Sad kids today will never experience the jump from Software-Render to 3D-Acceleration, this was so mindblowing - like opening your eyes and feeling the pain from using 'em for the first time :D
How about the dead guy in the spaceship making you jump, and meeting the predator for the first time when all the lights went out in the corridor! amazing memories.
@@mr.g354 Childsplay, upscaling and reflections from unrealistically polished surfaces, nothing compared to the jump back than. Don't understand why upscaling gets so much Hype though, still just rendering in lower resolutions and advanced checkerboard rendering, doesn't beat native (and how could it, still an approximation).
My Righteous blew me away after software rendering. I would watch that Unreal fly-by loop over and over. Just had to get it (and my Apollo Voodoo2) out of the box for some old card smell goodness. I wish I still had my old system, with case like the one in this video, to try them again but everything was gradually upgraded over the years into what I'm using now.
The first time I saw that was in a PC store. A few people were gathered around a PC, looking amazed. One guy said "Wow, this looks unreal! What is it?" That brought some laughs as the sales guy told him it's called Unreal! :)
I remember playing Battle Arena Toshinden on my PS1 and then going to my friend's house and playing Quake on software made. My brother came back from college a few months later with a new PC he built and he had the original Voodoo graphics with Quake 1 and Toshinden for the PC. The games looked so sharp and I my little brain was blown away. I set up my tv and ps1 next to my brothers computer and we compared the games side by side. It was amazing. Good times . I am so happy I experience the dawn of graphics accelerators from the very start
I remember a computer shop two blocks from my middle school, showed off an MMX 233 box with a Diamond Monster3D playing GLQuake. That sold me on PC 3D gaming. Also remembered PC Gamer here in the States showing off ads for Descent II on a Diamond Monster3D-II. Talk about drooling over hardware..
I had a Sierra Screamin 3d as my 2d and used it both through my V! and V2 years...God I miss those simple days of my 133mhz Pentium and especially my wonderful 333mhz cartridge slot P2...Thanks for the memories!
Mine was the Voodoo 3 2000. It was insane going from software rendering to that 3D accelerator. You went from shooting at blobs of moving pixels to shooting at things you could actually recognize. It was truly mind blowing. That Voodoo served me for several years before I was able to upgrade to something better.
Rich friend upgraded his rig back then and sold me his voodoo, even helped me install it on my pentium, overclock it and put an extra fan with thermal paste on it. One word: Quake. I had never experienced such speed, framerate and high res, unbelievable.
Miss those days...sorta. We didn't worry about case modding yet because it wasn't quite mainstream. All cases came in that great beige plastic or sometimes cool black. My first 3d card was the 3dfx Voodoo2 8 MB card on an AMD K6-233Mhz processor. I cant remember how much ram it had but it was old edo style stuff then, I believe. After hooking of the Voodoo2 and firing up Quake 2 I was in awe. It was a whole new era in gaming. Buddy of mine had a Riva TNT2 card that was nice when it came out too. The good old days of competition! Remember when one of the overclocking sites built the first PC to break the 1Ghz mark?
You said it well on the video. When I got Voodoo2 card, even the arcades didn't look impressive at all after that. It was insane jump, textures, resolution, speed absolutely everything got so much better. All of the sudden semi-impressive Playstation titles where suddenly looking ugly with it's twisting textures, low poly models etc.
I had a Voodoo 3 and 5. I had them sitting in their boxes in the attic for years then sold both of them for about $30 each. I am kind of sad I didn't keep them but I thought I had no more use for them anymore just memories.
I couldn't afford a Voodoo 2, but seen it in action a lot. Eventually the Voodoo Banshee came out, which was an all in one card I could afford. That's the one I got and loved it. Lower performance than the Voodoo 2, but it still worked fine in glide mode with every game I tried. Glad you posted this.
Carmageddon! Now that takes me back. I also remeber that the Voodo cards made me think of the generic PC as a contender for my Amiga, when it comes to games.
A really nice fun detailed video about these early beloved 3Dfx 3D accelerator cards well done. In those early days Glide,MiniGL and later Open Glide were good compelling competitors to Microsoft's Direct 3D. I prefer running the Glide API in Microprose's European Air War on a 3DFX card rather than running it using Direct X. I also love Quake 1 and 2 too.
This is my favorite era for GPUs because you could really see a difference. Later generations were pretty significant tooo, but soon after 2007, it all just starts to blend.
I could never get it to run back in the day because the Diamond drivers were lagging behind and I didn't know enough to get them directly from 3dfx until after the game was no longer "cutting edge" and I lost interest.
nice. I came back to computers after a hiatus (my last pc was a pc xt that lasted me into college) in order to get into 3d graphics. got a compaq pentium 2 450mhz and I splurged for the tnt-2 card. and first game I purchased for that system - sierra on-line's half-life. so a little after the voodoo 2 but I was still encountering all kinds of stuff about glide drivers.
I opened Motorhead from Pcem, 3 seconds later you opened it in the video. I never experienced it with a 3dfx before Pcem, it is pretty good. Back in the day I played Motorhead on a 4mb s3 machine, even with low settings this game is something else.
I had a similar experience as a kid. A neighbor got a Voodoo card and it blew my mind. The jump from the slow chunky looking software rendered stuff I was used to was insane
This is a great channel, glad to be your 33rd subscriber! I did the mistake of buying a pre-Voodoo card back in the day; the S3 ViRGE DX (I saw your earlier video too). I missed out on the 3DFX era entirely! But hey, retro channels like this inspired me to go back and revisit the Voodoo, I have a 3000 AGP that I play around with every so often :).
