S3 Virge is THE video card of my 1996 retro tower. It really delivers on the DOS era 2D performance. And the stigma about it is STILL keeping the price low.
I think the fact that there are still many of them is what's keeping the price low. Unlike 3dfx accelerator cards or actually rare cards, these were pretty common in prebuilt PCs.
I just bought an Orchid Righteous 3D to put in my 95 machine. It will be paired with an Ark 2000PV which has better performance and compatibility. The S3 is a great card for the money though.
Mediocre 3D cards are still great 2D cards. I have an S3 Virge in a Pentium Overdrive Windows 95 setup and it's Great. If I want to play early 3D games I have a completely different setup for that.
I recently found a scrapped Tower, it had S3 Virge and a Athlon K6 333 in it. Took it with me because of the fun i had Back then.... If somebody needs it, tell me. I also have a really old Video Grab/TV Card with ISA Bus. Would love to see Phil make a Video on it...
@@florianborkenhagen9434that K6 333mhz and VIA motherboard with S3 virgenPCI card was my second PC, later it had a Viper 550 card (Nvidia TNT) so much fun, and good price performance for its time. Playing command & conquer and some other games like Jeoff Grammonds F1 with steering wheel on my "game port".
@@warre1 The whole "whoops, i accidentally selected the wrong card" was quite funny. Not so funny, the 2 or 3 games that had no card selection and would just default to the virge.
@@warre1 @jukkapiispanen123 i bought it cause it was cheap, 3d accel wasnt a thing back then really till voodoo. i considered mistique or millenium but they were disappointing
I had an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 in my first decent PC build - a K6-2 300. It was a really good combo, the Virge was a very fast 2D card and compatible with everything in DOS and Windows that the Voodoo couldn't play, had all of the features of the Trio64V+ and a whopping 4MB RAM.
I had a Number Nine card that used Virge. I recall the disappointment. But back in 1996 a lot of us played with glacial FPS because it's what we had. There was a lot of making do at the time. With new games usually coming on CDs, making copies of games on floppies at computer shows, or behind the counter at a computer store if you knew the right person, died down. Played a lot of demos, too. The magazine CD-Rom Today had a disc which was always reliable for something shareware to pass the time. Single digit FPS and demos. That's the mid 90s.
Never was much of a gamer. Back then I had a Matrox Millennium PCI, which was very good for 2d acceleration. When I got interested in some gaming (Quake) I first got the Voodoo 2 2000, then later the Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, which card I still have today. To think 16Mb was once considered a lot of video ram. 😏
1996... I was still playing Amiga 500 games at home while I saw Duke3D, Quake and Tomb Raider at my buddies' places. I wasn't really jealous, I still liked the Amiga, I enjoyed all the games I could get on that little machine and I enjoyed my time at my buddies too.
That brings back a memory, my best friend in 1996 was into the Amiga too but all it took to get him onto the PC was Quake running on my PC with a Voodoo card.
yeah, Amiga was still great for 2d games and most of them had much better sound/music than the pc ports. but once doom was widely known, 2d games and any other home computer, kind of got forgotten, as the pc and consoles 3d era has begun. i also was still enjoying my few Amiga games from time to time (pc's were still expensive), until i saw 3d games in a voodoo card. as others said, that was the moment.
S3 Virge was used in Amiga Cybervision 64 3D graphics card. I have one in my Amiga 3000. Gives very nice 2D picture and runs full screen Doom, Genetic Species, Alien Breed 3D2 very nicely.
2:12 Ah, Matrox. They hold a special place in my heart even though I've never used any of their cards. See, they're based in my hometown of Montreal. They had been making commercial and industrial video cards since the late 1970s, and so, as their consumer products were consistently outdone by Nvidia, ATI and even 3dfx in the mid to late 1990s, they just shifted their focus back to commercial and industrial cards, and so they're actually still alive and kicking to this day. Matrox's founder and owner has been quite the philanthropist, donating tens of millions of dollars to local Universities' sciences departments even in the last couple of years.
Diese ganzen alten Hardware Reviews verdienen ein Abo - kenne keinen Kanal der so detailliert auf alte Hardware eingeht. Danke! Weckt tolle Erinnerungen.
I remember what I had in 1996. I had a Pentium 100 MHz with 16MB of RAM, a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 with 1MB of RAM, a 1.4GB hard drive, Sound Blaster AWE32, with Windows 95. It was a pretty stable machine. DOS games ran well and Windows worked decently enough. I did supplement it later in 96 with a Diamond Monster 3D, and this was also the first system I got a Subwoofer for. One of those Labtec sit by the monitor jobs, the LCS-2420 which was way more powerful than the cheap little speakers I had from the local computer shop. I played so many different games on that machine. But the one I remember most vividly was Lands of Lore Guardians of Destiny.
I had one but honestly never even bought it with any 3D Acceleration in mind, in 1996 these things were immediately cheap and available from the usual vaguely branded Taiwanese manufacturers with the crazy box art, they were popular cards just because of the price and acceptable 2D performance with 2/4MB of VRAM for 1024x768+ displays. I don't even remember mine coming with any ViRGE versions of games etc, I don't recall anyone having one and being disappointed by the 3D performance because very few even tried that 'capability'. Also in 1996 we had the release of the Rendition Verité and of course the Voodoo which was basically all the enthusiast magazines talked about, if you were building your own PC's and buying components you likely had one or the other.
I tried Unreal recently and I have to say that in retrospect it doesn't really work anymore :( .In multiplayer you can at least see hints of future turnaments but the single has aged much worse than Doom and Quake and compared to Half life a year younger it's just heaven and hell
Doom plays good with keyboard mostly, sprite enemies so hit detection is not the best. Quake released next and felt a lot like Doom with better speed and hit detection, mlook was introduced but not very practical. Unreal was the first FPS game that got mouse and keyboard controls right and that is the key. Halflife perfected the controls and added great story. Halo took all of this to the extreme, then came battlefield 1942, and then everyone's favorite Call of Duty. So with all this stated, without Unreal, you might never have had the level of control that we ended up with so quickly. Later Doom and Quake installments caught on, but we all owe it to Unreal for getting it right so early.
I have to disagree here. IMHO, Unreal I's singleplayer campaign is among the most athmospheric ones of all time. I re-play it every 2-3 years, and it never gets old; even the graphics don't look too bad. In comparison, Half-Life 1 aged much worse.
@@Ray-rt3yhMouse look and keyboard combo first brings X-engine in Bethesda's Terminator: Future Shock . Epic's Unreal brings fast paced Action shooting....And unreal graphics. Best in his time but simply and ugly now
The voodoo was really fantastic when it came out. Blew all the competition away. I tried a voodoo in a 486 and could get 25 fps in tomb raider in 640x480!
Reminds me of the incredible disappointment I had with my ATI 3D Expression+PC2TV card (Mach64 GT-B chipset). It was a PCI card, installed in my Pentium 120. Toggling "acceleration" would mostly make the game slightly better looking, but wouldn't really improve the framerate. I was so confused at the time that I called ATI and spoke to tech support, thinking my card was broken! At least the S-VIDEO TV out was excellent (I even used it to make a commercial DVD). (It is possible the 60 MHz front-side bus speed of my Pentium 120 might have made things worse, as the card was probably only tested on a 66 MHz FSB of a Pentium 100 or 133, but still, I was expecting actual acceleration.)
I remember our market here is South Africa was flooded with those S3 PCI cards and the people who bought computers with those cards where expecting Voodoo quality performance and then ended up being disappointed and regret not shelling out the extra bucks for a proper Voodoo card. Beer drinkers with a taste for campaign I guess. Ahh, sometimes I miss those days. 🤔 The S3's were amazing cards in the Windows 3.1 era and their VLB cards were great.
I had a top of the line Compaq at the time, it came with some sort of S3 chip built into the motherboard with Intel Indeo video capture a 233Mhz Pentium SDR ram like 32MBs and a zip drive and CD rom and a 6.5GB quantum hard drive (crazy large for the time lol) depending on the 3D game some ran OK and some games ran faster in software. I upgraded the cache RAM and later on I added a VooDoo 2. That Voodoo card was an amazing upgrade!!! I really loved that computer even with all the headaches, the zip drive got the click of death about a week or two before the hard drive failed... lost like 6 months of work I was doing on a file sharing program that would have been like a proto version of bit torrent. This caused me to stop programming all together. But playing games on that machine was a lot of fun :)
Ow man, i was so happy, had exactly the same setup, as a kid my first PC. Stealth 3D i forgot about that card. As the Riva 128 (i think) great machine. Played Duke3D and some other games on Windows 95. The sound of that old 5.25inch HDD from Seagate. Good old times.
