Will Tomb Raider (1996) benefit from a 3dfx Voodoo with 8MB of video memory?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ส.ค. 2024
- Let's explore the first Tomb Raider game, which was launched in 1996, a month before the 3dfx Voodoo was available for purchase. At the time of its release, the game was exclusively available with a software renderer. However, within a few weeks, gamers were in for a pleasant surprise. Join me on this journey as we delve into this gaming classic and examine whether the game benefits from the modified 3dfx Voodoo with 8MB of video memory, and if it improves its performance.
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0:00 Intro
1:23 Test System
4:14 Tomb Raider Intro
7:39 Gameplay
10:07 3dfx Voodoo
12:09 Frame rate capture tool
12:47 Benchmarks
16:18 Conclusion - บันเทิง
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I remember getting my first 3dFX card for Quake in 1996, it was such an amazing difference. We all had PCs for 'college', so we were at the birth of 3D PC Gaming. Such a difference to Wolfenstein just 4 years earlier.
I managed to convince my, then, wife hat I needed a pc for a course I was doing at college. he he. 30 years later it's now my job and my hobby. I never leave my pc...
@@Kallick heroic and relatable
I didn't get a 3DFX card until 1998, but Quake was the first game I played with it, and it absolutely blew my mind. So smooth! Tomb Raider 2 was also one of the first games I played with the card, and again it was just amazing how much better it was.
I got mine for Schleichfahrt (Archimedian Dynasties) an Battle Isle Incubation.
Miss those days..
Q2 on a voodoo3 banshee was awesome compared to software.. now we have q2rtx lol
3DFX was ahead of their time. What an amazing piece of engineering wonder. I loved my Voodoo 2 card. Good memories playing games with it.
Matrox Mystique was the best. I remember my pentium 200mmx with matrox.
@@saitama3135 Mystique was great for 2D image quality and for the 3D games it supported, it worked very well. But it lacked bi-linear filtering. Didn't matter in many games, I think the Matrox version of Mechwarrior 2 was the best of them all, and MotoRacer ran great with a Mystique, but the card wasn't supported much or for long. VooDoo was better. I got a Mystique first, and then a VooDoo to run alongside it.
Yeah it was a great time voodoo 2 💪🏻
I remember my first Voodoo card. I'd come straight from PS1. Loaded up Half Life. Sat watching what I thought was a cut scene, then realised it was active and I could move around! The leap was huge.
I love hearing stories from console peasants that finally had a moment of clarity...
My first video card was a voodoo banshee, and the very first game I remember running on it was Unreal 1, this was probably 1999. That intro, with the camera flying around a castle, in 1024x768, running at 60fps smoothly, was absolutely mesmerizing... It was a massive jump in quality.
From my memory, the guys at Epic took the effort to overly-optimize the software rendering so those without 3D acceleration in their systems could play the game thru software with a way more stable framerate and very nice details, for example the reflexions are rendered in both hardware and software.
Also the sunsets in Unreal are mesmerizing, even to this day.
Amen brother same here
A Voodoo Banshee would not run that at 60fps, maybe a Voodoo 3 with a PIII ;)
Probably Voodoo 3, Banshee max Glide resolution was 800x600 in 16 bit color.
@@giertox8737 Voodoo Banshee allowed 1280 by 960 on my setup back then and could deliver playable framerates up to 1024 by 768.
Unreal ran perfectly in 800 by 600 depending on the processor (Pentium II recommended) and with around 30 fps in 1024 by 768.
It had 16 megs of VRAM. Maybe you are confusing it with Voodoo Rage?
Voodoo Banshee was not that bad. Of course on average it was slightly slower than a Voodoo 2 12 MB due to the lacking second texturing unit and it needed patches for a lot of games to run fine (like Unreal). But it had 16 MB and was quite cheap and didn‘t rely on a high end CPU like Nvidias Riva TNT to run fast. And you didn‘t need a 2D video card which made it pretty cost-efficient in a gaming rig.
I visited my first LAN party in the beginning of 1999 with a Voodoo Banshee and people where surprised how crisp and smooth Unreal was delivered because they had myths about the Banshee in their minds.
A defining moment for games. The day 1 version of Tomb Raider was a flawed masterpiece. The Core Design team didn't have a great reputation for graphics and it showed. However there was no denying the gameplay was a step forward. Then it go 3Dfx support. My particular card was badged as an Orchid Righteous 3D but it used an early Voodoo chipset. Inside the box was a copy of Tomb Raider so with no particular expectations of anything special I installed it. I remember wondering if my save games would be recognised. I was about halfway in and I didn't fancy having to restart. I launched the game. The sludgy pixellated mess that used to be Lara was gone. Things were a lot smoother as well. Now you could actually interact with water and the backgrounds were free of smearing. I never did find out if my old saves worked.
