I remember getting a Pentium 2 300mhz with a Voodoo Banshee when I was at college. That thing was amazing! The card came with a copy of Unreal. I used to load up the intro in software then hardware mode just to see the amazing difference. Stepping outside in Unreal for the first time to see the amazing graphics, particularly the water effects, is one of my fondest PC gaming memories!
3dfx had the best commercials.. like "we have the computing power to end world hunger, but then we thought, HEY, why not use it for games?" and similar commercials.. watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA
I was 16 years old back in 1998. Rather than going ape shit over Nintendo 64, I was going ape shit when my step dad got me 3dfx Voodoo Banshee 16MB at Xmas. I still remember vividly when I replayed all my games and it was truly like playing another game. I first tried it on Unreal. The graphics from 640x480 was boosted to 1024x768. The graphics were super sharp and everything where much more responsive because it ran at 60fps. Then soon after homeworld and cataclysm. Then I tried playing half life. I remember I used to minimize the graphics aspect ratio so it had thick borders around the gameplay before the upgrade. Now I was playing in full screen and I was totally stoked about it. Because of that, I got into multiplayer online shooter and I am super glad that I took part of that because it was the golden years for multiplayer online back in 1998-2002.
@@SomePotato Nah, it could even do 1280x1024 for some odd reason. Mostly I think it was just because it had the memory to create a frame buffer that large (but still only 256x256 max texture resolution, even on the voodoo 3). Hell even glQuake would had run unacceptably above 800x600 by 1998 single player standards on the banshee.
@@bobzeepl At 1024x768 the banshee would be GPU limited on any slot 1 CPU. At some 640x480 it would run at about 40 FPS in the unreal time demo with a pentium II 300. With some rose tinted glasses, there were probably spots that indeed ran at 60 FPS, but not 1024x768 and these would have been in like a dead end or small indoor area.
Nvidia bought 3DFX properties when they went out of business, that's about it. The only technology of theirs they really used was SLI, not the 3DFX/Glide graphics modes.
i bought a voodoo 3 3000 back in 1999 or 2000 when quake 3 1st game out... i remember my pc coudlnt play quake 3.then after i asked my grandfather after 100 times he got me the voodoo3 at bestbuy and man every game i played on it was butter smooth...the good old days... how i miss them...gaming was alot better too back then.
Man I still remember the day when I put one of these inside my rig. Quake didn't run all that good and it looked butt ugly - Enter the 3Dfx Voodoo. Framerates instantly went up to and gameplay became so much smoother, textures were smoothed out as well so they didn't have that blocky software look to them. Those were the days. When the logo popped up, you knew it would be awesome :)
PC Gaming in the 80s and 90s was actually not all that great. On the plus side a computer built for windows 95, or 98 could be kept relevant until about 2002ish. Really it's always been possible to build a computer with 5-6 years of life in it. The sucky part is that there was a lot of conflicting proprietary standards back then. For a long time if you wanted a game to look and play the best it could, you needed the proprietary hardware it relied on. Today those graphics modes can be emulated. Elite Plus for example looks best in MCGA mode, which can be emulated in DOSBox, but when it came out it took a really expensive graphics card to run that mode. Likewise Glide API can be emulated as well, so games like Quake, Unreal, Tomb Raider, Thief, and other Glide API based games for 3dfx Voodoo card can look their best. During the time there were conflicting standards, if you had a 3dfx Voodoo card, some games ran absolutely terribly on your computer. You needed a computer with a different card and a different graphics API for the non-Glide game to look and run it's best. Although Glide support was the most common in top shelf 3D games, so that was the best investment. Today Glide API and 3dfx are dead, Direct3D and OpenGL took it's place, which is part of what helped kill Voodoo, the company that made the cards 3dfx, and the Glide API. Luckily Glide API can be emulated both in Windows and on DOSBox to get the prettiest graphics modes out of the Glide API enhanced games. This goes back to the DOS IBM XT and PCjr days too. Where there were proprietary standards by manufacturer. Most famously Tandy was a gaming dominator as a PCjr clone. It was so well realized that it blew away even many later 8086 and 8088 XT Clones. All the way to the 80286 generation of computers, Tandy support often was required for games to use the best graphical modes. During this period of time in the 1980s there was the step from 8-bit home computers, into the 16-bit machines... While the IBM PC standard format was becoming the established norm, it wasn't the only option. For 8-bit machines you had a ton of different proprietary standards, most of which were BASIC computers that used proprietary versions of BASIC. The Apple II, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, MSX, Atari 400/800/XL computers, Commodore VIC 20, and more. All computers that used varied hardware and proprietary BASIC programing languages. That's ignoring CP/M and proprietary DOS variants of the time. On top of that, this persisted into the 16/32-bit home computers with GUIs. Just look at the Commodore Amiga 500, later Apple Macintosh computers, the Atari ST family of computers, and the early IBM PCs compatible with Microsoft Windows 1-3.11 and IBM OS/2. In fact that's just a handful of the GUIs operating environments at the time. Like a lot of XT Clones had their own proprietary operating environments that ran on MicroSoft DOS. This was actually a huge problem, because back then not all hardware worked well with other hardware, just like today. When you ran into a compatibility issue, it was often because you simply had the wrong hardware. This could be a hugely expensive problem, requiring anything from a time consuming work around, several hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, or even more for a completely different computer. Once MicroSoft Windows 95 and 98 became the most common standard operating systems on a unified IBM compatible hardware standard, those compatibility issues started to die out. By the time of the Pentium II and the rise of DirectX, suddenly all hardware needed to support Direct3D, or it failed in the market. With the exception of Apple Macintosh standards, with their own proprietary hardware and operating system. Around 2001 Windows XP released, which finally cemented the PC market, especially for gaming. At which point the Intel/IBM PC standard had become established and virtually all PC games required Direct3D to the exclusion of everything else. Windows was the standard for 90% of home PCs, with the remainint 10% split between Linux and Mac, mostly Mac. About a decade ago Mac moved on to the Intel standard and built Boot Camp to add the ability to run Windows on Mac hardware. So we've had a compatibility golden age. With the rise of indie game developers, the huge back catalog PC games you can run in emulators on modern computers... Now really is a golden age for gamers, even if the AAA publishers and game retail chains are attempting to screw each other and the customers over. Digital distribution is starting to phase out physical copies of games, and you can have a huge library of DOS and other old PC games that run in a multitude of Emulators that are getting better with every update. Since old games take up such little HDD/SSD space. So yeah you might have missed the 90s, but you missed a lot of frustration and heart break from mutually incompatible hardware feuds. Now you can go back to those games with relative ease, at worst having to tweak an emulator to make them work. So many older games now are getting enhanced re-releases, plus there are tons of retro style titles being released all the time, and the obsolete hardware and old physical games are dirt cheap compared to when they were originally released. So it's never been better to be into the games of the past, retro gaming is amazing now. People are even making homebrew games specifically for old computers and consoles. It really is a golden age if you want to go back and experience the past.
I personally used a Windows 98 computer that my Dad had built in 97-98 I think, something like that. I was born in 99'. I know it had a NVIDIA GPU and a Pentium CPU, can't remember which Pentium it was. I remember from looking in the settings as the curious child I was. I played NFS High Stakes, Driver 1, Heavy Gear 2 and Tony Hawk's. Good fun!
