I just wanna say, I really enjoyed my experience hanging with LMG over the few days I was there. You guys treated me so well and were so accommodating the whole time! I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Canada! Thank you again for the incredible opportunity to work with you guys! -Ross
@@belstar1128 Poor management decisions, delays in getting hardware working and on sale... all the usual stuff. Designing and manufacturing cutting edge tech is a long and expensive process. Once you commit to it, you have to follow it through, otherwise you have nothing to sell. But a bad decision may not become obvious until well into development, and then it's too late.
I will never forget how I first came across 3dfx. I went to a local gaming café, where me and some friends used to play Lucasarts's Outlaws in multiplayer. The staff had upgraded the computers to Voodoo cards without telling anyone, and once I saw how incredible the game looked on those cards compared to not having it? I made it my mission to get one myself. It was a night and day difference to have texture filtering in games.
I'll never forget QWCTF with a 3dfx card. The colored lighting was ridiculous. The flags literally glowed through the walls and it was basically a hardware cheat at the time.
@@orbatos No, the real game changer was taking the load off the CPU and using much faster dedicated hardware for 3D graphics, and also making a good API for developers to use. Hardware T&L came much later.
@@another3997 What do do you think hardware transform and lighting are? At this point most people were getting their first video cards with 3D acceleration, in part due to the success of the voodoo 2, but also because of the massive droop in cost of production for both vector hardware and memory which had until that point been the domain of literal supercomputers. This kind of thing is why X was implemented as a network protocol, allowing a mere deskside workstation to leverage dozens of racks of hardware for CAD and lidar visualization. Shaders, which Linus erroneously says 3DFx didn't have, directly came from hardware optimizations developed on these massive systems.
those were times of rapid unbelievable change. Just compare how games looked like 1990 vs 2000. (Or even MS-DOS inteface vs Windows 2000). 10 years, but 2 different eras. Today Skyrim or GTA5 still sells because the progress doesn't look that drastic anymore..
@@JimNH777 Yeah, those changes were awesome for progress sake, but not for consumers's pockets, things were out of date in a year. And back then, "outdated" meant almost non-functional, unlike now and probably the last 20-25 years. It's insane.
@@stonedmountainunicorn9532 lol look at the times genius. And the username. And the age of this account ffs. And my comment laughing that they have more likes in 2 min, under them
I had this old computer from the late 90's with 2 intense 3d wildcat video cards that connected together with a 50 pin scsi cable. That was a truly bizarre setup.
@@mycosys It was just a question dude, i'm not a detective looking up 12 things before i comment. Not everyone is such a genius like you obviously are.......
So I worked in a PC repair shop when 3dfx hit the scene, the thing people forget is that having a 2D card AND a 3D card was seen as a bonus for most users at the time, so the Voodoo was seen as an add in bonus card, to go along side people's existing 2D cards, cards which more often than not the customer had chosen and liked already, so it was seen more as 'not losing my 2D card' rather than 'I have to buy a 2D AND 3D card?' It was seen more like an add in sound card really.
The prices were crazy at the time... 1999 was when computers were dirt cheap and finally affordable for everyone you went from 1992 - 3000 dollar computers to 1999 - 800 bucks for something that was 20 times or more faster and 4 times cheaper . Computers only got a little cheaper after that peaking in 2012 or so when i think you could get a desktop PC for 480 bucks
I think this teaches one thing that history keeps repeating: what makes a platform win competition in games usually is ease to develop tools for cheap to buy hardware to provide variety and accessibility
@@S1nwar It was the same developers that created the 3DMark demo, who decided to make a game out of that demo, and that game was...Max Payne. You're bang on.
did it really look real though? people often say that many games that came out in the 90s (or cgi in movies from the 80s) looked like real life when they came out. i can understand being mind blown by how fast graphics tek was progressing, but there's no way people looked at the game and then looked at really like and thought, ~yep, it looks about the same~
@@cvspvr there's a big difference between watching these old graphics on a new OLED screen (such as your phone or TV) or watching it on those old CRT screens we had back then. And no the graphics didn't look photorealistic by any means, but they were extremely impressive nonetheless. With every big graphical jump, I thought "there's no way graphics will look can look better than this".
Imagine AMD decides to slap 4 7950XTX cores on a board, draw 1200W and punches Nvidia in the face in 4k, making it a one-off GPU considering people are willing to pay that much for a collector's piece.
@@zayd1111 Imagine doing the 4 cores in Crossfire or SLI, maybe a 5 slot GPU but who care if someone is willing to pay $15000 on one GPU, might as well make a modern one that is nuts and charge $50000+ no?
@@zayd1111 Any thoughts on splitting the screen into quadrants each rendered by its own GPU? Maybe even a frontend chip assigned to combining results from preprocessing GPUs which do physics, raytracing, or so on. Presumably there'd need to be some significant intercore communicaiton going on to pull any of this off. Maybe as much chip realestate just put towards talking to the other chips and dealing with shared memory and optimizing where tasks that depend on oneanother get executed to avoid bottlenecks. Might end up with a full CPU on the thing just to dynamically reallocate load to optimize execution time. That way we could throw a few kilowatts at the GPU instead of merely hundreds of watts.
@@rarrawer sometimes when running early SLi you could actually see the split in the screen where the top and bottom images were spliced together (if using that mode and not alternate frames). I'm sure we'll see a revival of something similar down the line but it was a pain to code for. More sales for the GPU companies, though.
Since we’re starting to hit diminishing returns when it comes to visuals in games, it’s nice looking back on graphics that were a massive leap forward for the time.
The diminishing returns is software defined. Once you understand that Linux is going to be the gaming platform, you also understand how gaming engines have to be re-engineered and then those diminishing returns go bye-bye.
I mean, always best to be careful around claims like that. How quickly we forget that we said the same thing for the xbox 360 and PS3 and were pretty dead wrong. It's hard to tell given graphics cards come out more often than consoles, but comparing the 2000 series and games of the time to the 4000 series and new games, it's a noticeable jump.
@@jeschinstad Using Linux is now the equivalent of being Vegan or doing CrossFit... You don't have to ask, they will tell you as soon as you make eye contact with them.
I remember a Riva TNT 2 driver released by nVIDIA, which made the card directly support Glide. 3DFx made them remove it again, but were too late. Lots of people got a hold of that driver - myself included - and it truly did run games with 3DFx Glide just fine.
But it wouldn't be compatible for long, because 3DFX would just change their API enough to stop it working on Nvidia cards. Any further copying by Nvidia would have resulted in very expensive law suits and compensation payments.
I still have 2 actual 3dfx Voodoo2 PCI cards and they both worked perfectly when last removed. The improvements it made back the. We’re actually pretty amazing in both graphics as well as speed.
the fact that LTT and GN had a video about the Voodoo 5 6000 within a month of each other is crazy just the acquisition of one of these cards is a multimonth process
@@Daniel-vk4vg Not at all, GN's video goes a lot further in depth re; the mechanics of the board itself and the processes it took the creator to get it flying again. This video is a nice lead-in to GN's video for the interested.
This was like a short version of my computer history. Going to college in 1997 my friends and I would have endless debate’s on all these cards and in what would happen next. Remember 24 bit vs 32 bit color, the Matrox card my friend used to dominate in rocket arena? Those days where a crazy ride when actual technological innovations happened every year. Still happy I got to experience this all first hand on early internet, it was great and still is a great memory. Thanks a lot to all of the LTT crew who made this video, you REALLY made my day! 😊❤
@@R2_D3 Rocket Arena I know for sure was a mod for Unreal Tournament, but maybe it was also an older mod as well ? UT had a lot of mods based on other mods like there was literally a Team Fortress on UT.
4:34 - 119.879 fps looks like some artificial limit because it is exactly 2x59.94. If you do not know 59.94 fps is an NTSC exact frame rate for so called 60fps.
I have such fond memories of the 3DFX days.... Finished Mechwarrior 2 normal and then replayed it on a Monster 3D... The depth and Rocky terrain vs Brown flat. Was truly a turn in my gaming life.
It's wild how fast things moved and changed back then. They've only been around for a glimpse basically. But it felt so much longer, because everything was exciting and new (and I was young).
That case was a blast from the past I didn't expect. That was my first personal PC case from my early teens in the mid-late 00s. I just remember it being HUGE, as around that age I was about as tall as Linus is now
I had that exact same case, the Chenbro(I think?) Dragon, in the same colour, (but without the window), as the first PC I built for myself. You see the massive gap between the PSU and the top of the case? Young me saw that, and though "I wonder if I can fit a radiator in there?". Turns out, while you *could* sandwich a 120 rad in there (with a hole cut in the roof as an intake), using the PSU fan to pull air through a radiator is not a great idea. It worked, but no batter than air cooling. Also, that case was all thick steel. Bloody strong, but it weighed a ton.