I had a P75 at the time, and had pretty awful preformance in software rendering as you'd imagine. When I dropped my 3DFX in.... WOW!! It was one of the big jaw drop moments you only get once in while. Absolutely stunning 30fps, no problem.
Didn't think the P75 would deliver 30fps. I remember how my friend bought the Voodoo card with money his dad gave him. I was quite jealous because he could play any game with good visuals and performance.
No way would a Pentium75 do 30fps.
@@thefonzkiss with a 3DFX board, yes. Only at 640x480 mind.
I had a top of the ranged Pentium 200, having had a terrible AMD-PR-133 (which was an AMD 686 100Mhz rip off) that was really bad at floating point (and therefore Quake). My performance was probably similar or worse to an Intel P75. So I went all out and got a £200 Pentium 200Mhz. I already had 60-90fps in Quake 1 in 320x200 with that CPU, depending on the map. So when I got a VooDoo and ran GLQuake, I actually lost FPS (but in a higher resolution with added eye candy). For deathmatch, I still used software 320x200. But for single player I'd run the Glide version.
I think one of the reasons 3Dfx was so loved was because it did allow slower PC's, like the P75, P90, P120 etc - to eliminate that CPU bottleneck. Other 3D cards were tied much more closely to your CPU performance.
I will never forget being blown away by my first experience of Tomb Raider in 1998 on my 350 MHz Intel Pentium II with 32 MB SD RAM and 4MB Cirrus Logic 3D AGP Graphics Card. System Bus ran at 100 MHz on the Gigabyte Motherboard. And then I upgraded it with an extra 32 MB SDRAM and a Matrox Millennium G400 Graphics Card with 16 MB of Graphics Memory. And a Creative Sound Blaster Live! PCI Sound Card and the Quadrophonic Cambridge Audio FPS1000 Sound System. The Environmental Audio with the quality of the Subwoofer was as incredible as the 3D Graphics ! I thought the Resolution was higher than 640x480 VGA. Super VGA at 800x600 was fairly common at that point, and 1024x768 not a complete impossibility. I remember also having Tomb Raider 2 and Tomb Raider 3, but I never found the Puzzles and Level Design to be quite as good as the first game. Did the sequels add Higher Resolution Graphics ? And any extra Graphics Features such as Environment Bump Mapping that was built into the Matrox Millennium G400 ?
Dude, I was there back in the day. I was a teenager back then which was the prime age group to be for PC gaming in the late 90s. I had Voodoo Banshee with Cyrix 686. I remember antialiasing is like RTX mode on back in the day. It was one of those luxury graphical mode nobody bothered to turn on.
The game that brought me to the PS1 - love it, I really do wish they would do a decent remaster of this series on current hardware.
Playing Tomb Raider 2 with a 3dfx voodoo 2 on an aging P133Mhz computer was great! It looked amazing for the time! Same with FF7 on PC!
Tomb Raider was bought on day one by my friend from a reccomendation of mine because I'd read a review in PC Zone. We went to the video game shop and he bought a bunch of games, including TR. He had a Pentium 166MMX at the time, and even in software mode the game was visually impressive. Diving into the pool of water from 50m up was an insane gamer moment. We looked at the game in SVGA mode too but the framerate tanked to under 10fps. Later that year though, we both bought a Matrox Mystique and the game was fully playable in 640x480, so we ran through the game again. The following year with our 3Dfx VooDoo cards, through the first game and Tomb Raider 2.
I always kept my Mystique as a 2D card, and for the Matrox version of Mechwarrior 2 which was by far the best version of that game back in the 90's. The Mystique Tomb Raider patch was also extremely well optimized and, even though it lacked the bilinear filtering of the VooDoo card, I often used the Matrox exe instead of the Glide version.
Diving from 50m up? Didn't you mean 15m? 50m would break your bones on impact with the watersurface.
@@j.vonhogen9650 Dude its a video game! It's not REAL! And Lara can do it, as long as you held the key to make the dive animation, even though she still screams she enters the water like a graceful penguin.
@@TheVanillatech- Wait, what? This is just a video game?? This is not real?? No way!! I apologize for the misunderstanding, I really thought this was real footage of a real action hero diving into the water in a real underground temple complex. My mistake!
It doesn't change anything though, since the height still looks 15m at most, not anywhere near your estimate of 50m, which was the point I was trying to make.