I was born in '86, when I was 4 I got my first two computers of my own, when my dad got an IBM XT clone. His was a Headstart Explorer 8088. So the Atari 800XL and Commodore 64 were passed on to me and helped me learn to read. When my dad moved to a DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11Intel 486 machine, so the 8088 was passed on tome. Then he got a Windows 95 Pentium machine when the 486 died. That machine was passed on to me when the K6-2 was built. In 2000 I got the K6-2 500MHz machine with it's Elsa NVIDIA GeForce 256 and it's update to Windows 98 SE. Which shelved the two Windows 95 machines, the original with it's ATi Rage 128 and a nearly identical machine with a Voodoo 1. My dad had gotten a AMD Athlon 1GHz system with a GeForce 2 to replace the K6-2, which was funny because my PC consistently performed better than his despite being a lot less powerful. Few years later with the tax refund my Dad got us both nearly identical computers. Athlon Thorton CPU machines running Windows XP. His had a evga GeForce Ti 4400 for Graphics while I got the superior and much more expensive Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro. So my memories of computing throughout the 90's to early 2004. My dad had gone and become a certified computer technician and had taught me what he knew. That's just my main machines of the time. Over that period I got very acquainted with most computers and video game consoles from the late 1970s to the early 2000s between my dad and his techie brother. Since I got a lot of old hand-me-down computers and parts from my Uncle and my Dad and was made to build a lot of computers as I learned about them. So I felt a lot of the woes earlier gamers felt, I was just fortunate enough to have the right machines, along with access to parts to build other computers, when I ran into a hard incompatibility. I can now dip into my nostalgia by using an emulator. While purists have their issues with emulation, it's a lot more convenient than having a room dedicated to computers. Having to juggle desk space, or power cords to play a specific game, because a different computer is hooked to a monitor I needed.
True that! I remember nagging my parents for a 3D card (it turned out to be the VooDoo 2 later :) so I could play SiN. Also, it bumped up my Quake2 mods with the 3d tech ;)
Actually, by the time Half-Life came out, the first videocards to successfully combine 2D and 3D (i.e. able to play 3D (nearly) as fast and just as beautifully as the Voodoo cards) had already come out. The nVidia RIVA TNT being the best example. Within 2 years the 3dfx cards went from totally awesome must-haves to just a less compatible, more expensive and cumbersome option.
ApemanMonkey I didnt know that at the time though. Comp usa had the diamond monster cards on the front display and where i lived they were the thing to have.
LOL! Trident! That's what I had! A Trident 2D card that I got for about $35. I then added a Voodoo 1 card (coincidentally enough). That was like going from a Chevette to a Lambo Diablo! (figured I'd stick to the era there). And then I eventually upgraded my 4MB Voodoo 1 to twin 12MB Voodoo 2s in SLI! Forget the Lambo, I was now driving the freaking Space Shuttle! Thanks for another great trip back to my teens!!!
I had a trident too, and then an ati I think. We eventually moved to an S3 ViRGE, which was touted to be the first 3d accelerated card, then moved to the voodoo1 monster3d, then the voodoo1 6mb Canopus Pure3d, Creative Banshee, then an Nvidia Riva TNT....... etc etc... now 1080ti watercooled hybrid cards in SLI from evga. Never buying Nvidia products again though... I was very sad when 3dfx went under....
Anyone else hear the high pitch noise on the Quake 1 3DFX capture? Love the video, btw. Brings back memories. I still have my Voodoo 1 and 3 kicking around.
@TheTallGuy1985 Thanks for mentioning that. I wasn't sure if it was just my TFT LCD monitor or what, but there was definitely a somewhat fuzzy image using the pass-through cable. Not a problem at all on later Voodoo cards, like the Voodoo3, which are single-card solutions with no extra cables.
I had that voodoo 1 card, it was passed through just a you said. This was an exciting time to be alive... When you mentioned POD, I remember that my friend was obsessed with MMX technology. Good days :) later on I remember Turok and Wargasm. Shadow Warrior was great. I'm gonna go look for the 3DFX spin logo.
i'm 32 years old now, and i vividly remember the day i bought this card with my own money i was around 14 at the time and i installed one of these in my father's pentium 166mhz to play games (motocross madness, motoracer...NFS2!!) I remember paying 269$+ TAX for it here in canada :) Great video!
I had that exact 3d card! I was the hit at the LAN party when I first got it. My games looked and ran so much better than the other computers that were there, even if they had better specs. I did forget the patch through cable once and I had to disconnect the monitor cable from the 2d card and plug it into the 3d card every time I launched a game. Good times.
Tomb raider was my first look at 3d acceleration in pc gaming. Saw it running and immediately bought one. I still have it. Astounding. Quake was a thing of beauty back then. Great video.
My 98 PC was a AMD K6 166mhz with 16mb of ram if I remember right. The Pentium chips had slightly more honest MHZ but the AMD was a good value. Voodoo2 for playing Quake 2 as 60fps in 800X600+. I think 1280X1024 was possible but it's been so far back I don't remember if it was worth running. It was back in a time when resolution was your only quality adjustment on your new PC game.
well if you were like me i used to run those games i couldnt in a lower rez and then use the actual display scaling to reduce the image size to get a sharper picture!! (think of a large CRT with a small frame of a picture in the middle) LOL
@serginietor Could have something to do with the fact that the version of Quake shown in this comparison (WinQuake vs GLQuake) use different texture maps, I think. And, in fact, the 3D-accelerated GLQuake uses OpenGL to render, unlike the other two games shown. Googling "GLQuake Gamma" gives some info on the matter. And thanks, glad you enjoyed!
I had a voodoo1 and Voodoo2, what a gaming revolution those cards were back in the day. If only 3DFX wouldnt have decided to make their own cards. and stuck with the providing chips to manufacturers, they might still be around.
OMG I remember my dad buying me my first Voodoo card and showing me how to install it. That was the beginning of me becoming involved in computer upgrading and building my own rigs and such. Wow the memories this brings back. Thanks LGR!
Okay I'm gonna say this. I love this channel and I love this guy. His videos are awesome, he's teaching me so much about old computers and stuff and he's just entertaining to watch. Lazy Game Reviews, you have joined the excellent Doom LPer Altimamantoid as my go to TH-cam channel whenever I wanna entertain myself with some awesome stuff that puts a big old smile on my face.
Indeed. I had a Monster 3D for my Pentium Pro 200MHz. It was awesome, if you could get it to work! I actually learned a lot about tweaking, modifying and hacking settings/drivers by owning this thing. Never did get Mechwarrior 2 to run on the Monster 3D.
Pcs became the best gaming platform even before, with 256 Colors VGA Graphics. Just take a game like Monkey Island, it looked far better in VGA than on any other platform. This happened in the early 90s. I don`t like the word Masterrace, by the way.
+Volo That's the EGA version. The VGA version was released a little bit later with 256 colours and slightly higher res than the Amiga. It looked better on the PC and you didn't have to keep swapping a million freaking floppys, but adlib sounds not great compared to the Amiga; even the MT32 I would put about even with the amiga. The 1992 CDROM version is the first with clearly better sound than the amiga.
Quake in Software Mode: Huh... It looks SLIGHTLY better in Hardware Mode, but it's really hard to tell the difference NFS in Software Mode: The cars look kind of crap, and the sky looks like you're on another planet, but still perfectly serviceable Tomb Raider in Sofware Mode: NO GOD! PLEASE NO!!! NO..! *NOOOOO....*
An old comment but still - I am guessing you are just speaking off the video, anyone who remembers that time knows that Quake in Software vs Quake in hardware mode is incomparable, Voodoo made it look a thousand times better, but most also jump from 10FPS to 30+ FPS.