@@phuzz00 Definitely a heavy beast, yeah. Mine was the exact version in the video. At that age I didn't really know what water cooling even was yet. I'd just dipped my toes in. I got it from some guy on facebook who was selling (what I later discovered were) chop-shop PCs. He'd overprice and under deliver specs. I realized this and my mom and I scared him out of public business. Dude mix n' matched RAM, downgraded my CPU drastically after bringing it back for having a few issues (assuming I wouldn't notice the downgrade), used illegal windows copies, and did all of it on his front porch that wreaked of smoke. Live and learn I suppose, but the case itself stayed with me for another later build I scratched up used parts for myself. It wasn't much, but it's what I started editing and VFX on, which later evolved into an animation career. Weirdly enough I think I have that slimy porch surfer to thank for my life now haha
Chieftec CS-601 FTW! Have a couple of those... built a rig in 2003 in one and later got a few more to put older and newer hand-me-down stuff in them. At some point the whole family had those XD
I had the same one! Except the aluminum internals version. I thought it was an Antec case? I had red CCFL tubes inside and blue LED fans. I LOVED how it looked.
This is some crazy nostalgia for me! I still remember my bro giving me his old Voodoo 2, I think quake 2 was the first game I ever played at 60fps, that shit looked amazing to me back then! Also wow... This is the first time seeing 3D Mark 2001 in literally over 20 years!
i cant remember it to be honest... the first benchmark software i used was in windows 3.11 and i think that was the first time people used them in 1993
Man, that Antec case with the green LED fans made me nostalgic for my old rig. Threw it away when it spectacularly fried itself when I plugged it in after having sitting for years...
i remember the first time playing Quake on my voodoo. It was amazing once I got the drivers installed correctly. it went from blockly on the previous card to smooth as butter, smooth edges. .There is a special place in my heart for 3DFX. You should have tried Quake with that card.
I have a friend that had several of the Voodoo 5 6000 prototypes. I believe around 15ish from a load of surplus. They were super cool looking. Never tested any of them and all of them sold to collectors. This would have been around 10-15 years ago, they sold for $3k-$5k each then. Most of the collectors had them framed. It was pretty awesome. I really loved my Voodoo 3000! Really miss the cards! Thank you for the video, and actually seeing it work!
9:15 3dfx actually tried to solve that problem with the Banshee, a regular video card with a voodoo2 built-in, but it wasn’t very successful. I remember because I had one.
It was successful enough for the time and things were moving fast. The Voodoo 3 was a complete replacement with 32 bit colour and functional OpenGL. V4 introduced shaders, a full OpenGL implementation and reality only failed to compete due to SDRAM's poor fill rates compared to DDR.
@József Tarnai oh that's true, I completely forgot about that one. I don't even recall ever seeing one in store (because buying only was not a thing back then)
Banshee was sucessfull as mainstream card. Voodoo2 remained highend during 1998, and till march 1999. But it has flaws, first, highend was considered 2 voodoo2's in SLI, and that took out 2 PCI slots, along with usually PCI 2D card, so 3 PCI slots. And it heat like mad, because there was little space between PCI cards. So highend was 2x voodoo2 with 2d card lower highend was voodoo2 with 2d card and mainstream was banshee. Banshee was also into AGP slot. So it was attractive as mainstream card, with lower price. Banshee has also put Intel 740 away. Because till summer 1998, for half year, Intel 740 became quite suprisingly good mainstream card. Before summer of 1998 line of accelerators, Riva 128 was highend for Nvidia, S3 didnt have highend, Virge was outdated, and 3dfx had voodoo1, Matrox Mystique. And Ati had Rage Pro. All these graphic cards were beaten by Intel 740, which also utilized AGP functionality, and price was good (there was also rendition verite, which was also very good midrange path). But Banshee basicaly blow away Intel 740 very fast. It has similiar price, and it was much better than anything else from year 1997. Banshee was good card. It was also 2d/3d card, which was very attractive for midrange gamers. It also free up PCI slots.
That build reminds me of my first own PC build at that time, also in the Antec CS601 case. It was super solid and served me really well but the 80mm fans I had in there were super loud.
I still use my case that I bought in the late 90s. Except the front bezel door that broke off its been rock solid for all these decades. And its outlasted dozens of pc cases I have bought since for my family and friends.
i still have that case in gun metal gray. infact its right next to me in use running a secondary pc as im typing this. for the fans i had changed some iterations over time. last one that is still till today is rgb..yes a green in the front and a red an blue in the back. had an multicolored one on the sidepanel window but i removed it at some point cuz was kinda noisy
Huh, I never realised that was an Antec case. I knew it as the "Chieftec Dragon". I had one in the same blue as Linus, but without the window. It was my first fully custom build and lasted me a while. (depending on what you call a 'new' PC, I've been upgrading that same PC for twenty years, although I think I only still have a few screws still in use from the original)
What a throwback. My Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core/EpOx 8RDA+ Nforce2 mobo, 256mb ram, ATI Radeon 9500 Pro system was built in a case EXACTLY like that one. The Chieftec Dragon (yes I know it was an Antec full tower knockoff). Even used the included Austin 420w power supply without issue. Even had cathode tube lighting and everything. Loved that machine.
I bought a Radeon 9500pro right when the 9600s came out for 180$USD to replace my aging voodoo3 2000 and GeForce mx400s. I hope I'm remembering that order correctly 🤔 But yeah the voodoo was buttery smooth compared to openGL or any software drivers I'd seen. Starsiege Tribes was absolutely amazing and very fast paced once you got renegades and havok mods. Tribes 2 was just such a total let down and it kills me to say that. I wanted it to be good so badly 😢
My first dual graphicd cards setup from 3Dfx was a (1996). A pass-through VGA cable that daisy-chained the 2D graphics card to the Voodoo, and the Voodoo is then connected to the monitor.
Sure is nice to see the Chieftec Dragon case! I JUST replaced mine a few months ago because I got tired of not being able to use the side panel with a 3080ti waterblock.
I'm still using mine. Just put in a PC power and cooling 1050W PSU to feed my 6900XT. Had to drill out the rivets for the internal 3.5 bay mounts to fit the video card, but I switched to SATA cages in the 5.25" bays about a decade back so I haven't used them in that long, so it's no big loss.
You said something interesting at 13:10, that they basically became a competitor to their board partners. NVIDIA seems to be doing this more and more as generations go by. Wonder what would happen in a few more generations for nvidia?
The difference is that 3DFX didn't have the capital to make that a reality. I also think that 3DFX's footprint as a company was too narrow for them to attempt such a move, which was exactly what happened in the end. A case of ambition over reality
Nice idea but the situation is not comparable. Theres only 2 large scale GPU manufacturers, although Intel is trying their hands, the market has already been capitalised as compared to 3DFX's time. 3DFX at the end of its life was a enthusiast focused niche company that charged top dollars, in a market where others offered similar or even better (in some aspects) products at better prices. NVidia dominates both consumer and enterprise markets. For example, when 3DFX tried to pull the rug under AIBs many chose to jump ship to their compatitors, whereas recently EVGA decided to leave this market entirely rather than jump ship to AMD or Intel. AMD has demonstrated how willing it is to play the duopoly underdog. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
@@eggcopter But as the 3DFX debacle shows, fortunes can change very quickly. There are plenty of similar examples in the IT industry, and even more outside of it. Huge companies that were once dominant, either fade away or suddenly crash and burn. 3DFX were top dog for years, just like Nvidia is today. But complacency isn't a good business strategy, as Intel found out with both their Itanium and Pentium 4 CPU designs. DEC Alpha, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems and the once mighty IBM also come to mind.
@@YouHaventSeenMeRight this is the main thing, Nvidia was comprised of pure talents back then ( majority of the old employees were from IBM and Intel so they had good starting for efficiency in development for competetive market)and had huge companies throwing chunks of investment that they were able and still able to afford the losses, even if Nvidia is practicing an anti-competitive measure to stay on top against other gpu companies, they still have a few other markets to get into with the rising of AI learning, AI upscaling for real time camera, videos and live-videos (linus covered this) automobile AI, some side crypto that goes up and down in every few years, they are still going to stay on top i'd say at least for the next 10 years at most before AMD or Intel finally catch up with them since all the "fancy" features are in the hands of Nvidia, we don't know for certain yet, and don't forget Moore's Law Is dead is also catching up with physical limitation of chipmaking that i'd say for a business decision, expanding their fields of research and product is a good move even at the price of losing a sizeable of their current consumers with all the crazy pricing and deliberate Vram bottlenecks (might change though with recent leaks)
@@Maskharat you forget AMD has become very competitive in the CPU market, their Ryzen CPUs are basically keeping the company solvent at the moment, while they try to catch up in the GPU market
I had that Antec SX1030 case in 2001 and did a window mod also. Mine was beige and I tried to apply a black mirror finish with spray paint (I failed). It lasted until about 2004 when I got a black aluminum Lian Li that had a modular front drive bay/fan design.
