To this day i am more amazed at the way games looked when the 3DFX was introduced, than i am with the way current games look today. Considering Ray tracing is nothing new and has been around for decades, i cant help but feel that Nvidia and ATI/AMD have been holding back on the technology they could have given us years ago.
Ray Tracing was used in Half Life 2 but its totally static and pre-baked, It was also used in Quake 2 and Half Life 1, Today is basically the same except its in real time and has reflections which weren't possible back then, but Ray Tracing is nothing new, Back in 2000's, Games like Fear 2 and DOOM 3 used real time shadows and in return it aged horribly while Half Life 2 and its static lighting still looks decent today
Everything is old. If you had a cool $20 million in 1981 you could get properly anti-aliased real time 3D: th-cam.com/video/6W-qb_jHRhA/w-d-xo.html . Binary space partitioning for computer graphics was invented the same year as the first moon landing, in 1969; it was not invented by John Carmack for Doom. Transform and lighting was just standard fare on silicon graphics machines for professional use in the early 90's long before nvidia "invented the GPU", as they arbitrarily defined it; the real innovation of 3DFX was to take out everything that could be taken out. PCs had to be able to run the games in software mode; so the game had to have few polygons anyway and you already had a 2D card so who cares that there was no 2D core in the voodoo? You don't win by being first or even best; you win by doing the right things at the right times; if doom had come out in 1985 it would have used internal speaker and CGA colours and ran at 2 frames per second; it would not have been a success; it it had come out in 1995 it would have been a "build engine clone" or whatever and not been a big success; if it had been a real 3D engine like ultima underworld it would have ran too slow for an action game, especially in full screen. I think it is too early for raytracing; not that it has been held back arbitrarily; the performance isn't there yet to make a big impact; you're just going to get half-arsed combinations such as rasterization with some raytraced reflections etc. You can see the potential in fully path traced minecraft; but running a proper game with that level of lighting is the better part of a decade away.
@@iroquoiskaram8639I think the hard shadows in Doom 3 still look descent and work nicely in terms of adding horror and tension to the game. But Doom 3's rendering style would look really bad in a setting similar to Half-Life 2. HL2 definitely has a more natural looking lighting which fits to its map style with huge open spaces.
Last saturday I went to the thrift store and just bought for 10 us dollars an HP Pavilion 7410P which has Intel Pentium non MMX clocked at 200 Mhz and authentic OPL3 Yamaha onboard sound chip and S3 Virge onboard graphics. It also has a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive. I plan to install a Voodoo 1.
Michael Gardner as Kainia Karia Well, you can also do this today without buying anymore hardware than you own. See PCem or 86box PC emulator software for FREE. You can install Windows 98 and install Voodoo drivers as well as Sound blaster 16 or Sound Blaster Awe32 drivers or even Gravis Ultrasound and it's all completely virtual. You can play all of this on just about any modern laptop and play in a window or full screen and you don't need any hardware. You can choose CGA composite (which makes CGA games look better) or use Tandy graphics which makes CGA look better or use a Voodoo/Voodoo 2 card with SLI. You can emulate all the way down to a 8086/8088 and all the way up to a Pentium II or a Pentium Pro MMX or a non MMX pentium.
Great video, i am putting together a Diamond Monster 3dFX build and this will help me select games, i miss Dreams of Reality in this video though, a beatiful game specific for this card.
Some great games there! I think we all love Carmageddon and I'd forgotten all about Descent 2 so gonna have to go searching on eBay now as I remember playing that game and want to play it again now so watching your video is going to cost me money LOL! ;)
i remember having a voodoo back in the days and didn't know the difference between directed, openGL and 3dxf hahahaa most of the time I did not take advantage of it
A good choice! 👍 Don't forget to max. install 64MB RAM, because the 430TX chipset doesen't like more and with installed >64MB, you loose much of performance.
