7 ms·

It was truly jaw dropping firing up quake 1 for the first time on 3dfx voodoo1. Double the resolution of software and super smooth framerate, and much better q

It was truly jaw dropping firing up quake 1 for the first time on 3dfx voodoo1. Double the resolution of software and super smooth framerate, and much better quality texture mapping too. I recall tweaking some setting (gl_flashblend?) so that I could see pretty glowing orbs around my rockets (and strategically, also everybody else's rockets).

rob74 2y ago
I was the unfortunate owner of an S3 ViRGE card at the time - the (in)famous "3D decelerator". I managed to get Quake running on it, and it looked nice, but was slower than with software rendering...
- indemnity 2y ago
  Ahhh, what a piece of shit that was! I spent summer lawnmowing money on that thing. When I got a real job next summer, bought an AGP Matrox Millenium G200 and after that the NVIDIA GeForce2, and never strayed from NVDA since!
- vasac 2y ago
  I had an S3 ViRGE too. It really was a decelerator, and the number of games that actually supported it was minuscule. I managed to run GLQuake, but without any textures - just shades of gray - and even that ran at most a couple of frames per second. But there was another game - Terminal Velocity - that actually looked a lot better with hardware rendering, although it was still slower than software rendering. So, I would run it with hardware rendering to enjoy flying and then restart the game with software rendering to actually fight the enemies. :)
matwood 2y ago
It's hard to convey just how revolutionary the original voodoo cards were. There aren't many times in my life where there was a clear line of before and after, but this was one of those times.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  They also had the most recognizable unified box art style from all HW makers[1]. When you saw those eyes staring into your soul off the shelves, you knew it was a 3dfx GPU. They also had the best ads. [2] HW vendors today don't have the balls anymore to use designs like that, it's all flat sterile corporate nonsense. [1] https://www.ixbt.com/img/r30/00/02/08/90/boxes.jpg https://www.ixbt.com/img/r30/00/02/08/90/boxes.jpg [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/41r1wj/3dfx_was_all_kinds_of_savage/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/41r1wj/3dfx_w...
  - drooopy 2y ago
    Unless I'm mistaken, those cards were all produced by 3dfx after their acquisition of STB. Regardless, that box art blew my 14 year old mind back in the day.
  - hylaride 2y ago
    That's something I haven't seen in awhile! I remember as a kid staring at those in the store, not being able to afford them.
    - Helmut10001 2y ago
      I sold my used 3DFX Voodoo 5500 with original box in 2015 for about 290EUR. It is probably in a collector's shelf now.
      - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        >I sold my used 3DFX Voodoo 5500 with original box in 2015 for about 290EUR. Bruh. That's like selling your bitcoins in 2009 for two pizzas.
        hypercube33 2y ago
        I wiped my drive a few times before realizing dropbox didn't back my wallet up. I shrugged it off losing 30 bitcoins worth maybe at best 3 cents each at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.
Narishma 2y ago
> much better quality texture mapping too Debatable. I always preferred the crisp look of the software renderer to the washed out GLQuake. Same with Quake 2. I think it because textures back then were too low resolution so filtering just makes them look muddy.
- da_chicken 2y ago
  Even today I think a lot of Doom clones look better (or more nostalgic) with software rendering and texture mapping rather than OpenGL. There's an intensity of saturation to the colors that's lost. Fireblu is never quite so eye burning as when it's in software.
- pavlov 2y ago
  It’s also because the VGA signal quality from the 3dfx Voodoo wasn’t very good. It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so it needed another graphics card for rendering the desktop (any non-accelerated apps really), and this was connected to the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. There was a noticeable image quality loss from this arrangement. A Matrox card would give you crisp VGA with nice saturation, but the 3D acceleration was nearly worthless. Choices…
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - georgeecollins 2y ago