Quake looks so smooth in software mode because it runs on a PII which wasn't even out when Quake was released. When it came out, it wouldn't run nearly as smooth on the Pentiums of the day in 640x480.
Ah the nostalgia! I had the Orchid 3dfx card which had a relay that clicked when switching 2D/3D. We did crappy 2 player dm's over a network back in the day, the 3dfx equipped PII 300 vs an Am486 DX/4-100. Quake played on the 486, but you needed a magnifying glass to see anything because you had to shrink the frame down small to get it to play smoothly. Tomb Raider was the most impressive as in your review, like night and day. Great channel btw really bringing back the memories, thanks.
Bastet Furry Absolutely! Amazing 2D output from Matrox cards, and their Mystique version of Mechwarrior 2 was the best of all that generation of cards. Voodoo of course for Glide, bilinear filtering and raw power.
@@magicmulder Those were the days :-)! Millennium (fastest DOS-Solution then and some especially adapted titles ran like hell such as Nascar Racing) and - all hail - the mighty 3dfx Voodoo. Unbeatable performance on a Pentium 166 clocked to 200MHZ (before the 200-variant came out!) paired with the Triton1-chipset (first to use pipelined burst cache). But best is: That system is still flying today right next to my today's gaming rig. Same fun, but with 10.996 megabytes graphics memory less :-))
@@starfrost6816 Because it has to be done in real time. VHS and SVHS are analogue formats, so you have to play the tape and use a video capture card to get the footage onto a PC.
I remember spending £300 on a Voodoo 2 with a massive 8mb RAM. The difference with resolution and frame rate compared to a 2D card playing Quake 2 was amazing. Best £300 spent ever :p
+Dalle Smalhals There were two models of the Voodoo², namely an 8MB and a 12MB version. The difference was that the 12MB model had twice the texture memory (8MB), compared to the 8MB model (4MB). The other 4MB on each card was used for the frame buffer.
Quake 2 was far more representative about the 2D / 3D gap than Q1, NFS SE or Tomb Raider as the differences between software Q2 and the 3D one where really huge in both fidelity and speed.
You forgot Descent 2, the graphics and framerate acceleration was amazing! We were totally blown away at that time. Oh and you could Play D2voodoo/D2_3dfx in DOS mode, unlike most other Voodoo-accelerated games.
I was blown away with the, as you say, the night and day difference my new Orchid Righteous card made! Tomb Raider, Quake, and I remember just watching the Unreal looping intro over and over. Man, those reflections. I knew then I was PC for life.
I loved that card, it was the holy grail after years of underperformance of the PC. And NFS 2 SE is my favorite NFS of the series so far, not particularly fond of the Fast and the Furious turn they took afterwards.
Hey thanks for putting together this video! I was digging through some old gear and trying to explain to my 11 year old son what it was like when 3dfx came out with this revolutionary hardware... That's where your video stepped in and demonstrated it perfectly. Thanks!
There's something about this late 90s era of 3D graphics that I find aesthetically pleasing. The polygon counts were still low, but the shapes had lost that warped, pixelated look common to software 3D. Textures were simple and shadows were almost nonexistent. There's a clean, smooth, uncluttered feel to it that I still find very enjoyable.
Chris Groff That difference in brightness is only present in this video. In reality, games look almost the same, only with less pixelated textures and some extra effects in 3D accelerated mode.
***** LOL what a deal-breaker! I really wanted the split-second light flashes from my weapon to be 2 times brighter. Jokes aside, I do prefer software rendering in some games. Tomb Raider 2 looks better with blocky textures and no filtering in my opinion. You can just see that it was designed with the PS1 in mind, not the smooth visuals of the PC. I know it doesn't matter anymore but if I was a PC gamer in 1996 and I had money, I'd have spent it on a good CPU instead and waited until 2002 for a GPU. Those earlier games with simple low-poly models and low render distance that were usually perfectly playable at 320x240 just didn't need most of the improvements of 3D acceleration until around 2002 when most new games started dropping software support and were benefiting more from high resolution and smooth textures.
+hristaki99 Honestly for games like Quake 1/2 and Half-Life 1, i think they look way better without texture filtering and with pixelated textures, if you have filtering on everything looks like a paint smudge and you loose a lot of the hand painted detail the texture artists put into it
jackoneill45 Yeah, I like those games without filtering too. I do like filtering on 2D games though, especially low-res like SNES and NES games. All this indie retro thing with blocky graphics is bullshit. 2D games back in the day didn't even look pixelated. The RCA cable and CRT screen were natural filters that made them look smooth and pretty realistic. The problem is that it's very hard to emulate that effect on a PC. Of course, some emulators pulled it off like ZSNES with its built-in "NTSC filter" which looks great. You should definitely check it out if you haven't already.
I get your comment about 3DFX, you can see it in the context of its time. I do the same when I play old games, being impressed by then state of the art features as I was back in the day even though I don't bat an eye at modern games doing them better. Its nice to get that feeling that something groundbreaking is on show, instead of just logical progression that you get these days. This is why I like this channel, not because I miss most of this stuff, but its still nice to get that "damn I forgot about that, or like this where I remember just how much of a leap forward things like his were. lol that little accelerator was the birth of the PC master race, once the Voodoo 1 hit the scene, consoles got knocked off the top spot (though for me that was when they dropped the awesomeness that were the game cartridges).
I got chills seeing the 3dfx logo when the games started. I had a voodoo 2 in high school and everytime I saw the logo, I remembered how bad ass I was.
The good old times with 3DFX, I have a voodoo2 card from Creative with 12MB here somewhere on the attic, I have to put it in my old pentium computer... I love these hardware reviews :)
@WalrusRockGod Pod is indeed *very* tough to get to run on many modern systems. Differences in just about everything from Windows versions, video drivers, sound drivers, DirectX versions and even Glide wrappers make the game one of the pickiest to run on any other machine other than what it was made for. I have lots of information on my website, POD Phreak, which is one of the last remaining active fansites for Pod!
Woah, great! Thanks for this awesome Video, which has to be one the best if not your best hardware video. I perfectly remember when I got my diamond monster 3D for Christmas. I think I was 10 or 11 at that time. In Germany the card came with descent 2 and hyperblade which both kicked ass. There also were some sort of graphicdemos with it. My oh my! Sweet, sweet memories! Brought back to my mind by watching your video! Thanks alot!!
And I had an Orchid Righteous 3D (with Voodoo 1, 4 MB) and the successor Orchid Righteous 3D2, Voodoo 2 (With 12 MB). Always a pleasure to see these older videos, with things, somewhat common. :) Brings up the nostalgia. :)
Awesome review! The difference is significant and I agree with the difference between Tomb Raider II especially in 3DFX and non-3DFX mode is night and day. 3DFX techology was way ahead of it's time.
showed this to my casual retro gaming friend and he was amazed at the differences and just how awesome the games were in general. these games, the voodoo cards, and you all have one thing in common: you're all AWSOME (YEAH). ha, depth dwellers humor.
That was an excellent, in-depth overview--I thoroughly enjoyed it. It brings me back to when I purchased my first video card for myself (a Voodoo 3). It really was amazing going from complete software rendering in games like Quake, to Glide rendering, not to mention the ability to play games that weren't able to run before (or just ran extremely poor, like your Tomb Raider comparison).
@jetpack1986 Absolutely. The Rage Pro doesn't give you Glide mode, which on the games that support it is often miles better than DirectX games of the time.