@@3DfxAslinger Back in the day when I went from 16 to 80mb of ram, i found out windows would stick file cache at the top of ram starting out of cached range. So I would just fix it to 16mb in the registry. And it would work out, but yea, 30% drop in performance for things outside of L2 was painful.
For us DESCENT2 games the 3dfx Voodoo was a game changer. 60fps instead of ~23fps, and it looked sooo much cooler with its antialiasing. We all bought the Diamond Monster within 2 months :)...
@cesaru3619 it ran with 60fps in descent 2 back on our computers most of the time (unless too many things were happeneing of course). Vut evenb43 average is great when you are used to 23.
@cesaru3619 the biggest mistake they made is doing graphics cards themselves then, until voodoo2 they only did the chips. Doing everything direct to customer is extremely expensive and you need expertise with good distributors. They quickly ran out of money. The glide system back then was great, no problems compared to direct3d and opengl, where people had problems with every game back then.
Creative came up with the very first pre-3dfx 3D accelerator The 3D Blaster VLB, the same year 1995 Nvidia released NV1 both unfamous cards, year after Orchid (well known PC 2D graphics) uses 3Dfx chip for the first time, and computer gaming changed forever...
@@3DfxAslinger Nothing is more satisfying than side-drifting into crowd at the end of Maim Street and smearing a little old ladies insides all over the road. Glorious red blood... I think I need to install Carmageddon again.
I don't see why that would be a problem. The 3D problem is just a more general problem than the 2.5D problem. You still have proper 3D coordinates for vertices and textures in a 2.5D renderer. You've just defined the level in terms of sectors on a 2D map with heights and so on so that you cannot really have level-over-level geometry without hacks like "portals"; but everything you need to render it in 3D "for real" is still in there. If you just bung that geometry into real 3D and render it on a voodoo it will be almost correct; the possible exceptions being sprites which have to be turned into a billboarded quad and looking up or down which was sort of a hack in the 2.5D engine.
Nice video. :) I am in the middle of building a pure DOS retro PC, but would like to keep my options open for Windows 98. Socket 7 and 233MMX seems to be a good choice there. But I actually have an unrelated question.. The music you use in the first minute of your video.. What is that? I have heard it before, and I love it! But I can't place it. Please, I hope you can help me identify that music. :)
Where can I get that little nice app to tweak my card you showed off in the beginning? I know I can manually edit autoexec.bat but it's nice to have a gui version as well.
For some reasons, my 3DFX DOS patches doesn't seem to work for Carmageddon, it keep on giving me green screens...NO the card isn't defective cos it work fine with Screamer 2 and Tomb Raider Gold.
@@3DfxAslinger i didn't tested it on another system, but why would Tomb Raider and Screamer 2 work and not others with external patches? Those external patches without the required Glide files are just asking for troubles it seem... Tomb Raider and Screamer 2 seem to run just fine because they seem to have all the required files compiled inside 1 file, so there's no need to grab the right files that work with the game.
You can can try another glide2x.ovl file version (.ovl=for DOS glide games, dll=Windows) and copy it directly to the game directory with the .exe/.bat file, from where you start the game. The game should now using the glide2x.ovl that is in the game directory. Try it the .ovl from the 3dfx reference driver version 3.00.01. This is the best driver for the Voodoo 1, better than the latest 3.01.00 reference driver.
@@3DfxAslinger i even tried another Voodoo1 and it's doing the same thing. Where can i get that 3.00.01 Glide2x.ovl and dll exactly? i can't find them, not even on the FalconFly mirror sites...
If i understand correctly games such Quake 1 & 2 are OpenGL games, and they have miniGL drivers for 3Dfx. I the other side games like Tomb Raider 2, Turok & Unreal are Direct3d games, and they also have special driver for Voodoo. That’s only my thinking about that.
@@gaffa2002 ok you are right I meant use games with benchmarks that give you a score like q3 q2 q1 unreal ut etc… as the reviewers use to do back in the day.