Anyway, thanks for the penguin related info. It really helps! ;-)
@@j.vonhogen9650 When I was a kid, about 7 or 8, we went on vacation with another family. My mother had become friends with this other woman, and that meant she and her family, her husband and son, were invited along with us. I remember, in Malta, we went into Valetta one night and ended up at some carnival / fair. They had a huge VR machine that you went into, strapped youself inside, which had a giant screen and the whole thing moved around. It was a virtual reality rally drive, and it was very exciting.
What happened was, that family we travelled with, well the husband and dad, he was a fucking moron. He was the kind of dude that NOBODY liked. He came into the machine with my brother and myself and, once strapped in, he started talking out loud to the other 11 or so people paying for the experience. He was criticizing EVERY LITTLE THING the driver was doing. "He's in the wrong gear! He changed too early! He shouldn't be turning like that! He's not a good driver! If he did that again his engine would blow!". On and on and on. In the end, we all wanted to hang him. Proper dick, you see?
Same kinda dick that goes in search of hyperbolic comments regarding video games from yesteryear and argues with them.
Don't be that dick.
Dick.
@@TheVanillatech- Oh, I see what this is really about. You are not mad at me, you are mad at the father of that family who b@nged your mom during that vacation in Malta! It must have been really traumatizing for you to be in that same hotelroom every night pretending to be asleep! Really disturbing memories, I'm sure. Yuck!
I'm not an expert, but you may want to try psychoanalytic therapy to overcome your Oedipus complex before you may hurt someone. You are obviously full of anger and anxiety, and I do feel sorry for your pain and suffering, but psychological projection won't help you deal with your past. Lara Croft is not your mom, and your mom's boyfriend has probably already moved on and doesn't even remember your mother and her emotionally neglected son.
It's time to let it go and live your own life, as long as it lasts. Who knows, maybe you will figure out how to live a meaningful life without feeling rejected and without constantly thinking about those horrifying moments in that dark hotelroom in Malta.
Just remember that you are amazing and unique! You can do anything if you just put your mind to it, like jumping from a 50m high cliff without any consequence whatsoever! I wish you all the best.
P.S. You've signed your comment with "Dick", is that really your name, or is that just your Freudian way of fighting the demons of your past?
I still have my Voodoo 1 and 2 cards. Tomb Raider, Fatal Racing and Carmageddon were my favorite 3DDFX games early on.
I played this game with software render until I got my first GPU which was a Riva 128 based STB Velocity 128 and soon after the card was obsolete and I bought my first Voodoo based card. This game was stunning and another game I wish people would review more of is Drakan Order of the Flame. That was a very amazing looking game on the voodoo cards at the time. I loved exploring and flying around on a dragon through the game.
Drakan was pretty cool at the time
I do know what it feels like, because I was one of a few fortunate teens to have a Monster 3dfx Voodoo1. It was simply unbelievable from day 0. Most games and demos came from magazines at that time, I could test games like P.O.D., GLQuake, and a few more. Quake was a thing on its own, because I went from 20-25fps to almost 80fps. Again, at that time, 80fps at max resolution, on a CRT, it felt like it was an Arcade machine.
Pentium 90 overclocked to 120 and voodoo 1 was how I played the first Tomb Raider. The memories...
I guess I was spot on the ;)
I had a Pentium 200 (vanilla not MMX) and a Matrox Mystique. A few months into 1997 I bought a 3Dfx card but kept the Mystique as a 2D card, though the Matrox version of TR was amazing too - just without the bilinear filtering. Still remember thinking that the graphics of the Venice level on TR2 was the pinnacle of visuals, first time I saw it.
Really appreciating the depth you're going into this with. Loving it. My memory chips and sockets have arrived. Just waiting on the PCBs to get out of customs. Desperately trying to resist the urge to just solder the sockets back to back, then do the rest with wires. Ahhhh. No. I must be patient!
Good luck and stay strong :)
I'd like to see a benchmark of SVGA software mode in Tombraider, going from the minimum required CPU (Pentium 60Mhz) to the first CPU capable of hitting that 30fps cap (probably a Pentium 2 350Mhz or so). That would be super interesting.
still got goosebumps when i listen to the first secs of the intro theme
this game was my first experiences with my 3dfx card :)
Great video! The 3dfx was amazing, I remember playing POD (race game) and then trying the same game with the Voodoo I, was something unbelievable. And later on, the Ultra 64 N64 HLE emulator came out. Great times...
you should test the voodoo 8mb with unreal, halflife, quake2, turok, carmageddon 2 and see how it compares to the og 4mb. Especially with different cpus!