This takes me down memory lane, when I had an ATI Rage 128 AGP card with 16mb of VRAM. The 90's into the early 2000's saw such rapid advances in 3D graphics, it made your head spin!
Totally true. As an example, Crysis was the best looking game of all time when it came out over 15 years ago and still holds up today. Take the best looking game from 1995 and compare it to games from 2005 just 10 years later. Night and Day.
I vividly remember dreaming about this card back in the day. I would drool over it reading the specs on their website. Then nothing. RIP 3DFX. Not long after, I upgraded to an Asus V7700 GeForce 2 GTS Deluxe; $329 at the time. It came with active shutter 3D glasses that plugged into the card. Playing Unreal Gold in 3D was a wet dream come true. However, I always wondered how the 6000 would've performed. Thanks for the video!
I had a Voodoo3 in high school (would you believe it was OEM in a Dell T450 that my family still has and still runs [linux jump server now]). This, and the games mentioned are brining back high school memories for me. I also owned a GDM-FW900 (the monitor Linus is playing on) a few years later. Thanks for the memories.
With how parallelisable GPU work is, it actually made *some* sense if you didn't have the reliability for the huge modern chips. SLI is basically the same idea packaged differently (and Voodoo actually called the idea SLI as well, starting with Voodoo2 and the ability to pair cards). The chips (VSA-100) had been designed specifically for this use, with fillrate (hopefully) increasing linearly with the number of chips up to *32*. Though designs only got up to 4x with the 6000, and actual products up to 2x with the 5500.
I remember playing Roll Cage back in the day on my 3Dfx Banshee. You could choose between Glide or Direct 3D for the graphics. I really liked the Banshee. Although it was a more budget card than the Voodoo, you didn't need to use a pass through cable with another 2D graphics card. I eventually replaced it with a GeForce 2 MX.
I miss the days of launching Unreal Tournament '99, choosing Glide in the driver drop-down and smiling knowing what was coming next... I do miss 3dfx...
the "matrix inspired demo" is actually made by remedy on the same engine the first max payne ran, in fact some of the faces textures were actually used on the game
ELSA AG from Germany had already finished a 3D graphics card prototype with 4 or more chips at the end of the 80's. I personally had one of them in my hands and was also told how it should work... First of all, there was a chip for each basic color and another one that was supposed to calculate the shades of gray. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt too early and the new owners wanted to focus more on the modem/router area and then went completely bankrupt in 2002 and a Japanese company has it bought the name
So? SGI already had far better running, and the color idea as explained by you is idiotic, SGI was doing 3D, as were later everyone else, which involves no color channel separation whatsoever. I think you made that stuff up, because it isn't how it works.
I had a Voodoo FX 5500 AGP card right as I was wrapping up some college studies. Sadly didn't help some aspects of 3D modeling / rendering go any faster but it certainly did improve viewports and gaming. And that card only had two of those little processors on it, let alone 4. Pretty sure I owned that Sony monitor that was featured though! Great screen for the time. 120 FPS would have been nuts back then. I recall just being happy a game would run or get something like 20-30 FPS.
I remember playing Jane's F15 sim game when I was a young teen. I reinstalled it a few months later when I got my fresh Voodoo 3000 AGP, and holy cow it was another game
Long live 3Dfx! When I first got my Voodoo 3 3000 it was basically life changing!❤
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The heatsinks at the back of the cards GPU's makes sens because a lot of chips back then used some solder balls in the middle for cooling. The PCB acted as a heatsink, partially or fully depending on the GPU. You can still see that on modern BGA RAM chips in the data sheets. Also overclockers back then did do sandwich mods, basically a heatsink and fan on the back, active backplate if you will. And yes some cards ran very hot at the back no mater how much heatsink you threw at the front of the GPU, GeFroce256 comes to mind. Also Nvidia having 32bit support in games was not much of a big deal unless you where fanboying a feature. Both card supported 32bit colors in 2D but 32bit colors in 3D would easily lose you 30-40% of your FPS on most cards so few people would use that. In fact the V3 3000 could do 22bit dithering on the output using the 16bit framebuffer, it basically outputted 22bit colors dithering the image creating an image that looks better but is still faster to render. A Voodoo3 on a CRT looks very good with the right options set.
I love that even old tech looks so similar to new tech not it the coolers or the color but the actually board and how it is put together and all that the boards look the same just more dense now it’s cool to see
Love the classic Chieftec case. I went with a Chenming version of it back in the day due to having a single 120mm fan vs. dual 80s and still use it to this day. Nowadays it's just a node for my Tdarr setup but still, it's alive and well.
Still using that Chieftec Dragon case as my main PC today, with a Phenom II 1090T. I don't game on it, so even though it's ancient it still does the job.
@@waynebagger643 Whatever gets the job done! Had I not gotten into GTA Online pretty hard I'd still be on my Q6600 machine, that old thing and its DDR2 memory just couldn't handle online play. I've got an 11700K, 64GB DDR4, and a RTX 3080 now and hardly use it at all--I don't play much anymore and it's mostly older stuff that modern integrated graphics can run.
Totally forgot about 3DFX and Voodoo. That was a trip down memory lane. I never actually had any of their cards as far as I remember but I do remember the name. I have a giant ISA GPU in a box somewhere I need to pull it out, I don't recall the brand (Trident I think) but now I wonder if it might actually be worth something.
Holy... , I had the same exact case, except in black and a Voodoo 2, like 20 years ago... I remember buying all my parts from COMPUSA, Circuit City and Frys Electronics. It was my first PC build. This whole video was Nostalgia
I remember my dad getting all jazzed about voodoo cards back when I was a kid. He was really into Quake back then. He played Quake 3 Arena for probably 6 or 7 years and was pretty damn good at it.
I was SO HAPPY to see the term "3d Decelerator" put beside the S3 chip. That card... god. Its a meme that will never die. I had a Virge Gx (i think) When they came out. Lara never looked so Filtered(Sharp) .. It was like 3 fps, but damn it was purdy. Unplayable and useless, but pretty.
Thanks to S3, Microsoft bought them and developed D3TC off the original MeTaL API. U99 under it will never stop being beautiful, same goes to Quake 3 Arena
We had an S3 Trio in our ole Pentium 3 500 system. Damn card could hardly run anything. It used to crash pretty quickly when starting something like The Phantom Menace. Motocross Madness was fine though
@@leviblack7036 Was the Trio higher end than the Virge Gx/Dx (dont remmeber which it was) just remmeber that it was so "powerful" the thing didnt even have a heatsink on the gpu silicon. I had mine I believe in a around the 486/dx4 100 to Penium 200 era. That long ago kind of blurs together all this time later. But it was just before intel switched to the "nintendo cartridge" style of processor mounting. It was a fine card for 2d gaming It ran what I played well enough, but that thing REALLY didnt like anything remotely 3d. (but it was a fine windows base card) But yeah, it sucked. Glad someone else remembers these abominations.
@@Dj-Mccullough I don't know where it sat vs the Virge but this was circa 99-00. It certainly wasn't a high end card for its time. We had the option of getting a much better card when we brought the PC but we didn't think we needed it.
Still have my Voodoo 3 2000, and Diamond Monster 3D II shadowboxed on my wall. So many good memories with those cards in my childhood. :) Glide was absolutely amazing.
Back then, I recall not having a GLIDE enabled GPU. I wanted to play OG EQ but it *required* GLIDE. I also remember that 3d Mark 2001 test with the Matrix style test - it was so sick!
3dfx blew my mind SO HARD when it came out. I was used to playing Quake at like 8fps on my 33mhz 486.. Software renderer of course. Suddenly my buddy is running the game at framerates I'd never seen in any game, and it looked SO MUCH BETTER... The change was so dramatic. Only tech that's blown my mind harder is VR. Leaps come so rarely these days in tech and gaming. I miss the 90s... We went from Wolfenstein to HL1 and Battlefield 1 and Tribes PRETTY quick.
Not just any real CRT, that's an FW900. The only widescreen PC CRT ever made. Sometimes rebranded as IBM, Digital, HP, Silicon Graphics. There is usually one on eBay at any given time with an asking price in the thousands.
