This brings back memories. I wrote the back-end driver for the Argonaut titles on the Virge (used in Fx Fighter and Croc) - it my first job out of University back in the day when I joined Argonaut's technology team. It was really crazy back then with every video card needing a different customized back-end implementation - as I recall I had to do ATI Rage and some other cards as well. Later, after I left and formed my own company we also did the port of Tomb Raider for the Virge, although that was mostly done by a friend of mine. The Virge was an interesting card - it did pretty much everything right in terms of image quality features, but basically every effect you turned on halved the fillrate. Want perspective correct textures? Fillrate halves. Want depth buffering? Fillrate halves again. And so on. It was a real art trying to extract performance. When we did the port of Tomb Raider we were working from the version of the back end renderer of the engine that had been used for 3DFX's Voodoo graphics. One thing we didn't realize at the time was that it had been converted to use depth buffering, but the original engine version (software renderer) used a depth-sorting algorithm. If we had obtained that version from Eidos we probably could have got twice the frame rate, but we didn't realize that was an option in the engine at the time and just worked from what we got. I think we did use some of the Virge's more funky features though, like a pseudo-bilinear mode that only filtered in one direction but was faster. You had to calculate when you could use this instead of true bilinear filtering without losing too much image quality. Really fun times back then.
Thanks so much for sharing, I love hearing these stories firsthand from the people who were there. It certainly was an exciting time for PC rendering technology and gaming in general!
Excellent work Rees, and very thorough indeed! I think you're right RE comparing it with software rendering on the 233MMX, at the time the ViRGE came out my PC was a Pentium 75 with no MMX and getting 3D performance like seen on the ViRGE in your video would have been pretty incredible by those days' standards.
You can really tell the amount of work involved in getting this video made. So many random patches and fixes to hunt down but well worth it. Great cover of what S3 acceleration could do!
17:49 The mw2 and mw3 (maybe also mw4?) games were just phenomenal. They don't make them like they used to. And btw, the 233 MMX can run MW2 at 480p in software faster than the Virge.
Very interesting list, I appreciate the effort that went into not only installing and running these games but recording them and discussing them. This has caused me to install some games on systems I haven't gotten around to comparing yet. Thank you.
Oh that's great to hear! You're very welcome. I finally tracked down the ViRGE version of Whiplash 3D as well so I'll be making a video about that soon.
I remember using the virge on "jedi knight - dark forces II" i think it was. I remember that in software mode at 320x200 the virge looked better, but was actually slower then 320x200 in software mode on my at the time k6-2 550. I remember it going down in history as a 3d de-accelerator haha. I even managed to upgrade the ram for it, i bought 4 chips at a market. Didn't make it any faster. That card is what ended up being my 2d partner card for my voodoo2 i bought when i got my pentium 3 450mhz katmai machine. I overclocked it to 600mhz, and that machine with its voodoo2 was my workhorse for a long time before i moved to a pentium 3 socket 370 1gig machine. After that, i jumped ships, and bought an athlon 1900+. That machine was a beast.
I remember the S3 virge DX, it was in my first PC I owned, a pentium 133MHz, it was a better dos gaming card when using software rendering with the vesa drivers installed. I then upgraded the system with a 200MHz MMX and a 3dfx voodoo 3 2000 which was a massive jump in performance.
Really REALLY enjoyed this video Rees. Great work! You've reminded me of many games I'd forgotten about too lol. Including Terminal Velocity and TOCA. My S3 Virge experience on my P200MMX was limited to: 1) Install S3 Virge 2) Try Tomb Raider 3 3) Remove S3 Virge and return to Supplier 4) Receive Creative Labs 3D Blaster (3DFX Banshee) and live happily ever after :D
S3 Virge was not meant for 1998 era, and Pentium 200MMX + era. It was meant to for Pentium 75-133 era, or 486 DX2 100-133 era. And year 1996 primarily. Buying it after year 1997, was pure madness, it was like to buy 2d card. So your virge experience is your own fault, sorry. Banshee was released in 1998 or 1999 , virge era was over here, it was basicaly basic 3d solution, so you can at least run into menu. Who can buy virge when banshee was out, is mystery for me, but I've checked price listing, and it costed so little in 1998, that it was putting into computers like 2d card (there was no other worse option at the time). So you've missed Virge era, that's why your experience.
Man this video this day become one year ! this the first time i see you channle ! oh man thank you so much for the heart feelings that come from the 80s :( thxxxxxxxxxxxx
It's worth noting that the S3 Virge and Trio made their way into almost every server made in the last 20 years and is still used in those platforms to this day.
in 1997 when I was using a Packard Bell (Cry) Pentium 233 MMX I was looking at 3D cards and thought about the savage after my bad experience with the Mystique, but the Savage did not excite me. I waited until mid 1998 and got a 16MB Voodoo Banshee and wow, that was an awesome match for the 233 MMX; especially as it only had one PCI slot available, so it was a simple case of disable the onboard graphics and let the Banshee do its thing. So please do a Banshee video for old memories sake :-)
This is a trip down memory lane. I had two S3 cards, back in the day. I can't remember which one was the first card I had but I think it might have been a Trio 3D. I also had a Voodoo and remember testing them against each other on Tomb Raider. No contest. 3DFX won. The second S3 card was the Savage 4. Bought mostly for it's 2D performance but when it came to Unreal Tournament. The only winner. on the S3 Metal engine with the compressed textures, of course. I may also be mis-remembering but possibly Severence: Blade of Darkness also ran quite well on it but this was a long time ago.
Very nice video on the Virge, well done! I'm impressed you managed to get the s3d version of Destruction Derby - I couldnt find it for my Virge video. I'm also impressed you got Mechwarrior 2 to work.. my game just crashed in s3d mode!
It took so much tracking down - I think I found it on a Megaupload link on a Russian forum in the end. I'm going to be uploading it to archive.org in the next few days and will add the link to the list on my website.
I had a S3 Trio 64V+ (I think that it was) with 1M RAM on my Pentium 90 when I bought it. When I managed to upgrade the CPU to a Pentium 166 I got also some RAM for the system and for the video card. So I upgraded the card to the max 2M RAM and the computer to 32M. I ran Windows 95 at the time and with that card I finished Quake and played many many nights Starcraft.
I had S3 Trio 64V+ too with my Pentium-133 when I get to the high school in 1995, when Virge came out I want to get it because the 3d game thing seems became huge. Later on I got 2 Voodoo 2 12mb SLI then finally an IDT winchip2 200mhz to replace the P-133. Such a good memory and fun time back then.