Yeah and take tombraider 2 ans 3 with it. It is not supporting 3dfx but it does higher resolutions, so more mem should enable Z - Buffer on 800x600
If you do not have the correct driver, which is written for 8MB usage, the difference is not really noticable (if you check the graphs, the drops of 4MB, 6MB or 8MB configuration are very similar). if you use AA, the more memory if beneficial for the performance.
Awesome!
I remember playing this and 2, also Viper Racing on my old K6-2 back in the time...
Sehr geile Videoserie. Mein erster PC war ein P2 400 mit einer Voodoo 2. Ich habe vorher Tomb Raider immer auf dem alten P1 133 von meinem Vater gespielt. Als ich dann das erste Mal Tomb Raider mit dem 3dfx Mod gesehen hab, sind mir fast die Augen raus gefallen 😵😄
Great video!
Great video! I was wondering what your thoughts were about the wall texture tearing present in your overclock that are not present in the basic.
This was the first game I ever saw running on a Voodoo. Even my dad was amazed.
Tomb Raider had everything, the puzzles, the guns, the music, the graphics, the levels and in 3d.
The change from 2D games to polygon 3D was amazing and the change from polygon3d to glide or 3dfx was equally as amazing.
I came late to the 3dfx world with my Vodoo Banshee PCI (running on a Pentium MMX 233 mhz) I still remember the day I installed it and played again all these games with it (Quake II, Tomb Raider I and II, Need for Speed 2 SE...). It was a magical day for a teenager like me. Seeing such a change in the graphics of a game with a single component is something that will probably never be repeated again. I think the only time I ever felt anything like it again was watching Sonic Adventures on Dreamcast for the first time.
Heh. I remember a friend of mine had just moved out into a flat by himself, as a teenager, back then. He was really depressed, living alone, no money and nothingt to do. One day I went over to his and took a spare PC I had, with a 17" CRT. It had a VooDoo banshee inside too. I installed 20 games or so for him, including the ones you mentioned, and he finally had something to keep him from being bored! Those Banshee cards ran very well, a little flaky in support, but decent cards!
This was one of the first accelerated games I played. It was an amazing experience. I think I had MDK, Tomb Raider, and then Quake. (Quake ran my life for the next 2 years)
Haha I know what you mean! I played all of those way back. I was software for the longest time and got into Quake CTF. Then one Christmas I was given a Voodoo 3 2000. Oh man what a shock! Quake went from shooting pixel men to seeing faces through the scope. And let me tell you that Voodoo 3 2000 lasted for quite some time. I was poor and couldn't really afford to replace hardware. But when the chance came I had a choice between a card and new system I took the new system. Went to the Athlon Thunderbird 900MHz and that old Voodoo 3 2000 still let me play Counter Strike with probably 40FPS. Stuttered now and again but that card was a workhorse way beyond its cut off date. People at lan parties couldnt believe I was still running a Voodoo 3 2000 haha. One of the guys even gave me their old GeForce 2 MX 400 and begged me to use it. I was sad to give up the old girl but those 60fps smooth frames convinced me.
I can imagine what it was like playing all our games in software mode and going to THIS.. because I was there.
Dad had his gaming PC I used often, one day he brought home a 3dFX card or something and our games changed forever.
Same for when we had 56k modem and moved up to cable modem.
oh man this brings back memories of when i was playing Half life and Quake 2 with software rendering and my jaw dropping when i plugged in my Voodoo 3.
Great video, thank you!
Glad you liked it!
When I got my first PC, it didn't take long for me to learn a bit and realize I wanted a Gpu. I got a Voodoo card and the first two things I played were this, and MSFS. Having the experience of going from software draw to hardware acceleration was amazing, haven't experienced anything quite like that since.
Thanks for this nice video!
Where did I put my Tomb Raider CD again?...
I purchased a Creative Labs Voodoo2 3Dfx card for my Pentium 133 desktop in 1998, the things I remember playing the most were Star Wars Jedi Knight and the Nintendo 64 emulator UltraHLE.
I remember being at university back in 2001 thereabouts. I played all the Tomb Raider games before angel of darkness on a PC with the voodoo 3500 graphics card. The other cool thing about it was that it had a TV tuner card built into it too so you could watch tv on your PC in the halls without owning a tv (weight bulk/space). You could also output your video to an analogue tv too but I only remember doing that once or twice.
Yeah 3Dfx's attempts to stay relevant in the face of stiff upcoming competition. I was working at PC world part time from Xmas 1999 through to Jan '01. I remember literally seeing the downfall of VooDoo, as more and more remained on the shelves. Eventually we had to tell HQ to stop sending us stock of them, because they were not shifting. On the upside, I managed to get a decent VooDoo collection out of it, buying damaged box / missing contents / customer returned cards for pennies from the "returns" cage in the warehouse. Still have a bunch of VooDoo 2's, 3's and 4's in my GPU cabinet from back then. But it was a sad time, seeing them rotting there on the shelves...