@marviosantos It was rendered using "2D" hardware, and was rather commonly referred to as such back then. At least, it was around me. Technically accurate? No, but it was stated as 2D to make the clear distinction between software 3D and hardware 3D. You'd tell you someone you were playing a 3D game and they'd ask "on a 2D or 3D card?"
@serginietor I imagine that's a driver config deal going on there. There are separate gamma options for Glide mode, although I left it on default settings it did appear... "richer" than the 2D software mode. Richer, darker, whatever, it's certainly a difference.
This was my first 3d card, bought it January 2, 1998, when I got my first PC. I always had a 3d card. I remember when buying it the store was impressed, they never tried one and the owner wanted it too.
I didn't notice too much with quake other than some colors and lag but with need for speed and tomb raider I really saw some color, texture, and lag issues with the 2D card that were no where to be seen with the 3D card. freaking awesome overview, video, thing. best of luck to you.
@michaliskebab The Voodoo3 doesn't have any major problems with most V1/V2 games. If there is, there's pretty much always a patch for the game it has issues with. A Pentium II, while faster than you need, won't have any issues with Wolf3D and Doom. They should run the same speed no matter how fast the CPU is.
Golden age of gaming. At least for me.I've bought my first pc in late 1997 when i was 12 and my Voodoo 2 12 mb in the summer of 1998 (A Monster 3D II), i remember that period as the best for pc gaming.
@gamewizard There's a huge difference on a real machine, especially one that's slower than what I used in the video. Remember, Pentium PCs were at a premium back then, most people were still rocking a 486. Sure, nowadays you can find a faster machine for nothing, but back then the V1 made a huge difference, in frame rate, texture quality, lighting, etc. The difference is more visible in the video response to this one, where I install a Voodoo2 card.
Probably because NFS2 doesn't have anything but a 2D software renderer. NFS2SE has a 3D renderer, but only if you have a 3DFX Glide card installed (or a Glide wrapper).
@SvenneTheBlockhead Yeah, weird huh? I forget the reason behind that, but I faintly recall it having to do with a limitation in the game engine at that point. Thankfully they fixed it when they updated the code for NFS3.
@RandyPhantomHC Yes, those shown seem to work rather well with my Voodoo2. NFS2SE needs a patch to work with the Voodoo2 though, as it's designed for the Voodoo1. I don't think Quake did, and TR2 was fine.
@X3CuT1oNR I have a copy I downloaded, but not the real thing. Was it ever officially released? I remember reading about a while ago and there was rumor it never even got sent to store shelves, but a beta version had leaked or something, which is what I may have downloaded...
@gamewizard Not everyone had cash. Our family was using a 486 until well into 1997, then we got an AMD-K6 233MHz system and it was amazing. But it still ran Quake quite slowly, due to the lack of any 3D acceleration. Got a Voodoo card and it was smoother than I ever imagined.
I bought one of these cards back in 1997 just for GLQuake. If you wanted to play multiplayer, it was pretty much a requirement. A year later I bought the Voodoo2 and kept it until 2000. Then a shiny new GeForce 2 32MB card made its way into my new computer.
This is so nostalgic...my first 3D card was the "Orchid 3dfx" 8mb...what to say, other than thanks dad (2nd hand off a colleague) :-D golden era of computers. I was a great dos duke player, but this made need for speed 3, final fantasy vii, quake a total blast. LGR thanks for the incredible time capsule. we sure struggled back in the days getting things running correctly out of the box. p.s. my greatest gaming surprise was blade runner the game by westwood, found it in a boot fair (literally in a field) in the uk,i had never watched the movie since i was just a child but made watching the movie later on in life even better! ;-D cheers Mark
still have the sidewinder force feedback wheel and connector, would be more than happy to send it over since it is risking very sadly a great chuck away...............had a terrible struggle with drivers 10 years ago
I remember getting a Pentium 2 300mhz with a Voodoo Banshee when I was at college. That thing was amazing! The card came with a copy of Unreal. I used to load up the intro in software then hardware mode just to see the amazing difference.
Stepping outside in Unreal for the first time to see the amazing graphics, particularly the water effects, is one of my fondest PC gaming memories!
same here. had the creative voodoo banshee and that unreal..... wow...
i felt the same....
3dfx had the best commercials.. like "we have the computing power to end world hunger, but then we thought, HEY, why not use it for games?"
and similar commercials..
watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA
I was 16 years old back in 1998. Rather than going ape shit over Nintendo 64, I was going ape shit when my step dad got me 3dfx Voodoo Banshee 16MB at Xmas. I still remember vividly when I replayed all my games and it was truly like playing another game. I first tried it on Unreal. The graphics from 640x480 was boosted to 1024x768. The graphics were super sharp and everything where much more responsive because it ran at 60fps. Then soon after homeworld and cataclysm. Then I tried playing half life. I remember I used to minimize the graphics aspect ratio so it had thick borders around the gameplay before the upgrade. Now I was playing in full screen and I was totally stoked about it. Because of that, I got into multiplayer online shooter and I am super glad that I took part of that because it was the golden years for multiplayer online back in 1998-2002.
I'm pretty sure the Banshee is capped at 800x600 for 3D, but yes, the Voodoos shined in Unreal.
Banshee, 60 FPS, 1024x768? Doubt. Especially with a CPU you could have in 1998, while getting Banshee as an upgrade. Nostalgia is a powerful thing :)
@@SomePotato Nah, it could even do 1280x1024 for some odd reason. Mostly I think it was just because it had the memory to create a frame buffer that large (but still only 256x256 max texture resolution, even on the voodoo 3). Hell even glQuake would had run unacceptably above 800x600 by 1998 single player standards on the banshee.
@@bobzeepl At 1024x768 the banshee would be GPU limited on any slot 1 CPU. At some 640x480 it would run at about 40 FPS in the unreal time demo with a pentium II 300. With some rose tinted glasses, there were probably spots that indeed ran at 60 FPS, but not 1024x768 and these would have been in like a dead end or small indoor area.
Nvidia bought 3DFX properties when they went out of business, that's about it. The only technology of theirs they really used was SLI, not the 3DFX/Glide graphics modes.
i bought a voodoo 3 3000 back in 1999 or 2000 when quake 3 1st game out... i remember my pc coudlnt play quake 3.then after i asked my grandfather after 100 times he got me the voodoo3 at bestbuy and man every game i played on it was butter smooth...the good old days... how i miss them...gaming was alot better too back then.
300 bucks turned a pc into an arcade machine lol
Man I still remember the day when I put one of these inside my rig. Quake didn't run all that good and it looked butt ugly - Enter the 3Dfx Voodoo. Framerates instantly went up to and gameplay became so much smoother, textures were smoothed out as well so they didn't have that blocky software look to them. Those were the days.
When the logo popped up, you knew it would be awesome :)
Great channel.
Proper old school geek stuff.
Takes me back.
I was never around back in these times, but I kinda wish since it seemed interesting with gaming in the 90's =(
PC Gaming in the 80s and 90s was actually not all that great. On the plus side a computer built for windows 95, or 98 could be kept relevant until about 2002ish. Really it's always been possible to build a computer with 5-6 years of life in it. The sucky part is that there was a lot of conflicting proprietary standards back then. For a long time if you wanted a game to look and play the best it could, you needed the proprietary hardware it relied on.
Today those graphics modes can be emulated. Elite Plus for example looks best in MCGA mode, which can be emulated in DOSBox, but when it came out it took a really expensive graphics card to run that mode. Likewise Glide API can be emulated as well, so games like Quake, Unreal, Tomb Raider, Thief, and other Glide API based games for 3dfx Voodoo card can look their best.