My first PC was in October 1998 as a gift from my father for entering by exam into Politehnica University Electronics Division. It had a AMD K-6 II 300mhz and an S3 Virge GX/DX(that's how it was seen by Windows GX/DX and not just GX). My first games on this PC were Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2 I think, Age of Empires.
this brings back memories. My first PC had a Pentium 200 MMX, 32 megs of ram, a 4 MB virge and very soon a voodoo 1 .... I had the same blow away vibe when I launched Unreal and Tomb Raider 2. Great times :)
Sweet Memories. I had an Elsa S3 Virge Card back in the days. I've tried to play Jedi Knight in 3d. It was slow and choppy. But other then that it was a good Video Card. Well done and it could deliver a crisp Picture. And I also had a Spea Media fx. But I paired it with an AWE32 so it only did what it could do quite good: General MIDI (and eat up a LOT of Space in the Tower Case).
Hi Phil I remember building a lot of PCs with these back in the day when I had a computer shop in the UK. Probably because they were offering a lot of these to us cheap at the time. We got sent a sample voodoo 2 and once I saw that running Tomb Raider it was something we offered as an option in all our PCs. The sample went into my own PC 😅
I really wish I had kept my Pentium 200 and Rage 128 Pro 16MB. I missed out on DOS/early 3D gaming, having only upgraded from 8088 in 1999 and getting completely hooked on StarCraft as soon as I saw it. I got a few classics, thankfully - the X-Wing Alliance 3.5-game collection (XvT was a demo), Star Trek: Armada and ST:VOY: Elite Force, Mechwarrior 3, and the Half-Life Orange box. I was always impressed with the game discs whose audio tracks work in a CD player. The X-Wing and TIE Fighter discs were great as a child, doing my household chores over the summer with loud Star Wars music playing. Good times :)
I remember the first game i try when i bought my Voodo Diamond was POD. After playing a month in software renderer mode was mind blowing, the definition and silking move, i have no idea about FPS at that time but i knew just like Phil said that i was stepping into a new era. Great video!
I vividly remember those times, I also read PC Player every month and was really pumped for the S3 Virge when it was announced and PC Player joined the hype at first (they also had a full page ad each month for the Elsa Victory 3D). I made the mistake and didn't wait for the test and got myself said Elsa Victory 3D (where I had to replace the BIOS chip as it was so early that it came with VBE 1.2 so Elsa replaced it later with a VBE 2.0 BIOS). Still have the card. It was a good 2D performer and made 3D games "prettier" but never accelerated much, contrary to all the promises by S3 and companies, which is why I combined it with a Diamond Monster 3D later in 1997. I believe one of the few 3D games I played on it was Terminal Velocity that came with the card and was quite playable IIRC. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Moto Racer was also a great benchmark for these early 3D accelerator cards. Witnessing 60fps arcade-like graphics in motion was a sight to behold coming from DOS.
I really love that your returned to make videos on old hardware. I follow you really interesting, cause I love old hardware too and I always love to test and benchmark these old videocards on old systems!
My first personal PC back in 1997 was a Pentium 60. It had a slow PCI graphics card with an Avance Logic chip and 1 MB. Many things ran very slowly or at low resolutions because the RAM was simply too small. Then I bought an S3 Virge with 4 MB with my pocket money. There wasn't enough for more. But many 2D titles like StarCraft ran much more pleasantly with it. In terms of 2D, the card was good. And it works in every PC with a PCI bus and is robust and won't break. 3D performance became more and more important, especially towards the end of the 90s, so I bought in 1998 a Voodoo Banshee with a new PC in the fall.
Back in the day I had both the original Virge 325 and the Virge DX 375 (still have the 375). Recently, I borrowed a 325 from a friend and tried my old wrappers that allowed me to try Quake and other games in OpenGL. There's a video on my channel with that 325 card inside a Cyrix M2 based computer. If there is any demand, I would record some more tests with the 375 that was actually faster in the circumstances where a D3D to OpenGL or S3D to OpenGL wrapper is useful (related to the cost of bilinear filtering) and also corrects some of the hardware bugs.
@@philscomputerlabMy DX 375 was 4MB from the factory. The Diamond Stealth 2000 (325) was upgraded from 2MB to 4MB. Now, among the bottom of the barrel 3D cards, way past the time when you could excuse their features and performance, were the AGP cards with up to 8MB or RAM (including the Trio 3D). What I miss is my Savage 4 pro 16MB from that time; the S3TC in Unreal was amazing.
S3 did invent texture compression formats called S3TC that is still used today in all games with DirectX 12 and Vulkan but under different names (DXT or BCn). So it wasn't all bad.
Ah my first 3d card. I would have had a nice AGP card but when my father and I tried to put said AGP card in we wondered why it didn't fit in the PCI slot! So I ended up with an S3 ViRGE. My clearest memories of it are trying to run games but everything being white because no textures load 😆.
Hi Phil, as a long time fan and subscriber of your channel I was always intrigued by the fact you included the PC Player Benchmark in your Testsuite. I guess your personal history of living in Austria finally cleared this up for me. Great video as always and keep up delivering that awesome retro content which always relates really close to my own computing history. BTW my last DOS Graphics card was a SPEA V7 Mirage VLB and my first 3D card was an ATi 3D Rage Pro Xpert@Play AGP which was always a gamble to find out if those flaky Win98 drivers would support the newest Game. Regards, und Liebe Grüße aus Deutschland. 😊
The ViRGE was hobbled by a number of issues. One of its bigger problems was that they had to maintain voltage and form factor compatibility with the preceding S3 Trio chip it was a die shrunk improvement upon; they simply incorporated a basic 3D rasterizer into the space freed up by the die shrink. Another issue was that the ViRGE was intended to be an improvement for software-quality rendering over a low-end Pentium without a GPU. IIRC the ViRGE wasn’t even meant to handle z-buffering on chip, a limitation it shared with several other designs including Rendition’s V1000. Later updates to the ViRGE design made the most of a bad situation and 2D was quite good, but the ViRGE was flat out limited. It is pretty funny to see a Pentium II equipped with one struggle to manage GLQuake with a miniGL wrapper though.
Cool! PC Player was my go to magazine in the late 90th too here in Germany. I used a compbination of Diamond Stealth 64 with S3 968 and a 3dFX Voodoo additional graphics. I think it was also a Model from Diamond
Excellent review! Years ago I got one of these for a Pentium 75 in the late 90's. I remember the box saying something about 3D graphics being better or something and I noticed having more resolution options in Quake and some of the more interesting modes gave some nice scanlines! Doom, Heretic etc in dos ran a bit smoother too, actually thought the better 3D was referring to these games and was very happy with it! Wasn't until a fair while later that I actually tried the native 3D on the card but by that time I had a voodoo in there too. Still worth having a S3 ViRGE I reckon!
I remember people back in the day defending the S3 Virge only on the basis of its 2D capabilities. I think if it hadn't pretended to offer accelerated 3D, it would have had a far better reputation.
I remember all my Voodoo cards (still have them). They were so much of an improvement over what came before. Now we are only getting feature improvements with maybe a tiny bit of performance uplift in todays cards.
30-50% increase and with nvidia frame generator its basicly performance multiplier. Jedi survivor run easy 120fps epic settings, 4k and rt on with framegenerator on rtx 4080. Its over 100% improvement atleast to rtx 3080
As a poor teen I relied on S3 to see me through, and I have no regrets. I stuck with my 200MMX machine right up to the end of 1999 when I splurged and built an 800mhz machine with a Geforce 256...that was outdated within a year lol. What a hobby.
My first ever 3D GPU, I got it to replace a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5422. I bought it from a computer fair in Gateshead. It later found a home in my Amiga when the Mediator PCI came out, until it too was replaced by a Voodoo 3. Nostalgia...