    I really disagree. There were some nice Matrox cards. They weren't as good at 3d as 3DFX but for the time they really improved gaming. I developed Battlezone on G200. In those days we tried to have everyone have a different graphics card because the companies would just give them to us and we wanted to work with every card.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Matrox had great hardware, but the software drivers took too long to catch up. I was on the OpenGL team and my life's mission was to get Quake running as fast as the G200 and G400 was capable of. We finally caught up and got parity with Nvidia's TNT2, and then bam, they released the GeForce 256 series, and it was curtains for Matrox because their next gen hardware wasn't ready yet.
drooopy 2y ago
Replaying Heretic 2 back in 1998 with my first Voodoo (banshee) was a borderline otherwordly experience, compared to my first playthrough of the game using software rendering. Nothing has blown my mind the same way since.
- fullstop 2y ago
  I have had three experiences like this in my life: 1. PC Speaker -> Sound Blaster: Most games that I had were instantly upgraded 2. Doom: my first "real" fluid 3D experience, with stairs, etc, compared to maze-like maps in Wolfenstein 3. Software Rendering -> 3dfx (Canopus Pure3D): Transparent water surfaces in Quake (if you re-vis'd the maps), smooth and fluid visuals, it was amazing. The closest thing to this, in modern gaming, has been the boss fights in Elden Ring: https://i.imgur.com/gzLvsLw.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/gzLvsLw.mp4 -- visually, they are quite epic.
cloudking 2y ago
Core memory unlocked! Good times
gattr 2y ago
I've experienced only three improvements in video games that felt ground-breaking & jaw-dropping: 1. Sprite-based -> 3D sandbox world (in my case: Stunts, F29 Retaliator, Gunship 2000, Wolfenstein 3D) 2. Hardware 3D rendering (I had the NVidia RIVA 128ZX) 3. Fast-paced real-time multiplayer (Delta Force: Black Hawk Down) The 4th might be the usage of LLMs or similar technology for (mostly-)unattended content generation: NPC dialogue etc.
louthy 2y ago
Always thought the original software renderer looked much better. It didn’t have the bilinear filtering, so the textures didn’t look all smooth and ‘washed out’, which suited the environment more imho
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  Yeah same here. Always preferred the software renderer for Quake and Quake 2. Even over the modern stuff. The software renderer has this gritty feel that is integral to the art I feel. That said, the 3dfx was impressive at the time, and I was very jealous of my buddy who got one.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Mostly agree, but the RTX version of Quake 2 is very impressive to play.
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      I'd be interested in a RTX-enhanced software renderer. Ie replace the baked lighting with the GI raytracing, but otherwise keep the rest of the software renderer. Have a feeling that could be an awesome blend. Would be a bit challenging with the palette but should be doable.
      - tracker1 2y ago
        Doable, but not at a playable framerate without hardware.
        magicalhippo 2y ago
        Yeah that's what I was thinking. Like do a RT-only pass doing lighting (no textures), then do the software pass using the RT-lighting rather than baked lightmaps. Latency would be slightly higher but I guess one could implement the important parts[1] of the software renderer on the GPU. [1]: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_renderer.php https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_renderer.p...
christkv 2y ago
I dreamt about having the vodoo but i could not afford it. Went with a rendition verite based one. It was underpowered compared to the vodoo but I really consider it the first real GPU as it was a RISC processor.
goykasi 2y ago
Same here. I can still vividly remember the experience of loading in with a voodoo2 for the first time. It was night and day -- mind completely blown. The late `90s really established a new version of the gamer; consoles were fun, but computer gaming was a different world. It made me a junky for reading about hardware, overclocking and gaming.
BashiBazouk 2y ago
For me it was Carmageddon. I bought it later on an ipad and it may have just been rose tinted glasses of being completely blown away back in the day but the ipad version never seems quite as crisp...
- louthy 2y ago
  Carmageddon was a software renderer. Absolutely glorious game though!
barrkel 2y ago
In terms of pixels, it was 4x the resolution. And for fun, one of the window textures (visible in the difficulty choice lobby IIRC) was implemented as a mirror in glquake - IIRC John Carmack said it was so easy to do in OpenGL he did it as a kind of test.
pak9rabid 2y ago
Definitely one of my great early memories in computing. I had a similar experience seeing Quake2 running with the Glide renderer (on a Voodoo2) for the first time It was amazing.

