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Around 1999 we had a PC with both a Riva TNT and a Voodoo 2. The main games I played were Half Life and Unreal 1 (in addition to various games that came bundled

Around 1999 we had a PC with both a Riva TNT and a Voodoo 2. The main games I played were Half Life and Unreal 1 (in addition to various games that came bundled with hardware like Monster truck madness and Urban Assault). I found the Riva TNT to work much better than the Voodoo 2 for the main games I played (e.g. when choosing in the game options, the D3D or OpenGL options had less glitches, better looking translucency in Unreal, etc..., than the options that used the voodoo card), and in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward passthrough. Maybe being 1999 it was just a little bit too late to still fully appreciate 3dfx and modern day D3D and OpenGL took over around that time, so I just missed the proper Voodoo era by a hair. Note that by OpenGL here I meant OpenGL using the Riva TNT (I assume the Voodoo card drivers must have been called Glide or 3DFx in the settings). I've always seen D3D and OpenGL existing side by side, performing very similarly in most games I played, and supporting the same cards, with GeForce cards etc that came later. I mainly game using Wine/Proton on Linux now by the way.

flohofwoe 4y ago
Yep, as soon as the TNT came out it was pretty much over for 3dfx. Quake II on a Riva TNT running in 1024x768 was a sight to behold.
- OOPMan 4y ago
  I had one of those weird TNT2 M64 cards that you could fool into thinking it was a proper TNT2. Unfortunately for mine the foolery didn't work perfectly and I recall the card was a bit unstable when running that way, or maybe it didn't achieve the optimal performance possible for one of those fiddled M64s. Not really a huge surprise, IIRC it was a super cheap card...
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  3D gaming at 1024x768 in 1998 would be like 8K gaming today.
  - jonhohle 4y ago
    I had a Rage 128 in 1999 and easily gamed at 1024x768 - and ran Windows 98 at 1600x1200! For years it was so hard to find LCDs that came close to the resolution I had on my CRT for a reasonable price.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      And the LCDs of the day really struggled with contrast ratios and ghosting.
  - orbital-decay 4y ago
    More like 4K gaming today. PII 450MHz + Riva 128ZX or TNT easily ran Half-Life at 1152x864. (FPS expectations were also lower, however - nobody expected 100fps+ like we do today)
    - ajnin 4y ago
      I remember that the framerate was pretty important in Quake. Because player positions were interpolated linearly, you could miss the top of the parabola when jumping if your framerate was too low. I don't remember any numbers but getting a high framerate was definitely a concern when playing a bit competitively.
      - orbital-decay 4y ago
        Competitive play, sure, especially at low resolutions and everything disabled. Single player games were running at pretty low framerates though, with a few exceptions like Quake/Half-Life. Even 60fps was more of a luxury than a rule.
    - arglebargle123 4y ago
      My 200+ fps quake 2 config sure did. If you weren't running 200+ fps for online quake 2 you were in for a bad time. Between a Celeron 333A running at 550MHz and a dual voodoo2 you could drive games at pretty ridiculous frame rates.
- smcl 4y ago
  I feel like 3dfx still had a slight edge until the tail end of the Voodoo3 era (when the GF256 came out and blew everything away). But I think it depends what you prioritise. Like here, the V3 seems to have a pretty handy lead in most cases https://www.anandtech.com/show/288/14 https://www.anandtech.com/show/288/14 - but that's a TNT2 (not TNT2 Ultra) and it's all in 16 bit colour depth (not supported by the V3). It was certainly an interesting time, and as a V3 owner I did envy that 32 bit colour depth on the TNT2 and the G400 MAX's gorgeous bump mapping :D
  - dwater 4y ago
    I worked at CompUSA the summer of 1999 and there were demo machines for the Voodoo3 and TNT2, and what I remember most was that the Voodoo looked muddy while the TNT2 looked crisp. Frame rates weren’t different enough to have a clear winner, since there were 3 different Voodoo models and Nvidia had the ultra. I ended up getting a TNT2 Ultra and loved it. Never had any compatibility issues that I remember.
    - dbspin 4y ago
      I owned a Voodoo 3, while all my friends had TNT2's. My experience was the opposite. Not sure if it was the handling of anisotropic filtering, or some kind of texture filtering - but my Voodoo 3 was notably sharper on all the games of the time.
      - smcl 4y ago
        It may even vary depending on the game, the settings, whether D3D, OpenGL or GLide were used or which versions of the drivers were installed.
        dbspin 4y ago
        For sure, and I'm pretty certain I also tweaked the hell out of 3dfx tools too.
- rasz 4y ago
  >Quake II on a Riva TNT running in 1024x768 40 fps, 70 fps on V2 sli https://www.bluesnews.com/benchmarks/081598.html https://www.bluesnews.com/benchmarks/081598.html
hef19898 4y ago
Ha, I had a Riva TNT in my forst own PC! Totally forgot about that, and just how great Half Life was back the day, and still is IMHO.
avidphantasm 4y ago