Great inexpensive cards, had a very good Linux support early on which was a lifesaver in the late 90's (when we still had to input the timings of the monitor in the X config file...) ; certainly not the best by any stretch, but decent paired with a 3DFX accelerator.
The S3 Trio was my first graphics card, which I paid 300Euro for in 1997. You might think that was expensive, and an odd time to purchase it, but it was for my Amiga 4000, allowing me to run the crazy resolution of 1024*768 in 24bit colour, combined with the fantastic Amiga OS. And.... Then Diablo was released on the PC in the same year, and suddenly the IBM PC platform was better than the Amiga at something, also the same card cost 10% as much on the PCI bus.
@@giornikitop5373 1991 or 1992, if you ask me. PC blew the competition away when VGA gaming and Sound Blaster became a thing. And obviously CD-ROM (circa 1993) was the icing on the cake.
For Christmas 1996 I got a S3 Virge for my Pentium 90 running Windows 95. I was very disappointed. So only a few months later I had saved up enough to buy a Voodoo 1 to accompany it. Then the system was a blast.
I used to have an S3 Virge DX but the first real 3D GPU was the Power VR Kyro II. I remember playing a demo of Virtua Racing and it blew me away with its smoothness. Too bad PowerVR disappeared into the mobile space, although that was the right move for them.
My first PC being a Pentium 166 from Siemens, back in the day. I remember it had an onboard, 1MB Tseng ET4000, which was good enough for Dos, but lacked performance or support of the oncoming 3D stuff. For "upgrade" i bought a Mystique (and additionaly the 2 MB RAM upgrade), but it wasn't that of a thing then anyway. At last i got a Voodoo which made me happy for a while. But the systems were outdated so fast back then, and one had to move on. For some unknown reason i kept the Matrox and the Voodoo card back then, and after over 20 years in storage, i got them working again in a retro system i build a few months ago :-)
Never had the Virge back then... my first 3D Card was the Miro Crystal VRX (Rendition V1000)... already this one let my jaw drop back then with Motoracer and Quake. But then i got a Voodoo and had to use my S3 Trio64 as 2D unit and my jaws dropped again! I already knew back then that for 3D the Virge was a bad choice but as you said, DOS compatibility and 2D Windows performance was great. Even with only 2MB, i had a 15inch CRT only back then. Anyways, nice video again!
Great look back. It’s funny as just the other day I found a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 in a box of random stuff. It’s a Virge 3D card and even has the RAM upgrade so it’s sporting 4mb. I set it aside to look at it further and your video explained it all. I do recall people calling it a 3D in accelerator back in the day LOL! 😅
Back in the time I was a poor teenager, and this videocard was all I could afford lol. It was actually slower with hw 3d acceleration in some applications I remember. But remember this card (atleast in my country) was so much cheaper than the competition, so in terms of money it was a great buy :)
Anti-hype cards are always a great buy. I have a Radeon RX 6600, a perfectly fine card, but it's marked down a lot because everyone says to not buy it.
The first video card that I bought for myself was an S3 Trio64V+ because it was cheap, the second one I bought was a Virge, again because it was super cheap. I was still mostly playing DOS games since that's pretty much the limit for the card. It took me a while to actually upgrade, in fact all the way until the Voodoo2 came out. As a teenager without a job, I had to pick and choose what I could upgrade, and the CPU was next in line since the old one was a 133MHz AMD Am5x86-P75.
In 1996 I didn’t have a computer yet but I played FIFA 96 on the computer at moms work. Old cards are so small and bare. I recently got a ASUS 7970 Direct CII complete in box for my collection and it is so big and heavy. I love the old Direct CUII design. Feels so industrial with all metal and no plastic and no RGB like modern cards.
After my oldskool 486 PC build project I'm starting my Pentium project. Recently baught a S3 Vrige GX 4MB 35ns EDO (STB Nitro) and a Voodoo 1 (Diamond Monster 3D). Already had a mobo and P233 MMX CPU. I think it will be a good combo. The Virge for 2D and 3DFX for 3D 🙂
This was my first graphics card purchase, which came along with a bare bones system I got in 1997. Back then, I didn't know any better, but I also didn't play a lot of 3D games, so it didn't matter much at the time.
My first computer was a 233MMX 96 Mo ram, with a S3 64. Soon replaced with an Ati Expert Play, and I added a Voodoo 1 :) This 233 could run at 290 MHz, impressive.
I had a S3 Virge/DX in my i486 DX4/100 and AMD 5x86 back in the days and had no problems with it. All my DOS games was running just fine, because the vesa support was not that bad. Also there was a few game patches out there with S3 Virge support and with that, it looked better than software rendering - but the performance was bad. Fortunatly this was not a problem for me, because i always paired it with a 3Dfx voodoo graphics accelerator card. In my K6-II system i even had a AGP version which was paired with a voodoo 2.
The Matrox Mystique (first edition, 2MB) was my very first graphics card. I still have it around, great card at its time. With the specific patches, 3D acceleration was quite fast, for example in Tomb Raider, Schleichfahrt (Archimedian Dynasty) and I think Moto Racer later. But it was lacking any bilinear filtering, so there was no eye candy but only faster gameplay.
I had a Matrox Mystique back in the day, too. Paired with a Pentium 90 Mhz it was quite capable when playing Tomb Raider. Only in one of the later Colosseum levels it struggled a bit more, but i think the old P90 was to blame for that.
@@f3liscatus I had an IBM P166+ (same as Cyrix) which was not great for 3D tasks due to the rather bad FPU but quite a beast in integer calculation (I'm not an expert for these details but that's what I read back in the day). As far as I remember pairing it with a 3D accelerator was quite perfect, but as the internet had not been that popular back then, you couldn't compare that well, and besides to that the development was so fast that a few months later it already was time to upgrade...
I have a S3d virge in the original box, The pcb is a lighter color of green and mostly covered with gold color. Must be a different version than the one you have, the layout is a little different. Great for 2d dos stuff.
Was a nice intro with the PC Player Magazine. Was also my favorite mag at the time. But apparently I didnt follow along well enough. I got into 3D games only a few years later being impressed probably after seeing a Diamond Monster in action in Jedi Knight. So ofc I also had to have such a card and bought a Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro... and then thought it was defective...in the end I bought a Voodoo 2 on top of that. It also shows quite a bit how deceptive names were back then. Tons of cards had names which have absolutely nothing to do with the chips they use.
@@Thales_WH Yeah. Young me had to learn that the hard and costly way. To me Voodoo was Diamond Monster. And I basically thought the Diamond Fire GL 1000 was basically the same as the banshee (without knowing the banshee even existed). Naming schemes of the 90s...
In '96 I still had my VLB 486 DX2/66 system with Tseng Labs ET4000 I believe and later (I think around '98) replaced it with a Pentium 166 MMX with an Ati Rage II+ and added a Monster 3D Voodoo².
I had the S3 Virge in my PC back in the late 90s. It struggled to play the latest games at the time, but I played a lot of Quake and Starcraft decently well. I was more involved in the community side of gaming than the technology side, so I had everything I needed to play the games I want. It wasn't until I wanted to play Counter-Strike that I seriously wanted newer hardware.
Nice video. I did not get my own pc before 1998. 1996 I was allowed to play once in a while on the family dos pc. I cannot which card that pc had. Or if it had a card at all. Maybe I was just playing the games via the CPU. I had a great time notheless and thanks for sharing the info. It always interesting to learn about these early cards I have not really heard about besides the fact I was already into gaming back then.
i absolutely love the S3 Virge DX. I use it as a 2D Card paired with my Voodoo and Voodoo 2 machines. because of the Virges bad reputation its been incredibly cheap to pick them up even with the massive price hikes on retro hardware.
I used to have a 486 80Mhz with Cirrus Logic 1MB ISA video card. I remember when S3 Virge came out and I couldn't upgrade because I had no PCI slots. A year later I got a brand new Pentium II 333Mhz with an Ati Rage 3D 2MB if you remember those.
In 1996 I was still rockin' the 486DX4 100 with a Diamond Stealth VLB and an AWE32. Most of my money went to buying Atari Jaguar games out of the discount bin.