During the time there were conflicting standards, if you had a 3dfx Voodoo card, some games ran absolutely terribly on your computer. You needed a computer with a different card and a different graphics API for the non-Glide game to look and run it's best. Although Glide support was the most common in top shelf 3D games, so that was the best investment. Today Glide API and 3dfx are dead, Direct3D and OpenGL took it's place, which is part of what helped kill Voodoo, the company that made the cards 3dfx, and the Glide API. Luckily Glide API can be emulated both in Windows and on DOSBox to get the prettiest graphics modes out of the Glide API enhanced games.
This goes back to the DOS IBM XT and PCjr days too. Where there were proprietary standards by manufacturer. Most famously Tandy was a gaming dominator as a PCjr clone. It was so well realized that it blew away even many later 8086 and 8088 XT Clones. All the way to the 80286 generation of computers, Tandy support often was required for games to use the best graphical modes. During this period of time in the 1980s there was the step from 8-bit home computers, into the 16-bit machines...
While the IBM PC standard format was becoming the established norm, it wasn't the only option. For 8-bit machines you had a ton of different proprietary standards, most of which were BASIC computers that used proprietary versions of BASIC. The Apple II, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, MSX, Atari 400/800/XL computers, Commodore VIC 20, and more. All computers that used varied hardware and proprietary BASIC programing languages. That's ignoring CP/M and proprietary DOS variants of the time. On top of that, this persisted into the 16/32-bit home computers with GUIs. Just look at the Commodore Amiga 500, later Apple Macintosh computers, the Atari ST family of computers, and the early IBM PCs compatible with Microsoft Windows 1-3.11 and IBM OS/2. In fact that's just a handful of the GUIs operating environments at the time. Like a lot of XT Clones had their own proprietary operating environments that ran on MicroSoft DOS.
This was actually a huge problem, because back then not all hardware worked well with other hardware, just like today. When you ran into a compatibility issue, it was often because you simply had the wrong hardware. This could be a hugely expensive problem, requiring anything from a time consuming work around, several hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, or even more for a completely different computer. Once MicroSoft Windows 95 and 98 became the most common standard operating systems on a unified IBM compatible hardware standard, those compatibility issues started to die out. By the time of the Pentium II and the rise of DirectX, suddenly all hardware needed to support Direct3D, or it failed in the market. With the exception of Apple Macintosh standards, with their own proprietary hardware and operating system.
Around 2001 Windows XP released, which finally cemented the PC market, especially for gaming. At which point the Intel/IBM PC standard had become established and virtually all PC games required Direct3D to the exclusion of everything else. Windows was the standard for 90% of home PCs, with the remainint 10% split between Linux and Mac, mostly Mac. About a decade ago Mac moved on to the Intel standard and built Boot Camp to add the ability to run Windows on Mac hardware. So we've had a compatibility golden age. With the rise of indie game developers, the huge back catalog PC games you can run in emulators on modern computers... Now really is a golden age for gamers, even if the AAA publishers and game retail chains are attempting to screw each other and the customers over. Digital distribution is starting to phase out physical copies of games, and you can have a huge library of DOS and other old PC games that run in a multitude of Emulators that are getting better with every update. Since old games take up such little HDD/SSD space.
So yeah you might have missed the 90s, but you missed a lot of frustration and heart break from mutually incompatible hardware feuds. Now you can go back to those games with relative ease, at worst having to tweak an emulator to make them work. So many older games now are getting enhanced re-releases, plus there are tons of retro style titles being released all the time, and the obsolete hardware and old physical games are dirt cheap compared to when they were originally released. So it's never been better to be into the games of the past, retro gaming is amazing now. People are even making homebrew games specifically for old computers and consoles. It really is a golden age if you want to go back and experience the past.
Oh dang, I didn't expect this response. I said that 2 years ago haha. I'll have to give this a good read.
I personally used a Windows 98 computer that my Dad had built in 97-98 I think, something like that. I was born in 99'.
I know it had a NVIDIA GPU and a Pentium CPU, can't remember which Pentium it was. I remember from looking in the settings as the curious child I was. I played NFS High Stakes, Driver 1, Heavy Gear 2 and Tony Hawk's. Good fun!
I was born in '86, when I was 4 I got my first two computers of my own, when my dad got an IBM XT clone. His was a Headstart Explorer 8088. So the Atari 800XL and Commodore 64 were passed on to me and helped me learn to read. When my dad moved to a DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11Intel 486 machine, so the 8088 was passed on tome. Then he got a Windows 95 Pentium machine when the 486 died. That machine was passed on to me when the K6-2 was built. In 2000 I got the K6-2 500MHz machine with it's Elsa NVIDIA GeForce 256 and it's update to Windows 98 SE. Which shelved the two Windows 95 machines, the original with it's ATi Rage 128 and a nearly identical machine with a Voodoo 1. My dad had gotten a AMD Athlon 1GHz system with a GeForce 2 to replace the K6-2, which was funny because my PC consistently performed better than his despite being a lot less powerful. Few years later with the tax refund my Dad got us both nearly identical computers. Athlon Thorton CPU machines running Windows XP. His had a evga GeForce Ti 4400 for Graphics while I got the superior and much more expensive Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro.
So my memories of computing throughout the 90's to early 2004. My dad had gone and become a certified computer technician and had taught me what he knew. That's just my main machines of the time. Over that period I got very acquainted with most computers and video game consoles from the late 1970s to the early 2000s between my dad and his techie brother. Since I got a lot of old hand-me-down computers and parts from my Uncle and my Dad and was made to build a lot of computers as I learned about them. So I felt a lot of the woes earlier gamers felt, I was just fortunate enough to have the right machines, along with access to parts to build other computers, when I ran into a hard incompatibility. I can now dip into my nostalgia by using an emulator. While purists have their issues with emulation, it's a lot more convenient than having a room dedicated to computers. Having to juggle desk space, or power cords to play a specific game, because a different computer is hooked to a monitor I needed.
Unreal, Quake, and Half-life: 3 reasons to own a Voodoo back in the day.
Half-Life and the number three in the same sentence. Half-Life 3 confirmed.
True that! I remember nagging my parents for a 3D card (it turned out to be the VooDoo 2 later :) so I could play SiN. Also, it bumped up my Quake2 mods with the 3d tech ;)
Actually, by the time Half-Life came out, the first videocards to successfully combine 2D and 3D (i.e. able to play 3D (nearly) as fast and just as beautifully as the Voodoo cards) had already come out. The nVidia RIVA TNT being the best example. Within 2 years the 3dfx cards went from totally awesome must-haves to just a less compatible, more expensive and cumbersome option.
ApemanMonkey
I didnt know that at the time though. Comp usa had the diamond monster cards on the front display and where i lived they were the thing to have.
You forgot tomb raider
That Nine Inch Nails music from Quake is still the best.
Computing was infinitely more exciting during this era.
Good, solid nostalgia right there.
LOL! Trident! That's what I had! A Trident 2D card that I got for about $35. I then added a Voodoo 1 card (coincidentally enough). That was like going from a Chevette to a Lambo Diablo! (figured I'd stick to the era there). And then I eventually upgraded my 4MB Voodoo 1 to twin 12MB Voodoo 2s in SLI! Forget the Lambo, I was now driving the freaking Space Shuttle! Thanks for another great trip back to my teens!!!
voodoo 2 was a real leap in technology fabulous card
I had a trident too, and then an ati I think. We eventually moved to an S3 ViRGE, which was touted to be the first 3d accelerated card, then moved to the voodoo1 monster3d, then the voodoo1 6mb Canopus Pure3d, Creative Banshee, then an Nvidia Riva TNT....... etc etc... now 1080ti watercooled hybrid cards in SLI from evga. Never buying Nvidia products again though...