Thanks so much, and thanks for subscribing! Sorry to hear you missed out on the 3dfx cards, they really were something special, and the Virge ..well.. wasnt :P Glad to hear you finally got your voodoo though, the 3000 is also a great card!
Good ol times, man....... I remember my best friend (and roommate) sold his old car in order to buy Voodoo 2... We spent countless days & nights trying to beat Quake on nightmare diff.level, also, we played Half Life like nuts..... tryin to catch up with our college tasks at the same time... xD
Very special memories indeed :) My first Voodoo was the Banshee, their first 2D & 3D card. Best christmas ever :) Also great that you covered Motorhead! My favorite driving game ever!
I had the original Voodoo 1 in my first PC. I also had the voodoo 2. Actually I had 2 * Voodoo 2s SLI'd over a Radeon Rage Fury way back then. And boy it ran FAST!
A lot of love went into making this video - really nicely done. I just installed a voodoo banshee in one of my systems and was looking for some 3dfx content on YT and came across this vid :D
Thanks so much! It took a long time to make but was good fun so I'm glad you enjoyed it. I recently got a voodoo banshee myself and am also looking forward to covering it a future video.
@@ohsoretro5612 Saw one up on a Swedish website similar too ebay called Tradera, 530 sek is about 61 usd with 10 days left on the listing if you are looking for an identical card for sli, though there are drivers that lets you sli any voodoo 2 cards with eachother as long as you got the same amount of vram or it will be limited too the card with less vram. www.tradera.com/item/341371/428053791/a-trend-voodoo-2 Could be worth getting a socket 370 system up & running for voodoo 2 sli with something like a 850 mhz pentium III as slot 1 is a bit harder too find & maybe a small 32 gb ssd with a sata too ide adapter.
Motorhead! What a game! I played it hours and hours back in the day and still play it from time to time! Awesome speed effect in this game! A must try!
My first 3D accelerator was also a Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, the 12MB variant (at least I hope it was, after watching your video 😀). I had read on the internet (having just got it in our house in the spring of 1998) that the Voodoo 2 was a must have card for gaming, so I pestered my dad until I got one :-D. The PC was a Pentium II 300MHz, with 32MB of RAM and an ATI Rage Pro Turbo. To say my mind was blown after I saw the Voodoo accelerated graphics was an understatement! That Rage Pro turbo was rubbish for 3D. I think the very first game I tried on the Voodoo 2 was Quake 2, but I wasn't too keen on it. Need For Speed II SE was the other, and that was absolutely awesome 😀. So yeah, really happy memories from that time. Moto Racer, Half-Life, Descent: Freespace, Jedi Knight... so much fun. Bought a Voodoo 3 3000 in 1999 with my very first paycheck ever and was disappointed to see no real increase in performance, too dumb at the time to figure out that the Pentium II was bottlenecking it 😄. Thanks for the great video, brought back some fond memories 🙂
Thanks so much for watching and for sharing your experiences! NFS 2 SE really did look amazing on the voodoo's at the time. Remember driving through the swarm of wasps on the outback map and getting splattered bugs all over your windscreen? Was a really nice touch..
@@ohsoretro5612 Yup, I remember that 🙂. The raindrops as well - when it rained, the raindrops splattered on the windscreen, that absolutely blew my mind 😄. I also remember that there was this weird way you had to enable Glide mode in NFS II SE - you didn't enable it in-game, if I recall, you had to click on a different exe in the game folder to use Glide mode. Or something like that. Don't even know how I figured it out 😀
Nice one.. I remember this time, the year was 1999 (more precisely late 99), and I had a K6-II, using the old card from my old setup (Diammond Stealth 3d 2000 Pro - S3 Virge). I remeber that they release Star Wars - The Phantom Menace and the S3 dont support transparency, so the game doesnt run correctly. Then I buy in december 1999 a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Whow.. It was another world.. Just unbeliaveble.... I played a lot of games with this setup until 2002, when the support for Voodoo drivers were not available anymore, and the games start to run using 32 bit colors. The voodoo only use 16 bit, so I remember I droped it for a TNT-2. Still miss the GLIDE age...
Great videos! I watched the S3 ViRGE video and this one. Deserves more than 30 subscribers and more views 👍 I was subscriber number 29 when I subscribed 😅
Started with Verite 2200 Hercules Thriller 3D card, then started on the Voodoo journey with the Creative Voodoo Blaster PCI, then 3dfx Voodoo2, 3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 AGP, and finally 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. That's the end of the 3dfx era...
Me and my brother got a computer rather late, a 16mb k6 166mhz s3 virge machine. Think it was 97. A couple of years later we got a powercolor voodoo2 12mb and i got into gaming. I was a bit obsessed with unreal. Didnt believe what i was seeing haha.
I owned 2 voodoo2s and had them in SLI mode. Remember playing many of the sames games covered. Enjoyed these cards many years back then and cool seeing video games that are a good memory. Cheers!
I used 3DFX for 'Descent' and 'Whiplash'. Great fun. The tech was replaced by software based rendering. nVidia bought 3DFX, and they've been pushing hardware Ray Tracing. They like the idea of using proprietary hardware to dominate the GPU space, however very demanding for what seems to be not much visual gain in modern games. RT will be replaced by software rendering as well.
Carmageddon, started same here :-) a Friend got a Diamond Monster 3D and told me PCGamers Magazine got an 3dfx patch for Carmageddon and he will grab it later on that day. I was amazed how is converted the game from playable und unbelievable... so I a few time later I could call a Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D my own paired with my Pentium 100.
