Velocity is the moniker used by STB to brand their video cards. 3dfx purchased STB shortly before they became bankrupt. This is actually just an OEM Voodoo3 card.
basically it's a Voodoo 3 2000 cut in half in every way. 3DFX had it's OEM Voodoo 3 1000, which is the exact same card, only with 3DFX printed on the card. There were also rumours of an STB Velocity 200, which would basically have been a full blown V3 2000 chip on an STB marked card, but none were ever spotted in the wild, much like the mythical Kyro II SE chipset, which would have been named the 3D Prophet 4800, where the Kyro II was the 3D Prophet 4500.
I bought this exact card from Free Geek of Minneapolis two years ago for about $12. I knew right away it was a 3Dfx card, but I had no idea which one it was. Glad I held onto it!
I got a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee PCI card a couple of years ago. The nice thing is that it is a 3DFX Voodoo Banshee card for cheaper and with modern third-party software you can fix the V-sync not working bug that came with the original drivers.
So, fun story for me... I briefly bought one of these cards from a seller advertising it as a Voodoo3 1000 with 16MB of RAM. It turned out, that was miscategorized and after a bit of discussion I opted to return it. (Coincidentally, the actual listing I bought is in your video near the beginning at 0:47 for $165.99). It was priced like a full Voodoo3 and a bit disappointing when it turned out to be the Velocity 100 with half the VRAM for that price. I exchanged it for a proper Voodoo3 2000 with 16MB of VRAM and the new card works great.
Glad your story had a happy ending! V3 2000 is a superior card! 😎 Between the Velocity and the V3 1000, I almost prefer the Velocity due to the higher clocks. 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie Absolutely! I was open to the idea of keeping the card but the price was too high. I was talking with vSwitchZero about it and confirmed it did have the higher clocks, was running a pretty spicy 2.46v on the regulator and with active cooling seemed stable up to 166MHz, but the 8MB of VRAM felt like a bottleneck, especially at the price. (I didn't pay list price for it but wasn't far off after shipping and taxes) Ultimately, the Voodoo3 2000 with the same clocks and 16MB of VRAM will be the better card for this system. Now I just need to finish repairing the PCI versions that have been languishing on the healing bench for ages...
Looks like a banshee off the bat. I remember getting my 4MB 3DFX card... absolute game changer. In fact, it changed gaming itself as far as I'm concerned.
Yep! It’s basically the Voodoo3 version of the Banshee. But with the registry hack I mentioned it runs really great! 100% agree on the game changing aspect of these cards. I had Voodoo 2 SLI back in the old days and it was *miles* ahead of anything else at the time.
I thought about adding 3dfx Glide support to my toy game engine, ever since I rediscovered my Voodoo 2 kit. Curious. How do you approach your game's development? Are there any good examples for the 3dfx Glide API on GitHub or elsewhere?
I think I might have one of these cards in my random old video card box 🤔 I remember thinking that it looked like a bit like a Voodoo, but because it didn’t have any 3dfx branding, I overlooked it.
I wish I knew about this trick as a kid. I had Celeron 400/64MbRam/Velocity100 system back in 99. It was a good performer until Max Payne was released in 2001. It ran at around 10 fps on this card.
Very confusingly, STB made a lot of Velocity cards prior to being acquired by 3Dfx, including Riva 128 and S3 Virge varieties. I think both of those were 4MB! 😮
Ahh Voodoo... the first iteration was very impressive but also even more expensive as you had to use VGA pass-through from separate 2d card. Also as a side effect you could run only full screen applications (due to the primitive VGA pass-through). Besides Voodoo what makes me nostalgic is the memory of being able to buy a serious GPU below 300$...
With a little bit of more work, maybe possible to just replace the RAM modules, to have more RAM. This have been working with other cards, even with other 3DFX cards. Might worth a try...
Many chips where sold with disabled and often faulty parts. Are you sure this was not a disabled part sold off to STB who rebranded it as a different model?