The famous German Carmageddon version, with green blood and zombies. :D
To this day i am more amazed at the way games looked when the 3DFX was introduced, than i am with the way current games look today. Considering Ray tracing is nothing new and has been around for decades, i cant help but feel that Nvidia and ATI/AMD have been holding back on the technology they could have given us years ago.
Ray Tracing was used in Half Life 2 but its totally static and pre-baked, It was also used in Quake 2 and Half Life 1, Today is basically the same except its in real time and has reflections which weren't possible back then, but Ray Tracing is nothing new, Back in 2000's, Games like Fear 2 and DOOM 3 used real time shadows and in return it aged horribly while Half Life 2 and its static lighting still looks decent today
Everything is old. If you had a cool $20 million in 1981 you could get properly anti-aliased real time 3D: th-cam.com/video/6W-qb_jHRhA/w-d-xo.html . Binary space partitioning for computer graphics was invented the same year as the first moon landing, in 1969; it was not invented by John Carmack for Doom. Transform and lighting was just standard fare on silicon graphics machines for professional use in the early 90's long before nvidia "invented the GPU", as they arbitrarily defined it; the real innovation of 3DFX was to take out everything that could be taken out. PCs had to be able to run the games in software mode; so the game had to have few polygons anyway and you already had a 2D card so who cares that there was no 2D core in the voodoo?
You don't win by being first or even best; you win by doing the right things at the right times; if doom had come out in 1985 it would have used internal speaker and CGA colours and ran at 2 frames per second; it would not have been a success; it it had come out in 1995 it would have been a "build engine clone" or whatever and not been a big success; if it had been a real 3D engine like ultima underworld it would have ran too slow for an action game, especially in full screen. I think it is too early for raytracing; not that it has been held back arbitrarily; the performance isn't there yet to make a big impact; you're just going to get half-arsed combinations such as rasterization with some raytraced reflections etc. You can see the potential in fully path traced minecraft; but running a proper game with that level of lighting is the better part of a decade away.
@@iroquoiskaram8639I think the hard shadows in Doom 3 still look descent and work nicely in terms of adding horror and tension to the game. But Doom 3's rendering style would look really bad in a setting similar to Half-Life 2. HL2 definitely has a more natural looking lighting which fits to its map style with huge open spaces.
@@soylentgreenbI totally agree with you. Doing the right thing at the right time is the key to success.
No Quake1? I can't believe it. Quake 1 and Voodoo1 are the best friends. But first version was vQuake, worth to look at!
Last saturday I went to the thrift store and just bought for 10 us dollars an HP Pavilion 7410P which has Intel Pentium non MMX clocked at 200 Mhz and authentic OPL3 Yamaha onboard sound chip and S3 Virge onboard graphics. It also has a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive. I plan to install a Voodoo 1.
Very good basis!
Michael Gardner as Kainia Karia Well, you can also do this today without buying anymore hardware than you own. See PCem or 86box PC emulator software for FREE. You can install Windows 98 and install Voodoo drivers as well as Sound blaster 16 or Sound Blaster Awe32 drivers or even Gravis Ultrasound and it's all completely virtual.
You can play all of this on just about any modern laptop and play in a window or full screen and you don't need any hardware. You can choose CGA composite (which makes CGA games look better) or use Tandy graphics which makes CGA look better or use a Voodoo/Voodoo 2 card with SLI.
You can emulate all the way down to a 8086/8088 and all the way up to a Pentium II or a Pentium Pro MMX or a non MMX pentium.
The DOS games that supported glide were essentially designed with the voodoo1 in mind, makes perfect sense to me now.
Unglaublich wie flott GTA mit der Voodoo läuft. Es war im Softwaremode selbst mit einem PIII 450 noch recht zäh. Tolles System!
Screamer was a great racing game. Add to that "Moto Racer" and you were in for hours.
Very interesting, one of the voodoos is on eBay at the moment... So tempting :)
Great video, i am putting together a Diamond Monster 3dFX build and this will help me select games, i miss Dreams of Reality in this video though, a beatiful game specific for this card.