I'm surprised that you didn't include Unreal in the benchmarking of the card. Unreal FLEW on GL. I knew a guy who had a VooDoo 5 5500, and I thought it was so cool, until I realized it was barely faster then my VooDoo 3 3000. It's a shame that 3DFX fail cascaded so hard, and I swore off Nvidia after the buy out, until ATI proved how hard it was to make good video card drivers!
Uhm, as a retro enthusiast (and since I have 23 x Voodoo cards, including 2 x Voodoo 5 5500), I feel like I need to set the record straight. 😁 I can tell you without a doubt that the Voodoo 5 5500 is not "barely" faster than the Voodoo 3 3000. You were probably comparing them in CPU limited scenarios. At 1024 x 768 / 1280 x 1024, depending on the game, the Voodoo 5 5500 is almost twice as fast as a Voodoo 3 (or ~50% faster when the Voodoo 5 is running in 32 bit color).
Blooden, you may know this then, did all of the voodoo 3 3000 have the built in TV tuner capture cards then? I remember how annoying the purple mostterly long cable was, and how they added TV capture right around the time of the HD transition.
@@RetroNorth of course but Rampage still needed at least 6 months to function normally and to be released. The Voodoo 5 6000 on the other hand was practically just a step away from being released on the market.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 True, the 6000 was a beast and indeed much closer to general release. But it was all the same tech as the 5500, just more of it. ( With the addition of Voodoo Volts maybe if that counts. )
What a piece of history. 120 fps at the time wasn't even considered as anything in gaming as far as I remember. Damn throws us right back real good. Look how far we have come since then, wow.
Yes it was, rarer perhaps and most people preferred the higher resolutions, but you can see in the shown benchmarks from april 2000 both the original and second geforces getting over 100fps in Q3 at 800x600. Remember refresh rates were higher than for a long time in later years due to CRTs being a migraine inducing flicker fest at 60hz and not great at 75. 85Hz was a common minimum for many and at lower resolutions the good ones could go quite high.
One other nifty trick with the early Voodoo cards, because they only accelerated 3d, they were platform agnostic. You didn't have to flash the bios to use the same card on a Mac to recognize the color space. A co-worker had a pair of Voodoo 2 cards running in SLI which he replaced with a Voodoo 3, so I managed to get one of them for cheap. Installing it in my G3 desktop was as easy as popping in the card, and dragging the driver into the system folder.
same here. I bought the early Voodoo cards and flashed those and then upgraded to one that just worked. That was the pinnacle of Mac gaming, when it had a real culture and Mac devs trying to get the market of the ground.
This brings back so many memories.. I remember wanting a Voodoo but my dad refused to get one. We ended up with a Matrox M3D instead, paired with the Matrox Millenium on our Pentium Pro 200Mhz setup because he got nice discounts from work (he worked in urban/ city planning government agency that had very good deals on business graphics solutions like Matrox/ SGI/ Quantum3D).
That first step into 3D with Quake was friggin awesome. I put it on the same level as my first experience with VR on my Vive. That was the core part of my lan party days at the roundhouse in Aurora, IL. A great lan party venue...you could always just take a break and hang out at the bar downstairs. I don't miss lugging around that CRT monitor I had back then though. I'm pretty sure I still have my 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 somewhere in my storage boxes of computer parts.
my first dedicated card was a voodoo3 3000, so this is a cool blast from the past. had 3dfx maintained market dominance post y2k, my second card could have been another voodoo card instead of a geforce card.
On a semi-tangent but sort-of-related vein: check out some of the Intergraph 2D workstation cards from the early-mid 90's. Huge full-length video cards with tons of sundry chips, all driving a 13W3 curvy, BBW size monitor. In fact, now that I type this, you should start a retro-computing channel with rotating co-hosts such as "this does not compute".
I remember ATI Rage, Matrox, and S3 cards not impressing. When I first saw Tribes running on an original Voodoo card (I think) it was like a whole new world. I immediately built a new PC.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 87 วันนี้!! คู่เอก "ก้องชัย vs โชคปรีชา"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YN6e7HVnekw/mqdefault.jpg)
The little gimmick of the editor going out of Premiere to Google the website with the drivers was a great moment. Nice one,editor!
*Everyone liked that*
4:40
Are you the editor?
@@defeatSpace fuck they found me,time to leave
Should've gone to Wayback Archive
The fact that the owner trusts linus with the video card given his track record of dropping tech is just wild to me.
the owner originally wanted to sell the card. and he knows Linus can afford the asking price if he were to break it
@@MiloTheFirst1 exactly! He was probably hoping for a drop so he could get paid then and there 😜
That wouldn't be the only risk taken... I mean, we all know the many instances of "tHaT's BeEn StOlEn FrOm ThE oFfIcE!" :D
I dont know how much trust was involved. I think LTT grew out of trust phase, now its just business.
I'd trust him, bro
I just wanna say, I really enjoyed my experience hanging with LMG over the few days I was there. You guys treated me so well and were so accommodating the whole time! I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Canada! Thank you again for the incredible opportunity to work with you guys!
-Ross
Thank you for letting us have a gander at a piece of gaming history
@@omega1231 sure thing!! (:
the history lesson about 3DFX at the second half was genuinely great
How did they go bankrupt so quickly
@@belstar1128 ruined by shareholder decisions
@@belstar1128 Poor management decisions, delays in getting hardware working and on sale... all the usual stuff. Designing and manufacturing cutting edge tech is a long and expensive process. Once you commit to it, you have to follow it through, otherwise you have nothing to sell. But a bad decision may not become obvious until well into development, and then it's too late.
@DR 11 Bruh, the scripts are so different. Are you seriously saying they can't cover the same topic?
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 No, 3Dfx killed themselves with the decision to make their own cards.
Sometime in 2050: Let's see if this ancient RTX 9090 ti can run this game at the lowest setting.
I will never forget how I first came across 3dfx. I went to a local gaming café, where me and some friends used to play Lucasarts's Outlaws in multiplayer. The staff had upgraded the computers to Voodoo cards without telling anyone, and once I saw how incredible the game looked on those cards compared to not having it? I made it my mission to get one myself. It was a night and day difference to have texture filtering in games.
Hardware transform and lighting on consumer hardware really was the game changer.
I loved outlaw. I have it on my AMD K6 III 550 with Voodoo3 3000 rig
I'll never forget QWCTF with a 3dfx card. The colored lighting was ridiculous. The flags literally glowed through the walls and it was basically a hardware cheat at the time.
@@orbatos No, the real game changer was taking the load off the CPU and using much faster dedicated hardware for 3D graphics, and also making a good API for developers to use. Hardware T&L came much later.
@@another3997 What do do you think hardware transform and lighting are? At this point most people were getting their first video cards with 3D acceleration, in part due to the success of the voodoo 2, but also because of the massive droop in cost of production for both vector hardware and memory which had until that point been the domain of literal supercomputers. This kind of thing is why X was implemented as a network protocol, allowing a mere deskside workstation to leverage dozens of racks of hardware for CAD and lidar visualization. Shaders, which Linus erroneously says 3DFx didn't have, directly came from hardware optimizations developed on these massive systems.
3dfx managed to go from zero to hero and back in less time than it took from the release of RTX 2080 to RTX 4080. Think about it.
And about as short a time to go from Rich to broke.
Things were wild back then.
@@The_Keeper Yep. Signing the deal with the Mexico fabricator was the just the beginning.
those were times of rapid unbelievable change. Just compare how games looked like 1990 vs 2000. (Or even MS-DOS inteface vs Windows 2000). 10 years, but 2 different eras. Today Skyrim or GTA5 still sells because the progress doesn't look that drastic anymore..
Nvidia is starting to sound a lot linke 3dfx, lol.
@@JimNH777 Yeah, those changes were awesome for progress sake, but not for consumers's pockets, things were out of date in a year. And back then, "outdated" meant almost non-functional, unlike now and probably the last 20-25 years. It's insane.
Immediately knew a 4GPU card from 2000 had to be 3dfx, they are sorely missed.
Wish i had more than the one Voodoo3 card
I have 23 x Voodoo cards and I still feel like I don't have enough... 😅
you a bot? same comment as @-vloggotomychannel5303
@@stonedmountainunicorn9532 lol look at the times genius. And the username. And the age of this account ffs. And my comment laughing that they have more likes in 2 min, under them
I had this old computer from the late 90's with 2 intense 3d wildcat video cards that connected together with a 50 pin scsi cable. That was a truly bizarre setup.
@@mycosys It was just a question dude, i'm not a detective looking up 12 things before i comment.