I still have this game on CD. It runs on Arch Linux amazingly well.
Yes I can imagine what it means, my friend, as "I was there when it happened"! Everything you said is exactly how I experienced the first Tomb Raider. It barely run on my first computer (frankly I forget if it even was a pentium..maybe a 486?)...still I was in awe of the graphics and perfectly happy with a resolution todays you may find on a facebook avatar! I looked at the game's cardboard cover (another thing today people know nothing about) and wondered when one day we may experience graphics "that good". hehehe what a trip.
And Finally I did get the Voodoo card.
It was better than sex, man. I started playing with all sorst of videogames that were choppy to see how the performance would improve. It was the first time a graphics card would represent for me such an important component for the computer.
I think today when I buy a graphics card I expect that kind of enthusiasm (especially given the money we're paying).
Nice Benchmark. Ohh good old times of eye destroying poststamp playing. 😄
Sehr gutes Video, das habe ich in meiner Jugend mit einem 166MMX Pentium gespielt. Das waren noch Zeiten.☺
Vielen Dank! Ja, werde die Zeit nicht vergessen - als 3D Spiele wirklich 3D Spiele wurden!
@bits and bolts......Liked video. in the name of science. I don't know why you made this video.. but it's archived now
Thank you! I never had the chance to play Tomb Raider with a 3dfx card back in the day. And because some of my viewers asked to look at that game using the modded Maxi Gamer3D Voodoo card. All for science 😉. But there are more games to come. I think the next game I'll look into will be Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.
Seeing Tomb Raider running on a Voodoo for the first time back in the day was a revelation (no pun intended.) The difference between software & hardware rendering is stark. This may be sacrilege but honestly the Power VR is, in my opinion, a better option as it allows the card to make full use of it’s 4MB of texture memory & whatever ROP memory your 2D card had, typically 2MB at the time, offering higher resolutions. Obviously that’s comparing to a 4MB Voodoo & I was using a 4MB Tseng Labs ET6100 for 2D at the time, giving the game 8MB total to work with & resolutions up to 1024x768.
To add more sacrilege I was bored by about half way through Tomb Raider & only finished the game as my GF wanted to see all the cutscenes & the ending.
Really interesting video, thanks. It is interesting for me personally to compare to a Power VR PCX2 working with an ET6100.
Matrox Mystique version was also great. It lacked the bilinear filtering on the textures, but in SVGA mode the game ran perfectly smooth and looked amazing. I had both cards in my PC back then (Maxi Gamer 3Dfx and a 4MB Mystique) and often played using the Matrox card over the VooDoo.
@@TheVanillatech I have also plaid it recently on Rendition Vérité, in a retro PC & it’s glorious.
@@nicholsliwilson Yeah it really was a crisp game in SVGA, whichever card you used.
Ive never owned a Verite (still dont) - they were not marketed big over here in the UK, so I've never seen first hand how they look or feel. But I remember from a POD benchmarking video on TH-cam that I saw, the Rendition cards seemed pretty nice.
I remember seeing Quake2 with 3D acceleration for the first time. Canopus Pure3D 6meg Voodoo1 add-in card. Seeing that difference for the first time is unreal. You simply can't believe it runs that good.
Also…. VERY COOL! Thanks for making/sharing this. Absolutely excellent!
Glad you enjoyed it!
VooDoo 2 was the most wanted accelerator graphics that everyone did wants! I played Quake 2 with this card, it was awesome that time.
My first computer as a kid was a Gateway with a Pentium 2 processor. I ended up getting a 3DFX Voodoo 2 (can't remember the mb...) and all my friends were floored at how much better Tomb Raider 2 looked on my Gateway compared to their PS1. Wish I still had it.
Hey there! I totally agree that Tomb Raider was an awesome game for its time, but its configuration and benchmark capabilities are limited compared to Quake. Quake is an excellent choice for testing your mid-range computer, as it offers endless configuration options via its built-in console and configuration files. Plus, its benchmark feature is much more user-friendly!
Not to mention the fact that Tomb Raider was originally built on the Saturn Hardware, ported over to PS1, ported over to PC, so the assets are optimized for 2~4mb ram.
Quake, while every level is less then 1.44mb, will have some interesting performance dynamics depending on ram size.