@@ctrlaltrees Hm does the windows 95 version of destruction derby run on other 3d accelerated cards or will it simply not boot at all without a virge card of the era ? Could perhaps be used in combination with dgvoodoo or dgvoodoo2 for a more modern pc too run it.
This was awesome and helped me know what the Diamond Stealth 2000 Pro (4MB version of Virge/Dx) can do in games given my retro PC has only PCI ports (no AGP.) The system has a Pentium III in it, so I’ll see if any of these games fair better in my system. Thanks again for the comprehensive coverage of the Virge/DX! 👍
Gerat video! P2 333Mhz was Voodoo1/Voodoo2 time (I also started with P2 333 / Nvidia TNT1 / 128MB Ram). So the CPU seems a bit new for that timeframe abd guess way more people experienced it with Pentium and MMX CPUs.
Great video, you displayed so many games man, that must have been quite the work load. This deep dive into s3d was very cool, first video I have seen detail their offering this much. Thanks for putting it out there.
You're welcome, and thanks for the kind comment. Yes, it has taken months to track down all of these games and get them running properly! I hope all of the info I put on my website along the way makes life easier for anyone else who wants to try the same thing in future. 🙂
@@ctrlaltrees I probably will, thanks! At some point I want to give my own take on s3d, great references here besides being an entertaining video that I enjoyed very much.
My pentium ran terminal velocity and descent well with and without the virge. The only difference I could see on the virge on descent though was a slight blurring of textures up close lol.
I remember playing Descent 2 on an S3 Virge card and being extremely impressed. When he's got such a powerful CPU, the software render works great. On an older CPU, the S3 not only gives a great frame rate, but also really nice looking (for the time) texture filtering.
The S3 Virges were my gateway drug into upgrading PC's. I had the Virge 325 for a long while, then paired with a Voodoo1 up until the Amd k6-2 500Mhz, Then it was Amd Athlons and Nvidia all the way from then. Edit, I still have the exact Orchid Righteous from the day shown here, but alas It dosen't seem to work anymore. Also a huge Atari fan, Great Video!
My first brand new PC I am sure had some kind of S3 graphics inside it (alongside a Cyrix M2 233mhz). I only realised this playing X wing vs Tie fighter and noticed a 3d graphics option, ticked that and suddenly everything looked a little bit better!
Have a 4MB Virge GX2 AGP in my "1997" K6 233 MMX / 6MB Voodoo Graphics, downloading the Descent II Inifinite Abyss ISO now, had totally missed that. Can't wait to gie it a go and compare to my Voodoo card :D Great Video as usual, and a GREAT job on the list on your website. S3D version of Screamer is hilarious, worse performance than software and super blurry.
Oh it's just awful, I'm wondering whether it's because of the way it's been "patched". It would be good to track down the proper OEM version and see if it's any better.
@@ctrlaltrees probably not, the S3 can do better performance at 320x200 or better quality at 640x480, not both. At least in most games. Even my gx2 struggles.
@@ctrlaltrees You're welcome. It was a little odd that it didn't seem to be uploaded anywhere before I did because I could be wrong, but I think it's more common to find physically than the re-release.
I had soooo many S3 ViRGe cards from a local electronics surplus store I used to dumpster dive every weekend that threw them out. I legit had an entire milk crate filled to the top that I had to stop taking them lol. No idea what they were doing and why they had so many to throw out but they worked great under Linux back in the 90's! EDIT: The majority I remember were specifically DX cards, usually between 1-4 megabytes.
I feel the moniker "graphics decelerator" was well deserved, at least for your typical 1995 PCs. At the time I had a DX4-120 and Diamond Stealth3D 2000, and on that system I never came close to any noticeable performance gain. I got a Voodoo 1 upon release in 1996 and I never looked at the Virge's 3D support again, although I kept it in the system until i upgraded to a Pentium 2. I still have both that original Voodoo 1 and Stealth 3d, but not a period correct system to put it in, unfortunately.
486 can't do 3d so no wonder. I think a large part of the problem is that people had S3 cards in older systems where the cpu, and especially the fpu simply couldn't keep up. If you put a Voodoo card in a 486 it barely makes a difference either, the fpu simply isn't fast enough for 3d.
@@BadManiac A 486 can do 3D reasonably well in ms-dos. You won't reach 60 fps, but that was uncommon anyway. It's a different story in Windows especially when MMX was introduced, and that's what forced me to upgrade in the end. But those late 486 CPUs came very close to a P60 or a P66.
@@custardo Not really. They can do very basic software rendered 3D just about playably, but once you reach Quake it grinds to a halt.The vast majority of 486 struggle to reach 10FPS in Quake, a really well setup one can hit 15 FPS, and if you're a complete madman like CPU Galaxy, you can just about get to 20FPS. And that number won't change much, if at all, with a 3D card, the FPU in a 486 simply isn't fast enough.
@@BadManiac many people thinks, that Quake running slowing on 486 is because of FPU. But that's not the truth. It running slower, because Quake using multitexturing. One texture map is for light another for texture. So it has to count every pixel twice. Pentium can run it in one pass (both textures), because it was optimalized for Pentium instructions. 486 cannot do it in one pass, but it needs 2 clocks. That's why Quake running so slow on 486, not because of FPU. 486 has quite capable FPU, only a bit slower than Pentium, not like 2x slower.
@@warrax111 As far as I know, Quake still uses such a feature of Pentium as the possibility of simultaneous (and parallel) operation of the CPU and FPU. In earlier processors, the CPU was suspended for the duration of the FPU operation, waiting for it to receive results - this scheme went back from 8086/8087. The same problem was in AMD K6.
I remember magazines back then confirming what you mentioned here... hardware mode would look a little prettier, but run slower than software rendering. S3 Virge even began some pretty 3D modes that others would adopt for their own cards. :)
That is interesting. I had this card in one of my computers, and I actually did not know it is a 3D capable card. I always assumed it is decent 2D card with 2D accelration, but did not know (or tried) any 3D, probably because of the API not many games were compatible. I was not into gaming anyway at that time. I got it pretty late, maybe 1998, and year later was using Riva TNT2 anyway, so no big loss. TNT2 was really nice, played a lot of Quake 1-3, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, and few period games. Still as a 2D card Virge was decent, could got decent resolution, and with some trouble also worked on Linux with Xorg (it worked poorly in VESA mode, not supporting scrolling or high res at all), with good 2D acceleration.