I believe STB was owned by 3Dfx at this point and did most of the manufacturing for the regular Voodoo3 too. So far, everything has worked well with 2 TMUs active - fingers crossed! 🙂
@@jamesfmackenzie Such things often did not meet quality standards. AMD did that too, reselling 750Mhz models as 550Mhz models, but it was obviously cheaper to make a faster model and rebrand it into a slower version. That explains also the bigger OC advantage of buying a lower end model.
its so crazy the way computers used to work. i starred on MacOS 7.5 and got 98SE as a kid. did lots of registry stuff. but just adding a single stinrg to enable glide... fuckin nuts that that was even a thing
Similar story on my side! I started on Atari and got a PC in the early 90s! Very grateful to 3Dfx for keeping the dual TMU support in the driver - so we can easily get it working again! 😎
Excellent video. In 640x480 and 800x600 the performance of the Velocity 100 with the second TMU enabled is at the level of a Voodoo 3 2000 or even a little faster. But in 1024x768 because it only has 8 mb it is in many games slower or significantly slower than the Voodoo 3 2000.
Great question! Some of the Glide registry keys also work when set as DOS environment variables (for example SET FX_GLIDE_NO_SPLASH=1, SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0). It’s possible the TMU key works as a DOS environment variable too.
Maybe someone could figure out how to mod more RAM on to it. Might be down to soldering chips on top of the existing ones then connecting some address/select pins kinda like the xbox mods.
It would be nice if you could do a comparison of pcem17 Voodoo hardware emulation and real Voodoo cards. Does real hardware has advantage over hardware emulation?
I had heard of the Velocity 100 but never saw one in the wild, even back then. Did not know it was a Voodoo3 2000! Can it maybe be flashed with a Voodoo3 2000 BIOS? not that it's necessary of course if the only thing you need to do is change a registry key :)
"As we all know, 3dfx Voodoo Cards are highly sought after." I didn't know this! So my Pure 3d Voodoo 1 card in a box in a closet somewhere (unless it got lost complete) is worth something? No clue if it works or not, haven't used it since like the year 2000-2001 or so.
@@jamesfmackenzie I'll have to look to see if I still have the card, but there's absolutely no way I still have the box! I do have the original drivers CD though :) I wonder if in 15 years my GTS 250 will be valuable too...
When I was in Middle School I bought a Creative 3D Voodoo 2 in box with a bunch of other stuff for 50 bucks. Now that card in box is apparently worth 200-300 on its own
> The prices are much more reasonable > $119 > $117 > $99 I remember people paying by the pound to dispose of computers with real Voodoo cards in 'em at the e-waste facility I worked at fifteen years ago. Collectors with too much money have ruined retro computing by letting eBay sellers get comfortable asking for ten times what these cards are worth.
As you said, that was 15 years ago. Those computers were going to e-waste, meaning that all those cards were scrapped and/or recycled for materials. Just because they were common and not seen as being worth anything *a decade and a half ago* doesn't mean they are now.
Yeah I laughed at that haha. I'm sure market value is generally high but at some point one has to consider just what the actual worth of this stuff is haha. I guess some have a lot to blow on nostalgia even when the software has long been emulated. It's fun if it's able to put the stuff together with a small bit of cash on a whim, but there's no fun in it anymore now that it's speculated to hell.
Supply and demand. You cry because some old graphics cards are too expensive... What about housing? Many people cannot afford houses because there are a few rich people basically hoarding them and "investing" into them...
@@Aeduo Harmful behavior? Let's say I have a Voodoo3 3000 for sale, but there's 20 people wanting to buy that card from me, what do you thing it will happen? The one willing to give the most will get it. The reverse is also true, try selling some entry level sk 775 cpu, an e2180 for example. There are A LOT of those, but nobody wants them, again, supply and demand.
😂Velocity Is OEM Voodoo3 with newest PCB layout ( also often with half of memory ) ...Unfortunately, the buyers in the Czech Republic are organized and they know it = no true Price diference at secondmarket here ;/
Possible but tricky since that model doesn't have the pads for the additional 8MB. There are 16MB chips that do work, but my understanding is that there are also some passives and additional traces needed to address the additional RAM.
@@T3hBeowulf It is already done. There are versions of ATI Rage 128 pro with 16MB, where you can take memory chips and replace them to Veolcity. Also you need to replace some resistors (straps) on Velocity and flash the BIOS of Velocity with the firmware from V3 2000. And that's it.