My earliest memory of seeing a voodoo card in action was with pod, also one of the earliest games to get a glide patch I believe. My reaction as a kid "but ... where are the pixels ?" :D
I had a rather peculiar transition from software rendering to 3D accelerated world. My first ever PC already had a Voodoo card but I’ve experienced the former on my cousin’s PC which only had an S3 Trio64. The thing is I dived straight into Glide games whereas there were no 3dfx-capable games on my cousin’s PC to make it a before-after experience. So I know what the revolution was about but there was no eye-popping breakthrough moment as such. It all just happened as it they were totally different platforms. I have lots of fond Voodoo Graphics gaming memories but from 25 years perspective I regret being not assertive enough to persuade my dad into buying a Voodoo2 instead. But it was a hot new product back then, just a couple of months after its launch, so it would bump the price of the whole set dramatically.
I spend so much time with carmaggedon 1 and 2, also have voodoo 1, voodoo rush and voodoo 3 3000. I remeber Virge 3D card but we called it almost 3D card
My first serious gfx card was £100 Guillemot Voodoo 1. Bought it especially for Resident Evil and it blew me away. Also played Forsaken, Quake GL, unreal, tomb raider 2, alien trilogy all with varying performance. TR2 was literally a slide show, 1-2 fps not joking, but completed it lol
Nice. If you had at least an MMX it would be much better. I still remember being in awe when I first installed my monster 3D 2 and ran unreal tournament.
Funny story, glquake predates Voodoo. It was developed for Intergraph Realizm, a workstation card which did not sell saparately, and the Intergraph workstations had a "call us" pricing, so it's rumoured that the option usually came out to around $15000 (fifteen thousand USD) for the accelerator card alone. Windows NT workstations. Then Id planned on supporting Verite, but this fell through, probably because they weren't very good. 3Dfx had no plans for supporting OpenGL, it was far too complex. Carmack had no plans of supporting anything other than OpenGL, said it would be a waste of time, and OpenGL was the best possible API for the time anyway. He thought having glquake released would be the leverage needed to support OpenGL in competition to back then exceptionally messy Direct3D. Quake on Voodoo is a result of quick thinking on the part of 3Dfx company. While proper OpenGL support was not an option, implementing just enough OpenGL to support only Quake, with copious cheating, was something they could accomplish quickly. So they released the "MiniGL driver" which did just that and was actually an API wrapper running on top of Glide.
Hey, nice video! First time I saw a 3dfx in action it was a voodoo2 running Incoming, at the time I still had a 486DX4 100MHz w/ 1MB video card and the best thing I was able to run was Screamer (1) in 320x200, so you can imagine my reaction to Incoming at 800x600 in Glide :-)
At 47 yo, I remember owning a computer with a voodoo 3 2/3000. PCI At the time, I found out there was an agp version so I stupidly upgraded. I've owed both versions, and don't have either. Good times. Lol
Still have the voodoo 2 sitting on my game room shelf. I just don't have an old pc to use it on. That's ok though since most of those old games can be wrapped to work on modern setups. So it just sits there looking pretty lol.
Thanks so much for showing some love to the demoscene. The clips from Nature were so awesome to see. I remember how blown away the first time I saw it.
You're welcome, and thanks for watching! I played around with most of the demos I could find and they are still great showcases. I wish I could have included more of them but I try to keep my videos to around 15 minutes so I had to cut most of it unfortunately :(
I had a Daimond VooDoo2 12mb at the time. Think i had it inside my P233mmx. Think i used a Daimond Stealth s220 as a 2d card. The s220 was my first 3d card. Nice card, but not as fast as the VooDoo. Later i paired the VooDoo2 with a Matrox G200 when i switched to a P2. Sold my cards long ago, but a few years back bought 2 VooDoo2 12mb to finally make my dream pc from back in the day. It now has it’s home inside a P2-450, with a Matrox G200, SoundBlaster AWE32 and a Gravis Ultrasound clone.
Voodoo2 was also the first card with SLI. You can connect 2 Voodoo2 to get better performance and/or higher resolution! I still have 2x Voodoo2, one in my P-200mmx box and another in P3-500, but sometimes I put two of them into one box with SLI to feel .... rich ;)
You put a voodoo2 in a Pentium1! I'm surprised the god card didn't spontaneously combust at the heresy of your actions! As someone with a P2-233 at this time, I already had an AGP card (an amazing ATI-Ragepro2) and yet my Voodoo2 was without a doubt the best computer component purchase I've ever made. Like others have said it was mind-blowing, the improvement in graphics at the time! I already had doom2 running in Direct3d and was still amazed at the difference in 3dfx's GLIDE API. Its now 2021 and what I'd give to actually find ANY graphics card in stock, yet no matter how much I end up spending (Real time Ray tracing anyone!!) I know without question that I'll still not be anywhere near as impressed as firing up "UNREAL" for the first time, all those years ago....
Had a P60 with 8MB back then, so absolutely no games ran above 320 x 240, and even at that res we're talking 15 fps. Christmas '96 I got the Matrox Millennium believing it would drastically improve my gaming performance. Huge let-down. About April time got the Righteous 3D and POD. Must have moved about 1 in game metre before hitting pause, legging it round to my neighbours' and dragging them over to witness the new beast in town. Man, the bilinear filtering and 30 fps gameplay just looked so far in advance of the Saturn and Playstation. One upgrade literally quardupling performance in an instant
Voodoo receives analogue VGA signal from standard video card. Voodoo 1 and 2 only work with full screen programs in a handful resolutions and only 16 bit 565. So the frontend of the card simply contains an analogue switch which when the Voodoo isn't active passes through the signal from the 2D card. Or when it is active, disconnects the 2D card from the output and drives the output on its own.