I had one of these GPUs back then. I bought it together with my Pentium 200MHz machine ... all the good stuff back then. Except, the GPU wasn't good. The drivers were not good. Game support was not good. Etc. I am not sure about the timeline back then, but I upgraded to a Voodoo Banshee when that was available and it really was a huge upgrade that brought new life to my PC.
My first PC actually had an S3 Virge DX. I later upgraded it with a 3dfx voodoo 2 and even later got one more to run SLI on it. But I did try a couple of games in the S3 virge mode. And since at the time when I tried them I already had the 3dfx I didn't really find them very impressive. I was quite impressed later with their texture compression for their Savage 2000 cards though...
@36:00 POD MMX sticker was a scam. Intel paid game studios up to $1mil in bribes per title claiming benefits. POD uses MMX for _one_ sound filtering effect, zero speed benefits. Confirmed (the sum per endorsement) by Intels developer relations group co-lead from that time frame. Problem with Virge was it needed >100MHz Pentium to actually run "3D acceleration" at a decent speed, but ~100MHz was the break even speed to run 320x200 games faster in software rendering mode.
I used this GFX cards on some systems I built in those days, you could add ram to it via those slots. had that with AWE32 - Intel BX chipset era good chipset.
The README.RTF file included with the 2000 PC port of Metal Gear Solid makes mention of the S3 ViRGE GX chipset used in the ViRGE/GX and ViRGE/VX. I have yet to try it out with my original S3 ViRGE. I also know that the S3 ViRGE is *technically* supported by Direct3D, but in the two games I tried it had serious issues. Sonic R had a majority of the screen appearing black due to issues with alpha, and Half-Life displayed without any textures.
Yeah, I looked into the Direct3D stuff but it was so buggy I decided not to bother with it. Interested to hear about Metal Gear Solid, I'll look into it. Thanks!
So this video is actually a massive apology for being slightly factually inaccruate on a video you have now delisted? That's why I subscribe. Well that and the sarcasm... and mostly the sarcasm actually.
I would like to see a video on the NEC released PowerVR and PowerVR2 PCI boards that were just an add in cards, and I think used video overlay or maybe just calculated the 3D geometry and texture stuff and fed data to the videocard via some frame buffer or something. I think that it might actually be the first conventional implementation of a GPU.
Ahhhhh man, I *love* Mechwarrior 2. I remember trying to run the demo an a 66MHz 486-DX2 Intel Overdrive with no 3D accelerator...and it did *not* go well. Eventually managed to get to play it, and some years later Mechwarrior 3 came out and a cousin had it, I played it, absolutely adored it, and went home to try and run it on my own system which had some glorious onboard graphics and 24mb of RAM (game wanted 32 as a minimum)...which also did *not* go well and I was sad. Eventually, thankfully, I got to play that, too. MW3 is probably by far my favourite MW game and it's both a shame it's picky as hell and a pain in the ass to get running on a modern system or a Win 98/2000/ME if you're mad/XP virtual machine. Then again it is a wonderful excuse to build a system to run it on haha The interlaced video between the menu options in the transitions for Battle Race is godawful on the eyes!
Battle Race is nothing all that special, but I do know that the lead programmer on it, Martin Hoffesommer, actually went to work for S3 off the back of his work with them for the game (it was a pack in with certain S3 Virge cards, and the developer Soft-Enterprises made a small bit of money off each bundle sold), to help on their S3 Texture Compression system. His codework even made it as far as Valve, which I discovered through a google search and turning up a database concerning the 2003 Valve leak files. Not sure exactly what Valve used the code for, though.
Are you still looking for that Whiplash 3D CD? I've been working on and off on a video showcasing the Virge GX2 and came across this video in my search for resources. anyways I have the CD if you're still looking I should be able to rip an ISO.
watching this for a few min i thought that case looked very familiar, ive got pretty much the same exact one with a JCC sticker in the square and a grey toggle switch
Nice video. Back in the days, I really wanted to like the Virge as it would have been a cheap 3D option for others than my main PC. But I couldn't. The D3D support was just too bad.
S3 ViRGE graphics decselerator yes !!!! Often seen , much more speed on softwarerendering .... but the S3 ViRGE was a cool chip for cardbuilder, the virge has the same pinout as the normal S3 chip.
@@ctrlaltrees Infamous = bad, like Hitler, or that Miley Cyrus episode of Black Mirror. Do you think the S3 would've made a decent job of rendering Virtua Fighter? Terminal Velocity certainly looks nicer.
Ooh, if you have a 486 with a PCI slot, I would very much like to see how Tomb Raider runs. We used to run Tomb Raider on our second hand 486 in a tiny window, so seeing if a 3D accelerator makes a difference would be very gratifying.
I had one of these in a pentium 200 mmx Packard bell. Was built into the motherboard. Didn't have a clue what it could do at the time... Which wasn't much to be fair lol.
S3 Virge could have been OK with options to override Bilinear filtering to OFF in drivers.And then add support for alpha blending and it's quite a nice cheap card.
I remember my stepdad buying the S3 in computer fair and popping in the memory upgrade chips, without them you could have 1024x768 or 65k colours, not both..!
X-Wing vs. TIE FIghter and Balance of Power ran fairly well on the S3 with 4 megs, in a K6-233. No complains the only artifact in the frames was a black box in the background of every explosion but it was 100% playable. Good video tho, I think this video card was missunderstood by most people.
I recall seeing a magazine ad for the Virge back in the day, with Virtua Fighter being showcased as a compatible title. Weirdly enough, I can't find any references to it online, so I'm not sure if the Virge-compatible version really made it to market. I was completely in awe of Virtua Fighter, so the ad made me salivate over the Virge. Good thing I didn't have the money, I guess. ;)
No problem! Yes, there were quite a few titles that announced Virge support that never materialised. Trouble is the API was hard to develop for with very little benefit, so I suppose they decided that it just wasn't worth the effort.
I tried running Longbow 2 on a virgeDX. It run in slow motion, no matter the Grfx settings. BTW funny thing, I remember playing some of these games and they run fine. I was a kid though, and I can't recall what my dad had bought.
I have the diamond stealth version of this card expanded to 4mb and actually if I want to play Descent II on 640x480 in DOS my machine benefits from the graphics "accelerator" I believe due to the fact I only have a pentium 133. If my chip was faster I imagine software would run better.