@@grachincIndeed, you are correct. I read about the process and tried to determine how dedicated I was to going through it for my card. Ultimately, I felt the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and the risk of mutilating two cards to make a Frankenstein card just wasn't alluring enough for me. I was noting that it was a tricky process but not impossible.
The 3dfx Velocity 100 (with the second TMU enabled) was by far the fastest budget card of 1999. But people preferred to buy the (slower) TNT2 M64 because it had 16 or 32 mb while the (faster) Velocity 100 only had 8 mb. They thought that a 16 or 32 mb card (TNT2 M64) will surely be faster than an 8 mb one (Velocity 100), which was totally wrong.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 I think people were more worried about the future when 8mb wouldn‘t be enough anymore. Same as today. 8Gb is enough at the moment, but I wouldn‘t buy a new card with only 8Gb anymore.
@@jamesfmackenzie I was an integrator/OEM for pre-built computers when I owned a business. I had a box of those and a couple custom variants that are buried in a box at storage somewhere. Theres probably 60 or so in that box along with driver disks and game bundles, Hexen, Doom, Quake, and a few others like Wheel of Time and a custom title called Astrospace(tm) that was never released for the 12mb variant with the riser board. Who knows where they sit in tha storage anymore. I'll have to look for them next time I go swimming in there.
Nahhhhh why pay any more than $50 for these when I could just get a really low old GPU and plug it into a free PCIE slot. Then run a VM on windows xp or something and a cpu limiter and you're good to go.
Velocity is the moniker used by STB to brand their video cards. 3dfx purchased STB shortly before they became bankrupt. This is actually just an OEM Voodoo3 card.
I remember getting getting two dozen compaq's that all had this same specific 3dfx card at a recycling center. Wish I kept a few, was a long time ago.
basically it's a Voodoo 3 2000 cut in half in every way. 3DFX had it's OEM Voodoo 3 1000, which is the exact same card, only with 3DFX printed on the card. There were also rumours of an STB Velocity 200, which would basically have been a full blown V3 2000 chip on an STB marked card, but none were ever spotted in the wild, much like the mythical Kyro II SE chipset, which would have been named the 3D Prophet 4800, where the Kyro II was the 3D Prophet 4500.
This video will probably drive prices up lol.
😂😭
I bought this exact card from Free Geek of Minneapolis two years ago for about $12. I knew right away it was a 3Dfx card, but I had no idea which one it was. Glad I held onto it!
@@joshreiman wow! You got a great deal! 🏆
I got a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee PCI card a couple of years ago. The nice thing is that it is a 3DFX Voodoo Banshee card for cheaper and with modern third-party software you can fix the V-sync not working bug that came with the original drivers.
Nice! The Banshee is one of the 3Dfx cards I don’t have! 😎
i remember getting a Banshee card as a kid and that bug was annoying as hell. Hated that card
My first hardware accelerated 3D / 3DFX API card! forced me to ditch this Cyrix CPU / Mobo I had and switch to a Pentium 233 and supporting Mobo
So, fun story for me... I briefly bought one of these cards from a seller advertising it as a Voodoo3 1000 with 16MB of RAM. It turned out, that was miscategorized and after a bit of discussion I opted to return it. (Coincidentally, the actual listing I bought is in your video near the beginning at 0:47 for $165.99). It was priced like a full Voodoo3 and a bit disappointing when it turned out to be the Velocity 100 with half the VRAM for that price.
I exchanged it for a proper Voodoo3 2000 with 16MB of VRAM and the new card works great.
Glad your story had a happy ending! V3 2000 is a superior card! 😎
Between the Velocity and the V3 1000, I almost prefer the Velocity due to the higher clocks. 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie Absolutely! I was open to the idea of keeping the card but the price was too high. I was talking with vSwitchZero about it and confirmed it did have the higher clocks, was running a pretty spicy 2.46v on the regulator and with active cooling seemed stable up to 166MHz, but the 8MB of VRAM felt like a bottleneck, especially at the price. (I didn't pay list price for it but wasn't far off after shipping and taxes)
Ultimately, the Voodoo3 2000 with the same clocks and 16MB of VRAM will be the better card for this system.