I was very sad when 3dfx went under....
"Forget the Lambo, I was now driving the freaking Space Shuttle!" voted :))
Anyone else hear the high pitch noise on the Quake 1 3DFX capture? Love the video, btw. Brings back memories. I still have my Voodoo 1 and 3 kicking around.
This takes me by. My first ever 3D card along with the reason I bought it (well, my grandparents did) sitting on the shelf behind.
When I got my Voodoo 2 it changed my life. What a difference it made from my old 3D ATI card! I also can't believe this video is nearly 10 years old.
Looking back....i still think that LGR is timeless :)
@TheTallGuy1985 Thanks for mentioning that. I wasn't sure if it was just my TFT LCD monitor or what, but there was definitely a somewhat fuzzy image using the pass-through cable. Not a problem at all on later Voodoo cards, like the Voodoo3, which are single-card solutions with no extra cables.
I had that voodoo 1 card, it was passed through just a you said. This was an exciting time to be alive... When you mentioned POD, I remember that my friend was obsessed with MMX technology. Good days :) later on I remember Turok and Wargasm. Shadow Warrior was great.
I'm gonna go look for the 3DFX spin logo.
I was obsessed to play turok but found out it wouldnt run on my pc for some reason .... :((
i'm 32 years old now, and i vividly remember the day i bought this card with my own money i was around 14 at the time and i installed one of these in my father's pentium 166mhz to play games (motocross madness, motoracer...NFS2!!)
I remember paying 269$+ TAX for it here in canada :)
Great video!
I had that exact 3d card! I was the hit at the LAN party when I first got it. My games looked and ran so much better than the other computers that were there, even if they had better specs. I did forget the patch through cable once and I had to disconnect the monitor cable from the 2d card and plug it into the 3d card every time I launched a game. Good times.
Tomb raider was my first look at 3d acceleration in pc gaming. Saw it running and immediately bought one. I still have it. Astounding. Quake was a thing of beauty back then. Great video.
The noises of Quake reminds me of countless hours of bot matches and TeamFortress on QuakeWorld via GameSpy ;D
Nice! I still have my Voodoo 3 3000, I loved that card and still occasionally bust it out. 3DFX was so awesome back then.
Suddendly I feel the urge to build a 98 style pc.
+Blue Baby this video got me to buy an S3 Virge, Voodoo 1 and a Voodoo 5500 AGP! Thanks LGR!
My 98 PC was a AMD K6 166mhz with 16mb of ram if I remember right. The Pentium chips had slightly more honest MHZ but the AMD was a good value. Voodoo2 for playing Quake 2 as 60fps in 800X600+. I think 1280X1024 was possible but it's been so far back I don't remember if it was worth running. It was back in a time when resolution was your only quality adjustment on your new PC game.
well if you were like me i used to run those games i couldnt in a lower rez and then use the actual display scaling to reduce the image size to get a sharper picture!! (think of a large CRT with a small frame of a picture in the middle) LOL
@serginietor Could have something to do with the fact that the version of Quake shown in this comparison (WinQuake vs GLQuake) use different texture maps, I think. And, in fact, the 3D-accelerated GLQuake uses OpenGL to render, unlike the other two games shown. Googling "GLQuake Gamma" gives some info on the matter.
And thanks, glad you enjoyed!
3:50 "It's a pretty nice little solution.... kinda clunky.... uhhh, it's a real pain, actually, when you think about it."
It's not 480fps 12k UHDR over a CrispyFast Displayport 2.4b connection Available Only At BestBuy.com Rememebr QUALITY_Remember MONSTER TM
Plug 'and' Play
I had a voodoo1 and Voodoo2, what a gaming revolution those cards were back in the day.
If only 3DFX wouldnt have decided to make their own cards. and stuck with the providing chips to manufacturers, they might still be around.
I remember the Tomb Raider games being real showcases for the Voodoo cards. Those games sold a lot of 3Dfx cards...
apache havoc
tomb raider was a lot nicer with a rendition verite v1000, but 3dfx was pushing more triangles in less time... blurry triangles, but faster
First game I saw a 3dfx running....bought one 2 days later.
OMG I remember my dad buying me my first Voodoo card and showing me how to install it. That was the beginning of me becoming involved in computer upgrading and building my own rigs and such. Wow the memories this brings back. Thanks LGR!
I love how glide 3d graphics looks, MS direct3D was not so nice.
Okay I'm gonna say this. I love this channel and I love this guy. His videos are awesome, he's teaching me so much about old computers and stuff and he's just entertaining to watch. Lazy Game Reviews, you have joined the excellent Doom LPer Altimamantoid as my go to TH-cam channel whenever I wanna entertain myself with some awesome stuff that puts a big old smile on my face.
and the PC master race is BORN!
voodoo magic lol
Indeed. I had a Monster 3D for my Pentium Pro 200MHz. It was awesome, if you could get it to work! I actually learned a lot about tweaking, modifying and hacking settings/drivers by owning this thing.
Never did get Mechwarrior 2 to run on the Monster 3D.
Pcs became the best gaming platform even before, with 256 Colors VGA Graphics. Just take a game like Monkey Island, it looked far better in VGA than on any other platform. This happened in the early 90s.
I don`t like the word Masterrace, by the way.
CeleCraft, Monkey Island had only 16 colors. Craftly dithered, but still 16.
Graphics were slightly better on Amiga, but Adlib sound was better on PC.
+Volo That's the EGA version. The VGA version was released a little bit later with 256 colours and slightly higher res than the Amiga. It looked better on the PC and you didn't have to keep swapping a million freaking floppys, but adlib sounds not great compared to the Amiga; even the MT32 I would put about even with the amiga. The 1992 CDROM version is the first with clearly better sound than the amiga.
Nothing lazy at all with these early videos man. They are fun to watch.
Quake in Software Mode: Huh... It looks SLIGHTLY better in Hardware Mode, but it's really hard to tell the difference
NFS in Software Mode: The cars look kind of crap, and the sky looks like you're on another planet, but still perfectly serviceable
Tomb Raider in Sofware Mode: NO GOD! PLEASE NO!!! NO..! *NOOOOO....*
An old comment but still - I am guessing you are just speaking off the video, anyone who remembers that time knows that Quake in Software vs Quake in hardware mode is incomparable, Voodoo made it look a thousand times better, but most also jump from 10FPS to 30+ FPS.
Quake looks so smooth in software mode because it runs on a PII which wasn't even out when Quake was released. When it came out, it wouldn't run nearly as smooth on the Pentiums of the day in 640x480.
It's all being softened/blurred by the capture method, when playing it the differences were obvious.
Ah the nostalgia! I had the Orchid 3dfx card which had a relay that clicked when switching 2D/3D. We did crappy 2 player dm's over a network back in the day, the 3dfx equipped PII 300 vs an Am486 DX/4-100. Quake played on the 486, but you needed a magnifying glass to see anything because you had to shrink the frame down small to get it to play smoothly. Tomb Raider was the most impressive as in your review, like night and day. Great channel btw really bringing back the memories, thanks.