"Last and fastest pentium mmx that intel ever made" that is not quite right though! Later on came not only a 266 MHz version, but even a 300 MHz Pentium MMX (google SL34N), albeit they were not released for Socket 7, but as mobile and embedded packages - there are (or were?) adapters for that though.
Yes, well spotted. I was having some trouble with CD audio in DOS at one point but eventually managed to get it working. I must have captured this while it was still broken.
Thank you, that was a very interesting interesting video. My first PC was a AMD K6 233 with a S3 Virge, so pretty close to what you are running. It was nice to see that I didn't miss out on anything back in the days, since the game I played wasn't accelerated. But I would probably have tried to get hold of Tomb Raider if I had known. By the way how does running Quake in software compare to Virge accelerated Quake?
I ended up resigning myself to software mode. Visuals werent as nice, but it was nearly always a better experience. I did enjoy the card though. Was fun to develop for and in controlled conditions (ie. not gaming, or at best games designed around the hardware) is could pull off surprisingly decent results.
The beginning of the 3d accelerator era was a weird one in a lot of ways. We were just coming out of the SVGA era where different cards were incompatible with each other. The Playstation had been released and companies felt pressure to release 3d cards. The funny thing is though, a decent PC at 320x200 and software rendering could match what the Playstation could do with its hardware rendering. The Playstation ran most games at 8 to 16bit color at 256x224. Some were higher, but that was the most common. The Playstation with its 33mhz cpu used its hardware accelerator to match what you could already do on PC, not to surpass it. Tomb Raider for instance looked and played pretty similarly on a Pentium 75, 486 120mhz, or the Playstation. And when the Playstation was released, the Pentium 133mhz was already out.
The second part of that (which I didn't get the chance to write about yesterday (stupid work)) was that 3d accelerators initially released for pc were built with ASIC chips. Those ASICs at the time were usually clocked between 40 or 60 mhz or so. They were specifically designed for running 3d math, and could do so faster than a similarly clocked Pentium... but a much faster Pentium? No so much. ASICs were pretty important early on and worked pretty well, and the money that was pumped into their development because of 3d accelerators, allowed them to improve pretty rapidly in speed, functionality, and expansion, including amount of addressable ram.
What you're forgetting here is that a Playstation was £200 at most, and a PC worth using for gaming would rush you a grand at the very least. There were cheaper PCs out there, but they wouldn't be good enough for the job. Most people I know had to struggle to cobble together the £200 for a Playstation, being that it was more than the average weekly wage at the time. It's not like now(well, not right now thanks to the scalpocalypse) where you can throw together a good gaming PC for less than the price of a PS5.
The playstation was more *significantly* more powerful than a 133mhz pentium for graphics rendering. 8bit color at 320x200 was almost default in that era for pc games. Going higher color depth hurt performance a lot. Most playstation games were 320x224 in 15bit color. Many in 512x224. 256x224 wasn't common, especially for 3d. All a person has to do is look at games side by side and the compromises to get games running on cpu driven 3d renderers is very obvious. And what exactly do you mean by "We were just coming out of the SVGA era where different cars were incompatible with each other"? VESA is VESA. It's a *standard*. And supported by about %99.5 of videocards. Absolutely *not* incompatible with each other. It's the entire purpose of VESA. The exception being where apis are used rather than hitting the hardware directly, which obvbiously isnt a problem when it comes to compatibility. Software will use the appropriate code path for the relevant api. Also, the cpu in the psx is comparable to low end pentiums for software rendered 3d.
Update: I finally found Fatal Racing / Whiplash! Part 2 video is here: th-cam.com/video/A9ZQHbf6Ovk/w-d-xo.html
This brings back memories. I wrote the back-end driver for the Argonaut titles on the Virge (used in Fx Fighter and Croc) - it my first job out of University back in the day when I joined Argonaut's technology team. It was really crazy back then with every video card needing a different customized back-end implementation - as I recall I had to do ATI Rage and some other cards as well. Later, after I left and formed my own company we also did the port of Tomb Raider for the Virge, although that was mostly done by a friend of mine. The Virge was an interesting card - it did pretty much everything right in terms of image quality features, but basically every effect you turned on halved the fillrate. Want perspective correct textures? Fillrate halves. Want depth buffering? Fillrate halves again. And so on. It was a real art trying to extract performance.
When we did the port of Tomb Raider we were working from the version of the back end renderer of the engine that had been used for 3DFX's Voodoo graphics. One thing we didn't realize at the time was that it had been converted to use depth buffering, but the original engine version (software renderer) used a depth-sorting algorithm. If we had obtained that version from Eidos we probably could have got twice the frame rate, but we didn't realize that was an option in the engine at the time and just worked from what we got. I think we did use some of the Virge's more funky features though, like a pseudo-bilinear mode that only filtered in one direction but was faster. You had to calculate when you could use this instead of true bilinear filtering without losing too much image quality.
Really fun times back then.
Thanks so much for sharing, I love hearing these stories firsthand from the people who were there. It certainly was an exciting time for PC rendering technology and gaming in general!
Thanks for sharing
Cool stuff. Time flies eh?
BASED AND OLDGRAPHICSPILLED
I don't think anyone could do any better than this at showcasing the ViRGE
Well thankyou so much, that means a lot! Big fan of your channel so I'm glad you think I did it justice. 😁
A wild Neil appeared! 😃 Great video BTW!
Excellent work Rees, and very thorough indeed! I think you're right RE comparing it with software rendering on the 233MMX, at the time the ViRGE came out my PC was a Pentium 75 with no MMX and getting 3D performance like seen on the ViRGE in your video would have been pretty incredible by those days' standards.
You can really tell the amount of work involved in getting this video made. So many random patches and fixes to hunt down but well worth it. Great cover of what S3 acceleration could do!
Thanks! It's been months in the making 😬
17:49 The mw2 and mw3 (maybe also mw4?) games were just phenomenal. They don't make them like they used to.
And btw, the 233 MMX can run MW2 at 480p in software faster than the Virge.
Very interesting list, I appreciate the effort that went into not only installing and running these games but recording them and discussing them. This has caused me to install some games on systems I haven't gotten around to comparing yet. Thank you.
Oh that's great to hear! You're very welcome. I finally tracked down the ViRGE version of Whiplash 3D as well so I'll be making a video about that soon.
That was the best Virge Game showcase of the entire TH-cam!! Thanks! Just subscribed keep the good work
I had one of these (2MB version) paired with a 3Dfx Voodoo. It was a good combo back then.