Funny card, hehe. Luckily I never had one! In 1996 I was too busy for playing games and only had a borrowed office-PC from work - a Dell Optiplex-something with a P120. It wasn't until 1999 I bought myself a gaming PC again, when the Coppermines were released. Have a beefy P3-700 Dell Dimension that still runs beautifully. I forget what GPU it had initially but I think it was one of the #9 cards. Love that machine anyway, and spent way too many hours grinding Starcraft on it - one of my all-time favorites and the main reason I bought the machine. Speaking of #9, whatever happened to them? They were huge for awhile and then just seemed to disappear off the map.
I remember that time quite well.. I had considered replacing my Trio64v2 with a Virge, but after reading the benchmarks in PC Games, instead opted to add a Voodoo1 to my setup. I was quite satisfied with the resulting system. In '97, it got replaced by an Intel 740 and a Voodoo2, followed up by a Riva TNT (1, 2, 256..), and more or less every second Nvidia generation ever since then.
1996 - Was using just an Acorn Electron, recently purchased from the local charity shop for just a tenner, complete in box with additional games and a cassette recorder.
I was looking for a new PCI graphics card right when the S3 virge came out, I was just about to get the S3 Trio64, but I opted for the new virge instead. I had no interest in 3D, nor was I even aware it was supposed to be a 3D card, and I extremely satisfied with it as a general purpose graphics card and 2D accelerator. A few years later when I wanted to get into accelerated 3D, I bought a 3dfx voodoo2 and used it in combination with the same S3 virge for a few more years, until I finally replaced them both for the geforce2mx in 2001. It was many years later, in the 2010s when I first learned from youtube that a lot of people were buying it as a 3D accelerator and were dissapointed by it, so the whole negativity for the virge was a surprise for me. I'm still using S3 virge cards for my retro PCs, I don't think I have a better PCI 2D card in my collection still.
To the question if 10 fps is playable or not: I remember my hunger to be amazed by the new games back in those days. I could not afford a good 3D card, but my curiosity was way higher than that. And I remember how I enjoyed playing the first time these 3D games even if it was like a comic book. When we evaluate something from the past, we need to consider the circumstances of the time which is of course very difficult when looking at today's standards.
Back at the time we had an ATI Rage Pro Turbo PCI and the performance (or lack thereof) was similar to the S3 card from the video. Later we got a Voodoo 2, which I remember to be quite expensive, but the jump in performance and 3D image quality was significant. I still have both cards and while the ATI card isn't worth much nowadays, I was really quite surprised how sharp and clean the 2D image looked when connected to a modern LCD.
In the 1990s I was a teenager in Poland. My go to magazine for computer hardware was CHIP. Yes, they had a Polish edition. For games I went with Gambler and Reset. Both went bancrupt in the early 2000s.
@@philscomputerlabNo, the publisher was Vogel Burda, or something like that. Like many other magazines CHIP closed down in the mid 2000s. My first Linux which was a Red Hat was from one of their CDs. It is how my Linux adventure started.
1996. Big DESCENT 2 fan. Bought the DIamond Monster (=3dfx Voodoo). And my jaw drapped. It was revolutionary. 60fps nearly all time where software was at about 20-30fps, and looking at the aliasing was just so beautiful. Game changer. I saw Virge on a LAN session before with Descent 2 and it was horrible as you stated. I think it however also supported 3D glasses and that was -while also a slide show- really interesting to look Descent 2 at.
I had an S3 ViRGE in the early 2000s when they were dirt cheap (just needed a PCI card) and I used it when flashing new BIOS-es on AGP cards. When it died I desoldered the chip with a hot air gun and made it into a pretty neat key chain. I imagine it would have been quite the disappointment when new.
I did buy the s3 virge card back in the day solely for it's decent 2d performance and the fact it had been heavily discounted. I paired it with a voodoo 2 card
When i bought it it was quite un upgrade over what i had, and it could render mpeg2 which was nice. I remember doing a little overclock with Powerstrip, and tuning the monitor refresh rate, that was a great tool at the time!
I remember reading the negative articles about those new-fangled 3D accelerators. I didn't see the need for one in my Pentium machine at the time. It was only when games like Quake II and NFS II came out, I started wondering about an accelerator. I got a Voodoo I for Christmas in 1997. I was completely blown away by it.
I appreciate taking a historical look at situation when the card came out, While not making the video overly long. I'm getting bad memories of when I got my FX5500 thinking it "supported DX9"
Thanks for covering this retro topic; I never realized I was curious about netburst but now that's next on my list. :) Thinking back on these old cards, especially the ViRGE versus the 3dfx Voodoo cards, how did these old cards do the rasterization? Now we have Vulkan and shaders aplenty, but before and during the era of "hardware transform and lighting", I have no idea. From the part about S3 claiming to have 50 games supported by winter, it makes me think they had to work with the game devs. Their 3D API might have been bad or hard to implement, which could've doomed it even with good silicon.
Around the time the 3Dfx came out I still had a Trio64V+ with 2Mb combined with a P100. A friend of mine litterly jumped on the 3Dfx when he could get his hands on it because he loved his FPS games and such. I myself was already greatly addicted to RTS games which had no need for any 3D acceleration. I did however upgraded to a Matrox G200 card with 4Mb which was good enough for the type of games I mostly played. Did ended up with my friends 1st Voodoo 1 card after he upgraded to Voodoo 2 with 12Mb just in case I needed a bit 3D acceleration 😉
I remember buying an S3 Virge back in Fall 1997 (to upgrade my S3Trio64V+), I was able to score one (random Taiwanese vendor) that was in my budget (for 100 DM) and I felt disappointed that it was not giving an extra juice to my Pentium 120. Sure, now DirectX would display Direct3D features but that was it. Thank you for testing it because you really show evidence that the nickname "3D deccelerator" is appropriate, and also chasing a Virge for building a Pentium computer is not a must, and any S3 Trio will be better and cheaper option to populate.
I mainly remember them for being great in DOS for 2D. I'm not too sure about DirectDraw but remember that being OK as well. Looking back at that era I wonder how much the drivers are to blame for some of the failures of early 3D. Some of the hardware specs did not seem that bad on paper.
S3 Virge is THE video card of my 1996 retro tower. It really delivers on the DOS era 2D performance. And the stigma about it is STILL keeping the price low.
I think the fact that there are still many of them is what's keeping the price low. Unlike 3dfx accelerator cards or actually rare cards, these were pretty common in prebuilt PCs.
I just bought an Orchid Righteous 3D to put in my 95 machine. It will be paired with an Ark 2000PV which has better performance and compatibility. The S3 is a great card for the money though.
Mediocre 3D cards are still great 2D cards. I have an S3 Virge in a Pentium Overdrive Windows 95 setup and it's Great. If I want to play early 3D games I have a completely different setup for that.
I recently found a scrapped Tower, it had S3 Virge and a Athlon K6 333 in it. Took it with me because of the fun i had Back then....
If somebody needs it, tell me. I also have a really old Video Grab/TV Card with ISA Bus. Would love to see Phil make a Video on it...
@@florianborkenhagen9434that K6 333mhz and VIA motherboard with S3 virgenPCI card was my second PC, later it had a Viper 550 card (Nvidia TNT) so much fun, and good price performance for its time. Playing command & conquer and some other games like Jeoff Grammonds F1 with steering wheel on my "game port".
The 2D of this card was pretty amazing at least.
I got Voodoo 1 as 3d card and left Virge as 2d card back then after I realized how slow Virge was in 3d.
@@warre1 The whole "whoops, i accidentally selected the wrong card" was quite funny.
Not so funny, the 2 or 3 games that had no card selection and would just default to the virge.
Partial hw scaling in DOS quickview and so on, but in full 2d power only with SDD
@@warre1 The same here.
@@warre1 @jukkapiispanen123 i bought it cause it was cheap, 3d accel wasnt a thing back then really till voodoo. i considered mistique or millenium but they were disappointing
You know where hype never meets disappointment?
Phil's Computer Lab
😂
I had an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 in my first decent PC build - a K6-2 300. It was a really good combo, the Virge was a very fast 2D card and compatible with everything in DOS and Windows that the Voodoo couldn't play, had all of the features of the Trio64V+ and a whopping 4MB RAM.
Ive had my S3 in P200 MMX with STUNNING 32 MB ram :)
@@branojuraj9063 Packard Bell Multimedia R515?
