The Banshee had fantastic 2D output for the time, when I later switched to a GeForce 256 there was a noticeable downgrade in 2D image quality in terms of sharpness and stability
The actual sharpness of the 2d was determined by the analog filtering on the card. Most venders just used the cheapest that was possible where as 3dfx actually enforced some standard on it. In the digital realm the nvidia 2d engine of the GF256 was close to the banshee. Though I do agree it was not as feature complete or as fast.
I have a Matrox G200A, a Voodoo 3 2000, and a GeForce 256 (3D Blaster Annihilator Pro) and they all give good 2D image quality at 1280x1024. I also had a GeForce 2 MX 200 from ELSA and that card was absolutely terrible at higher resolutions, blurry and such, so I got rid of it.
I had the Voodoo 2/Nvidia Riva128 and upgated to the Matrox G400 (dual VGA head) and then to the GeForce 2-Ti. The 2D/3D image, sharpness and colours on the Matrox were amazing and the 2D/3D image on the GeForce2-Ti was terrible with washout colours and badly blurred. The colours could not be fixed however removing the "EMI/RFI" ceramic filter capacitors (signal to ground) on the RGB video traces to the RGB connector fixed the blurred image making it nice and sharp!
My first 3D accelerator ever and the only 3Dfx card i owned back in the day : the allmighty Gainward Dragon 4000 16Mb AGP. Paired with a AMD K6-2 300Mhz CPU was my gaming machine from 98 to 2000. It was such a pleasure to play games like FIFA99, Unreal, Quake 2, Half-Life, Shogo and many, many other gems from the period. Great card in my opinion!
Same here as well the Voodoo Banshee was nice but if memory serves slower in 3D. -Banshee doesn't take advantage of agp bus. -Banshee better then single voodoo 2 in games that don't use multitexturing. (higher clocks) -Voodoo 2 better then banshee in games that use multitexturing. (most games at the time) -voodoo 2 in sli vastly superior to banshee. -Banshee has more texture memory, which can reduce stuttering compared to Voodoo2 in some games. -Banshee has more resolution flexibility. -Banshee can do 3D in a window. -Banshee has excellent VGA and GUI acceleration. These are from two old forum posts from the time.
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing.
@@GodKitty677 I have 2 Banchee cards today. My first, which I got for Xmas around 98 or 99 and it was PCI, But than later picked up a 2nd card that was AGP. So Banchee "Can" work with AGP...
Call back to the K6-2 300Mhz w/ 3dNOW!!!! My 1st BIG PC UPGRADE XMAS!!!! I begged everyone in my family to buy me the upgrades on my Xmas list, and I got them. All becuase I spilled milk into the keyboard of my good old pentium 133 socket 7 system, and it shorted the KB port in just the way the sys would turn on but not let me pass the "NO keyboard Detected"... So my dad took me to the local shop and got me a new main board that would work with all my existing parts, including the Pentium 133 I already had... But this new Shuttle Board would work with the K6-2 300, so that's what went on my Xmas list. Along with Creative Voodoo Blaster Banchee, PCI Sound Blaster Live Gold, a 4X Internal CDRW drive, and another small upgrade which got me upto 32MD's of SIMM ram.... I had a VisionMaster Pro 22in CRT back then and I could just watch for day after day playing Quake, Unreal, Quake 2, Full Throttle, and a bunch more. Thanks for the strole.
I just got my first 3dfx card 2 days ago, and it happens to be a 16mb Voodoo Banshee PCI! What splendid timing for this video! Also, I love the classy garden footage of the cards. Very relaxing.
This is one of my favorite GPU's for a DOS gaming PC. The great 2D engine and Glide support make it fantastic for this era. The Voodoo3 is much of the same with better 3D performance.
Yeah it was not so bad. My main coputer at the time was a Celeron 450A and i had a voodoo2 and Matrox G200 Marvel for 2d. And used a monitor with two inputs so I didn't have to worry about the loopback. My second computer was a Celeron 400@500 on the 83mhz bus and a pci banshee on an intel 810 based board. And honestly both computers played very good. The banshee in that computer was overclocked slightly, to something like 110 or 115. And it pulled some good numbers compared to my main box.
@@wishusknight3009 Loved those old celerons. I was an avid overclocker back in the day and had a lot if fun with those cpus. My main system was a P2 300, S code was SL2W8. These chips were famous for being underclocked 450mhz models. I was able to hit well over 500 with mine. A couple years later I took a coppermine celeron from 600mhz to 1087mhz.