I still have my Voodoo 1 card. :) Man I loved that thing back in the day. Favorite games - Quake and Hexen. Can't remember if Quake 2 came out. Though I remember playing Quake 2 on an Elsa card that supported shutter glasses (basically turning your monitor into a 3D display). Having depth perception ups your sniping game. LOL
The scan line from back in the days brings back memory
i had Pentium 120Mhz cpu it good for its time. ran a Voodoo Rush in it
I still remember running this game on my first ever PC in 1999. It's a low cost PC and has no dedicated graphic card. This game could run on it (Celeron CPU), but with reduced resolution hence tiny windows on a big screen of 14 inch.
Now that I have a laptop with iGPU screaming at 1 teraflops in battery saving mode, how many of this game instances can be run at the same time simultaneously? Wow...
Do you know if the 320x200 res option ran too fast/caused screen tearing at 70hz (line doubled for VGA)?
I played this on a P166 in 320x240 mode. It was only half through the game that I got stuck in some Egyptian tomb and really didn't know what to do next (no internet...). I just started pressing buttons on my keyboard out of frustration. And then the game switched to 640x480 mode... I still remember that to this day. I think I already finished the game when I bought my 3DFX card. I think Unreal was the first game I played with 3DFX.
This game blew my mind on PS1
i've played NFS Porsche on a Compaq with Vodoo 8Mb, great memories man, great times....
The day we got a Voodoo Banshee, I'll never forget it. NFS3 never looked better.
I had the same Graphics card. Did you also happen to play Carmageddon on it? It was sooo beautiful (IBM Captiva P200 MMX) KEKW
To think we went from 8MB to 24gigs on a 3090-4090... But I was shocked with the difference between the two different cards.
Tomb raider was the first true 3d game I ever played and boy did I play it, over and over again. Resident evil 1 I played so much I could complete it in 45 mins.
if I remember correctly, red baron II / 3d unlocked 800x600 if sufficient memory /sli was detected. I seem to remember reading about 1024/768 being possible on sli voodoo II on a later patch.
TR2 looked and worked amazing on my P200 MMX + Voodoo 2 12MB, and of course Unreal
Voodoo2 12mb on pass-thru Matrox Mystique 2mb and Diamond Monster 2. Oh boy. Matrix shipped with Scorched Planet and Mechwarrior Enhanced 3DFX. Remember getting the very first 3DFX patches for games like Tomb Raider, Carmageddon, EF2000,Longbow Gold/2, Jane’s F-15,EAW (to name a few) and Morrowind. Truly the birth of gaming. I still have my voodoo 3, TI 4600, Matrox Mystique, diamond monster, voodoo2 12mb and AWE32 sound card! I even have my old (upgraded lol) Win 98/DOS 6.22 dual boot himem.sys etc pc. A proper custom built pc back in 95. Cost something like £2,406 U.K.
Excellent video, like! Most probably it will make a difference with increased memory in newer games with higher system requirements from 1997-1998.
I still play with my 166mmx with Matrox Mystique PCI and Diamond Monster 3dfx voodoo1 assembled between 1996 and 1997 especially to play Tomb Raider and Quake with the dedicated libraries.
I remember back in the day saying.. one day actual game play will look as good as the cut scenes... and nowadays it looks even better!
First ever 3dfx voodoo 1 with 4mb I ever saw was on tombraider. Bought my own a month later. Revolutionary hardware that took quake and unreal to a whole new level. Glory days of pc gaming to me.
Good times. Had a 166mmx@208 with a dynamite 128. Just about as good as it got until the v1 was released. Still miss playing Motoracer on my v1
Back in 1997 - 1998, I didn't know what the purpose of have 8 MB of video memory was. I thought all you needed was enough space to have a framebuffer.
Now, I have a AMD Radeon 6800 with 16 GB VRAM.
2:20 Meanwhile the advert shows a stick of 16 MB for 100 USD.
3:54 Prebuilts were marked up pretty high or would always be bundled with extra stuff you didn't really need. It seems like custom building a PC was much cheaper as a Pentium 133 equipped mobo (I think it's equipped?) was 338 USD and 16 MB of RAM would cost somewhere in the 150 USD range by the later part of 1996. I suspect that a whole PC, without the monitor, would probably cost about 1k USD.
*Edit* OK, so I kind of managed to piece together a Pentium 133 PC with 16 MB of RAM, 2 GB HDD and an ATI Rage II from prices I managed to find online. I got to just under 1k USD.
If you were upgrading from, say, 486SX PC for Doom, chances are you could recycle the sound card, speakers, floppy drive, PSU, mouse, keyboard and monitor. With a CD ROM drive it would add up to around 1.2k USD. And the RAM was actually among the cheapest parts. For 100 bucks more you could upgrade it to 32 MB of RAM. Something I imagine would really help out with snappiness. Overall it was a better performing PC than what the prebuilts could offer.