@@smoothknyte no it was a custom build, Packard Bell was unavailable to buy in 90s here at slovakia
I had a Number Nine card that used Virge. I recall the disappointment.
But back in 1996 a lot of us played with glacial FPS because it's what we had. There was a lot of making do at the time. With new games usually coming on CDs, making copies of games on floppies at computer shows, or behind the counter at a computer store if you knew the right person, died down. Played a lot of demos, too. The magazine CD-Rom Today had a disc which was always reliable for something shareware to pass the time. Single digit FPS and demos. That's the mid 90s.
Never was much of a gamer. Back then I had a Matrox Millennium PCI, which was very good for 2d acceleration. When I got interested in some gaming (Quake) I first got the Voodoo 2 2000, then later the Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, which card I still have today. To think 16Mb was once considered a lot of video ram. 😏
1996... I was still playing Amiga 500 games at home while I saw Duke3D, Quake and Tomb Raider at my buddies' places. I wasn't really jealous, I still liked the Amiga, I enjoyed all the games I could get on that little machine and I enjoyed my time at my buddies too.
That brings back a memory, my best friend in 1996 was into the Amiga too but all it took to get him onto the PC was Quake running on my PC with a Voodoo card.
yeah, Amiga was still great for 2d games and most of them had much better sound/music than the pc ports. but once doom was widely known, 2d games and any other home computer, kind of got forgotten, as the pc and consoles 3d era has begun. i also was still enjoying my few Amiga games from time to time (pc's were still expensive), until i saw 3d games in a voodoo card. as others said, that was the moment.
S3 Virge was used in Amiga Cybervision 64 3D graphics card. I have one in my Amiga 3000. Gives very nice 2D picture and runs full screen Doom, Genetic Species, Alien Breed 3D2 very nicely.
2:12 Ah, Matrox. They hold a special place in my heart even though I've never used any of their cards. See, they're based in my hometown of Montreal. They had been making commercial and industrial video cards since the late 1970s, and so, as their consumer products were consistently outdone by Nvidia, ATI and even 3dfx in the mid to late 1990s, they just shifted their focus back to commercial and industrial cards, and so they're actually still alive and kicking to this day. Matrox's founder and owner has been quite the philanthropist, donating tens of millions of dollars to local Universities' sciences departments even in the last couple of years.
Thanks for sharing!
Diese ganzen alten Hardware Reviews verdienen ein Abo - kenne keinen Kanal der so detailliert auf alte Hardware eingeht. Danke! Weckt tolle Erinnerungen.
@@zerotonine807 Danke schön 😊
I remember what I had in 1996. I had a Pentium 100 MHz with 16MB of RAM, a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 with 1MB of RAM, a 1.4GB hard drive, Sound Blaster AWE32, with Windows 95. It was a pretty stable machine. DOS games ran well and Windows worked decently enough. I did supplement it later in 96 with a Diamond Monster 3D, and this was also the first system I got a Subwoofer for. One of those Labtec sit by the monitor jobs, the LCS-2420 which was way more powerful than the cheap little speakers I had from the local computer shop. I played so many different games on that machine. But the one I remember most vividly was Lands of Lore Guardians of Destiny.
I had one but honestly never even bought it with any 3D Acceleration in mind, in 1996 these things were immediately cheap and available from the usual vaguely branded Taiwanese manufacturers with the crazy box art, they were popular cards just because of the price and acceptable 2D performance with 2/4MB of VRAM for 1024x768+ displays.
I don't even remember mine coming with any ViRGE versions of games etc, I don't recall anyone having one and being disappointed by the 3D performance because very few even tried that 'capability'. Also in 1996 we had the release of the Rendition Verité and of course the Voodoo which was basically all the enthusiast magazines talked about, if you were building your own PC's and buying components you likely had one or the other.
my jaw dropped when I saw Unreal on a voodoo 2, the moment when you leave the ship and step outside ... awesome
I tried Unreal recently and I have to say that in retrospect it doesn't really work anymore :( .In multiplayer you can at least see hints of future turnaments but the single has aged much worse than Doom and Quake and compared to Half life a year younger it's just heaven and hell
Doom plays good with keyboard mostly, sprite enemies so hit detection is not the best. Quake released next and felt a lot like Doom with better speed and hit detection, mlook was introduced but not very practical. Unreal was the first FPS game that got mouse and keyboard controls right and that is the key. Halflife perfected the controls and added great story. Halo took all of this to the extreme, then came battlefield 1942, and then everyone's favorite Call of Duty. So with all this stated, without Unreal, you might never have had the level of control that we ended up with so quickly. Later Doom and Quake installments caught on, but we all owe it to Unreal for getting it right so early.
I have to disagree here. IMHO, Unreal I's singleplayer campaign is among the most athmospheric ones of all time. I re-play it every 2-3 years, and it never gets old; even the graphics don't look too bad. In comparison, Half-Life 1 aged much worse.
@@czviktor
Just your opinion.
@@Ray-rt3yhMouse look and keyboard combo first brings X-engine in Bethesda's Terminator: Future Shock . Epic's Unreal brings fast paced Action shooting....And unreal graphics. Best in his time but simply and ugly now
The voodoo was really fantastic when it came out. Blew all the competition away. I tried a voodoo in a 486 and could get 25 fps in tomb raider in 640x480!
I remember it well. I did some research and bought the Voodoo 1 and never regretted it
Reminds me of the incredible disappointment I had with my ATI 3D Expression+PC2TV card (Mach64 GT-B chipset). It was a PCI card, installed in my Pentium 120. Toggling "acceleration" would mostly make the game slightly better looking, but wouldn't really improve the framerate. I was so confused at the time that I called ATI and spoke to tech support, thinking my card was broken! At least the S-VIDEO TV out was excellent (I even used it to make a commercial DVD).
(It is possible the 60 MHz front-side bus speed of my Pentium 120 might have made things worse, as the card was probably only tested on a 66 MHz FSB of a Pentium 100 or 133, but still, I was expecting actual acceleration.)
I don't think people realise just how great a job 3dfx done in making their chipset. It was like a bulldozer
In my area they were just used as basic display adapters for clone pc builders. Cheap as chips
I remember our market here is South Africa was flooded with those S3 PCI cards and the people who bought computers with those cards where expecting Voodoo quality performance and then ended up being disappointed and regret not shelling out the extra bucks for a proper Voodoo card. Beer drinkers with a taste for campaign I guess. Ahh, sometimes I miss those days. 🤔 The S3's were amazing cards in the Windows 3.1 era and their VLB cards were great.
I had a top of the line Compaq at the time, it came with some sort of S3 chip built into the motherboard with Intel Indeo video capture a 233Mhz Pentium SDR ram like 32MBs and a zip drive and CD rom and a 6.5GB quantum hard drive (crazy large for the time lol) depending on the 3D game some ran OK and some games ran faster in software. I upgraded the cache RAM and later on I added a VooDoo 2. That Voodoo card was an amazing upgrade!!! I really loved that computer even with all the headaches, the zip drive got the click of death about a week or two before the hard drive failed... lost like 6 months of work I was doing on a file sharing program that would have been like a proto version of bit torrent. This caused me to stop programming all together. But playing games on that machine was a lot of fun :)
1996 was a great year. My family got our first PC in '96. It had a Pentium 200 and an S3 ViRGE / DIamond Stealth 3D 2000.
Diamond Stealth 3D, nice!
Ow man, i was so happy, had exactly the same setup, as a kid my first PC. Stealth 3D i forgot about that card. As the Riva 128 (i think) great machine. Played Duke3D and some other games on Windows 95. The sound of that old 5.25inch HDD from Seagate. Good old times.
A S3 ViRGE or Matrox board was often the pairing of choice with a Voodoo 2, at least with the friends I knew who could afford to run Voodoo 2s :P
Anyone who had a computer back in the 90's was using a 3D Virge. I remember that card very well.