I remember using the virge on "jedi knight - dark forces II" i think it was. I remember that in software mode at 320x200 the virge looked better, but was actually slower then 320x200 in software mode on my at the time k6-2 550. I remember it going down in history as a 3d de-accelerator haha. I even managed to upgrade the ram for it, i bought 4 chips at a market. Didn't make it any faster. That card is what ended up being my 2d partner card for my voodoo2 i bought when i got my pentium 3 450mhz katmai machine. I overclocked it to 600mhz, and that machine with its voodoo2 was my workhorse for a long time before i moved to a pentium 3 socket 370 1gig machine. After that, i jumped ships, and bought an athlon 1900+. That machine was a beast.
I remember the S3 virge DX, it was in my first PC I owned, a pentium 133MHz, it was a better dos gaming card when using software rendering with the vesa drivers installed. I then upgraded the system with a 200MHz MMX and a 3dfx voodoo 3 2000 which was a massive jump in performance.
Really REALLY enjoyed this video Rees. Great work! You've reminded me of many games I'd forgotten about too lol. Including Terminal Velocity and TOCA. My S3 Virge experience on my P200MMX was limited to:
1) Install S3 Virge
2) Try Tomb Raider 3
3) Remove S3 Virge and return to Supplier
4) Receive Creative Labs 3D Blaster (3DFX Banshee) and live happily ever after :D
Between you and me, I think you made the right choice there 😂
S3 Virge was not meant for 1998 era, and Pentium 200MMX + era.
It was meant to for Pentium 75-133 era, or 486 DX2 100-133 era. And year 1996 primarily.
Buying it after year 1997, was pure madness, it was like to buy 2d card. So your virge experience is your own fault, sorry. Banshee was released in 1998 or 1999 , virge era was over here, it was basicaly basic 3d solution, so you can at least run into menu. Who can buy virge when banshee was out, is mystery for me, but I've checked price listing, and it costed so little in 1998, that it was putting into computers like 2d card (there was no other worse option at the time).
So you've missed Virge era, that's why your experience.
@@warrax111 Exactly 3 years of tech development in 90's was an abyss. In February 1999 Pentium III were released !
Man this video this day become one year ! this the first time i see you channle ! oh man thank you so much for the heart feelings that come from the 80s :( thxxxxxxxxxxxx
It's worth noting that the S3 Virge and Trio made their way into almost every server made in the last 20 years and is still used in those platforms to this day.
how so?
That case is beautiful
Excellent video Rees. I bet you have a nice time playing all of this. Imagine how challenging is to test all these games on the same platform.
RM monitor!! I remember banks of the these CRTs in secondary school, trip down memory lane!
Very interesting video :) it's nice to see something different to 3dfx accelerated stuff.
Terminal velocity looked amazing back in the day. Loved it.
in 1997 when I was using a Packard Bell (Cry) Pentium 233 MMX I was looking at 3D cards and thought about the savage after my bad experience with the Mystique, but the Savage did not excite me. I waited until mid 1998 and got a 16MB Voodoo Banshee and wow, that was an awesome match for the 233 MMX; especially as it only had one PCI slot available, so it was a simple case of disable the onboard graphics and let the Banshee do its thing. So please do a Banshee video for old memories sake :-)
This is a trip down memory lane.
I had two S3 cards, back in the day. I can't remember which one was the first card I had but I think it might have been a Trio 3D. I also had a Voodoo and remember testing them against each other on Tomb Raider. No contest. 3DFX won.
The second S3 card was the Savage 4. Bought mostly for it's 2D performance but when it came to Unreal Tournament. The only winner. on the S3 Metal engine with the compressed textures, of course. I may also be mis-remembering but possibly Severence: Blade of Darkness also ran quite well on it but this was a long time ago.
Very nice video on the Virge, well done! I'm impressed you managed to get the s3d version of Destruction Derby - I couldnt find it for my Virge video. I'm also impressed you got Mechwarrior 2 to work.. my game just crashed in s3d mode!
It took so much tracking down - I think I found it on a Megaupload link on a Russian forum in the end. I'm going to be uploading it to archive.org in the next few days and will add the link to the list on my website.
@@ctrlaltrees That would be great, thanks! I'd love to try it out on my virge
Done! Here's the link: archive.org/details/d2dderbyS3
@@ctrlaltrees Thanks so much!
Wow Rees, solid effort there with this video. Must have taken ages!!
Months!
I had a S3 Trio 64V+ (I think that it was) with 1M RAM on my Pentium 90 when I bought it. When I managed to upgrade the CPU to a Pentium 166 I got also some RAM for the system and for the video card. So I upgraded the card to the max 2M RAM and the computer to 32M. I ran Windows 95 at the time and with that card I finished Quake and played many many nights Starcraft.
I had S3 Trio 64V+ too with my Pentium-133 when I get to the high school in 1995, when Virge came out I want to get it because the 3d game thing seems became huge. Later on I got 2 Voodoo 2 12mb SLI then finally an IDT winchip2 200mhz to replace the P-133. Such a good memory and fun time back then.
Nice showcase of games that made use of the S3 Virge. You got a lot more use out of it than I did mine 😃
Hahahaha. I'm glad you can still remember the 3D card of s3 virge in 2021. It's so rare
2021 yeah. s3 virge gx2
Well, with the global GPU shortage at the moment it might be our only option 😉
@@ctrlaltrees haha.great
Awesome insight and a couple of surprises in the form of games I didn’t know.
Thanks Rich, yes, I'm so glad I decided to explore everything this card had to offer, I think I unearthed some hidden gems along the way!
@@ctrlaltrees indeed. And this period was to me at least the most exciting time. So many cool and interesting games. And so much exciting hardware.
Between the huge strides in 3D graphics and the rise of the internet it was a very exciting time to be a PC gamer, that's for sure!
@@ctrlaltrees Hm does the windows 95 version of destruction derby run on other 3d accelerated cards or will it simply not boot at all without a virge card of the era ?
Could perhaps be used in combination with dgvoodoo or dgvoodoo2 for a more modern pc too run it.
The Neil Thomas voice over was hilarious!
This was awesome and helped me know what the Diamond Stealth 2000 Pro (4MB version of Virge/Dx) can do in games given my retro PC has only PCI ports (no AGP.) The system has a Pentium III in it, so I’ll see if any of these games fair better in my system. Thanks again for the comprehensive coverage of the Virge/DX! 👍
Gerat video! P2 333Mhz was Voodoo1/Voodoo2 time (I also started with P2 333 / Nvidia TNT1 / 128MB Ram).