Some great games there! I think we all love Carmageddon and I'd forgotten all about Descent 2 so gonna have to go searching on eBay now as I remember playing that game and want to play it again now so watching your video is going to cost me money LOL! ;)
Nice!
i remember having a voodoo back in the days and didn't know the difference between directed, openGL and 3dxf hahahaa most of the time I did not take advantage of it
Nice video 👍🏼 motivates me to build my 430TX chipset with P233MMX and Voodoo 1. I think I’ll put a AWE32 in it for the sound.
A good choice! 👍 Don't forget to max. install 64MB RAM, because the 430TX chipset doesen't like more and with installed >64MB, you loose much of performance.
@@3DfxAslinger Back in the day when I went from 16 to 80mb of ram, i found out windows would stick file cache at the top of ram starting out of cached range. So I would just fix it to 16mb in the registry. And it would work out, but yea, 30% drop in performance for things outside of L2 was painful.
@Dalle Smalhals Interesting CPU for a Super Socket 7 build with a Voodoo Banshee or Voodoo 3 2000.
Boring. Build a Socket 8 legend instead.
For us DESCENT2 games the 3dfx Voodoo was a game changer. 60fps instead of ~23fps, and it looked sooo much cooler with its antialiasing. We all bought the Diamond Monster within 2 months :)...
brah as you can see the voodoo don't run at 60 fps average.... more like 43...
@cesaru3619 it ran with 60fps in descent 2 back on our computers most of the time (unless too many things were happeneing of course). Vut evenb43 average is great when you are used to 23.
@@Lofote voodoo 1 and 2 were good, then they died because they sucked improving their tech either software or hardware... rip 3dfx
@cesaru3619 the biggest mistake they made is doing graphics cards themselves then, until voodoo2 they only did the chips. Doing everything direct to customer is extremely expensive and you need expertise with good distributors. They quickly ran out of money.
The glide system back then was great, no problems compared to direct3d and opengl, where people had problems with every game back then.
Creative came up with the very first pre-3dfx 3D accelerator The 3D Blaster VLB, the same year 1995 Nvidia released NV1 both unfamous cards, year after Orchid (well known PC 2D graphics) uses 3Dfx chip for the first time, and computer gaming changed forever...
awesome video!!! great memories!!
Still no mouse look in blood? It’s 3d you should be able to look up and down!
Fillrate is the king !
Seriously ... get the blood patch on Carmageddon! XD
Thanks, not thought about the blood patch, but zombies are also nice. :D
@@3DfxAslinger Nothing is more satisfying than side-drifting into crowd at the end of Maim Street and smearing a little old ladies insides all over the road. Glorious red blood...
I think I need to install Carmageddon again.
I was in the war...
What would be the best is you giving the links to grab the proper DOS 3DFX patches for each game.
For example here: soggi.org/misc/3dfx-voodoo-game-patches.htm
It is interesting to see how Voodoo handles Build Engine games (like Blood), since these are not exactly real 3D games ("2.5D").
I don't see why that would be a problem. The 3D problem is just a more general problem than the 2.5D problem. You still have proper 3D coordinates for vertices and textures in a 2.5D renderer. You've just defined the level in terms of sectors on a 2D map with heights and so on so that you cannot really have level-over-level geometry without hacks like "portals"; but everything you need to render it in 3D "for real" is still in there. If you just bung that geometry into real 3D and render it on a voodoo it will be almost correct; the possible exceptions being sprites which have to be turned into a billboarded quad and looking up or down which was sort of a hack in the 2.5D engine.
Lovely
I think for recording it's better to have vsync on to avoid screen tearing in final video.
I noticed it quite a lot in the Blood game when you turn.
Grand Theft Auto has some really ugly tearing also, just shows how fast this Voodoo card can run these games.
Quite nice
I know, but you can't see the max. performance with vsync on. I have never played with activated vsync, also in the 90s. That never bothered me. :)
What was the theme at the beginning from I remember that song
Great video! ^_^
Fuuuck i jumped in my young years :) hahah i had same same PC and games ^^ it was the good time !