My first PC was in October 1998 as a gift from my father for entering by exam into Politehnica University Electronics Division. It had a AMD K-6 II 300mhz and an S3 Virge GX/DX(that's how it was seen by Windows GX/DX and not just GX). My first games on this PC were Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2 I think, Age of Empires.
this brings back memories. My first PC had a Pentium 200 MMX, 32 megs of ram, a 4 MB virge and very soon a voodoo 1 .... I had the same blow away vibe when I launched Unreal and Tomb Raider 2. Great times :)
The S3 was an affordable and half decent card for folk on a budget (PC gear was very expensive in the 90s)
Sweet Memories. I had an Elsa S3 Virge Card back in the days. I've tried to play Jedi Knight in 3d. It was slow and choppy. But other then that it was a good Video Card. Well done and it could deliver a crisp Picture. And I also had a Spea Media fx. But I paired it with an AWE32 so it only did what it could do quite good: General MIDI (and eat up a LOT of Space in the Tower Case).
My first pc had the Virge gpu,solid DOS card.I added Voodoo card next to it for 3D games in Win 95.
Hi Phil I remember building a lot of PCs with these back in the day when I had a computer shop in the UK. Probably because they were offering a lot of these to us cheap at the time. We got sent a sample voodoo 2 and once I saw that running Tomb Raider it was something we offered as an option in all our PCs. The sample went into my own PC 😅
YOU STOLE IT!
😀
Every new PCL video fills my heart with retro joy!
Thank you 👍
I really wish I had kept my Pentium 200 and Rage 128 Pro 16MB. I missed out on DOS/early 3D gaming, having only upgraded from 8088 in 1999 and getting completely hooked on StarCraft as soon as I saw it.
I got a few classics, thankfully - the X-Wing Alliance 3.5-game collection (XvT was a demo), Star Trek: Armada and ST:VOY: Elite Force, Mechwarrior 3, and the Half-Life Orange box.
I was always impressed with the game discs whose audio tracks work in a CD player. The X-Wing and TIE Fighter discs were great as a child, doing my household chores over the summer with loud Star Wars music playing. Good times :)
I remember the first game i try when i bought my Voodo Diamond was POD. After playing a month in software renderer mode was mind blowing, the definition and silking move, i have no idea about FPS at that time but i knew just like Phil said that i was stepping into a new era. Great video!
I vividly remember those times, I also read PC Player every month and was really pumped for the S3 Virge when it was announced and PC Player joined the hype at first (they also had a full page ad each month for the Elsa Victory 3D). I made the mistake and didn't wait for the test and got myself said Elsa Victory 3D (where I had to replace the BIOS chip as it was so early that it came with VBE 1.2 so Elsa replaced it later with a VBE 2.0 BIOS). Still have the card. It was a good 2D performer and made 3D games "prettier" but never accelerated much, contrary to all the promises by S3 and companies, which is why I combined it with a Diamond Monster 3D later in 1997. I believe one of the few 3D games I played on it was Terminal Velocity that came with the card and was quite playable IIRC.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Haha yes I saw that advertisement actually when doing the research.
Moto Racer was also a great benchmark for these early 3D accelerator cards. Witnessing 60fps arcade-like graphics in motion was a sight to behold coming from DOS.
I really love that your returned to make videos on old hardware. I follow you really interesting, cause I love old hardware too and I always love to test and benchmark these old videocards on old systems!
More to come! Thank you for watching for such a long time 😊
My first personal PC back in 1997 was a Pentium 60. It had a slow PCI graphics card with an Avance Logic chip and 1 MB. Many things ran very slowly or at low resolutions because the RAM was simply too small. Then I bought an S3 Virge with 4 MB with my pocket money. There wasn't enough for more. But many 2D titles like StarCraft ran much more pleasantly with it. In terms of 2D, the card was good. And it works in every PC with a PCI bus and is robust and won't break. 3D performance became more and more important, especially towards the end of the 90s, so I bought in 1998 a Voodoo Banshee with a new PC in the fall.
Back in the day I had both the original Virge 325 and the Virge DX 375 (still have the 375). Recently, I borrowed a 325 from a friend and tried my old wrappers that allowed me to try Quake and other games in OpenGL. There's a video on my channel with that 325 card inside a Cyrix M2 based computer. If there is any demand, I would record some more tests with the 375 that was actually faster in the circumstances where a D3D to OpenGL or S3D to OpenGL wrapper is useful (related to the cost of bilinear filtering) and also corrects some of the hardware bugs.
For the DX I want to source RAM upgrade, give it the best shot!
@@philscomputerlabMy DX 375 was 4MB from the factory. The Diamond Stealth 2000 (325) was upgraded from 2MB to 4MB. Now, among the bottom of the barrel 3D cards, way past the time when you could excuse their features and performance, were the AGP cards with up to 8MB or RAM (including the Trio 3D). What I miss is my Savage 4 pro 16MB from that time; the S3TC in Unreal was amazing.
I'd definitely check this out
S3 did invent texture compression formats called S3TC that is still used today in all games with DirectX 12 and Vulkan but under different names (DXT or BCn). So it wasn't all bad.
Ah my first 3d card. I would have had a nice AGP card but when my father and I tried to put said AGP card in we wondered why it didn't fit in the PCI slot! So I ended up with an S3 ViRGE. My clearest memories of it are trying to run games but everything being white because no textures load 😆.
I also bought the AGP version of Voodoo but it would not fit the AGP slot that I had so I was out of luck.
Yep! I been there done that too!
Hi Phil, as a long time fan and subscriber of your channel I was always intrigued by the fact you included the PC Player Benchmark in your Testsuite. I guess your personal history of living in Austria finally cleared this up for me. Great video as always and keep up delivering that awesome retro content which always relates really close to my own computing history. BTW my last DOS Graphics card was a SPEA V7 Mirage VLB and my first 3D card was an ATi 3D Rage Pro Xpert@Play AGP which was always a gamble to find out if those flaky Win98 drivers would support the newest Game.
Regards, und Liebe Grüße aus Deutschland. 😊
Dankeschön 😊
The ViRGE was hobbled by a number of issues. One of its bigger problems was that they had to maintain voltage and form factor compatibility with the preceding S3 Trio chip it was a die shrunk improvement upon; they simply incorporated a basic 3D rasterizer into the space freed up by the die shrink. Another issue was that the ViRGE was intended to be an improvement for software-quality rendering over a low-end Pentium without a GPU. IIRC the ViRGE wasn’t even meant to handle z-buffering on chip, a limitation it shared with several other designs including Rendition’s V1000. Later updates to the ViRGE design made the most of a bad situation and 2D was quite good, but the ViRGE was flat out limited.
It is pretty funny to see a Pentium II equipped with one struggle to manage GLQuake with a miniGL wrapper though.
Cool! PC Player was my go to magazine in the late 90th too here in Germany.
I used a compbination of Diamond Stealth 64 with S3 968 and a 3dFX Voodoo additional graphics. I think it was also a Model from Diamond
Excellent review! Years ago I got one of these for a Pentium 75 in the late 90's. I remember the box saying something about 3D graphics being better or something and I noticed having more resolution options in Quake and some of the more interesting modes gave some nice scanlines! Doom, Heretic etc in dos ran a bit smoother too, actually thought the better 3D was referring to these games and was very happy with it! Wasn't until a fair while later that I actually tried the native 3D on the card but by that time I had a voodoo in there too. Still worth having a S3 ViRGE I reckon!
I remember people back in the day defending the S3 Virge only on the basis of its 2D capabilities. I think if it hadn't pretended to offer accelerated 3D, it would have had a far better reputation.
In 1996 I had a 100MHz DX4 with a VLB Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 2MB. It wasn't much, but it was honest work :)
I remember all my Voodoo cards (still have them). They were so much of an improvement over what came before. Now we are only getting feature improvements with maybe a tiny bit of performance uplift in todays cards.
30-50% increase and with nvidia frame generator its basicly performance multiplier. Jedi survivor run easy 120fps epic settings, 4k and rt on with framegenerator on rtx 4080. Its over 100% improvement atleast to rtx 3080
@@powerplay074I think we are talking PCI not PCIE. Like 25 to 30 years ago or longer!
I had some VooDoo cards too but I had to sell them or lose them.
As a poor teen I relied on S3 to see me through, and I have no regrets. I stuck with my 200MMX machine right up to the end of 1999 when I splurged and built an 800mhz machine with a Geforce 256...that was outdated within a year lol. What a hobby.