In 1998, I paired my Riva128 with an already somewhat cheapish Voodoo just to play Unreal and KHG. Unreal's initial OpenGL renderer was way too slow on the Riva128 and the D3D patch wasn't out yet. OpenGL would only run acceptable in 320x240. Today, with good OpenGL/D3D support in Unreal and mature graphics drivers, the Riva128 has no problem running Unreal, albeit not as fast as the Voodoo. If I had todays experience back in the day, I would certainly not have bought a Voodoo. A few months later, the Voodoo was kicked out as it was obsolete with a TNT inside the system. And that TNT lasted me for quite a while until I got a Geforce256 DDR in 2000. If it wasn't for '97, where there was practically no competition to the voodoo, or '98 games that wouldn't support anything but glide, you could very well live without one.
oh yes.. the voodoo.. i remember when I was ordering the voodoo 3 2000.. it took like million years to be shipped so I had an interim solution a voodoo banshee (I hope I spelled it correctly) but moreover I kinda never used glide because I wasn't aware of what the 31278937219372189 settings mean we had back in the days hahahaha
A game that for certain shows off what this card can do is Homeworld and its DLC Cataclysm both these games have been remade yet the originals can be found in the remake and as for Cataclysm it got a GOG release and a name change Emergence these are space RTS games like Starcraft and Command and Conquer only in full 3d.
Absolutely! Loved both Homeworld (must've played through it at least 5 times by now) and I recently got hold of an original copy of Cataclysm and have been replaying it again - great titles!
I remember games like Doom, Duke Nukem, the first Elder Scrolls, even System Shock all ran off the CPU. It wasn’t until games like Half-Life 2, Tribes, Guild Wars, etc. that made it necessary to own a video card.
I have some diamond monster 2 SLI around, but no idea in what setup these were integrated - because things changed so fast back in the days... new system components every month or week or so? I recently stumbled across some of my old stuff. Can't remember being rich at any point in time... but holy sh*t! More than 30 graphics cards?🤪 Today I play on a 6 year old laptop or an even older desktop - utterly unimaginable in the 90's
Damn the only reason why I remember this video card was this card came out when Diablo 2 came out and damn did it make a difference. Talk about memories
Sad kids today will never experience the jump from Software-Render to 3D-Acceleration, this was so mindblowing - like opening your eyes and feeling the pain from using 'em for the first time :D
How about the dead guy in the spaceship making you jump, and meeting the predator for the first time when all the lights went out in the corridor! amazing memories.
@@buggerlugz6753 You mean the Skarj in Unreal? Yeah, that gave me nearly a heart attack at the age of 10 xD
kids today get dlss and ray tracing reflections and lighting
@@mr.g354 Childsplay, upscaling and reflections from unrealistically polished surfaces, nothing compared to the jump back than. Don't understand why upscaling gets so much Hype though, still just rendering in lower resolutions and advanced checkerboard rendering, doesn't beat native (and how could it, still an approximation).
It was a great time and the demos were awesome back then.
I remember starting Unreal for the first time after I'd installed my Orchid Righteous card. My jaw hit the floor on the opening castle fly-by.
The orchid righteous was my first graphics accelerator too!
The 4MB Orchid Righteous was also my first 3D card :)
My Righteous blew me away after software rendering. I would watch that Unreal fly-by loop over and over. Just had to get it (and my Apollo Voodoo2) out of the box for some old card smell goodness. I wish I still had my old system, with case like the one in this video, to try them again but everything was gradually upgraded over the years into what I'm using now.
Ohm the good old Unreal Castle flyby. That was mesmerizing to watch. I can still play the music in my head.
The first time I saw that was in a PC store. A few people were gathered around a PC, looking amazed. One guy said "Wow, this looks unreal! What is it?" That brought some laughs as the sales guy told him it's called Unreal! :)
Wow, brings back memories of my Banshee 16mb matched with a Intel Pentium 350mhz.
I remember playing Battle Arena Toshinden on my PS1 and then going to my friend's house and playing Quake on software made. My brother came back from college a few months later with a new PC he built and he had the original Voodoo graphics with Quake 1 and Toshinden for the PC. The games looked so sharp and I my little brain was blown away. I set up my tv and ps1 next to my brothers computer and we compared the games side by side. It was amazing. Good times . I am so happy I experience the dawn of graphics accelerators from the very start
I remember a computer shop two blocks from my middle school, showed off an MMX 233 box with a Diamond Monster3D playing GLQuake. That sold me on PC 3D gaming. Also remembered PC Gamer here in the States showing off ads for Descent II on a Diamond Monster3D-II. Talk about drooling over hardware..
I had a Sierra Screamin 3d as my 2d and used it both through my V! and V2 years...God I miss those simple days of my 133mhz Pentium and especially my wonderful 333mhz cartridge slot P2...Thanks for the memories!
My first card was the voodoo 5. I loved it so much.
Mine was the Voodoo 3 2000. It was insane going from software rendering to that 3D accelerator. You went from shooting at blobs of moving pixels to shooting at things you could actually recognize. It was truly mind blowing. That Voodoo served me for several years before I was able to upgrade to something better.
@@GamerLoggos Mine was S3 32/64 1MB, few years later I have added Voodoo 2 8MB. Great days.