I had a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2. Running Quake with the GLide renderer for the first time was life changing. However, the pass through of the 2D card always felt like a hack. It also led to a noticeable reduction in 2D video quality. It always pained me to have to pass the beautiful output from my Matrox Millennium through the Voodoo.
kodt 4y ago
A Voodoo 2 was kind of old and slow for 1999. A Voodoo 3 was a good card then, but the TNT2 did eclipse it in several games. Only a handful of games where still better in Glide.
time0ut 4y ago
I fondly remember the K6-2 system I had with a Voodoo 2 and 192MB of RAM. It was the first PC that was all mine. I also played HL1 and Unreal Tournament 1. The big games though were the HL mods TFC and Counter-Strike. I dragged that thing to so many LAN parties. A true golden age. It was also the first PC I ever installed Linux on. My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. I don’t even remember what distro at this point.
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  >My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. You were smarter than me. I wanted all those free compilers so badly I just went and installed redhat on the family pc. Ask me how well that conversation went with the old man...
- metadat 4y ago
  "Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a borked software change wasn't google-able. Edit: @throwawayx38: I 100% agree with you! Thanks for your reply.
  - throwawayx38 4y ago
    To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself that was risky. Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a certain risk.
    - bigger_cheese 4y ago
      I have vague memories from early days of using Linux that you used to have to manually set the modeline for your videocard in X11 - if you got things wrong you could potentially permanently damage the monitor.
  - time0ut 4y ago
    Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought it was too risky.
bee_rider 4y ago
Urban Assault was such a cool game, what a shame it never caught on.
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  It was a gem! It came bundled with the Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick
- erikw 4y ago
  I reached out to Microsoft to try to buy the rights to it several years ago. They referred me to the original developer in Germany, but they either weren’t interested, or the ownership was too complicated. I’d love a modern version of Urban Assault, although the original is still completely playable. I’m not aware of any other game that managed so well to combine RTS and FPS.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    How much could the rights to a game like that cost? Depending on whether it's in range of the average person's disposable income, this could be a cool thing to do as a preservationist.
jeffbee 4y ago
The pass-through was really awkward. Depending on the exact board implementation it either looked perfect or terrible, and you couldn’t trust the reviewers because they were all blind, using awful monitors, and tended to focus on the game performance instead of whether it looked like trash the other 90% of the time you spent looking at the display.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Yeah, this doesn't get mentioned enough. 3Dfx's first few cards were revelatory, but if you used the same computer for "actual work", the passthrough tended to kind of make your text look like ass in Windows/DOS.
rasz 4y ago
> in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward passthrough. 32bit on TNT at half the framerate, performance hit was brutal. 16bit on TNT was ugly AF due to bad internal precision while 3dfx did some dithering ~22bit magic "Voodoo2 Graphics uses a programmable color lookup table to allow for programmable gamma correction. The 16-bit dithered color data from the frame buffer is used an an index into the gamma-correction color table -- the 24-bit output of the gamma-correction color table is then fed to the monitor or Television."
- to11mtm 4y ago
  I was never a fan of the 3dfx dithering/filtering, personally. Things usually looked just a bit too muddled for my taste in most games. It wasn't as bad as others (I remember the Matrox M3D having some very interesting features, but Image quality was definitely worse than Voodoo. Marginally better than a Virge at least, lol.) 16 bit on TNT was fine for most of what I played at the time, although at the time it was mostly Quake/Quake2 and a few other games. Admittedly I was much more into 2d (especially strategy) games at the time, so 2d perf (and good VESA compat for dos trash and emulators) was more important to me for the most part. I think 3dfx had a good product but lost the plot somewhere in between/combination of their cutting 3rd parties out of the market, and not deeply integrating as quickly vs considering binning. VSA-100 was a good idea in theory but the idea they could make a working board with 4 chips in sync at an affordable cost was too bold, and probably a sign they needed to do some soul seeking before going down that path. Now, it's possible that comment is only discernable in hindsight only. After all, these folks had seemed like engineering geniuses with what they had already pulled off. OTOH, when we consider the cost jump of a '1 to 2 to 4 CPU' system back then... maybe everyone was a bit too optimistic.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Yep, as soon as the TNT came out it was pretty much over for 3dfx. Quake II on a Riva TNT running in 1024x768 was a sight to behold.