The VESA support for DOS 2D was quite good, though I seem to remember there being glitches at 400x300 and 512x384 modes, which were carried forward to the Voodoo3. Still a heck of a card at the price point considering how many flawed to awful options were in the market in 1998.
Lets not forget that there were many Banshee cards sold with higher frequencies. For example the Gigabyte GA630 runs with 110/130 mhz instead of the standard 100/100 mhz, being 15-20% faster than the standard version. The Monster Fusion Banshee run with 105/120 mhz, being also much faster than the standard version.
The first look of this Graphics Card in 1998 got when my tech magazine reviewed it. And I believe it as top line gfx of time, if not exceptional ofcourse
Cool to see a new video from you man. I bought a Banshee back in the day for my HP Pavilion K6-2 and was pretty happy with it for about a year, not bad considering how fast things were moving back then
Just found your channel. Love these trips down memory lane. I got my first computer about 2001, it was my dad's old computer had a Pentium III 900mhz, 128mb ram, Geforce4 Ti 4200 128mb graphics card. Loved playing Hellbender and Fury 3 with the Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick. Had the Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Sim City 2000, Sim Farm. Had a game called Ice and Fire that was really cool would love to play again. I got my dad's old PC cause he upgraded to a Pentium 4, 512mb ram, Radeon 9800xt 256mb. I remember staying up late the day we got a 10/100 switch and figuring out how to share files with each other....lol
A lot of people confuse the banshee to the actually hated on rush. Banshee was the shit up until u played multi textured games. So underrated. Pretty much for the try hard 3dfx fan on a budget.
Wonderful video... Still remember buying that Maxi Gamer Phoenix pci. Coming from an awful 2d only SiS VGA card, it gave my already aging pentium 1 a nice boost and the ability to discover all those 3d games of the era, even some friends had voodoo 2 even sli, it was more than enough to really enjoy the gameplay
Very nicely put together, with lovely b-roll. I'll waltz myself down to the lab with the music of the opening sequence in my head to try and get the last piece of footage I need.
Oh interesting! I ripped it off an old record we found at Goodwill, and it went under a slightly different name, but it's exactly the same. Never heard of that particular release!
Also, it was a Voodoo card that runed 2D - if you wanted to own 3Dfx and had to replace your 2D card (It was clear that cards like S3 Trio couldn't support new 2D games in 1998) then Voodoo Banshe was quite a good deal in general.
I remember this card because i had a Voodoo Rush this time and when i able to upgrade i didnt want two VGA cards in my PC but when i read the first test in some magazine i decide to buy a S3Trio 4MB and a Voodoo II 12MB instead of a Banshee :)
I feel like most of the people saying the Banshee was disliked likely were not around at the time the card was actually out. The Banshee was very popular for budget builds. I owned one at the time and I knew several others that did. An SLI Voodoo 2 setup was beyond the reach of most teenagers in 1998. Sure journalists that got video cards for free bagged on it. Also most of the forum complainers were likely just kids that were fanboying. Also the whole argument about poor driver support I don’t recall being an issue in the time. It ran every game I wanted to play. I am glad you pointed out games like Quake 3. It was really amazing at the time to play that game and UT99 on such a humble graphics card. Great video.
I love my Banshee. It was a great replacement for my Stealth ii. I even convinced a friend or two to purchase one. Much loved by me. I had the lovely Phoenix model.
I went with a Matrox G400. Dualhead in 1999 on 2x 17" Viewsonic monitors was amazing. Better 2D, as well. And I got good framerates in Descent 3 and Quake 3 Arena. :D
My first 3D card. A proper 2D and 3D card that best every other card at the time but ignorance of many who loves to criticize because they had Riva TNT with crappy 2D and awful directX who had to compete with glide. People who had much more expensive voodoo 2 also with their 2 tmu loved to criticize. Banshee brought voodoo experiences to the mass.
I actually sold both of my Voodoo2 12MB cards recently because I had decided the Ensonique Banshee I have is "good enough" Voodoo for me in my PII 450MHz rig. The 2D video quality through the loopback cable on the V2 sucked. So, while 3D games were great I had to deal with a sub-par Windows desktop. Games are not the only thing I use this computer for so the poor visual was a deal breaker. The Banshee 2D quality is superb...extremely crisp. Games (to my eyes) look just fine and the lack of the second texture unit really does not bother me at all. And, it is natively supported in BeOS 5 which was another plus for me at least. This machine also functions as a BeBox. So yeah, I really love this card. It is overall a fantastic 2D and 3D card and worthy of owning.