Rich friend upgraded his rig back then and sold me his voodoo, even helped me install it on my pentium, overclock it and put an extra fan with thermal paste on it. One word: Quake. I had never experienced such speed, framerate and high res, unbelievable.
Thanks. Nice snippet of history.
Miss those days...sorta. We didn't worry about case modding yet because it wasn't quite mainstream. All cases came in that great beige plastic or sometimes cool black. My first 3d card was the 3dfx Voodoo2 8 MB card on an AMD K6-233Mhz processor. I cant remember how much ram it had but it was old edo style stuff then, I believe. After hooking of the Voodoo2 and firing up Quake 2 I was in awe. It was a whole new era in gaming. Buddy of mine had a Riva TNT2 card that was nice when it came out too. The good old days of competition! Remember when one of the overclocking sites built the first PC to break the 1Ghz mark?
I remember my Voodoo 3 3000 AGP here. Much needed for Half-Life and the Counter-strike betas, let alone any game in the late 90s. Good video, mate.
Still got 2 voodoo 2 card sitting here... ready & waiting for a retro OG SLI gaming system.
This was great. The moment my struggling P75 running Tomb Raider was switched from software to Glide... wow, it was astounding.
You said it well on the video. When I got Voodoo2 card, even the arcades didn't look impressive at all after that. It was insane jump, textures, resolution, speed absolutely everything got so much better. All of the sudden semi-impressive Playstation titles where suddenly looking ugly with it's twisting textures, low poly models etc.
I had a Voodoo 3 and 5. I had them sitting in their boxes in the attic for years then sold both of them for about $30 each. I am kind of sad I didn't keep them but I thought I had no more use for them anymore just memories.
Carmageddon II! Gosh, I played it sooo much!
Transport tycoon deluxe OST in background... kudos!
When I got my first Creative Voodoo2, I played half life demo, tomb raider, and kingpin life of crime. oh and the midtown madness demo.
I remember the graphics jump! Glad I was a kid during this era.
I couldn't afford a Voodoo 2, but seen it in action a lot. Eventually the Voodoo Banshee came out, which was an all in one card I could afford. That's the one I got and loved it. Lower performance than the Voodoo 2, but it still worked fine in glide mode with every game I tried. Glad you posted this.
I had the voodoo banshee as well. First game I played on it was star wars episode 1 racer :)
Carmageddon! Now that takes me back. I also remeber that the Voodo cards made me think of the generic PC as a contender for my Amiga, when it comes to games.
The transport tycoon music in the background.
What a game.
Still play it every now and then.
Seeing SiN on a friends Voodoo 2 PC was an eyeopener for me. Spend the next 10 years chasing the next best card that I could afford at the time
Oooh, the flatscreen CRT monitor would have been so sought after, back in the day!
this card was so expensive at that times, at my countery that is ... walking dowh the memory lane, thanks for the vids
A really nice fun detailed video about these early beloved 3Dfx 3D accelerator cards well done.
In those early days Glide,MiniGL and later Open Glide were good compelling competitors to Microsoft's Direct 3D.
I prefer running the Glide API in Microprose's European Air War on a 3DFX card rather than running it using Direct X.
I also love Quake 1 and 2 too.
This is my favorite era for GPUs because you could really see a difference.
Later generations were pretty significant tooo, but soon after 2007, it all just starts to blend.
Oh, how i remember these beauts...thank you 3DFX!
I'm a bit mad my parents throw away my old computer a decade ago, it had dual Voodoo 2's... :(
Turok was one the greatest games I remember on vodoo.
I could never get it to run back in the day because the Diamond drivers were lagging behind and I didn't know enough to get them directly from 3dfx until after the game was no longer "cutting edge" and I lost interest.
this takes me back. I had two voodoo2 in SLI with a celron 300 running at 500mhz....
My exact setup at the time! Half-life goodness......so sweet
SLI has always eluded me unfortunately.. I have always wanted to try it but never had 2 working voodoo2's to try it out on - maybe someday :)
nice. I came back to computers after a hiatus (my last pc was a pc xt that lasted me into college) in order to get into 3d graphics. got a compaq pentium 2 450mhz and I splurged for the tnt-2 card. and first game I purchased for that system - sierra on-line's half-life. so a little after the voodoo 2 but I was still encountering all kinds of stuff about glide drivers.
added a like for the mention of motorhead-spent hours on this..oh and that great italian soundtrack it had. I even found that music on the net.
Very interesting retrospective I’ve got a few voodoo 2 cards myself I often pair them with high end gpus
It vas very cool. My first GPU was a Voodoo 2
You brought a smile to my lips remembering when we used to play these games in full 3D. Nice touch with the lava lamp BTW...
I opened Motorhead from Pcem, 3 seconds later you opened it in the video. I never experienced it with a 3dfx before Pcem, it is pretty good. Back in the day I played Motorhead on a 4mb s3 machine, even with low settings this game is something else.
My first gpu was a Voodoo Rush, my second one a Voodoo Banshee. I still have a 3Dfx chip from the banshee on my key chain.
I had a similar experience as a kid. A neighbor got a Voodoo card and it blew my mind. The jump from the slow chunky looking software rendered stuff I was used to was insane
Doh, simple pleasures of 90s, 50 or 90MHz 3d card.
This is a great channel, glad to be your 33rd subscriber! I did the mistake of buying a pre-Voodoo card back in the day; the S3 ViRGE DX (I saw your earlier video too). I missed out on the 3DFX era entirely! But hey, retro channels like this inspired me to go back and revisit the Voodoo, I have a 3000 AGP that I play around with every so often :).