OOPMan 4y ago
I had one of those weird TNT2 M64 cards that you could fool into thinking it was a proper TNT2. Unfortunately for mine the foolery didn't work perfectly and I recall the card was a bit unstable when running that way, or maybe it didn't achieve the optimal performance possible for one of those fiddled M64s. Not really a huge surprise, IIRC it was a super cheap card...
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
3D gaming at 1024x768 in 1998 would be like 8K gaming today.
- jonhohle 4y ago
  I had a Rage 128 in 1999 and easily gamed at 1024x768 - and ran Windows 98 at 1600x1200! For years it was so hard to find LCDs that came close to the resolution I had on my CRT for a reasonable price.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    And the LCDs of the day really struggled with contrast ratios and ghosting.
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  More like 4K gaming today. PII 450MHz + Riva 128ZX or TNT easily ran Half-Life at 1152x864. (FPS expectations were also lower, however - nobody expected 100fps+ like we do today)
  - ajnin 4y ago
    I remember that the framerate was pretty important in Quake. Because player positions were interpolated linearly, you could miss the top of the parabola when jumping if your framerate was too low. I don't remember any numbers but getting a high framerate was definitely a concern when playing a bit competitively.
    - orbital-decay 4y ago
      Competitive play, sure, especially at low resolutions and everything disabled. Single player games were running at pretty low framerates though, with a few exceptions like Quake/Half-Life. Even 60fps was more of a luxury than a rule.
  - arglebargle123 4y ago
    My 200+ fps quake 2 config sure did. If you weren't running 200+ fps for online quake 2 you were in for a bad time. Between a Celeron 333A running at 550MHz and a dual voodoo2 you could drive games at pretty ridiculous frame rates.
smcl 4y ago
I feel like 3dfx still had a slight edge until the tail end of the Voodoo3 era (when the GF256 came out and blew everything away). But I think it depends what you prioritise. Like here, the V3 seems to have a pretty handy lead in most cases https://www.anandtech.com/show/288/14 https://www.anandtech.com/show/288/14 - but that's a TNT2 (not TNT2 Ultra) and it's all in 16 bit colour depth (not supported by the V3). It was certainly an interesting time, and as a V3 owner I did envy that 32 bit colour depth on the TNT2 and the G400 MAX's gorgeous bump mapping :D
- dwater 4y ago
  I worked at CompUSA the summer of 1999 and there were demo machines for the Voodoo3 and TNT2, and what I remember most was that the Voodoo looked muddy while the TNT2 looked crisp. Frame rates weren’t different enough to have a clear winner, since there were 3 different Voodoo models and Nvidia had the ultra. I ended up getting a TNT2 Ultra and loved it. Never had any compatibility issues that I remember.
  - dbspin 4y ago
    I owned a Voodoo 3, while all my friends had TNT2's. My experience was the opposite. Not sure if it was the handling of anisotropic filtering, or some kind of texture filtering - but my Voodoo 3 was notably sharper on all the games of the time.
    - smcl 4y ago
      It may even vary depending on the game, the settings, whether D3D, OpenGL or GLide were used or which versions of the drivers were installed.
      - dbspin 4y ago
        For sure, and I'm pretty certain I also tweaked the hell out of 3dfx tools too.
rasz 4y ago
>Quake II on a Riva TNT running in 1024x768 40 fps, 70 fps on V2 sli https://www.bluesnews.com/benchmarks/081598.html https://www.bluesnews.com/benchmarks/081598.html

hef19898 4y ago

Ha, I had a Riva TNT in my forst own PC! Totally forgot about that, and just how great Half Life was back the day, and still is IMHO.