So the CPU seems a bit new for that timeframe abd guess way more people experienced it with Pentium and MMX CPUs.
The PC in this video is a 233 MMX.
Great video, you displayed so many games man, that must have been quite the work load. This deep dive into s3d was very cool, first video I have seen detail their offering this much. Thanks for putting it out there.
You're welcome, and thanks for the kind comment. Yes, it has taken months to track down all of these games and get them running properly! I hope all of the info I put on my website along the way makes life easier for anyone else who wants to try the same thing in future. 🙂
@@ctrlaltrees I probably will, thanks! At some point I want to give my own take on s3d, great references here besides being an entertaining video that I enjoyed very much.
These demos don't really hold up today but when these cards were brand new and the very first 3D accelerated games came to the PC it was mind blowing.
Yesss. Terminal Velocity. Basically, a game that lured me in to gamedev.
My pentium ran terminal velocity and descent well with and without the virge. The only difference I could see on the virge on descent though was a slight blurring of textures up close lol.
I remember playing Descent 2 on an S3 Virge card and being extremely impressed. When he's got such a powerful CPU, the software render works great. On an older CPU, the S3 not only gives a great frame rate, but also really nice looking (for the time) texture filtering.
Man mechwarrior takes me back, absolutely loved those games when I was 12 when mwII came out
This is my whole childhood but mine was all shareware because we were poor.
@8:57 Hehe, "Loooooser!!!" :D Games was much motivating this time :D
The S3 Virges were my gateway drug into upgrading PC's. I had the Virge 325 for a long while, then paired with a Voodoo1 up until the Amd k6-2 500Mhz, Then it was Amd Athlons and Nvidia all the way from then. Edit, I still have the exact Orchid Righteous from the day shown here, but alas It dosen't seem to work anymore. Also a huge Atari fan, Great Video!
There are people in the 3dfx community who you can send defective Voodoo cards to for repair in exchange for some money.
Great video! Sadly I only played few games off that list. And all of them in pure DOS.
My first brand new PC I am sure had some kind of S3 graphics inside it (alongside a Cyrix M2 233mhz). I only realised this playing X wing vs Tie fighter and noticed a 3d graphics option, ticked that and suddenly everything looked a little bit better!
Have a 4MB Virge GX2 AGP in my "1997" K6 233 MMX / 6MB Voodoo Graphics, downloading the Descent II Inifinite Abyss ISO now, had totally missed that. Can't wait to gie it a go and compare to my Voodoo card :D Great Video as usual, and a GREAT job on the list on your website.
S3D version of Screamer is hilarious, worse performance than software and super blurry.
Oh it's just awful, I'm wondering whether it's because of the way it's been "patched". It would be good to track down the proper OEM version and see if it's any better.
@@ctrlaltrees probably not, the S3 can do better performance at 320x200 or better quality at 640x480, not both. At least in most games. Even my gx2 struggles.
Cool to see you used my dump of the original release of Croc.
Thanks so much for making it available. I'm a big fan of preservation and archive.org as I'm sure you can see!
@@ctrlaltrees You're welcome. It was a little odd that it didn't seem to be uploaded anywhere before I did because I could be wrong, but I think it's more common to find physically than the re-release.
Wow, i did have that Diamond card, (bought it only because Destruction Derby). Cool nostalgia! 😁
I had soooo many S3 ViRGe cards from a local electronics surplus store I used to dumpster dive every weekend that threw them out. I legit had an entire milk crate filled to the top that I had to stop taking them lol. No idea what they were doing and why they had so many to throw out but they worked great under Linux back in the 90's!
EDIT: The majority I remember were specifically DX cards, usually between 1-4 megabytes.
this was interesting, also learned what ViRGE means 😅
I feel the moniker "graphics decelerator" was well deserved, at least for your typical 1995 PCs. At the time I had a DX4-120 and Diamond Stealth3D 2000, and on that system I never came close to any noticeable performance gain. I got a Voodoo 1 upon release in 1996 and I never looked at the Virge's 3D support again, although I kept it in the system until i upgraded to a Pentium 2. I still have both that original Voodoo 1 and Stealth 3d, but not a period correct system to put it in, unfortunately.
486 can't do 3d so no wonder. I think a large part of the problem is that people had S3 cards in older systems where the cpu, and especially the fpu simply couldn't keep up.
If you put a Voodoo card in a 486 it barely makes a difference either, the fpu simply isn't fast enough for 3d.
@@BadManiac A 486 can do 3D reasonably well in ms-dos. You won't reach 60 fps, but that was uncommon anyway. It's a different story in Windows especially when MMX was introduced, and that's what forced me to upgrade in the end. But those late 486 CPUs came very close to a P60 or a P66.
@@custardo Not really. They can do very basic software rendered 3D just about playably, but once you reach Quake it grinds to a halt.The vast majority of 486 struggle to reach 10FPS in Quake, a really well setup one can hit 15 FPS, and if you're a complete madman like CPU Galaxy, you can just about get to 20FPS. And that number won't change much, if at all, with a 3D card, the FPU in a 486 simply isn't fast enough.
@@BadManiac many people thinks, that Quake running slowing on 486 is because of FPU. But that's not the truth. It running slower, because Quake using multitexturing. One texture map is for light another for texture. So it has to count every pixel twice.
Pentium can run it in one pass (both textures), because it was optimalized for Pentium instructions.
486 cannot do it in one pass, but it needs 2 clocks. That's why Quake running so slow on 486, not because of FPU. 486 has quite capable FPU, only a bit slower than Pentium, not like 2x slower.
@@warrax111 As far as I know, Quake still uses such a feature of Pentium as the possibility of simultaneous (and parallel) operation of the CPU and FPU. In earlier processors, the CPU was suspended for the duration of the FPU operation, waiting for it to receive results - this scheme went back from 8086/8087. The same problem was in AMD K6.
I had S3 Virge. First alone, and then as 2d card for 3DFX Voodoo
I spent many hours playing TOCA 2 on the PS1, this looks good on PC!
I remember magazines back then confirming what you mentioned here... hardware mode would look a little prettier, but run slower than software rendering. S3 Virge even began some pretty 3D modes that others would adopt for their own cards. :)
The Voodoo is famous, not infamous ... now the ViRGE, the _ViRGE_ is infamous.