Also fun fact: Tomb Raider with a Voodoo card was optimized so well that even a 486 could run it at a decent framerate, so long as it's one of those faster 486 systems. I imagine that a 486DX2-66 would even run it at least as good as a Pentium 133 would in software mode at 640x480.
jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm
jcmit.net/diskprice.htm
www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cd-rom-prices-plummeting/
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/3d-rage-ii.c873
I finished first time Tomb Raider on my P1@166 with 32M and S3Trio with 2M under Win95. Years later, I played again but with a P3 and Ati Radeon 9250 under Win98 (not sure if I finished it or no, I was upgrading to an AthlonXP at the time). Now it´s tome to give it a try on my newly P1@100.
When I first played it, I wanted a Voodoo 2 but the card that I bought was defective and after I returned it, that store did not get any soon, so I had to play on the integrated S3Trio.
I remember seeing different 3DFX cards and the amazing looking boxes in my local electronics boutique in the UK, next to the Creative Labs SoundBlaster Cards and WarCraft stand etc.
Loved the gaming era back then PS2, GameCube, Xbox Original, Games Mag sections good times good times
Oh yeah! The original art on Voodoo GPU boxes were insane. All those UV painted faces and stuff. It really caught your eye.
I remember overclocking my trident and adjusting it's IRQ latency for better performance back in the day. I think at that time, I had an early test release of the 6x86 P200+ .
my uncle's 3dfx setup was always smooth..that was until my family bought an eMonster eMachine that had we TNT2. Remember it waa pretty crazy playing Giant Citizen Kabuto for tbe first time and you could actually see far away.
descent 1 and 2 would be a good test, maybe screamer 2/screamer rally, nfs2:se and moto racer. i get the feeling these are simple enough for the cpus to push well enough and let the extra memory matter... but i'm not sure if they go above 640x480. how about some overclocking with active cooling on the tmu and fbi? is that on the plans?
I already put some heatsinks on the Maxi Gamer3D. Will try some overclocking with active cooling and probably the games you've mentioned in future videos. Thanks for the suggestions!
There was a Matrox Mystique patch for Tomb Raider as well. Not as good as the 3DFX, but for Tomb Raider was pretty similar. I think the Mystique was a combined 2D/3D, so saved using a second PCI slot for a 3D only card. Now I'm remembering some of the other 3D cards of the time, lol. Anyone one remember the Creative Labs One? I seem to remember one, but I spent way too much money on upgrades back then!
There is also an S3 Virge Patch for Tomb Raider. The S3 card is also a 2D/3D card. If you take a look at Final Reality benchmark it shows you which features are properly supported on each card. The Matrox Mystique has only 3 or so from the entire list and the Virge still misses a few. But to be fair, both are great 2D cards with some 3D features support added. Idk how well the Matrox card does but my S3 card ran decent in Tomb Raider, even with a 133MHz AMD 5x86.
I still remember it vividly. Lord knows how I saved up for that card. I'm sure I was broke at the time.
Great, now I have to go replay the first 5 tomb raider games again.. lol
I remeber my first family PC being a Intel 2 450, and I didnt tell my dad I spent my childhood paycheck on a Savage 4 GPU because he would have never let me open it up and tinker with such an expensive electronic he purchased, so I waited til he left on a business trip and slipped that bad boy in and played UT Tornement in all its CRT glory. I to this day remember waking up and my buddy was playing UT for way to long looking so tired lol, man those were the days.
1997 was when I had my first PC, had many since then, with forgotten configurations, but still remember the 1997 build. It was a Pentium MMX 200Mhz, 16MB RAM, S3Trio64 with 1MB VGA, SoundBlaster AWE64, 2.1GB Quantum Fireball HDD, all in a 430TX Intel Motherboard. Playing games was... Well... Not good. But then, when I bought a Riva TNT... Seemed like a new PC... Such an advancement in gaming!!
what a nice trip to the past
Since my first computer was a 486 DXII 80 I was kinda hyped about MMX (and sadly in the end only got a K6 200 as an upgrade when K6-2 already was avaible)! Can you make a comparison, like fps benchmark, level of detail etc between those (kinda rare) MMX games with MMX enabled/disabled on the same CPU or at least the same Mhz-Ratio?
Great idea! I am actually trying to get a regular K6 without MMX and 3Dnow! to play around with this. I read that DirectX used MMX and 3Dnow! for Direct3D games.
I got 2x Monster 3D2's in SLI was incredible at the time, took 3SFX to another level
I loved my Voodoo card! And the acceleration card too! Good old times. I miss it. About 30 years ago...