Thanks so much, and thanks for subscribing! Sorry to hear you missed out on the 3dfx cards, they really were something special, and the Virge ..well.. wasnt :P Glad to hear you finally got your voodoo though, the 3000 is also a great card!
Good ol times, man....... I remember my best friend (and roommate) sold his old car in order to buy Voodoo 2... We spent countless days & nights trying to beat Quake on nightmare diff.level, also, we played Half Life like nuts..... tryin to catch up with our college tasks at the same time... xD
Very special memories indeed :) My first Voodoo was the Banshee, their first 2D & 3D card. Best christmas ever :) Also great that you covered Motorhead! My favorite driving game ever!
I still have my 2 diamond 12mb voodoo 2 cards boxed in my spare room . In 24mb sli these were amazingly fast.
I first videocard was an AGP Voodoo 3 3000 in the 1990s. Ahh, my Dad and I built that computer, which he still has I'm sure somewhere.
I miss transport tycoon too
Try OpenTTD ;)
these eyes... they followed me through childhood as I browsed through PC stores even though I had not a single penny to buy anything.
still remember the first time i fired up Need for Speed 2 & Jedi knight with my 4mb 3DFX voodoo card, the difference was epic
I had the original Voodoo 1 in my first PC.
I also had the voodoo 2. Actually I had 2 * Voodoo 2s SLI'd over a Radeon Rage Fury way back then.
And boy it ran FAST!
A lot of love went into making this video - really nicely done. I just installed a voodoo banshee in one of my systems and was looking for some 3dfx content on YT and came across this vid :D
Thanks so much! It took a long time to make but was good fun so I'm glad you enjoyed it. I recently got a voodoo banshee myself and am also looking forward to covering it a future video.
@@ohsoretro5612 Saw one up on a Swedish website similar too ebay called Tradera, 530 sek is about 61 usd with 10 days left on the listing if you are looking for an identical card for sli, though there are drivers that lets you sli any voodoo 2 cards with eachother as long as you got the same amount of vram or it will be limited too the card with less vram.
www.tradera.com/item/341371/428053791/a-trend-voodoo-2
Could be worth getting a socket 370 system up & running for voodoo 2 sli with something like a 850 mhz pentium III as slot 1 is a bit harder too find & maybe a small 32 gb ssd with a sata too ide adapter.
Motorhead! What a game! I played it hours and hours back in the day and still play it from time to time! Awesome speed effect in this game! A must try!
My first 3D accelerator was also a Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, the 12MB variant (at least I hope it was, after watching your video 😀). I had read on the internet (having just got it in our house in the spring of 1998) that the Voodoo 2 was a must have card for gaming, so I pestered my dad until I got one :-D. The PC was a Pentium II 300MHz, with 32MB of RAM and an ATI Rage Pro Turbo. To say my mind was blown after I saw the Voodoo accelerated graphics was an understatement! That Rage Pro turbo was rubbish for 3D. I think the very first game I tried on the Voodoo 2 was Quake 2, but I wasn't too keen on it. Need For Speed II SE was the other, and that was absolutely awesome 😀. So yeah, really happy memories from that time. Moto Racer, Half-Life, Descent: Freespace, Jedi Knight... so much fun. Bought a Voodoo 3 3000 in 1999 with my very first paycheck ever and was disappointed to see no real increase in performance, too dumb at the time to figure out that the Pentium II was bottlenecking it 😄.
Thanks for the great video, brought back some fond memories 🙂
Thanks so much for watching and for sharing your experiences! NFS 2 SE really did look amazing on the voodoo's at the time. Remember driving through the swarm of wasps on the outback map and getting splattered bugs all over your windscreen? Was a really nice touch..
@@ohsoretro5612 Yup, I remember that 🙂. The raindrops as well - when it rained, the raindrops splattered on the windscreen, that absolutely blew my mind 😄. I also remember that there was this weird way you had to enable Glide mode in NFS II SE - you didn't enable it in-game, if I recall, you had to click on a different exe in the game folder to use Glide mode. Or something like that. Don't even know how I figured it out 😀
Nice one.. I remember this time, the year was 1999 (more precisely late 99), and I had a K6-II, using the old card from my old setup (Diammond Stealth 3d 2000 Pro - S3 Virge). I remeber that they release Star Wars - The Phantom Menace and the S3 dont support transparency, so the game doesnt run correctly. Then I buy in december 1999 a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Whow.. It was another world.. Just unbeliaveble.... I played a lot of games with this setup until 2002, when the support for Voodoo drivers were not available anymore, and the games start to run using 32 bit colors. The voodoo only use 16 bit, so I remember I droped it for a TNT-2. Still miss the GLIDE age...
Sad story, TNT2 was a sidegrade.
It's sad 3dfx couldn't keep up.
Great videos! I watched the S3 ViRGE video and this one. Deserves more than 30 subscribers and more views 👍
I was subscriber number 29 when I subscribed 😅
Thanks for watching Edwin, and I really appreciate the kind words!
Started with Verite 2200 Hercules Thriller 3D card, then started on the Voodoo journey with the Creative Voodoo Blaster PCI, then 3dfx Voodoo2, 3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 AGP, and finally 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. That's the end of the 3dfx era...
Me and my brother got a computer rather late, a 16mb k6 166mhz s3 virge machine. Think it was 97. A couple of years later we got a powercolor voodoo2 12mb and i got into gaming. I was a bit obsessed with unreal. Didnt believe what i was seeing haha.
Motorhead was incredibly fast and smooth.