Not everyone is such a genius like you obviously are.......
So I worked in a PC repair shop when 3dfx hit the scene, the thing people forget is that having a 2D card AND a 3D card was seen as a bonus for most users at the time, so the Voodoo was seen as an add in bonus card, to go along side people's existing 2D cards, cards which more often than not the customer had chosen and liked already, so it was seen more as 'not losing my 2D card' rather than 'I have to buy a 2D AND 3D card?' It was seen more like an add in sound card really.
The prices were crazy at the time... 1999 was when computers were dirt cheap and finally affordable for everyone you went from 1992 - 3000 dollar computers to 1999 - 800 bucks for something that was 20 times or more faster and 4 times cheaper . Computers only got a little cheaper after that peaking in 2012 or so when i think you could get a desktop PC for 480 bucks
I think this teaches one thing that history keeps repeating: what makes a platform win competition in games usually is ease to develop tools for cheap to buy hardware to provide variety and accessibility
Tell that to nvidia and current aaa developers lol
Wow the "matrix" style demo during the 3dMark section looked so real to me when it first came out! It's amazing how perceptions change over time
looked like max payne on highest settings
I remember marveling at the graphics in Halo CE, amazed at the blood textures of the Covenant when hitting their dead bodies lol. So many colors...
@@S1nwar It was the same developers that created the 3DMark demo, who decided to make a game out of that demo, and that game was...Max Payne. You're bang on.
did it really look real though? people often say that many games that came out in the 90s (or cgi in movies from the 80s) looked like real life when they came out. i can understand being mind blown by how fast graphics tek was progressing, but there's no way people looked at the game and then looked at really like and thought, ~yep, it looks about the same~
@@cvspvr there's a big difference between watching these old graphics on a new OLED screen (such as your phone or TV) or watching it on those old CRT screens we had back then.
And no the graphics didn't look photorealistic by any means, but they were extremely impressive nonetheless. With every big graphical jump, I thought "there's no way graphics will look can look better than this".
The RTX 4090 is shivering right now. No one can stop the 3dfx revival!
Imagine AMD decides to slap 4 7950XTX cores on a board, draw 1200W and punches Nvidia in the face in 4k, making it a one-off GPU considering people are willing to pay that much for a collector's piece.
@@zayd1111 Imagine doing the 4 cores in Crossfire or SLI, maybe a 5 slot GPU but who care if someone is willing to pay $15000 on one GPU, might as well make a modern one that is nuts and charge $50000+ no?
@@zayd1111 Any thoughts on splitting the screen into quadrants each rendered by its own GPU?
Maybe even a frontend chip assigned to combining results from preprocessing GPUs which do physics, raytracing, or so on.
Presumably there'd need to be some significant intercore communicaiton going on to pull any of this off.
Maybe as much chip realestate just put towards talking to the other chips and dealing with shared memory and optimizing where tasks that depend on oneanother get executed to avoid bottlenecks.
Might end up with a full CPU on the thing just to dynamically reallocate load to optimize execution time.
That way we could throw a few kilowatts at the GPU instead of merely hundreds of watts.
@@rarrawer sometimes when running early SLi you could actually see the split in the screen where the top and bottom images were spliced together (if using that mode and not alternate frames).
I'm sure we'll see a revival of something similar down the line but it was a pain to code for. More sales for the GPU companies, though.
Since we’re starting to hit diminishing returns when it comes to visuals in games, it’s nice looking back on graphics that were a massive leap forward for the time.
The diminishing returns is software defined. Once you understand that Linux is going to be the gaming platform, you also understand how gaming engines have to be re-engineered and then those diminishing returns go bye-bye.
@@jeschinstad please explain how Linux is going to solve anything AAA game development related.
@@jeschinstad how can a platform solve the fact that developers/publishers bring out bad games?
I mean, always best to be careful around claims like that.
How quickly we forget that we said the same thing for the xbox 360 and PS3 and were pretty dead wrong.
It's hard to tell given graphics cards come out more often than consoles, but comparing the 2000 series and games of the time to the 4000 series and new games, it's a noticeable jump.
@@jeschinstad Using Linux is now the equivalent of being Vegan or doing CrossFit... You don't have to ask, they will tell you as soon as you make eye contact with them.
I remember a Riva TNT 2 driver released by nVIDIA, which made the card directly support Glide. 3DFx made them remove it again, but were too late. Lots of people got a hold of that driver - myself included - and it truly did run games with 3DFx Glide just fine.
But it wouldn't be compatible for long, because 3DFX would just change their API enough to stop it working on Nvidia cards. Any further copying by Nvidia would have resulted in very expensive law suits and compensation payments.
I still have 2 actual 3dfx Voodoo2 PCI cards and they both worked perfectly when last removed. The improvements it made back the. We’re actually pretty amazing in both graphics as well as speed.
the fact that LTT and GN had a video about the Voodoo 5 6000 within a month of each other is crazy just the acquisition of one of these cards is a multimonth process
GN's was a reproduction though.
@@MrBogie4646 GN is the one that you could spend months or years obtaining. This one is pure unobtainium.
Crazy right!? What a not coincidence
Gamers Nexus did a great video essay about this card too, loads of technical info, definitely check it!
I thought the design looked familiar
That was a great video
@@Daniel-vk4vg Not at all, GN's video goes a lot further in depth re; the mechanics of the board itself and the processes it took the creator to get it flying again. This video is a nice lead-in to GN's video for the interested.
LTT is so far behind the zeitgeist
@@Daniel-vk4vgone more reason to watch GN to support the original.
This was like a short version of my computer history. Going to college in 1997 my friends and I would have endless debate’s on all these cards and in what would happen next. Remember 24 bit vs 32 bit color, the Matrox card my friend used to dominate in rocket arena? Those days where a crazy ride when actual technological innovations happened every year. Still happy I got to experience this all first hand on early internet, it was great and still is a great memory.
Thanks a lot to all of the LTT crew who made this video, you REALLY made my day! 😊❤
I remember when I had a Videologic Apocalypse 5D. The picture was quite impressive for the time-period.
Rocket Arena? You must mean Quake3 Arena.... 😉
@@R2_D3 Rocket Arena I know for sure was a mod for Unreal Tournament, but maybe it was also an older mod as well ? UT had a lot of mods based on other mods like there was literally a Team Fortress on UT.
The Matrox Mystake ?
@@Gatorade69 Ah yes, you are totally right! Forgot about that one! Think it's even on my UT GOTY Edition.
I clearly remember been blown away when I got my first 3Dfx card with 4MB of ram, such a step up from software rendering.
4:34 - 119.879 fps looks like some artificial limit because it is exactly 2x59.94. If you do not know 59.94 fps is an NTSC exact frame rate for so called 60fps.
I have such fond memories of the 3DFX days.... Finished Mechwarrior 2 normal and then replayed it on a Monster 3D... The depth and Rocky terrain vs Brown flat. Was truly a turn in my gaming life.
i Stil own 3dfx Trust voodoo Dragon ,in my closet 😁
It's wild how fast things moved and changed back then. They've only been around for a glimpse basically. But it felt so much longer, because everything was exciting and new (and I was young).
Shoutout to Ross for letting us witness this incredible artifact!
Ross holding his breath the entire video, while linus holds it
Of course!! (:
@@Haskellerz Honestly a bit yeah lol.....
I think he last updated his profile pic in 2007 :p
this made me think of that hearthstone card that says "that belongs in a museum!" for some reason lol
That case was a blast from the past I didn't expect. That was my first personal PC case from my early teens in the mid-late 00s. I just remember it being HUGE, as around that age I was about as tall as Linus is now
I work at bestbuy and someone recycled a PC with the case but in black lol, I was like damn, this is a dope old case.
I had that exact same case, the Chenbro(I think?) Dragon, in the same colour, (but without the window), as the first PC I built for myself.
You see the massive gap between the PSU and the top of the case? Young me saw that, and though "I wonder if I can fit a radiator in there?".
Turns out, while you *could* sandwich a 120 rad in there (with a hole cut in the roof as an intake), using the PSU fan to pull air through a radiator is not a great idea. It worked, but no batter than air cooling.
Also, that case was all thick steel. Bloody strong, but it weighed a ton.
@@phuzz00 Definitely a heavy beast, yeah. Mine was the exact version in the video. At that age I didn't really know what water cooling even was yet. I'd just dipped my toes in. I got it from some guy on facebook who was selling (what I later discovered were) chop-shop PCs. He'd overprice and under deliver specs. I realized this and my mom and I scared him out of public business. Dude mix n' matched RAM, downgraded my CPU drastically after bringing it back for having a few issues (assuming I wouldn't notice the downgrade), used illegal windows copies, and did all of it on his front porch that wreaked of smoke.