Nice video!
Why the Caramgeddon dont use the CD audio tracks?
Thanks! I like the MIDI Music more in Carmageddon. 😀
Nice video. :) I am in the middle of building a pure DOS retro PC, but would like to keep my options open for Windows 98. Socket 7 and 233MMX seems to be a good choice there. But I actually have an unrelated question.. The music you use in the first minute of your video.. What is that? I have heard it before, and I love it! But I can't place it. Please, I hope you can help me identify that music. :)
Thanks! The music is the Windows XP music installation, or when you see the Welcome screen of Windows XP.
@@3DfxAslinger Aaah, yes! Wow, I forgot XP had this music. Thank you!! :)
should play the same games with a Voodoo 8MB to see if there is any improvement
You can see differences in later games, like Unreal. I have made a comparison video of the 4, 6 and 8 MB version.
@@3DfxAslinger going to watch the video right now
Where can I get that little nice app to tweak my card you showed off in the beginning? I know I can manually edit autoexec.bat but it's nice to have a gui version as well.
All here on FalconFly: www.3dfx.info/tools.htm
Do all the settings made in that tool go into the autoexec.bat?
That is correct!
Ok, thanks!
What is the name of the song in the beginning?
Windows XP Installation music
Can you to run GLIDE1.dll based games under DosBox / Win98 using your 3Dfx Orchid Righteous?
Yes, all 3dfx cards can also used with the DosBox under Win 9x/ME.
For some reasons, my 3DFX DOS patches doesn't seem to work for Carmageddon, it keep on giving me green screens...NO the card isn't defective cos it work fine with Screamer 2 and Tomb Raider Gold.
Also tested on another system? Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2?
@@3DfxAslinger i didn't tested it on another system, but why would Tomb Raider and Screamer 2 work and not others with external patches? Those external patches without the required Glide files are just asking for troubles it seem... Tomb Raider and Screamer 2 seem to run just fine because they seem to have all the required files compiled inside 1 file, so there's no need to grab the right files that work with the game.
You can can try another glide2x.ovl file version (.ovl=for DOS glide games, dll=Windows) and copy it directly to the game directory with the .exe/.bat file, from where you start the game. The game should now using the glide2x.ovl that is in the game directory. Try it the .ovl from the 3dfx reference driver version 3.00.01. This is the best driver for the Voodoo 1, better than the latest 3.01.00 reference driver.
@@3DfxAslinger i even tried another Voodoo1 and it's doing the same thing. Where can i get that 3.00.01 Glide2x.ovl and dll exactly? i can't find them, not even on the FalconFly mirror sites...
Is here on FalconFly: www.3dfx.info/voodoo1.htm You can extract the .exe file with Winrar/7zip...to get the driver files.
Hmmm... Modern GTA5 looks a bit better than DOS version, obviously.
Can You give me the drivers?
Well done my friend. Choose all real glide games .
If i understand correctly games such Quake 1 & 2 are OpenGL games, and they have miniGL drivers for 3Dfx. I the other side games like Tomb Raider 2, Turok & Unreal are Direct3d games, and they also have special driver for Voodoo. That’s only my thinking about that.
Yes, the games in the video can run without Windows 95/98/ME, under pure MS-DOS mode. Turok also supports Glide, but under Windows.
Unreal is also a native Glide game while also having a Direct3D renderer.
13:46 😄
Luck! 🙂
Haha, that happens in real rallycross, too.
Hey i can play GTA whit 3dfx graphics?
GTA 1+2 has 3dfx Glide support.
POD 3dfx....
sorry but anything lower than 60 fps is garbage at any resolution. L2review and use games with benchmarks next time,...
Fraps? Those games are for MS-DOS, man.
@@gaffa2002 ok you are right I meant use games with benchmarks that give you a score like q3 q2 q1 unreal ut etc… as the reviewers use to do back in the day.
@@cesaru3619Ok, got it now. Thanks for clarifying