My first ever 3D GPU, I got it to replace a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5422. I bought it from a computer fair in Gateshead. It later found a home in my Amiga when the Mediator PCI came out, until it too was replaced by a Voodoo 3. Nostalgia...
Great inexpensive cards, had a very good Linux support early on which was a lifesaver in the late 90's (when we still had to input the timings of the monitor in the X config file...) ; certainly not the best by any stretch, but decent paired with a 3DFX accelerator.
The S3 Trio was my first graphics card, which I paid 300Euro for in 1997. You might think that was expensive, and an odd time to purchase it, but it was for my Amiga 4000, allowing me to run the crazy resolution of 1024*768 in 24bit colour, combined with the fantastic Amiga OS. And.... Then Diablo was released on the PC in the same year, and suddenly the IBM PC platform was better than the Amiga at something, also the same card cost 10% as much on the PCI bus.
pc was already better at something than the amiga and all other home computers, since 1993.
@@giornikitop5373 1991 or 1992, if you ask me. PC blew the competition away when VGA gaming and Sound Blaster became a thing. And obviously CD-ROM (circa 1993) was the icing on the cake.
For Christmas 1996 I got a S3 Virge for my Pentium 90 running Windows 95. I was very disappointed. So only a few months later I had saved up enough to buy a Voodoo 1 to accompany it. Then the system was a blast.
I used to have an S3 Virge DX but the first real 3D GPU was the Power VR Kyro II. I remember playing a demo of Virtua Racing and it blew me away with its smoothness. Too bad PowerVR disappeared into the mobile space, although that was the right move for them.
My first PC being a Pentium 166 from Siemens, back in the day. I remember it had an onboard, 1MB Tseng ET4000, which was good enough for Dos, but lacked performance or support of the oncoming 3D stuff. For "upgrade" i bought a Mystique (and additionaly the 2 MB RAM upgrade), but it wasn't that of a thing then anyway. At last i got a Voodoo which made me happy for a while. But the systems were outdated so fast back then, and one had to move on. For some unknown reason i kept the Matrox and the Voodoo card back then, and after over 20 years in storage, i got them working again in a retro system i build a few months ago :-)
Never had the Virge back then... my first 3D Card was the Miro Crystal VRX (Rendition V1000)... already this one let my jaw drop back then with Motoracer and Quake. But then i got a Voodoo and had to use my S3 Trio64 as 2D unit and my jaws dropped again! I already knew back then that for 3D the Virge was a bad choice but as you said, DOS compatibility and 2D Windows performance was great. Even with only 2MB, i had a 15inch CRT only back then. Anyways, nice video again!
Great look back. It’s funny as just the other day I found a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 in a box of random stuff. It’s a Virge 3D card and even has the RAM upgrade so it’s sporting 4mb. I set it aside to look at it further and your video explained it all. I do recall people calling it a 3D in accelerator back in the day LOL! 😅
They seem to be everywhere and the lackluster performance has kept prices reasonable and availability healthy 😃
Back in the time I was a poor teenager, and this videocard was all I could afford lol. It was actually slower with hw 3d acceleration in some applications I remember. But remember this card (atleast in my country) was so much cheaper than the competition, so in terms of money it was a great buy :)
Anti-hype cards are always a great buy. I have a Radeon RX 6600, a perfectly fine card, but it's marked down a lot because everyone says to not buy it.
@@kameko_exeI got an RX 5500 XT 8GB for really cheap and it was a great purchase
@@kameko_exeI often especially search for this to get an extra discount 😅
A little slower but much cheaper is a +++ 😅
I always enjoy the personal anecdotes and story time :)
The first video card that I bought for myself was an S3 Trio64V+ because it was cheap, the second one I bought was a Virge, again because it was super cheap. I was still mostly playing DOS games since that's pretty much the limit for the card. It took me a while to actually upgrade, in fact all the way until the Voodoo2 came out. As a teenager without a job, I had to pick and choose what I could upgrade, and the CPU was next in line since the old one was a 133MHz AMD Am5x86-P75.
Matrox, those were some incredible cards for the day. They even kept up with the voodoo on occasion, and the image quality was incredible.
In 1996 I didn’t have a computer yet but I played FIFA 96 on the computer at moms work. Old cards are so small and bare. I recently got a ASUS 7970 Direct CII complete in box for my collection and it is so big and heavy. I love the old Direct CUII design. Feels so industrial with all metal and no plastic and no RGB like modern cards.
After my oldskool 486 PC build project I'm starting my Pentium project. Recently baught a S3 Vrige GX 4MB 35ns EDO (STB Nitro) and a Voodoo 1 (Diamond Monster 3D). Already had a mobo and P233 MMX CPU. I think it will be a good combo. The Virge for 2D and 3DFX for 3D 🙂
This was my first graphics card purchase, which came along with a bare bones system I got in 1997. Back then, I didn't know any better, but I also didn't play a lot of 3D games, so it didn't matter much at the time.
My first computer was a 233MMX 96 Mo ram, with a S3 64.
Soon replaced with an Ati Expert Play, and I added a Voodoo 1 :)
This 233 could run at 290 MHz, impressive.
I had a S3 Virge/DX in my i486 DX4/100 and AMD 5x86 back in the days and had no problems with it. All my DOS games was running just fine, because the vesa support was not that bad.
Also there was a few game patches out there with S3 Virge support and with that, it looked better than software rendering - but the performance was bad.
Fortunatly this was not a problem for me, because i always paired it with a 3Dfx voodoo graphics accelerator card. In my K6-II system i even had a AGP version which was paired with a voodoo 2.
The Matrox Mystique (first edition, 2MB) was my very first graphics card. I still have it around, great card at its time.
With the specific patches, 3D acceleration was quite fast, for example in Tomb Raider, Schleichfahrt (Archimedian Dynasty) and I think Moto Racer later. But it was lacking any bilinear filtering, so there was no eye candy but only faster gameplay.
I had a Matrox Mystique back in the day, too. Paired with a Pentium 90 Mhz it was quite capable when playing Tomb Raider. Only in one of the later Colosseum levels it struggled a bit more, but i think the old P90 was to blame for that.
@@f3liscatus I had an IBM P166+ (same as Cyrix) which was not great for 3D tasks due to the rather bad FPU but quite a beast in integer calculation (I'm not an expert for these details but that's what I read back in the day). As far as I remember pairing it with a 3D accelerator was quite perfect, but as the internet had not been that popular back then, you couldn't compare that well, and besides to that the development was so fast that a few months later it already was time to upgrade...
I have a S3d virge in the original box, The pcb is a lighter color of green and mostly covered with gold color. Must be a different version than the one you have, the layout is a little different. Great for 2d dos stuff.
I had one of these back in the day and I definitely remember them being referred to as a "decelerator", lol
I remember it and was just as fascinated as you were, thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I feel truly blessed to have on hand this exact Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro 2MB+ cards kitted out with 4MB total. Great DOS performer.
Awesome 😎
Was a nice intro with the PC Player Magazine. Was also my favorite mag at the time. But apparently I didnt follow along well enough. I got into 3D games only a few years later being impressed probably after seeing a Diamond Monster in action in Jedi Knight. So ofc I also had to have such a card and bought a Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro... and then thought it was defective...in the end I bought a Voodoo 2 on top of that.
It also shows quite a bit how deceptive names were back then. Tons of cards had names which have absolutely nothing to do with the chips they use.
@Kordanor The Diamond Fire GL 1000 was a good card, but not for gaming. In fact, it wasn't designed for that.
@@Thales_WH Yeah. Young me had to learn that the hard and costly way. To me Voodoo was Diamond Monster. And I basically thought the Diamond Fire GL 1000 was basically the same as the banshee (without knowing the banshee even existed). Naming schemes of the 90s...
In '96 I still had my VLB 486 DX2/66 system with Tseng Labs ET4000 I believe and later (I think around '98) replaced it with a Pentium 166 MMX with an Ati Rage II+ and added a Monster 3D Voodoo².
I had the S3 Virge in my PC back in the late 90s. It struggled to play the latest games at the time, but I played a lot of Quake and Starcraft decently well. I was more involved in the community side of gaming than the technology side, so I had everything I needed to play the games I want. It wasn't until I wanted to play Counter-Strike that I seriously wanted newer hardware.
