe an ATI Rage 128 and none of these came even close. To this day, this remains a mystery.

rasz 4y ago
Diablo 2 did some weird things. Here is a post about its fake perspective mode https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/ https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/

hatsuseno 4y ago

> All of this meant that the Voodoo Rush was dead on arrival. Interesting this should be my first video card that I bought myself. I do remember there being issues using specific renderer libraries, swapping out glide dll's and that sort of stuff to make certain games work. For a DOA card I sure was happy with it!

russ 4y ago

I remember my dad’s friend joined 3dfx in ‘94 and we became testers for all their prototype cards. Being able to play Virtua Fighter on our PC still ranks as one of the most magical moments I’ve had with technology.

smcl 4y ago

> ATI’s Radeon and NVIDIA’s RIVA TNT2 were now offering higher performance at roughly the same price Minor nitpick - Voodoo 3 and TNT2 weren't competing with Radeon. Among that generation were the 3dfx Voodoo 3, NVidia TNT2, S3 Savage4 and Matrox G400 - ATI's offering around this time was the Rage Fury. The ATI Radeon was part of the next generation, along with the Geforce 256 and S3 Savage 2000. edit: or possibly even the one after that? Wikipedia tells me the Rage Fury MAXX was out around the same time as Geforce 256, and Radeon only showed up around the time of the GeForce 2 family. The MAXX slipped from my memory, it was pretty iirc finicky card (performing badly and having buggy drivers, possibly hardware?) and a bit of a disappointment.