That is interesting. I had this card in one of my computers, and I actually did not know it is a 3D capable card. I always assumed it is decent 2D card with 2D accelration, but did not know (or tried) any 3D, probably because of the API not many games were compatible. I was not into gaming anyway at that time. I got it pretty late, maybe 1998, and year later was using Riva TNT2 anyway, so no big loss. TNT2 was really nice, played a lot of Quake 1-3, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, and few period games. Still as a 2D card Virge was decent, could got decent resolution, and with some trouble also worked on Linux with Xorg (it worked poorly in VESA mode, not supporting scrolling or high res at all), with good 2D acceleration.
I had one of these GPUs back then. I bought it together with my Pentium 200MHz machine ... all the good stuff back then. Except, the GPU wasn't good. The drivers were not good. Game support was not good. Etc. I am not sure about the timeline back then, but I upgraded to a Voodoo Banshee when that was available and it really was a huge upgrade that brought new life to my PC.
My first PC actually had an S3 Virge DX. I later upgraded it with a 3dfx voodoo 2 and even later got one more to run SLI on it. But I did try a couple of games in the S3 virge mode. And since at the time when I tried them I already had the 3dfx I didn't really find them very impressive. I was quite impressed later with their texture compression for their Savage 2000 cards though...
New sub, love your videos!
Welcome aboard! Thanks for the kind comment. 🙂
My first pc was a 60mhz Pentium when I was 13 so this video is a huge trip down memory lane
This feels like one of those "don't meet your heroes" type of reviews
20:32 "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
@36:00
POD MMX sticker was a scam. Intel paid game studios up to $1mil in bribes per title claiming benefits. POD uses MMX for _one_ sound filtering effect, zero speed benefits. Confirmed (the sum per endorsement) by Intels developer relations group co-lead from that time frame.
Problem with Virge was it needed >100MHz Pentium to actually run "3D acceleration" at a decent speed, but ~100MHz was the break even speed to run 320x200 games faster in software rendering mode.
I used this GFX cards on some systems I built in those days, you could add ram to it via those slots. had that with AWE32 - Intel BX chipset era good chipset.
The README.RTF file included with the 2000 PC port of Metal Gear Solid makes mention of the S3 ViRGE GX chipset used in the ViRGE/GX and ViRGE/VX. I have yet to try it out with my original S3 ViRGE.
I also know that the S3 ViRGE is *technically* supported by Direct3D, but in the two games I tried it had serious issues. Sonic R had a majority of the screen appearing black due to issues with alpha, and Half-Life displayed without any textures.
Yeah, I looked into the Direct3D stuff but it was so buggy I decided not to bother with it. Interested to hear about Metal Gear Solid, I'll look into it. Thanks!
So this video is actually a massive apology for being slightly factually inaccruate on a video you have now delisted?
That's why I subscribe. Well that and the sarcasm... and mostly the sarcasm actually.
Sarcasm? No... I hate it. Lowest form of wit. 😉
I would like to see a video on the NEC released PowerVR and PowerVR2 PCI boards that were just an add in cards, and I think used video overlay or maybe just calculated the 3D geometry and texture stuff and fed data to the videocard via some frame buffer or something. I think that it might actually be the first conventional implementation of a GPU.
Destruction Derby run in 1024*768? Wow!
Ahhhhh man, I *love* Mechwarrior 2. I remember trying to run the demo an a 66MHz 486-DX2 Intel Overdrive with no 3D accelerator...and it did *not* go well. Eventually managed to get to play it, and some years later Mechwarrior 3 came out and a cousin had it, I played it, absolutely adored it, and went home to try and run it on my own system which had some glorious onboard graphics and 24mb of RAM (game wanted 32 as a minimum)...which also did *not* go well and I was sad.
Eventually, thankfully, I got to play that, too. MW3 is probably by far my favourite MW game and it's both a shame it's picky as hell and a pain in the ass to get running on a modern system or a Win 98/2000/ME if you're mad/XP virtual machine. Then again it is a wonderful excuse to build a system to run it on haha
The interlaced video between the menu options in the transitions for Battle Race is godawful on the eyes!
A comparison between S3D, 3dfx, Rage, MGA-Mystique on very early 3D would be nice.
Awesome stuff!
Battle Race is nothing all that special, but I do know that the lead programmer on it, Martin Hoffesommer, actually went to work for S3 off the back of his work with them for the game (it was a pack in with certain S3 Virge cards, and the developer Soft-Enterprises made a small bit of money off each bundle sold), to help on their S3 Texture Compression system. His codework even made it as far as Valve, which I discovered through a google search and turning up a database concerning the 2003 Valve leak files. Not sure exactly what Valve used the code for, though.
youtube removed my like on the video so i've readded it :) keep up the great work
Awesome review and retrospective! But what about S3 Virge GX2? ;)
27:04
Congratulations For S3 VIRGE
Are you still looking for that Whiplash 3D CD? I've been working on and off on a video showcasing the Virge GX2 and came across this video in my search for resources. anyways I have the CD if you're still looking I should be able to rip an ISO.
Oh yes, very much so! Thanks for the offer. Easiest way to contact me is probably email on rees@ctrl-alt-rees.com
watching this for a few min i thought that case looked very familiar, ive got pretty much the same exact one with a JCC sticker in the square and a grey toggle switch
Nice video. Back in the days, I really wanted to like the Virge as it would have been a cheap 3D option for others than my main PC. But I couldn't. The D3D support was just too bad.
S3 ViRGE graphics decselerator yes !!!! Often seen , much more speed on softwarerendering .... but the S3 ViRGE was a cool chip for cardbuilder, the virge has the same pinout as the normal S3 chip.
Nice! Do you know if there's already a S3D wrapper? I still haven't been able to find one.
Only OpenGL as far as I can see
@@ctrlaltrees Yes, but I meant wrappers that make it possible to run these games on other hardware, like the glide wrappers available.
Why is the Voodoo infamous?
Certainly the best known and longest lived of those early 3D accelerators and still has a big cult following today.
@@ctrlaltrees Infamous = bad, like Hitler, or that Miley Cyrus episode of Black Mirror.
Do you think the S3 would've made a decent job of rendering Virtua Fighter? Terminal Velocity certainly looks nicer.
Ooh, if you have a 486 with a PCI slot, I would very much like to see how Tomb Raider runs. We used to run Tomb Raider on our second hand 486 in a tiny window, so seeing if a 3D accelerator makes a difference would be very gratifying.