avidphantasm 4y ago

I had a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2. Running Quake with the GLide renderer for the first time was life changing. However, the pass through of the 2D card always felt like a hack. It also led to a noticeable reduction in 2D video quality. It always pained me to have to pass the beautiful output from my Matrox Millennium through the Voodoo.

kodt 4y ago

A Voodoo 2 was kind of old and slow for 1999. A Voodoo 3 was a good card then, but the TNT2 did eclipse it in several games. Only a handful of games where still better in Glide.

time0ut 4y ago

I fondly remember the K6-2 system I had with a Voodoo 2 and 192MB of RAM. It was the first PC that was all mine. I also played HL1 and Unreal Tournament 1. The big games though were the HL mods TFC and Counter-Strike. I dragged that thing to so many LAN parties. A true golden age. It was also the first PC I ever installed Linux on. My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. I don’t even remember what distro at this point.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
>My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. You were smarter than me. I wanted all those free compilers so badly I just went and installed redhat on the family pc. Ask me how well that conversation went with the old man...
metadat 4y ago
"Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a borked software change wasn't google-able. Edit: @throwawayx38: I 100% agree with you! Thanks for your reply.
- throwawayx38 4y ago
  To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself that was risky. Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a certain risk.
  - bigger_cheese 4y ago
    I have vague memories from early days of using Linux that you used to have to manually set the modeline for your videocard in X11 - if you got things wrong you could potentially permanently damage the monitor.
- time0ut 4y ago
  Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought it was too risky.

bee_rider 4y ago

Urban Assault was such a cool game, what a shame it never caught on.

Aardwolf 4y ago
It was a gem! It came bundled with the Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick
erikw 4y ago
I reached out to Microsoft to try to buy the rights to it several years ago. They referred me to the original developer in Germany, but they either weren’t interested, or the ownership was too complicated. I’d love a modern version of Urban Assault, although the original is still completely playable. I’m not aware of any other game that managed so well to combine RTS and FPS.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  How much could the rights to a game like that cost? Depending on whether it's in range of the average person's disposable income, this could be a cool thing to do as a preservationist.

jeffbee 4y ago

The pass-through was really awkward. Depending on the exact board implementation it either looked perfect or terrible, and you couldn’t trust the reviewers because they were all blind, using awful monitors, and tended to focus on the game performance instead of whether it looked like trash the other 90% of the time you spent looking at the display.

JohnBooty 4y ago
Yeah, this doesn't get mentioned enough. 3Dfx's first few cards were revelatory, but if you used the same computer for "actual work", the passthrough tended to kind of make your text look like ass in Windows/DOS.

rasz 4y ago

> in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward passthrough. 32bit on TNT at half the framerate, performance hit was brutal. 16bit on TNT was ugly AF due to bad internal precision while 3dfx did some dithering ~22bit magic "Voodoo2 Graphics uses a programmable color lookup table to allow for programmable gamma correction. The 16-bit dithered color data from the frame buffer is used an an index into the gamma-correction color table -- the 24-bit output of the gamma-correction color table is then fed to the monitor or Television."

to11mtm 4y ago
I was never a fan of the 3dfx dithering/filtering, personally. Things usually looked just a bit too muddled for my taste in most games. It wasn't as bad as others (I remember the Matrox M3D having some very interesting features, but Image quality was definitely worse than Voodoo. Marginally better than a Virge at least, lol.) 16 bit on TNT was fine for most of what I played at the time, although at the time it was mostly Quake/Quake2 and a few other games. Admittedly I was much more into 2d (especially strategy) games at the time, so 2d perf (and good VESA compat for dos trash and emulators) was more important to me for the most part. I think 3dfx had a good product but lost the plot somewhere in between/combination of their cutting 3rd parties out of the market, and not deeply integrating as quickly vs considering binning. VSA-100 was a good idea in theory but the idea they could make a working board with 4 chips in sync at an affordable cost was too bold, and probably a sign they needed to do some soul seeking before going down that path. Now, it's possible that comment is only discernable in hindsight only. After all, these folks had seemed like engineering geniuses with what they had already pulled off. OTOH, when we consider the cost jump of a '1 to 2 to 4 CPU' system back then... maybe everyone was a bit too optimistic.