Now I just need to finish repairing the PCI versions that have been languishing on the healing bench for ages...
Looks like a banshee off the bat. I remember getting my 4MB 3DFX card... absolute game changer. In fact, it changed gaming itself as far as I'm concerned.
Yep! It’s basically the Voodoo3 version of the Banshee. But with the registry hack I mentioned it runs really great!
100% agree on the game changing aspect of these cards. I had Voodoo 2 SLI back in the old days and it was *miles* ahead of anything else at the time.
Absolutely did! The leap out of the world of software rendering was wild! There is a reason why Quake 3 made it mandatory to have 3D card.
Wonder if you can use higher density ram packages on the card or not
As someone who is currently developing a 3dfx game, it's sad to see most of the velocity cards on Ebay are already being sold out 😭
I thought about adding 3dfx Glide support to my toy game engine, ever since I rediscovered my Voodoo 2 kit.
Curious. How do you approach your game's development? Are there any good examples for the 3dfx Glide API on GitHub or elsewhere?
Would love to learn more about your game!
Wow, didn't know that my old graphics card might be valuable. I think that I still got 'em in storage.
I think I might have one of these cards in my random old video card box 🤔
I remember thinking that it looked like a bit like a Voodoo, but because it didn’t have any 3dfx branding, I overlooked it.
Good luck with the search! 😎
I wish I knew about this trick as a kid. I had Celeron 400/64MbRam/Velocity100 system back in 99. It was a good performer until Max Payne was released in 2001. It ran at around 10 fps on this card.
I had a similar machine! With the legendary Celeron 300A 😎 Wish I had kept it around!
I remember Dell and some other OEM PC's coming with an STB Velocity card with 4MB of memory.
Very confusingly, STB made a lot of Velocity cards prior to being acquired by 3Dfx, including Riva 128 and S3 Virge varieties.
I think both of those were 4MB! 😮
Good tip, just bought one from eBay and will do the registry mod : )
Awesome! Good luck!!
Ahh Voodoo... the first iteration was very impressive but also even more expensive as you had to use VGA pass-through from separate 2d card. Also as a side effect you could run only full screen applications (due to the primitive VGA pass-through). Besides Voodoo what makes me nostalgic is the memory of being able to buy a serious GPU below 300$...
Modern GPUs are way too expensive 😢
Basically the Velocity is the discount 3000, as long as you fiddle with the registry editor
Yes indeed!
With a little bit of more work, maybe possible to just replace the RAM modules, to have more RAM. This have been working with other cards, even with other 3DFX cards. Might worth a try...
Many chips where sold with disabled and often faulty parts. Are you sure this was not a disabled part sold off to STB who rebranded it as a different model?
I believe STB was owned by 3Dfx at this point and did most of the manufacturing for the regular Voodoo3 too.
So far, everything has worked well with 2 TMUs active - fingers crossed! 🙂
@@jamesfmackenzie Such things often did not meet quality standards. AMD did that too, reselling 750Mhz models as 550Mhz models, but it was obviously cheaper to make a faster model and rebrand it into a slower version. That explains also the bigger OC advantage of buying a lower end model.
How come a 8mb card beats a 16mb card running at the same frequency in some tests?
I think AGP vs PCI bus. It’s either that or driver differences :-)
I wonder if soldering on ram chips would work
its so crazy the way computers used to work. i starred on MacOS 7.5 and got 98SE as a kid. did lots of registry stuff. but just adding a single stinrg to enable glide... fuckin nuts that that was even a thing
Similar story on my side! I started on Atari and got a PC in the early 90s!
Very grateful to 3Dfx for keeping the dual TMU support in the driver - so we can easily get it working again! 😎
Nice! Did not know about the existence of this model.
Me neither! (until very recently 😂). It’s a great card!
I got the latest winlator working on lineage os 21 android 14 on the raspberry pi 5 can you tst to see if any games run on it
Excellent video. In 640x480 and 800x600 the performance of the Velocity 100 with the second TMU enabled is at the level of a Voodoo 3 2000 or even a little faster. But in 1024x768 because it only has 8 mb it is in many games slower or significantly slower than the Voodoo 3 2000.