rob74 2y ago

I was the unfortunate owner of an S3 ViRGE card at the time - the (in)famous "3D decelerator". I managed to get Quake running on it, and it looked nice, but was slower than with software rendering...

indemnity 2y ago
Ahhh, what a piece of shit that was! I spent summer lawnmowing money on that thing. When I got a real job next summer, bought an AGP Matrox Millenium G200 and after that the NVIDIA GeForce2, and never strayed from NVDA since!
vasac 2y ago
I had an S3 ViRGE too. It really was a decelerator, and the number of games that actually supported it was minuscule. I managed to run GLQuake, but without any textures - just shades of gray - and even that ran at most a couple of frames per second. But there was another game - Terminal Velocity - that actually looked a lot better with hardware rendering, although it was still slower than software rendering. So, I would run it with hardware rendering to enjoy flying and then restart the game with software rendering to actually fight the enemies. :)

matwood 2y ago

It's hard to convey just how revolutionary the original voodoo cards were. There aren't many times in my life where there was a clear line of before and after, but this was one of those times.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
They also had the most recognizable unified box art style from all HW makers[1]. When you saw those eyes staring into your soul off the shelves, you knew it was a 3dfx GPU. They also had the best ads. [2] HW vendors today don't have the balls anymore to use designs like that, it's all flat sterile corporate nonsense. [1] https://www.ixbt.com/img/r30/00/02/08/90/boxes.jpg https://www.ixbt.com/img/r30/00/02/08/90/boxes.jpg [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/41r1wj/3dfx_was_all_kinds_of_savage/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/41r1wj/3dfx_w...
- drooopy 2y ago
  Unless I'm mistaken, those cards were all produced by 3dfx after their acquisition of STB. Regardless, that box art blew my 14 year old mind back in the day.
- hylaride 2y ago
  That's something I haven't seen in awhile! I remember as a kid staring at those in the store, not being able to afford them.
  - Helmut10001 2y ago
    I sold my used 3DFX Voodoo 5500 with original box in 2015 for about 290EUR. It is probably in a collector's shelf now.
    - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      >I sold my used 3DFX Voodoo 5500 with original box in 2015 for about 290EUR. Bruh. That's like selling your bitcoins in 2009 for two pizzas.
      - hypercube33 2y ago
        I wiped my drive a few times before realizing dropbox didn't back my wallet up. I shrugged it off losing 30 bitcoins worth maybe at best 3 cents each at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.

Narishma 2y ago

> much better quality texture mapping too Debatable. I always preferred the crisp look of the software renderer to the washed out GLQuake. Same with Quake 2. I think it because textures back then were too low resolution so filtering just makes them look muddy.

da_chicken 2y ago
Even today I think a lot of Doom clones look better (or more nostalgic) with software rendering and texture mapping rather than OpenGL. There's an intensity of saturation to the colors that's lost. Fireblu is never quite so eye burning as when it's in software.
pavlov 2y ago
It’s also because the VGA signal quality from the 3dfx Voodoo wasn’t very good. It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so it needed another graphics card for rendering the desktop (any non-accelerated apps really), and this was connected to the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. There was a noticeable image quality loss from this arrangement. A Matrox card would give you crisp VGA with nice saturation, but the 3D acceleration was nearly worthless. Choices…
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  I really disagree. There were some nice Matrox cards. They weren't as good at 3d as 3DFX but for the time they really improved gaming. I developed Battlezone on G200. In those days we tried to have everyone have a different graphics card because the companies would just give them to us and we wanted to work with every card.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Matrox had great hardware, but the software drivers took too long to catch up. I was on the OpenGL team and my life's mission was to get Quake running as fast as the G200 and G400 was capable of. We finally caught up and got parity with Nvidia's TNT2, and then bam, they released the GeForce 256 series, and it was curtains for Matrox because their next gen hardware wasn't ready yet.