Matrox Mystique 220 and a Voodoo 1 for the win, at least back then. ;)
Bastet Furry Absolutely! Amazing 2D output from Matrox cards, and their Mystique version of Mechwarrior 2 was the best of all that generation of cards. Voodoo of course for Glide, bilinear filtering and raw power.
Got the same!!
I had the Millennium paired with the first gen Voodoo. On a Pentium Pro 200 system with 64 MB RAM. Most expensive computer I ever built.
@@magicmulder Those were the days :-)! Millennium (fastest DOS-Solution then and some especially adapted titles ran like hell such as Nascar Racing) and - all hail - the mighty 3dfx Voodoo. Unbeatable performance on a Pentium 166 clocked to 200MHZ (before the 200-variant came out!) paired with the Triton1-chipset (first to use pipelined burst cache). But best is: That system is still flying today right next to my today's gaming rig. Same fun, but with 10.996 megabytes graphics memory less :-))
@@NightRidersUrbex So did mine. Gave it to a friend's son to tinker with 3 years ago.
Combining the 2D card with the 3D one is like a super early primitive SLI lol I love it.
What a blast from the past.
Did you really record these older videos on actual video tape? :O
This one was not, no. I used a cheap 720p digital camera. But the oldest videos were recorded on VHS-C.
Oh man, the time alone spent on transferring tapes must be insane when it all adds up
why?
@@starfrost6816 Because it has to be done in real time. VHS and SVHS are analogue formats, so you have to play the tape and use a video capture card to get the footage onto a PC.
@@LGR
Holy crap this is old.
Crazy that you have had this channel for so long. Watching in 2019 and you have gotten SO much better at this TH-cam thing....lol.
I remember spending £300 on a Voodoo 2 with a massive 8mb RAM. The difference with resolution and frame rate compared to a 2D card playing Quake 2 was amazing. Best £300 spent ever :p
+Dalle Smalhals if it was 12mb my mistake. Long time ago 😉
+Dalle Smalhals There were two models of the Voodoo², namely an 8MB and a 12MB version. The difference was that the 12MB model had twice the texture memory (8MB), compared to the 8MB model (4MB). The other 4MB on each card was used for the frame buffer.
Quake 2 was far more representative about the 2D / 3D gap than Q1, NFS SE or Tomb Raider as the differences between software Q2 and the 3D one where really huge in both fidelity and speed.
You forgot Descent 2, the graphics and framerate acceleration was amazing! We were totally blown away at that time. Oh and you could Play D2voodoo/D2_3dfx in DOS mode, unlike most other Voodoo-accelerated games.
Botpack9 epic song from UT99. great choice.
I was blown away with the, as you say, the night and day difference my new Orchid Righteous card made! Tomb Raider, Quake, and I remember just watching the Unreal looping intro over and over. Man, those reflections. I knew then I was PC for life.
I loved that card, it was the holy grail after years of underperformance of the PC. And NFS 2 SE is my favorite NFS of the series so far, not particularly fond of the Fast and the Furious turn they took afterwards.
Oh man, the memories.
I remember mine came with a bunch of full games, including 3dfx versions of Descent 2 and Mechwarrior 2. Best bundle ever!
20:18 what exactly is that thing in the background?
It was some kind of rubbery slug toy. Inflated it with an air compressor, haha.
+Lazy Game Reviews Oh lol
I think its a condom, Try it inside out :P
I was just listening to botpack-9 from UT and I can hear you playing it in the background. What a coinkydink! Rock on LGR!
Sega Saturn was very successful, but only in Japan. It actually outsold the Nintendo 64 there.
Hey thanks for putting together this video! I was digging through some old gear and trying to explain to my 11 year old son what it was like when 3dfx came out with this revolutionary hardware... That's where your video stepped in and demonstrated it perfectly.
Thanks!
Are you playing Quake without a mouse and with the Arrow Keys?
@kazimann Yes indeed! I still hope to review it, whenever I make myself sit down and learn the gameplay.
And 20 years later I have 4 GB video card.
I'm more amazed at how phones are now capable of close to Ps3 level of graphics.
+NitroLPR9
They never will be outlawed
+NitroLPR9 What are you smoking?
There's something about this late 90s era of 3D graphics that I find aesthetically pleasing. The polygon counts were still low, but the shapes had lost that warped, pixelated look common to software 3D. Textures were simple and shadows were almost nonexistent. There's a clean, smooth, uncluttered feel to it that I still find very enjoyable.
I played Half Life 1 on software mode back in the day, at minimum resolution and like 15 FPS LOL.
Odin's Playground aww bur 🐻
Playing Moto racer and Quake on a 3Dfx was such a smooth experience. I will always remember. SGI you did a fucking great job! Respect!
Computers and computer games were alot more funnier back in those days.
Bark yeah because if you upgraded something you would actually notice a difference
Miss that when upgrading any part or over clocking all made a massive difference
In hindsight, that would have been a far superior way to demonstrate it. Will do so in the future when possible.
It's weird, in some ways, I like the software rendered mode better. In 3D accelerated mode, it looks a bit... Flat, and less colorful.
Chris Groff That difference in brightness is only present in this video. In reality, games look almost the same, only with less pixelated textures and some extra effects in 3D accelerated mode.
***** LOL what a deal-breaker! I really wanted the split-second light flashes from my weapon to be 2 times brighter. Jokes aside, I do prefer software rendering in some games. Tomb Raider 2 looks better with blocky textures and no filtering in my opinion. You can just see that it was designed with the PS1 in mind, not the smooth visuals of the PC. I know it doesn't matter anymore but if I was a PC gamer in 1996 and I had money, I'd have spent it on a good CPU instead and waited until 2002 for a GPU. Those earlier games with simple low-poly models and low render distance that were usually perfectly playable at 320x240 just didn't need most of the improvements of 3D acceleration until around 2002 when most new games started dropping software support and were benefiting more from high resolution and smooth textures.
+hristaki99 Honestly for games like Quake 1/2 and Half-Life 1, i think they look way better without texture filtering and with pixelated textures, if you have filtering on everything looks like a paint smudge and you loose a lot of the hand painted detail the texture artists put into it
jackoneill45 Yeah, I like those games without filtering too. I do like filtering on 2D games though, especially low-res like SNES and NES games. All this indie retro thing with blocky graphics is bullshit. 2D games back in the day didn't even look pixelated. The RCA cable and CRT screen were natural filters that made them look smooth and pretty realistic. The problem is that it's very hard to emulate that effect on a PC. Of course, some emulators pulled it off like ZSNES with its built-in "NTSC filter" which looks great. You should definitely check it out if you haven't already.
True, ithink it was this with Glide drivers (not sure). But dont remember Quake2 colorless on OpenGL.
One of my retro PCs has a 3dfx Voodoo 2, and it is just mega awesome. I seriously bought the card based on this review. Thank you, LGR!
Just sold mine 2 weeks ago (dec 2016) for $15 :)
I get your comment about 3DFX, you can see it in the context of its time. I do the same when I play old games, being impressed by then state of the art features as I was back in the day even though I don't bat an eye at modern games doing them better. Its nice to get that feeling that something groundbreaking is on show, instead of just logical progression that you get these days. This is why I like this channel, not because I miss most of this stuff, but its still nice to get that "damn I forgot about that, or like this where I remember just how much of a leap forward things like his were. lol that little accelerator was the birth of the PC master race, once the Voodoo 1 hit the scene, consoles got knocked off the top spot (though for me that was when they dropped the awesomeness that were the game cartridges).