Thanks for the kind words! I’m v impressed with the Velocity 100 - a great purchase! 😎
Of course Velocity AGP outperforms Voodoo PCI. It is because of the bus.
I wonder if second TMU is disabled in DOS where there is no registry.
Great question!
Some of the Glide registry keys also work when set as DOS environment variables (for example SET FX_GLIDE_NO_SPLASH=1, SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0). It’s possible the TMU key works as a DOS environment variable too.
Maybe someone could figure out how to mod more RAM on to it. Might be down to soldering chips on top of the existing ones then connecting some address/select pins kinda like the xbox mods.
I think it should be doable! Especially since the card can be flashed with a modified Voodoo3 2000 bios 😎
Hey Hey i think a intresting game to test on any of your voodoo cards would be one of the knights of the old republic games
It would be nice if you could do a comparison of pcem17 Voodoo hardware emulation and real Voodoo cards. Does real hardware has advantage over hardware emulation?
Great idea!
@@jamesfmackenzie Oh man i would like to see that! Its a big factor in question "do i need to hunt for real hardware?".
What's the name of the F1 game shown in the beginning?
It’s Formula 1 from Psygnosis! (RIP 😢). Released in 1997.
@jamesfmackenzie thanks! looks really good for its time
Is not to find here in Gernany... Sadly. But for a round 180€ i get an Voodoo Banshee.. i think thats okay.. or the 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 AGP for 124€
Today any 3Dfx card is strongly recommended 😊
😎
How well does this run 2d in Win 3.11? (drivers and such)
I haven’t tried Win 3.11, but in general the 2D support is great 😎
Question is: If silicone and clocks are the same, why does it perform better than a regular Voodoo3?
My guess is AGP vs PCI (my Voodoo3 2000 is PCI only)
@ Yes, that would do it. Did you mention that and I missed it?
@@jensdroessler3575 I didn’t mention it :-)
@@jamesfmackenzie I spied the connectors and said wait those are different interfaces/slots...
Awesome!
Thanks!
That heatsink - Should've gone to SpecSavers.
😂
Just curious what motherboard and processor you are using on this? Thanks
It’s a QDI P6V694X/A10F, along with a Pentium III at 933MHz 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie Awesome
Just use something like nGlide, unless you're just really into the history. (if you're wanting to play these older games)
These days it's easier 😋
I had heard of the Velocity 100 but never saw one in the wild, even back then. Did not know it was a Voodoo3 2000!
Can it maybe be flashed with a Voodoo3 2000 BIOS? not that it's necessary of course if the only thing you need to do is change a registry key :)
It can be! And then you can use any regular Voodoo3 drivers 😎
Check out this thread on Vogons:
www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=93073
"As we all know, 3dfx Voodoo Cards are highly sought after." I didn't know this! So my Pure 3d Voodoo 1 card in a box in a closet somewhere (unless it got lost complete) is worth something? No clue if it works or not, haven't used it since like the year 2000-2001 or so.
Yes indeed! Especially in box!
@@jamesfmackenzie I'll have to look to see if I still have the card, but there's absolutely no way I still have the box! I do have the original drivers CD though :)
I wonder if in 15 years my GTS 250 will be valuable too...
When I was in Middle School I bought a Creative 3D Voodoo 2 in box with a bunch of other stuff for 50 bucks. Now that card in box is apparently worth 200-300 on its own
@@markbauermeister5449 Bought some 3dfX cards several years ago but never installed them. Seems was a good investment :-)
> The prices are much more reasonable
> $119
> $117
> $99
I remember people paying by the pound to dispose of computers with real Voodoo cards in 'em at the e-waste facility I worked at fifteen years ago. Collectors with too much money have ruined retro computing by letting eBay sellers get comfortable asking for ten times what these cards are worth.
As you said, that was 15 years ago. Those computers were going to e-waste, meaning that all those cards were scrapped and/or recycled for materials. Just because they were common and not seen as being worth anything *a decade and a half ago* doesn't mean they are now.
Yeah I laughed at that haha. I'm sure market value is generally high but at some point one has to consider just what the actual worth of this stuff is haha. I guess some have a lot to blow on nostalgia even when the software has long been emulated. It's fun if it's able to put the stuff together with a small bit of cash on a whim, but there's no fun in it anymore now that it's speculated to hell.