drooopy 2y ago

Replaying Heretic 2 back in 1998 with my first Voodoo (banshee) was a borderline otherwordly experience, compared to my first playthrough of the game using software rendering. Nothing has blown my mind the same way since.

fullstop 2y ago
I have had three experiences like this in my life: 1. PC Speaker -> Sound Blaster: Most games that I had were instantly upgraded 2. Doom: my first "real" fluid 3D experience, with stairs, etc, compared to maze-like maps in Wolfenstein 3. Software Rendering -> 3dfx (Canopus Pure3D): Transparent water surfaces in Quake (if you re-vis'd the maps), smooth and fluid visuals, it was amazing. The closest thing to this, in modern gaming, has been the boss fights in Elden Ring: https://i.imgur.com/gzLvsLw.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/gzLvsLw.mp4 -- visually, they are quite epic.

cloudking 2y ago

Core memory unlocked! Good times

gattr 2y ago

I've experienced only three improvements in video games that felt ground-breaking & jaw-dropping: 1. Sprite-based -> 3D sandbox world (in my case: Stunts, F29 Retaliator, Gunship 2000, Wolfenstein 3D) 2. Hardware 3D rendering (I had the NVidia RIVA 128ZX) 3. Fast-paced real-time multiplayer (Delta Force: Black Hawk Down) The 4th might be the usage of LLMs or similar technology for (mostly-)unattended content generation: NPC dialogue etc.

louthy 2y ago

Always thought the original software renderer looked much better. It didn’t have the bilinear filtering, so the textures didn’t look all smooth and ‘washed out’, which suited the environment more imho

magicalhippo 2y ago
Yeah same here. Always preferred the software renderer for Quake and Quake 2. Even over the modern stuff. The software renderer has this gritty feel that is integral to the art I feel. That said, the 3dfx was impressive at the time, and I was very jealous of my buddy who got one.
- tracker1 2y ago
  Mostly agree, but the RTX version of Quake 2 is very impressive to play.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    I'd be interested in a RTX-enhanced software renderer. Ie replace the baked lighting with the GI raytracing, but otherwise keep the rest of the software renderer. Have a feeling that could be an awesome blend. Would be a bit challenging with the palette but should be doable.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      Doable, but not at a playable framerate without hardware.
      - magicalhippo 2y ago
        Yeah that's what I was thinking. Like do a RT-only pass doing lighting (no textures), then do the software pass using the RT-lighting rather than baked lightmaps. Latency would be slightly higher but I guess one could implement the important parts[1] of the software renderer on the GPU. [1]: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_renderer.php https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_renderer.p...

christkv 2y ago

I dreamt about having the vodoo but i could not afford it. Went with a rendition verite based one. It was underpowered compared to the vodoo but I really consider it the first real GPU as it was a RISC processor.

goykasi 2y ago

Same here. I can still vividly remember the experience of loading in with a voodoo2 for the first time. It was night and day -- mind completely blown. The late `90s really established a new version of the gamer; consoles were fun, but computer gaming was a different world. It made me a junky for reading about hardware, overclocking and gaming.

BashiBazouk 2y ago

For me it was Carmageddon. I bought it later on an ipad and it may have just been rose tinted glasses of being completely blown away back in the day but the ipad version never seems quite as crisp...

louthy 2y ago
Carmageddon was a software renderer. Absolutely glorious game though!

barrkel 2y ago

In terms of pixels, it was 4x the resolution. And for fun, one of the window textures (visible in the difficulty choice lobby IIRC) was implemented as a mirror in glquake - IIRC John Carmack said it was so easy to do in OpenGL he did it as a kind of test.

pak9rabid 2y ago

Definitely one of my great early memories in computing. I had a similar experience seeing Quake2 running with the Glide renderer (on a Voodoo2) for the first time It was amazing.