Live and learn I suppose, but the case itself stayed with me for another later build I scratched up used parts for myself. It wasn't much, but it's what I started editing and VFX on, which later evolved into an animation career. Weirdly enough I think I have that slimy porch surfer to thank for my life now haha
Chieftec CS-601 FTW! Have a couple of those... built a rig in 2003 in one and later got a few more to put older and newer hand-me-down stuff in them. At some point the whole family had those XD
I had the same one! Except the aluminum internals version. I thought it was an Antec case? I had red CCFL tubes inside and blue LED fans. I LOVED how it looked.
This is some crazy nostalgia for me! I still remember my bro giving me his old Voodoo 2, I think quake 2 was the first game I ever played at 60fps, that shit looked amazing to me back then! Also wow... This is the first time seeing 3D Mark 2001 in literally over 20 years!
i cant remember it to be honest... the first benchmark software i used was in windows 3.11 and i think that was the first time people used them in 1993
I remember being surprised at how fast 3dfx went from being the best to a has-been. When Nvidia bought them out a lot of gamers wept a few tears.
I thought it was a lawsuit from Nvidia
A tangent from Glide, S3's API, MeTaL, was super cool. It had S3 Texture Compression, which later got added to both DirectX and OpenGL.
Man, that Antec case with the green LED fans made me nostalgic for my old rig. Threw it away when it spectacularly fried itself when I plugged it in after having sitting for years...
It's a Chieftec CS-601 though. Antec's Plusview 1000AMG looks very similar though (and Chieftec copied parts of the design AFAIK)
Could you imagine a modern version with maybe four 3070's bound together?
No but I can imagine a 4090 the breaker keeps tripping so someone upsizes the breaker to stop it and now there house is burning down from the overdraw
@@Doubie. Nvidia: The 5090 uses 1.21 jigawatts.
@@Doubie. got to love USA problems...
Go EU/UK higher power limit.
@@Ravensfan-qx5pc This isn't SLI tho. We're talking about one card with 4 GPUs, not four cards with one gpu each
i can't afford the electricity bill to imagine that
i remember the first time playing Quake on my voodoo. It was amazing once I got the drivers installed correctly. it went from blockly on the previous card to smooth as butter, smooth edges. .There is a special place in my heart for 3DFX. You should have tried Quake with that card.
I have a friend that had several of the Voodoo 5 6000 prototypes. I believe around 15ish from a load of surplus. They were super cool looking. Never tested any of them and all of them sold to collectors. This would have been around 10-15 years ago, they sold for $3k-$5k each then. Most of the collectors had them framed. It was pretty awesome. I really loved my Voodoo 3000! Really miss the cards! Thank you for the video, and actually seeing it work!
9:15 3dfx actually tried to solve that problem with the Banshee, a regular video card with a voodoo2 built-in, but it wasn’t very successful. I remember because I had one.
Former banshee owner here too.
That's because the Banshee had poorer performance than a Voodoo II but they were quite popular.
It was successful enough for the time and things were moving fast. The Voodoo 3 was a complete replacement with 32 bit colour and functional OpenGL. V4 introduced shaders, a full OpenGL implementation and reality only failed to compete due to SDRAM's poor fill rates compared to DDR.
@József Tarnai oh that's true, I completely forgot about that one. I don't even recall ever seeing one in store (because buying only was not a thing back then)
Banshee was sucessfull as mainstream card.
Voodoo2 remained highend during 1998, and till march 1999. But it has flaws, first, highend was considered 2 voodoo2's in SLI, and that took out 2 PCI slots, along with usually PCI 2D card, so 3 PCI slots. And it heat like mad, because there was little space between PCI cards.
So highend was 2x voodoo2 with 2d card
lower highend was voodoo2 with 2d card
and mainstream was banshee. Banshee was also into AGP slot.
So it was attractive as mainstream card, with lower price.
Banshee has also put Intel 740 away. Because till summer 1998, for half year, Intel 740 became quite suprisingly good mainstream card. Before summer of 1998 line of accelerators, Riva 128 was highend for Nvidia, S3 didnt have highend, Virge was outdated, and 3dfx had voodoo1, Matrox Mystique. And Ati had Rage Pro. All these graphic cards were beaten by Intel 740, which also utilized AGP functionality, and price was good (there was also rendition verite, which was also very good midrange path).
But Banshee basicaly blow away Intel 740 very fast. It has similiar price, and it was much better than anything else from year 1997. Banshee was good card. It was also 2d/3d card, which was very attractive for midrange gamers. It also free up PCI slots.
The first gpu I ever bought was a voodoo 5 5500. LOved that card
It was a great card.
it was a beast
very good card, I bought Banshee and then Voodoo 3 3000.
That build reminds me of my first own PC build at that time, also in the Antec CS601 case. It was super solid and served me really well but the 80mm fans I had in there were super loud.
Same here! Mine were blue fans that i customed installed. My REM cycle was shot from all the blue light.
I still use my case that I bought in the late 90s. Except the front bezel door that broke off its been rock solid for all these decades. And its outlasted dozens of pc cases I have bought since for my family and friends.
i still have that case in gun metal gray. infact its right next to me in use running a secondary pc as im typing this. for the fans i had changed some iterations over time. last one that is still till today is rgb..yes a green in the front and a red an blue in the back. had an multicolored one on the sidepanel window but i removed it at some point cuz was kinda noisy
Huh, I never realised that was an Antec case. I knew it as the "Chieftec Dragon". I had one in the same blue as Linus, but without the window. It was my first fully custom build and lasted me a while. (depending on what you call a 'new' PC, I've been upgrading that same PC for twenty years, although I think I only still have a few screws still in use from the original)
@@phuzz00 Yes, it was sold under both brand names. Mine was actually the white variant without a window.
2:29 editor went a little nuts
What a throwback. My Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core/EpOx 8RDA+ Nforce2 mobo, 256mb ram, ATI Radeon 9500 Pro system was built in a case EXACTLY like that one. The Chieftec Dragon (yes I know it was an Antec full tower knockoff). Even used the included Austin 420w power supply without issue. Even had cathode tube lighting and everything. Loved that machine.
Ah! good taste, I ran an XP2400+ and a Radeon 9600, no cathode ray tubes, just LED
I bought a Radeon 9500pro right when the 9600s came out for 180$USD to replace my aging voodoo3 2000 and GeForce mx400s. I hope I'm remembering that order correctly 🤔
But yeah the voodoo was buttery smooth compared to openGL or any software drivers I'd seen. Starsiege Tribes was absolutely amazing and very fast paced once you got renegades and havok mods. Tribes 2 was just such a total let down and it kills me to say that. I wanted it to be good so badly 😢
My first dual graphicd cards setup from 3Dfx was a (1996).
A pass-through VGA cable that daisy-chained the 2D graphics card to the Voodoo, and the Voodoo is then connected to the monitor.
Sure is nice to see the Chieftec Dragon case! I JUST replaced mine a few months ago because I got tired of not being able to use the side panel with a 3080ti waterblock.
I'm still using mine. Just put in a PC power and cooling 1050W PSU to feed my 6900XT.
Had to drill out the rivets for the internal 3.5 bay mounts to fit the video card, but I switched to SATA cages in the 5.25" bays about a decade back so I haven't used them in that long, so it's no big loss.
@@matthewcaron3319 Awesome!!! Love to hear that!
3:00 to see the FPS, Fraps 1.9D can be used in Windows 98 in Direct3D and OpenGL including 3dfx OpenGL.
Did you notice the MacGyver Theme song playing in the background? lol
You said something interesting at 13:10, that they basically became a competitor to their board partners. NVIDIA seems to be doing this more and more as generations go by. Wonder what would happen in a few more generations for nvidia?
The difference is that 3DFX didn't have the capital to make that a reality. I also think that 3DFX's footprint as a company was too narrow for them to attempt such a move, which was exactly what happened in the end. A case of ambition over reality
Nice idea but the situation is not comparable. Theres only 2 large scale GPU manufacturers, although Intel is trying their hands, the market has already been capitalised as compared to 3DFX's time. 3DFX at the end of its life was a enthusiast focused niche company that charged top dollars, in a market where others offered similar or even better (in some aspects) products at better prices. NVidia dominates both consumer and enterprise markets. For example, when 3DFX tried to pull the rug under AIBs many chose to jump ship to their compatitors, whereas recently EVGA decided to leave this market entirely rather than jump ship to AMD or Intel. AMD has demonstrated how willing it is to play the duopoly underdog. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
@@eggcopter But as the 3DFX debacle shows, fortunes can change very quickly. There are plenty of similar examples in the IT industry, and even more outside of it. Huge companies that were once dominant, either fade away or suddenly crash and burn. 3DFX were top dog for years, just like Nvidia is today. But complacency isn't a good business strategy, as Intel found out with both their Itanium and Pentium 4 CPU designs. DEC Alpha, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems and the once mighty IBM also come to mind.