I had one of these in a pentium 200 mmx Packard bell. Was built into the motherboard. Didn't have a clue what it could do at the time... Which wasn't much to be fair lol.
S3 Virge could have been OK with options to override Bilinear filtering to OFF in drivers.And then add support for alpha blending and it's quite a nice cheap card.
I've got S3 Virge on my home server mainly for console output. I'd love to see side-by-side benchmark of S3 Virge/DX vs S3 Trio3D though
I remember my stepdad buying the S3 in computer fair and popping in the memory upgrade chips, without them you could have 1024x768 or 65k colours, not both..!
Kinda impressive seeing the virge crank out 3d at 1024x768
X-Wing vs. TIE FIghter and Balance of Power ran fairly well on the S3 with 4 megs, in a K6-233. No complains the only artifact in the frames was a black box in the background of every explosion but it was 100% playable. Good video tho, I think this video card was missunderstood by most people.
I recall seeing a magazine ad for the Virge back in the day, with Virtua Fighter being showcased as a compatible title. Weirdly enough, I can't find any references to it online, so I'm not sure if the Virge-compatible version really made it to market. I was completely in awe of Virtua Fighter, so the ad made me salivate over the Virge. Good thing I didn't have the money, I guess. ;)
never mind, I noticed you have mentioned VF as vaporware on your website, thanks for taking the effort in doing the research.
No problem! Yes, there were quite a few titles that announced Virge support that never materialised. Trouble is the API was hard to develop for with very little benefit, so I suppose they decided that it just wasn't worth the effort.
Thank you great video!!!!
I tried running Longbow 2 on a virgeDX. It run in slow motion, no matter the Grfx settings.
BTW funny thing, I remember playing some of these games and they run fine. I was a kid though, and I can't recall what my dad had bought.
I have the diamond stealth version of this card expanded to 4mb and actually if I want to play Descent II on 640x480 in DOS my machine benefits from the graphics "accelerator" I believe due to the fact I only have a pentium 133. If my chip was faster I imagine software would run better.
Makes me wonder if the VIA Chrome9 (based on S3's Savage3D gpu IP) could run this graphics api.
"Last and fastest pentium mmx that intel ever made" that is not quite right though! Later on came not only a 266 MHz version, but even a 300 MHz Pentium MMX (google SL34N), albeit they were not released for Socket 7, but as mobile and embedded packages - there are (or were?) adapters for that though.
¿Sabes donde se puede conseguir el Screamer en version completa? (Do you know where you can get the full version Screamer?)
The full retail version is on archive.org: archive.org/details/msdos_Screamer_1995
As for the S3 version... No, I'm still looking for it. 🙂
@@ctrlaltrees Gracias.
This card able to run very limited hardware 3d feature, every problem solve after add-on the voodoo 2 graphic...
Screamer seems to be missing CD Audio?
Yes, well spotted. I was having some trouble with CD audio in DOS at one point but eventually managed to get it working. I must have captured this while it was still broken.
I had a Pentium 233 machine w/S3 virge too.. quite the upgrade from a 486 66mhz
Good video pal
There's an HP OEM Whiplash CD on Ebay now.
If I good remeber there was also a version of NHL which was running with S3.
Thank you, that was a very interesting interesting video. My first PC was a AMD K6 233 with a S3 Virge, so pretty close to what you are running. It was nice to see that I didn't miss out on anything back in the days, since the game I played wasn't accelerated. But I would probably have tried to get hold of Tomb Raider if I had known.
By the way how does running Quake in software compare to Virge accelerated Quake?
I ended up resigning myself to software mode.
Visuals werent as nice, but it was nearly always a better experience.
I did enjoy the card though. Was fun to develop for and in controlled conditions (ie. not gaming, or at best games designed around the hardware) is could pull off surprisingly decent results.
Where you get Whiplash\Fatal Racing for S3 Virge?
There's a link to download it on my website: ctrl-alt-rees.com/2020-12-06-s3-virge-officially-supported-games-and-s3d-patch-downloads.html
The beginning of the 3d accelerator era was a weird one in a lot of ways. We were just coming out of the SVGA era where different cards were incompatible with each other. The Playstation had been released and companies felt pressure to release 3d cards.
The funny thing is though, a decent PC at 320x200 and software rendering could match what the Playstation could do with its hardware rendering. The Playstation ran most games at 8 to 16bit color at 256x224. Some were higher, but that was the most common. The Playstation with its 33mhz cpu used its hardware accelerator to match what you could already do on PC, not to surpass it. Tomb Raider for instance looked and played pretty similarly on a Pentium 75, 486 120mhz, or the Playstation. And when the Playstation was released, the Pentium 133mhz was already out.
The second part of that (which I didn't get the chance to write about yesterday (stupid work)) was that 3d accelerators initially released for pc were built with ASIC chips. Those ASICs at the time were usually clocked between 40 or 60 mhz or so. They were specifically designed for running 3d math, and could do so faster than a similarly clocked Pentium... but a much faster Pentium? No so much. ASICs were pretty important early on and worked pretty well, and the money that was pumped into their development because of 3d accelerators, allowed them to improve pretty rapidly in speed, functionality, and expansion, including amount of addressable ram.
What you're forgetting here is that a Playstation was £200 at most, and a PC worth using for gaming would rush you a grand at the very least. There were cheaper PCs out there, but they wouldn't be good enough for the job.
Most people I know had to struggle to cobble together the £200 for a Playstation, being that it was more than the average weekly wage at the time. It's not like now(well, not right now thanks to the scalpocalypse) where you can throw together a good gaming PC for less than the price of a PS5.
The playstation was more *significantly* more powerful than a 133mhz pentium for graphics rendering.
8bit color at 320x200 was almost default in that era for pc games. Going higher color depth hurt performance a lot.
Most playstation games were 320x224 in 15bit color. Many in 512x224. 256x224 wasn't common, especially for 3d.
All a person has to do is look at games side by side and the compromises to get games running on cpu driven 3d renderers is very obvious.
And what exactly do you mean by "We were just coming out of the SVGA era where different cars were incompatible with each other"?
VESA is VESA. It's a *standard*. And supported by about %99.5 of videocards. Absolutely *not* incompatible with each other. It's the entire purpose of VESA.
The exception being where apis are used rather than hitting the hardware directly, which obvbiously isnt a problem when it comes to compatibility. Software will use the appropriate code path for the relevant api.
Also, the cpu in the psx is comparable to low end pentiums for software rendered 3d.