I had a Riva TNT 2 with 32MB, my friend had a Riva TNT 2 ultra with 64MB I was so jealous! he could run Severance: Blade of Darkness and I couldnt :/
I got chills seeing the 3dfx logo when the games started. I had a voodoo 2 in high school and everytime I saw the logo, I remembered how bad ass I was.
i got my 3dfx card when it came out and it totally changed gaming forever. it was (imoo) one of the largest leaps in gaming.
The good old times with 3DFX, I have a voodoo2 card from Creative with 12MB here somewhere on the attic, I have to put it in my old pentium computer...
I love these hardware reviews :)
@thatsistheguy Quite welcome. Also thank Dayv99 for providing the Voodoo1 card! I hope to have more 3DFX videos in the future as well.
@RJTamm93 Never tried the Saturn port, but I'll have to track it down and give it a go. I love odd variations of PC games on consoles, bad or good.
@WalrusRockGod Pod is indeed *very* tough to get to run on many modern systems. Differences in just about everything from Windows versions, video drivers, sound drivers, DirectX versions and even Glide wrappers make the game one of the pickiest to run on any other machine other than what it was made for. I have lots of information on my website, POD Phreak, which is one of the last remaining active fansites for Pod!
Woah, great! Thanks for this awesome Video, which has to be one the best if not your best hardware video. I perfectly remember when I got my diamond monster 3D for Christmas. I think I was 10 or 11 at that time. In Germany the card came with descent 2 and hyperblade which both kicked ass. There also were some sort of graphicdemos with it. My oh my! Sweet, sweet memories! Brought back to my mind by watching your video! Thanks alot!!
And I had an Orchid Righteous 3D (with Voodoo 1, 4 MB) and the successor Orchid Righteous 3D2, Voodoo 2 (With 12 MB).
Always a pleasure to see these older videos, with things, somewhat common. :)
Brings up the nostalgia. :)
Awesome review! The difference is significant and I agree with the difference between Tomb Raider II especially in 3DFX and non-3DFX mode is night and day. 3DFX techology was way ahead of it's time.
showed this to my casual retro gaming friend and he was amazed at the differences and just how awesome the games were in general.
these games, the voodoo cards, and you all have one thing in common: you're all AWSOME (YEAH).
ha, depth dwellers humor.
Ahh the good old days,I had 2 voodoo 2's running in SLI back in the day.
Great video
A 3dfx video card was a dream for every single kid out there back in the old days :)
DUDE! Looking at you videos is like reliving my pc-life! Im subscribing!
That was an excellent, in-depth overview--I thoroughly enjoyed it. It brings me back to when I purchased my first video card for myself (a Voodoo 3). It really was amazing going from complete software rendering in games like Quake, to Glide rendering, not to mention the ability to play games that weren't able to run before (or just ran extremely poor, like your Tomb Raider comparison).
@jetpack1986 Absolutely. The Rage Pro doesn't give you Glide mode, which on the games that support it is often miles better than DirectX games of the time.
@marviosantos It was rendered using "2D" hardware, and was rather commonly referred to as such back then. At least, it was around me. Technically accurate? No, but it was stated as 2D to make the clear distinction between software 3D and hardware 3D. You'd tell you someone you were playing a 3D game and they'd ask "on a 2D or 3D card?"
@serginietor I imagine that's a driver config deal going on there. There are separate gamma options for Glide mode, although I left it on default settings it did appear... "richer" than the 2D software mode. Richer, darker, whatever, it's certainly a difference.
This was my first 3d card, bought it January 2, 1998, when I got my first PC. I always had a 3d card. I remember when buying it the store was impressed, they never tried one and the owner wanted it too.
I remember when the voodoo cards were for sale at best buy and they came with the voodoo skinny mouse pads! Memories!!!
I didn't notice too much with quake other than some colors and lag but with need for speed and tomb raider I really saw some color, texture, and lag issues with the 2D card that were no where to be seen with the 3D card.
freaking awesome overview, video, thing.
best of luck to you.
@michaliskebab The Voodoo3 doesn't have any major problems with most V1/V2 games. If there is, there's pretty much always a patch for the game it has issues with.
A Pentium II, while faster than you need, won't have any issues with Wolf3D and Doom. They should run the same speed no matter how fast the CPU is.
Golden age of gaming.
At least for me.I've bought my first pc in late 1997 when i was 12 and my Voodoo 2 12 mb in the summer of 1998 (A Monster 3D II), i remember that period as the best for pc gaming.
I hope to at some point in the future!
Still one of my favorite LGR vids!
I bought my first 3D card in 1998 too... it was a Voodoo Banshee and it blew my mind at the time. It was a 2D/3D combo card IIRC.
@gamewizard There's a huge difference on a real machine, especially one that's slower than what I used in the video. Remember, Pentium PCs were at a premium back then, most people were still rocking a 486. Sure, nowadays you can find a faster machine for nothing, but back then the V1 made a huge difference, in frame rate, texture quality, lighting, etc. The difference is more visible in the video response to this one, where I install a Voodoo2 card.
I remember when my friend at college had one of these. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, graphics on a PC as good as the consoles of the time :)
Probably because NFS2 doesn't have anything but a 2D software renderer. NFS2SE has a 3D renderer, but only if you have a 3DFX Glide card installed (or a Glide wrapper).
@SvenneTheBlockhead Yeah, weird huh? I forget the reason behind that, but I faintly recall it having to do with a limitation in the game engine at that point. Thankfully they fixed it when they updated the code for NFS3.
@weaselfierce I think this particular card was $159 new.
good old 720p videos....good memories.....
Hehe, I still have a Righteous 3D card. What fantastic cards these were!
Your videos bring back soo many memories. Thx man!
@RandyPhantomHC Yes, those shown seem to work rather well with my Voodoo2. NFS2SE needs a patch to work with the Voodoo2 though, as it's designed for the Voodoo1. I don't think Quake did, and TR2 was fine.
@X3CuT1oNR I have a copy I downloaded, but not the real thing. Was it ever officially released? I remember reading about a while ago and there was rumor it never even got sent to store shelves, but a beta version had leaked or something, which is what I may have downloaded...
@gamewizard Not everyone had cash. Our family was using a 486 until well into 1997, then we got an AMD-K6 233MHz system and it was amazing. But it still ran Quake quite slowly, due to the lack of any 3D acceleration. Got a Voodoo card and it was smoother than I ever imagined.
I bought one of these cards back in 1997 just for GLQuake. If you wanted to play multiplayer, it was pretty much a requirement. A year later I bought the Voodoo2 and kept it until 2000. Then a shiny new GeForce 2 32MB card made its way into my new computer.
Very nice flash back in time with the 3Dfx Voodoo1. I still have a Voodoo1, Voodoo2 and even a Voodoo3 (all in one solution) for in my old P3 system.
This is so nostalgic...my first 3D card was the "Orchid 3dfx" 8mb...what to say, other than thanks dad (2nd hand off a colleague) :-D golden era of computers. I was a great dos duke player, but this made need for speed 3, final fantasy vii, quake a total blast. LGR thanks for the incredible time capsule. we sure struggled back in the days getting things running correctly out of the box. p.s. my greatest gaming surprise was blade runner the game by westwood, found it in a boot fair (literally in a field) in the uk,i had never watched the movie since i was just a child but made watching the movie later on in life even better! ;-D cheers Mark
still have the sidewinder force feedback wheel and connector, would be more than happy to send it over since it is risking very sadly a great chuck away...............had a terrible struggle with drivers 10 years ago