@@YouHaventSeenMeRight this is the main thing, Nvidia was comprised of pure talents back then ( majority of the old employees were from IBM and Intel so they had good starting for efficiency in development for competetive market)and had huge companies throwing chunks of investment that they were able and still able to afford the losses, even if Nvidia is practicing an anti-competitive measure to stay on top against other gpu companies, they still have a few other markets to get into with the rising of AI learning, AI upscaling for real time camera, videos and live-videos (linus covered this) automobile AI, some side crypto that goes up and down in every few years, they are still going to stay on top i'd say at least for the next 10 years at most before AMD or Intel finally catch up with them since all the "fancy" features are in the hands of Nvidia, we don't know for certain yet, and don't forget Moore's Law Is dead is also catching up with physical limitation of chipmaking that i'd say for a business decision, expanding their fields of research and product is a good move even at the price of losing a sizeable of their current consumers with all the crazy pricing and deliberate Vram bottlenecks (might change though with recent leaks)
@@Maskharat you forget AMD has become very competitive in the CPU market, their Ryzen CPUs are basically keeping the company solvent at the moment, while they try to catch up in the GPU market
I had that Antec SX1030 case in 2001 and did a window mod also. Mine was beige and I tried to apply a black mirror finish with spray paint (I failed). It lasted until about 2004 when I got a black aluminum Lian Li that had a modular front drive bay/fan design.
This takes me down memory lane, when I had an ATI Rage 128 AGP card with 16mb of VRAM. The 90's into the early 2000's saw such rapid advances in 3D graphics, it made your head spin!
So true
I remember Doom 3 being a big leap.
@@King-O-Hell D3 was later, best played on Radeon 9700 or so, vivid gore lol. Great game though.
Totally true. As an example, Crysis was the best looking game of all time when it came out over 15 years ago and still holds up today. Take the best looking game from 1995 and compare it to games from 2005 just 10 years later. Night and Day.
I vividly remember dreaming about this card back in the day. I would drool over it reading the specs on their website. Then nothing. RIP 3DFX. Not long after, I upgraded to an Asus V7700 GeForce 2 GTS Deluxe; $329 at the time. It came with active shutter 3D glasses that plugged into the card. Playing Unreal Gold in 3D was a wet dream come true. However, I always wondered how the 6000 would've performed. Thanks for the video!
UnrealStunner "TAG" and when playing Unreal 222-225 I Played as Saint on the MoF Clan
I had a Voodoo3 in high school (would you believe it was OEM in a Dell T450 that my family still has and still runs [linux jump server now]).
This, and the games mentioned are brining back high school memories for me. I also owned a GDM-FW900 (the monitor Linus is playing on) a few years later.
Thanks for the memories.
The Dell T4xx line is a relatively modern tower server, are you sure there isn't a swapped number in there somewhere?
@@resneptacle its a dell xps t450.
This video sent me down a rabbit hole of retro PC parts.
Missed opportunity to fly in @LGR for a soothing "tech tales" portion.
4’s better than 1 right? It’s so fricking long tho-
With how parallelisable GPU work is, it actually made *some* sense if you didn't have the reliability for the huge modern chips. SLI is basically the same idea packaged differently (and Voodoo actually called the idea SLI as well, starting with Voodoo2 and the ability to pair cards). The chips (VSA-100) had been designed specifically for this use, with fillrate (hopefully) increasing linearly with the number of chips up to *32*. Though designs only got up to 4x with the 6000, and actual products up to 2x with the 5500.
That’s what sh-
Probably shorter than 4090
@@stylinsandwich yea lol
@@DreamOfFlying we don’t talk about that…
I miss how 3DFx 's box art was hardcore and next level. When you got one you felt like you were playing with the wild side.
yea, box art is a lost thing now days, I miss the box arts of the late 90's early 2K era., And a little later the likes of the XFX "X" shaped boxes.
I remember playing Roll Cage back in the day on my 3Dfx Banshee.
You could choose between Glide or Direct 3D for the graphics.
I really liked the Banshee. Although it was a more budget card than the Voodoo, you didn't need to use a pass through cable with another 2D graphics card. I eventually replaced it with a GeForce 2 MX.
I miss the days of launching Unreal Tournament '99, choosing Glide in the driver drop-down and smiling knowing what was coming next... I do miss 3dfx...
I'm impressed Linus didn't drop it
the "matrix inspired demo" is actually made by remedy on the same engine the first max payne ran, in fact some of the faces textures were actually used on the game
I love how everyone is taking us down this memory lane of 3dfx
ELSA AG from Germany had already finished a 3D graphics card prototype with 4 or more chips at the end of the 80's.
I personally had one of them in my hands and was also told how it should work...
First of all, there was a chip for each basic color and another one that was supposed to calculate the shades of gray. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt too early and the new owners wanted to focus more on the modem/router area and then went completely bankrupt in 2002 and a Japanese company has it bought the name
So? SGI already had far better running, and the color idea as explained by you is idiotic, SGI was doing 3D, as were later everyone else, which involves no color channel separation whatsoever. I think you made that stuff up, because it isn't how it works.
I had a Voodoo FX 5500 AGP card right as I was wrapping up some college studies. Sadly didn't help some aspects of 3D modeling / rendering go any faster but it certainly did improve viewports and gaming. And that card only had two of those little processors on it, let alone 4. Pretty sure I owned that Sony monitor that was featured though! Great screen for the time.
120 FPS would have been nuts back then. I recall just being happy a game would run or get something like 20-30 FPS.
I remember playing Jane's F15 sim game when I was a young teen. I reinstalled it a few months later when I got my fresh Voodoo 3000 AGP, and holy cow it was another game
It would've been cool to see the card tested against others that were out around the time it would've released so we can see exactly how it'd compete.
Long live 3Dfx! When I first got my Voodoo 3 3000 it was basically life changing!❤
The heatsinks at the back of the cards GPU's makes sens because a lot of chips back then used some solder balls in the middle for cooling.
The PCB acted as a heatsink, partially or fully depending on the GPU.
You can still see that on modern BGA RAM chips in the data sheets.
Also overclockers back then did do sandwich mods, basically a heatsink and fan on the back, active backplate if you will.
And yes some cards ran very hot at the back no mater how much heatsink you threw at the front of the GPU, GeFroce256 comes to mind.
Also Nvidia having 32bit support in games was not much of a big deal unless you where fanboying a feature.
Both card supported 32bit colors in 2D but 32bit colors in 3D would easily lose you 30-40% of your FPS on most cards so few people would use that.
In fact the V3 3000 could do 22bit dithering on the output using the 16bit framebuffer, it basically outputted 22bit colors dithering the image creating an image that looks better but is still faster to render.
A Voodoo3 on a CRT looks very good with the right options set.
I love that even old tech looks so similar to new tech not it the coolers or the color but the actually board and how it is put together and all that the boards look the same just more dense now it’s cool to see
Given your track record of dropping things, I have no idea why they would bring this priceless relic to you ;)
Love the classic Chieftec case. I went with a Chenming version of it back in the day due to having a single 120mm fan vs. dual 80s and still use it to this day. Nowadays it's just a node for my Tdarr setup but still, it's alive and well.
Still using that Chieftec Dragon case as my main PC today, with a Phenom II 1090T. I don't game on it, so even though it's ancient it still does the job.
@@waynebagger643 Whatever gets the job done! Had I not gotten into GTA Online pretty hard I'd still be on my Q6600 machine, that old thing and its DDR2 memory just couldn't handle online play. I've got an 11700K, 64GB DDR4, and a RTX 3080 now and hardly use it at all--I don't play much anymore and it's mostly older stuff that modern integrated graphics can run.
Loved this video. I'm very nostalgic towards 3dfx and the voodoo cards. The voodoo 2 was my first.
Totally forgot about 3DFX and Voodoo. That was a trip down memory lane. I never actually had any of their cards as far as I remember but I do remember the name. I have a giant ISA GPU in a box somewhere I need to pull it out, I don't recall the brand (Trident I think) but now I wonder if it might actually be worth something.
Holy... , I had the same exact case, except in black and a Voodoo 2, like 20 years ago... I remember buying all my parts from COMPUSA, Circuit City and Frys Electronics. It was my first PC build. This whole video was Nostalgia
I remember my dad getting all jazzed about voodoo cards back when I was a kid. He was really into Quake back then. He played Quake 3 Arena for probably 6 or 7 years and was pretty damn good at it.