Nice video. I did not get my own pc before 1998. 1996 I was allowed to play once in a while on the family dos pc. I cannot which card that pc had. Or if it had a card at all. Maybe I was just playing the games via the CPU. I had a great time notheless and thanks for sharing the info. It always interesting to learn about these early cards I have not really heard about besides the fact I was already into gaming back then.
i absolutely love the S3 Virge DX. I use it as a 2D Card paired with my Voodoo and Voodoo 2 machines. because of the Virges bad reputation its been incredibly cheap to pick them up even with the massive price hikes on retro hardware.
I used to have a 486 80Mhz with Cirrus Logic 1MB ISA video card. I remember when S3 Virge came out and I couldn't upgrade because I had no PCI slots. A year later I got a brand new Pentium II 333Mhz with an Ati Rage 3D 2MB if you remember those.
In 1996 I was still rockin' the 486DX4 100 with a Diamond Stealth VLB and an AWE32. Most of my money went to buying Atari Jaguar games out of the discount bin.
Funny card, hehe. Luckily I never had one! In 1996 I was too busy for playing games and only had a borrowed office-PC from work - a Dell Optiplex-something with a P120.
It wasn't until 1999 I bought myself a gaming PC again, when the Coppermines were released. Have a beefy P3-700 Dell Dimension that still runs beautifully. I forget what GPU it had initially but I think it was one of the #9 cards. Love that machine anyway, and spent way too many hours grinding Starcraft on it - one of my all-time favorites and the main reason I bought the machine. Speaking of #9, whatever happened to them? They were huge for awhile and then just seemed to disappear off the map.
I remember that time quite well.. I had considered replacing my Trio64v2 with a Virge, but after reading the benchmarks in PC Games, instead opted to add a Voodoo1 to my setup. I was quite satisfied with the resulting system.
In '97, it got replaced by an Intel 740 and a Voodoo2, followed up by a Riva TNT (1, 2, 256..), and more or less every second Nvidia generation ever since then.
1996 - Was using just an Acorn Electron, recently purchased from the local charity shop for just a tenner, complete in box with additional games and a cassette recorder.
I was looking for a new PCI graphics card right when the S3 virge came out, I was just about to get the S3 Trio64, but I opted for the new virge instead. I had no interest in 3D, nor was I even aware it was supposed to be a 3D card, and I extremely satisfied with it as a general purpose graphics card and 2D accelerator. A few years later when I wanted to get into accelerated 3D, I bought a 3dfx voodoo2 and used it in combination with the same S3 virge for a few more years, until I finally replaced them both for the geforce2mx in 2001. It was many years later, in the 2010s when I first learned from youtube that a lot of people were buying it as a 3D accelerator and were dissapointed by it, so the whole negativity for the virge was a surprise for me. I'm still using S3 virge cards for my retro PCs, I don't think I have a better PCI 2D card in my collection still.
To the question if 10 fps is playable or not: I remember my hunger to be amazed by the new games back in those days. I could not afford a good 3D card, but my curiosity was way higher than that. And I remember how I enjoyed playing the first time these 3D games even if it was like a comic book. When we evaluate something from the past, we need to consider the circumstances of the time which is of course very difficult when looking at today's standards.
Yea that reminds me of playing Wing Commander on a 286 with EGA graphics and PC speaker. Despite all this it was amazing 🤩
Back at the time we had an ATI Rage Pro Turbo PCI and the performance (or lack thereof) was similar to the S3 card from the video. Later we got a Voodoo 2, which I remember to be quite expensive, but the jump in performance and 3D image quality was significant. I still have both cards and while the ATI card isn't worth much nowadays, I was really quite surprised how sharp and clean the 2D image looked when connected to a modern LCD.
In the 1990s I was a teenager in Poland. My go to magazine for computer hardware was CHIP. Yes, they had a Polish edition. For games I went with Gambler and Reset. Both went bancrupt in the early 2000s.
CHIP! Oh that rings some bells. I'm sure there was a German release. Was it from Heise Verlag?
@@philscomputerlabNo, the publisher was Vogel Burda, or something like that. Like many other magazines CHIP closed down in the mid 2000s. My first Linux which was a Red Hat was from one of their CDs. It is how my Linux adventure started.
1996. Big DESCENT 2 fan. Bought the DIamond Monster (=3dfx Voodoo). And my jaw drapped. It was revolutionary. 60fps nearly all time where software was at about 20-30fps, and looking at the aliasing was just so beautiful. Game changer.
I saw Virge on a LAN session before with Descent 2 and it was horrible as you stated. I think it however also supported 3D glasses and that was -while also a slide show- really interesting to look Descent 2 at.
I remember getting an S3 Virge just to play Descent with HW acceleration. It ran slower, like 10-15 fps.
S3 for 2D. VooDoo for 3D. Great Combo.
I had an S3 ViRGE in the early 2000s when they were dirt cheap (just needed a PCI card) and I used it when flashing new BIOS-es on AGP cards.
When it died I desoldered the chip with a hot air gun and made it into a pretty neat key chain. I imagine it would have been quite the disappointment when new.
I did buy the s3 virge card back in the day solely for it's decent 2d performance and the fact it had been heavily discounted. I paired it with a voodoo 2 card
When i bought it it was quite un upgrade over what i had, and it could render mpeg2 which was nice.
I remember doing a little overclock with Powerstrip, and tuning the monitor refresh rate, that was a great tool at the time!
I have a Virge GX pci and a GX2 agp. One day I'll test and do a comparison between the two though I've read there basically the same
I used to own S3 Virge DX in 97 paired with 3DFX Voodoo 1. That was a good combo back then. Especially with my AMD K6-III 300mhz ;)
Phil, you ought to test the enhanced version of Terminal Velocity that utilised the S3 ViRGE's 3D capability.
I remember reading the negative articles about those new-fangled 3D accelerators. I didn't see the need for one in my Pentium machine at the time. It was only when games like Quake II and NFS II came out, I started wondering about an accelerator. I got a Voodoo I for Christmas in 1997. I was completely blown away by it.
I have worked for S3 at this time. So, your video is a very nostalgic for me.
I appreciate taking a historical look at situation when the card came out, While not making the video overly long.
I'm getting bad memories of when I got my FX5500 thinking it "supported DX9"
😊 Thank you. At least the FX is making a comeback for retro 😀
Phil, I have two ViRGE cards - a ViRGE/DX 4Mb PCI and a ViRGE/GX2 AGP 4Mb. If you want to test a 4Mb ViRGE, I'll be happy to oblige.
Thanks for covering this retro topic; I never realized I was curious about netburst but now that's next on my list. :)
Thinking back on these old cards, especially the ViRGE versus the 3dfx Voodoo cards, how did these old cards do the rasterization? Now we have Vulkan and shaders aplenty, but before and during the era of "hardware transform and lighting", I have no idea. From the part about S3 claiming to have 50 games supported by winter, it makes me think they had to work with the game devs. Their 3D API might have been bad or hard to implement, which could've doomed it even with good silicon.
Around the time the 3Dfx came out I still had a Trio64V+ with 2Mb combined with a P100.
A friend of mine litterly jumped on the 3Dfx when he could get his hands on it because he loved his FPS games and such.
I myself was already greatly addicted to RTS games which had no need for any 3D acceleration.
I did however upgraded to a Matrox G200 card with 4Mb which was good enough for the type of games I mostly played.
Did ended up with my friends 1st Voodoo 1 card after he upgraded to Voodoo 2 with 12Mb just in case I needed a bit 3D acceleration 😉
Great to see you Phil !
😃👍
I remember buying an S3 Virge back in Fall 1997 (to upgrade my S3Trio64V+), I was able to score one (random Taiwanese vendor) that was in my budget (for 100 DM) and I felt disappointed that it was not giving an extra juice to my Pentium 120. Sure, now DirectX would display Direct3D features but that was it. Thank you for testing it because you really show evidence that the nickname "3D deccelerator" is appropriate, and also chasing a Virge for building a Pentium computer is not a must, and any S3 Trio will be better and cheaper option to populate.
I mainly remember them for being great in DOS for 2D. I'm not too sure about DirectDraw but remember that being OK as well.
Looking back at that era I wonder how much the drivers are to blame for some of the failures of early 3D. Some of the hardware specs did not seem that bad on paper.