Supply and demand. You cry because some old graphics cards are too expensive... What about housing? Many people cannot afford houses because there are a few rich people basically hoarding them and "investing" into them...
@@eugenb9017 well yeah that should be obvious but maybe it isn't. It's a pretty obnoxious and harmful behavior that's reinforced at all levels.
@@Aeduo Harmful behavior? Let's say I have a Voodoo3 3000 for sale, but there's 20 people wanting to buy that card from me, what do you thing it will happen? The one willing to give the most will get it.
The reverse is also true, try selling some entry level sk 775 cpu, an e2180 for example. There are A LOT of those, but nobody wants them, again, supply and demand.
Prices on Ebay go up in 1,2,3... :D
😂
@jamesfmackenzie Hmmm ooor, you did found a Box full of them and now comes the big Profit ;)
@ I wish 😂
😂Velocity Is OEM Voodoo3 with newest PCB layout ( also often with half of memory ) ...Unfortunately, the buyers in the Czech Republic are organized and they know it = no true Price diference at secondmarket here ;/
That’s a shame! The buyers are too knowledgable 😂
And now lets solder 16mb RAM to it ;)
That would be a nice project! 😎
Possible but tricky since that model doesn't have the pads for the additional 8MB.
There are 16MB chips that do work, but my understanding is that there are also some passives and additional traces needed to address the additional RAM.
@@T3hBeowulf It is already done. There are versions of ATI Rage 128 pro with 16MB, where you can take memory chips and replace them to Veolcity. Also you need to replace some resistors (straps) on Velocity and flash the BIOS of Velocity with the firmware from V3 2000. And that's it.
@@grachincIndeed, you are correct. I read about the process and tried to determine how dedicated I was to going through it for my card. Ultimately, I felt the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and the risk of mutilating two cards to make a Frankenstein card just wasn't alluring enough for me.
I was noting that it was a tricky process but not impossible.
The 3dfx Velocity 100 (with the second TMU enabled) was by far the fastest budget card of 1999. But people preferred to buy the (slower) TNT2 M64 because it had 16 or 32 mb while the (faster) Velocity 100 only had 8 mb. They thought that a 16 or 32 mb card (TNT2 M64) will surely be faster than an 8 mb one (Velocity 100), which was totally wrong.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 I think people were more worried about the future when 8mb wouldn‘t be enough anymore. Same as today. 8Gb is enough at the moment, but I wouldn‘t buy a new card with only 8Gb anymore.
I have a box of them. I bet that thing weighs 70lbs.
I’m very jealous! 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie I was an integrator/OEM for pre-built computers when I owned a business. I had a box of those and a couple custom variants that are buried in a box at storage somewhere. Theres probably 60 or so in that box along with driver disks and game bundles, Hexen, Doom, Quake, and a few others like Wheel of Time and a custom title called Astrospace(tm) that was never released for the 12mb variant with the riser board. Who knows where they sit in tha storage anymore. I'll have to look for them next time I go swimming in there.
@@TronixGuy93 sounds like you must have a treasure trove of memories in that storage unit! Good luck with the swim :-)
Could you get steam to run on the raspberry pi 5?
Not yet! But maybe in the next video 😎
AGP is only a PCI Bus on steroids. With a PCI 2 PCI-E its possible. 😉 AGP is Backwards compatible to nativ PCI 😁
Is made? was made? is still being made? very confusing for foreign people...
Was made, back in 1999-2000. 3DFX went bankrupt back in 2001 and were bought up by Nvidia.
Nahhhhh why pay any more than $50 for these when I could just get a really low old GPU and plug it into a free PCIE slot. Then run a VM on windows xp or something and a cpu limiter and you're good to go.
Glide is just different on some games
Because there are people that prefer to build a RETRO pc rather than do a VM.
Free?
Т.е. 99$ по вашему, бесплатно?
Pff. It's 3dfx voodoo3 1000 and it's no secret
V3 1000 has more RAM and lower clocks vs the Velocity 100 😎
@jamesfmackenzie My Bad. When it was selling in my country I didnt saw any 16Mb variant. Just checked techpowerup - you're right