I REALLY wish we could get a third competitor - and HOPE Intel gets their act together... and hope that we see more in there. We need more.
There's also Imagination Technologies trying to get back into the desktop market... failing for now, though.
I remember when 3DFX decided to produce their own GPUs. Almost everyone said: It's going to go wrong!
I was SO HAPPY to see the term "3d Decelerator" put beside the S3 chip. That card... god. Its a meme that will never die. I had a Virge Gx (i think) When they came out. Lara never looked so Filtered(Sharp) .. It was like 3 fps, but damn it was purdy. Unplayable and useless, but pretty.
Thanks to S3, Microsoft bought them and developed D3TC off the original MeTaL API.
U99 under it will never stop being beautiful, same goes to Quake 3 Arena
We had an S3 Trio in our ole Pentium 3 500 system. Damn card could hardly run anything. It used to crash pretty quickly when starting something like The Phantom Menace. Motocross Madness was fine though
@@leviblack7036 Was the Trio higher end than the Virge Gx/Dx (dont remmeber which it was) just remmeber that it was so "powerful" the thing didnt even have a heatsink on the gpu silicon. I had mine I believe in a around the 486/dx4 100 to Penium 200 era. That long ago kind of blurs together all this time later. But it was just before intel switched to the "nintendo cartridge" style of processor mounting. It was a fine card for 2d gaming It ran what I played well enough, but that thing REALLY didnt like anything remotely 3d. (but it was a fine windows base card) But yeah, it sucked. Glad someone else remembers these abominations.
@@Dj-Mccullough I don't know where it sat vs the Virge but this was circa 99-00. It certainly wasn't a high end card for its time. We had the option of getting a much better card when we brought the PC but we didn't think we needed it.
Ohhh
Still have my Voodoo 3 2000, and Diamond Monster 3D II shadowboxed on my wall. So many good memories with those cards in my childhood. :) Glide was absolutely amazing.
Great video Linus and Anthony. It was a great moment in time in 3D games history. Thank you for sharing
Back then, I recall not having a GLIDE enabled GPU. I wanted to play OG EQ but it *required* GLIDE. I also remember that 3d Mark 2001 test with the Matrix style test - it was so sick!
EQ?
was that a MacGyver melody at around 4:24?
100% it is! Commented the same then went looking to see if anyone else noticed xD
I will never forget the first time I ran Quake the 'proper way' with my 3dfx Voodoo 1... ❤❤❤
3dfx blew my mind SO HARD when it came out. I was used to playing Quake at like 8fps on my 33mhz 486.. Software renderer of course. Suddenly my buddy is running the game at framerates I'd never seen in any game, and it looked SO MUCH BETTER... The change was so dramatic.
Only tech that's blown my mind harder is VR. Leaps come so rarely these days in tech and gaming. I miss the 90s... We went from Wolfenstein to HL1 and Battlefield 1 and Tribes PRETTY quick.
Extra points for running a REAL CRT monitor!
Not just any real CRT, that's an FW900. The only widescreen PC CRT ever made. Sometimes rebranded as IBM, Digital, HP, Silicon Graphics. There is usually one on eBay at any given time with an asking price in the thousands.
I'm surprised that you didn't include Unreal in the benchmarking of the card. Unreal FLEW on GL. I knew a guy who had a VooDoo 5 5500, and I thought it was so cool, until I realized it was barely faster then my VooDoo 3 3000. It's a shame that 3DFX fail cascaded so hard, and I swore off Nvidia after the buy out, until ATI proved how hard it was to make good video card drivers!
Uhm, as a retro enthusiast (and since I have 23 x Voodoo cards, including 2 x Voodoo 5 5500), I feel like I need to set the record straight. 😁
I can tell you without a doubt that the Voodoo 5 5500 is not "barely" faster than the Voodoo 3 3000. You were probably comparing them in CPU limited scenarios. At 1024 x 768 / 1280 x 1024, depending on the game, the Voodoo 5 5500 is almost twice as fast as a Voodoo 3 (or ~50% faster when the Voodoo 5 is running in 32 bit color).
Blooden, you may know this then, did all of the voodoo 3 3000 have the built in TV tuner capture cards then? I remember how annoying the purple mostterly long cable was, and how they added TV capture right around the time of the HD transition.
1:08 So no LTT screwdriver now.
The PC case @ 1:37 bring back alot of memories, i had the black one.
1:40 i have that exact old case with an old OC q6600 just can't bring my self to get ride of it
Like! Too bad the CRAZY multi-GPU MONSTER Voodoo 5 6000 was never officially released.
The Voodoo Rampage would have been interesting as well.
@@RetroNorth of course but Rampage still needed at least 6 months to function normally and to be released. The Voodoo 5 6000 on the other hand was practically just a step away from being released on the market.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 True, the 6000 was a beast and indeed much closer to general release. But it was all the same tech as the 5500, just more of it. ( With the addition of Voodoo Volts maybe if that counts. )
What a piece of history. 120 fps at the time wasn't even considered as anything in gaming as far as I remember.
Damn throws us right back real good. Look how far we have come since then, wow.
Yes it was, rarer perhaps and most people preferred the higher resolutions, but you can see in the shown benchmarks from april 2000 both the original and second geforces getting over 100fps in Q3 at 800x600.
Remember refresh rates were higher than for a long time in later years due to CRTs being a migraine inducing flicker fest at 60hz and not great at 75. 85Hz was a common minimum for many and at lower resolutions the good ones could go quite high.
One other nifty trick with the early Voodoo cards, because they only accelerated 3d, they were platform agnostic. You didn't have to flash the bios to use the same card on a Mac to recognize the color space. A co-worker had a pair of Voodoo 2 cards running in SLI which he replaced with a Voodoo 3, so I managed to get one of them for cheap. Installing it in my G3 desktop was as easy as popping in the card, and dragging the driver into the system folder.
same here. I bought the early Voodoo cards and flashed those and then upgraded to one that just worked.
That was the pinnacle of Mac gaming, when it had a real culture and Mac devs trying to get the market of the ground.
The second Linus lifted the Chieftec case on the desk nostalgia hit me. Loved the Chieftec big towers and I still have a server running in one.
I have the same blue and used it on my desktop for 15 years, but here it was marketed as Chenming (and Antec in the U.S I think)
3:25 Now imagine paying 3x that for a modern GPU. Thanks NVIDIA
Did you auction this one off for charity?
Damn I knew I would find this comment here.
Damn you're second to this comment. sorry man.
I got my first 3dfx card in 1999 and it was AMAZING how much better it ran than software!
2:32 Hey it's the Quicktime Picture Viewer default picture thingy
This brings back so many memories.. I remember wanting a Voodoo but my dad refused to get one.
We ended up with a Matrox M3D instead, paired with the Matrox Millenium on our Pentium Pro 200Mhz setup because he got nice discounts from work (he worked in urban/ city planning government agency that had very good deals on business graphics solutions like Matrox/ SGI/ Quantum3D).
3:32 linus in his joe biden era
But will it run Crysis?
Never heard that one before........
Now he’s just blatantly copying gamers nexus at this point. Steve did this video over a week ago…..
That first step into 3D with Quake was friggin awesome. I put it on the same level as my first experience with VR on my Vive.
That was the core part of my lan party days at the roundhouse in Aurora, IL. A great lan party venue...you could always just take a break and hang out at the bar downstairs. I don't miss lugging around that CRT monitor I had back then though.
I'm pretty sure I still have my 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 somewhere in my storage boxes of computer parts.
my first dedicated card was a voodoo3 3000, so this is a cool blast from the past. had 3dfx maintained market dominance post y2k, my second card could have been another voodoo card instead of a geforce card.
On a semi-tangent but sort-of-related vein: check out some of the Intergraph 2D workstation cards from the early-mid 90's. Huge full-length video cards with tons of sundry chips, all driving a 13W3 curvy, BBW size monitor. In fact, now that I type this, you should start a retro-computing channel with rotating co-hosts such as "this does not compute".
I remember ATI Rage, Matrox, and S3 cards not impressing. When I first saw Tribes running on an original Voodoo card (I think) it was like a whole new world. I immediately built a new PC.
I had a Voodoo 3 3DFX card back in the day, it ran Quake sooo well... Those were the days.
Man this makes me feel old, I still remember the TNT and when i got my Gefore 2 MX400... what a blast
Oooooh, those logos at 10:00. That's some peak 90s graphics design.
That was neat. I love these old tech videos where the tech is just used as intended.