What about open source alternatives and glide wrappers... I don't remember the full details but I believe there was one called Open Lara maybe you can try a higher resolution there? Amazing video by the way
If you want to play on a modern system, there's a wrapper based on Ati Cif which is wonderfull, when it works :)
There's nothing quite like the evolution of graphics and gaming in the 90's and into the early 2000's.
The closest wow-moment after that was Crysis. Then there's minor cool stuff like FEAR's lightning effects and stuff.
But nothing quite like the old days.
Speaking of different resolutions with a Voodoo1 card, you can force the game Pod (NOT Star Wars Pod Racer) into displaying in 800x600 during races, though menus still display in 640x480. It's some kind of trick you have to do in the .ini file of the game i think, i forgot what exactly, but there might be a site somewhere telling what to do.
Good memories. Not sure about it, but probably very late '96. One of the first games I played on my Matrox Millennium 4MB + Diamond Monster 3D combo.
That was a very desired combination of 2D + 3D cards.
"Can you imagine?" Ja, I remember it well. I got a 3dfx voodoo 2 because Tomb Raider, Quake and GTA had support. It was surreal playing a game that struggled to keep up at 640x480x8bit, suddenly become buttery smooth at 1024x768x16bit color. It was wild how performance was largely decoupled from screen resolution (Getting away from a midgrade S3 card also made a huge difference.)
It felt like I converted my lowly Pentium clone machine into an SGI workstation. Good times.
Nostalgy...My first pc had a p200 with mmx in it. I proudly overclocked it to 233mhz later on. My schoolfriends told me that no one needs such a insane compute power.
I remember getting my Diamond Monster3D 3dfx card and blown away by it. I stopped playing the playstation and only played PC games till the Dreamcast. Quake with glide was amazing. A real shame 3dfx went with making their own cards, allowing nvidia to take over. Mechwarrior 2 was also amazing with it. sadly, i remember my voodoo 3 card looking lame compared my dreamcast with 32 bit color, and my next card was a Nvidia card. It was amazing waiting on games to get a glide patch back then.
I remember there was a way to put higher resolution F1 or F2 in game and it went to 1280x1024 or something like that
First time I played tomb raider was on my first pc. Pentium 233 Mmx with 32 MB of ram, s3 virge 2d only card with 4mb of VRAM and sound blaster 16. Everything on 3.2 GB hd played on a 15 " crt monitor. Good old times. Always wanted a vodoo or later a vodoo 2 3d card, but my parents never let me buy it.
Midtown madness would be good to try, I had the demo on my voodoo 2 and it took a fair amount of tweaking to get it to run good.
I was 20 years old in 1996 many nights playing Tombraider 1-3 graphics continuously got better as years went on
I had the newer mmx version of pentium 166 released in the same month as tomb raider. I played the game not very long after its release and it was fine at 640x480. I´m sure it dropped below 30 fps at times but it didn´t feel laggy.
Why on earth did you keep mipmapping enabled??!?
(Great video, btw!!)
I expected mipmapping to utilize more memory due to multiple scaled down versions of the same texture. I may be wrong regarding this.
@@bitsundbolts I... feel like I should know the answer to this one, with all the testing i've done in the recent years 😕
Damn aging memory...
I remember playing tomb raider 3 on voodoo banshee in 2000. That was my first computer
Dang, I wish I still had my Voodoo 3. Not to USE it, but simply because it's a piece of history.
Hello, how do yo urecord VGA please? What method do you use?
OSSC + HDMI to USB capture device.
Had a 3000 with an OC'd 486 DX4-120. Most benchmarks picked it up as a P90.
I brought my Voodoo 2 card to play FF7 in the PC and noticed a big difference in speed and graphics. I believe the card was about $200 and that was a big purchase for me to save up. Now these days kids are paying $450+ for a single card and doing multi-gpu setups just to play games.
Multi-GPU is already a thing of the past if you aren't an overlocker trying to beat the scores of others in benchmarks. But yeah, GPU are crazy because Nvidia, but also AMD believe, they can still charge scalper and mining boom prices. Even though I could afford them, I don't upgrade out of principle.
I still remember ordering two Monster 3D Voodoo 2 graphics cards with a friend and when I put mine in, I found out that it was defective. Had to RMA it and they send me a replacement, but in the end it was awesome.
Well, my retro PC with Pentium 233MMX now has a Voodoo 2 inside and I was playing Tomb Raider under DOS with a Voodoo 2 patch.
good video, i still own the original version of the game from PS release. pity i dont have any way to play it tho. :-(