Motorhead was actually a pack-in for one of my first Nvidia cards. I can't remember if it was Riva 128 or TNT.
I loved my Monster 3D card, playing games like Nedd for Speed 2 SE great memories!
I owned 2 voodoo2s and had them in SLI mode. Remember playing many of the sames games covered. Enjoyed these cards many years back then and cool seeing video games that are a good memory. Cheers!
I used 3DFX for 'Descent' and 'Whiplash'. Great fun. The tech was replaced by software based rendering.
nVidia bought 3DFX, and they've been pushing hardware Ray Tracing. They like the idea of using proprietary hardware to dominate the GPU space, however very demanding for what seems to be not much visual gain in modern games. RT will be replaced by software rendering as well.
Diamond Monster Voodoo II here. Still have it (and I think the box) somewhere.
Half-life was the ultimate game on Voodoo2 for me. I got my hands on it only in 1999, but still was an amazing experience.
Carmageddon, started same here :-) a Friend got a Diamond Monster 3D and told me PCGamers Magazine got an 3dfx patch for Carmageddon and he will grab it later on that day.
I was amazed how is converted the game from playable und unbelievable... so I a few time later I could call a Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D my own paired with my Pentium 100.
My earliest memory of seeing a voodoo card in action was with pod, also one of the earliest games to get a glide patch I believe.
My reaction as a kid "but ... where are the pixels ?" :D
I had a rather peculiar transition from software rendering to 3D accelerated world. My first ever PC already had a Voodoo card but I’ve experienced the former on my cousin’s PC which only had an S3 Trio64. The thing is I dived straight into Glide games whereas there were no 3dfx-capable games on my cousin’s PC to make it a before-after experience. So I know what the revolution was about but there was no eye-popping breakthrough moment as such. It all just happened as it they were totally different platforms.
I have lots of fond Voodoo Graphics gaming memories but from 25 years perspective I regret being not assertive enough to persuade my dad into buying a Voodoo2 instead. But it was a hot new product back then, just a couple of months after its launch, so it would bump the price of the whole set dramatically.
I spend so much time with carmaggedon 1 and 2, also have voodoo 1, voodoo rush and voodoo 3 3000. I remeber Virge 3D card but we called it almost 3D card
I remeber getting a voodoo 3 3000 for xmas and playing half life , counter strike the best memories
Love the Transport tycoon ost
My first serious gfx card was £100 Guillemot Voodoo 1. Bought it especially for Resident Evil and it blew me away. Also played Forsaken, Quake GL, unreal, tomb raider 2, alien trilogy all with varying performance. TR2 was literally a slide show, 1-2 fps not joking, but completed it lol
Nice. If you had at least an MMX it would be much better. I still remember being in awe when I first installed my monster 3D 2 and ran unreal tournament.
Agree, I upgraded to 233mhz Pentium MMX from my 166mhz Cyrix 686 and it was a big step up with my Voodoo card.
Funny story, glquake predates Voodoo. It was developed for Intergraph Realizm, a workstation card which did not sell saparately, and the Intergraph workstations had a "call us" pricing, so it's rumoured that the option usually came out to around $15000 (fifteen thousand USD) for the accelerator card alone. Windows NT workstations.
Then Id planned on supporting Verite, but this fell through, probably because they weren't very good.
3Dfx had no plans for supporting OpenGL, it was far too complex.
Carmack had no plans of supporting anything other than OpenGL, said it would be a waste of time, and OpenGL was the best possible API for the time anyway. He thought having glquake released would be the leverage needed to support OpenGL in competition to back then exceptionally messy Direct3D.
Quake on Voodoo is a result of quick thinking on the part of 3Dfx company. While proper OpenGL support was not an option, implementing just enough OpenGL to support only Quake, with copious cheating, was something they could accomplish quickly. So they released the "MiniGL driver" which did just that and was actually an API wrapper running on top of Glide.
Hey, nice video!
First time I saw a 3dfx in action it was a voodoo2 running Incoming, at the time I still had a 486DX4 100MHz w/ 1MB video card and the best thing I was able to run was Screamer (1) in 320x200, so you can imagine my reaction to Incoming at 800x600 in Glide :-)
At 47 yo, I remember owning a computer with a voodoo 3 2/3000. PCI
At the time, I found out there was an agp version so I stupidly upgraded.
I've owed both versions, and don't have either.
Good times.
Lol
Still have the voodoo 2 sitting on my game room shelf. I just don't have an old pc to use it on. That's ok though since most of those old games can be wrapped to work on modern setups. So it just sits there looking pretty lol.
You should have shown the game without 3DFX and than with the acceleration! This is how my jaw dropped back than! :)
Good idea! Will try that in the next one! Thanks for the idea!
I remember getting the Voodoo 2 in April 1998 I think it was. I spent my entire tax refund to get that card and didn't regret it one bit.
Carmageddon, Descent2 and my voodoo card. So many hours of enjoyment.
Thanks so much for showing some love to the demoscene. The clips from Nature were so awesome to see. I remember how blown away the first time I saw it.
You're welcome, and thanks for watching! I played around with most of the demos I could find and they are still great showcases. I wish I could have included more of them but I try to keep my videos to around 15 minutes so I had to cut most of it unfortunately :(
Wait a tick, is Nature the demo shown at 4:22?! I've been looking for that exact Glide demo for about 20 years!
@@ChrisMerrett1983 Yes sir, Nature by Vertigo. You can find a copy archived here: www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2181
Very cool Video, keep it up Oh So Retro!
Thanks for the kind words, and for the view Spectre!
I had a Daimond VooDoo2 12mb at the time. Think i had it inside my P233mmx. Think i used a Daimond Stealth s220 as a 2d card. The s220 was my first 3d card. Nice card, but not as fast as the VooDoo. Later i paired the VooDoo2 with a Matrox G200 when i switched to a P2. Sold my cards long ago, but a few years back bought 2 VooDoo2 12mb to finally make my dream pc from back in the day. It now has it’s home inside a P2-450, with a Matrox G200, SoundBlaster AWE32 and a Gravis Ultrasound clone.
man what an exciting time for those guys, I'm jealous :D
Voodoo2 was also the first card with SLI. You can connect 2 Voodoo2 to get better performance and/or higher resolution!
I still have 2x Voodoo2, one in my P-200mmx box and another in P3-500, but sometimes I put two of them into one box with SLI to feel .... rich ;)
Plebeians waste time on video games. Circus and bread.
I remember 3dfx voodoo 2 until the banshee.
Then i moved on to s3 savage 4.
Voodoo card? Subscribed!
You put a voodoo2 in a Pentium1! I'm surprised the god card didn't spontaneously combust at the heresy of your actions!
As someone with a P2-233 at this time, I already had an AGP card (an amazing ATI-Ragepro2) and yet my Voodoo2 was without a doubt the best computer component purchase I've ever made. Like others have said it was mind-blowing, the improvement in graphics at the time! I already had doom2 running in Direct3d and was still amazed at the difference in 3dfx's GLIDE API.
Its now 2021 and what I'd give to actually find ANY graphics card in stock, yet no matter how much I end up spending (Real time Ray tracing anyone!!) I know without question that I'll still not be anywhere near as impressed as firing up "UNREAL" for the first time, all those years ago....
haha yes well I wanted to "simulate" a voodoo1 because I dont have one :) But I will build a "proper" voodoo2 system in the near future!
Had a P60 with 8MB back then, so absolutely no games ran above 320 x 240, and even at that res we're talking 15 fps. Christmas '96 I got the Matrox Millennium believing it would drastically improve my gaming performance. Huge let-down. About April time got the Righteous 3D and POD. Must have moved about 1 in game metre before hitting pause, legging it round to my neighbours' and dragging them over to witness the new beast in town. Man, the bilinear filtering and 30 fps gameplay just looked so far in advance of the Saturn and Playstation. One upgrade literally quardupling performance in an instant
My had a Viper car on the box.
Voodoo 3 was my first accelerator. What a huge step up from software!
I've always wondered how that passthrough cable worked. What kind of signal does the Voodoo receive from the 2d card?
Voodoo receives analogue VGA signal from standard video card. Voodoo 1 and 2 only work with full screen programs in a handful resolutions and only 16 bit 565. So the frontend of the card simply contains an analogue switch which when the Voodoo isn't active passes through the signal from the 2D card. Or when it is active, disconnects the 2D card from the output and drives the output on its own.
In 1998, I paired my Riva128 with an already somewhat cheapish Voodoo just to play Unreal and KHG. Unreal's initial OpenGL renderer was way too slow on the Riva128 and the D3D patch wasn't out yet. OpenGL would only run acceptable in 320x240. Today, with good OpenGL/D3D support in Unreal and mature graphics drivers, the Riva128 has no problem running Unreal, albeit not as fast as the Voodoo. If I had todays experience back in the day, I would certainly not have bought a Voodoo. A few months later, the Voodoo was kicked out as it was obsolete with a TNT inside the system. And that TNT lasted me for quite a while until I got a Geforce256 DDR in 2000. If it wasn't for '97, where there was practically no competition to the voodoo, or '98 games that wouldn't support anything but glide, you could very well live without one.
oh yes.. the voodoo.. i remember when I was ordering the voodoo 3 2000.. it took like million years to be shipped so I had an interim solution a voodoo banshee (I hope I spelled it correctly) but moreover I kinda never used glide because I wasn't aware of what the 31278937219372189 settings mean we had back in the days hahahaha
A game that for certain shows off what this card can do is Homeworld and its DLC Cataclysm both these games have been remade yet the originals can be found in the remake and as for Cataclysm it got a GOG release and a name change Emergence these are space RTS games like Starcraft and Command and Conquer only in full 3d.
Absolutely! Loved both Homeworld (must've played through it at least 5 times by now) and I recently got hold of an original copy of Cataclysm and have been replaying it again - great titles!
Awesome video! My first 3dfx experience was with Tomb Raider but I also loved Carmageddon and Nfs2 SE!
Those were great games! I wanted to test TR1 but it didnt want to run on a voodoo2.. guess I'll have to try TR2 instead!
Ah yes my First 3D grafix cards.... Awesome in 1999! 😆
I remember games like Doom, Duke Nukem, the first Elder Scrolls, even System Shock all ran off the CPU. It wasn’t until games like Half-Life 2, Tribes, Guild Wars, etc. that made it necessary to own a video card.
I had that exact case once upon a time. Really wish I'd kept it now, given how much people want for AT cases anymore. :/
the most memorabel gpu upgrade
I have some diamond monster 2 SLI around, but no idea in what setup these were integrated - because things changed so fast back in the days... new system components every month or week or so? I recently stumbled across some of my old stuff. Can't remember being rich at any point in time...
but holy sh*t! More than 30 graphics cards?🤪
Today I play on a 6 year old laptop or an even older desktop - utterly unimaginable in the 90's
This brings back memories :)
Damn the only reason why I remember this video card was this card came out when Diablo 2 came out and damn did it make a difference. Talk about memories