I have nothing but fond memories for my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee. Unreal, unreal tournament, GLQuake, quake three Arena, King pin. Winamp with the amp can visualizer. So many good memories. And all the games were guaranteed to be screamers for performance on the Banshee if you could run them in glide.
Well I don't know about other people but I upgraded a Matrox G200 with a 3D Blaster Banshee back in the day and I couldn't be happier. In fact I just got another for a retro build I'm putting together.
i had a trident 1mb VLB, and when upgrading my computer jumped from that to a voodoo banshee (1998) ... i loved that card. never had any issues with it. my next upgrade was to a geforce 2 32mb (2000) ...
I had a VOODOO 1 attached to a Matrox Mystique (For those who don't know, the VOODOO 1 didn't offer any 2d output. It had a passthrough port for that)... Then I upgraded to the Creative 3d Blaster Banshee (a Voodoo Banshee from Creative Labs) and I LOVED IT!!! It was fast, worked with all my older games, the only downfall I had was the early drivers were junk for Windows98. But this was fixed around 1999 and with internet it was easy to update. It worked GREAT after and I still have it. I don't use it in my retro machine, as I have a 64mb VooDoo 5 that I can use for that. I still love playing Quake 1 with the KQP (Killer Quake Patch) and using my 3dFx Card which just makes it look GREAT!!! I play multiplayer with friends on my local network using my old Pentium 3- 1.3Ghz with 256mb Ram, 128gb SSD and Voodoo5... Runs fast and looks great!!!
The banshee was my 3rd gpu ever and to go from a 1megabyte pci ATI to the banshee on agp and 16 megabytes was huge. From 800x600 to 1024x768 was wow factor. I wish I still had it.my fourth gpu was a radeon 9600xt which I still have.
I had a Quantum 3D Banshee and I loved it. I had it running alongside my Pentium 166MMX and then when I upgraded to an AMD Duron 700, it went into that until I upgraded to an Nvidia MX 400.
In the late 90s I had a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 2 card. One of my best friends had a Voodoo Banshee. I remember it feeling really crippled when playing the same games, but thinking back it was probably because we were running the same games in 1024x758 whereas my Voodoo 2 topped out at 800x600. I bought a Voodoo 3 like the day they came out after seeing all of the hype. I stuck with that until upgrading to a Geforce 2 a year or two later.
@@PixelPipes Awesome! Just had a look and found a full recording on TH-cam (not sure if you've got links turned off so I'll add it to the Twitter post)
Oh wow I didn't even think to look for it on TH-cam! Figured it was too obscure Here's the link he found for anyone else curious: th-cam.com/video/s7q8eixjx9s/w-d-xo.html
I upgraded to the Voodoo Banshee from my Diamond Monster (Voodoo 1) card and was quite happy with it. I was disappointed at the time I couldn't get an AGP version. AGP versions were in limited supply. I later upgraded to a Voodoo 3 3000, Voodoo 3 3500 TV and finally Voodoo 5 5500. The only card I don't have anymore is the Voodoo 3 3000, as I sold that to get the Voodoo 3 3500 TV. What I appreciated most about 3dfx products was their quality and practicality. Sure TNT had 32-bit rendering, but it was mostly a slideshow and memory limitations meant that texture quality had to be sacrificed. Apparently even the Voodoo 1 would render everything in 32-bit, then down-sample it to 16-bit for storing in the frame buffer.
I had the rush as my first 3d card, then the banshee and I was thrilled to have it, wasn’t at all disappointed with it. But it did start the thirst of the upgrade over the next 20 years !
Brings back memories, my first 3D card, the banshee, the later added a voodoo2. The good days. Wish they would've stayed in business. In my opinion, nVidia wouldn't be what they would today without them acquiring 3DFX.
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing. I was sharing the PC with my dad at the time and one day it started having some issues and he took it in to the computer shop to have it repaired. The owner told my dad that I had a fire hazard sitting there and had removed the riva128 and replaced that and the voodoo2 with a S3 virge dx card instead. Told my dad, I need to buy a nintendo instead because computers weren't designed for games.
In the late 90's, the Voodoo Banshee was an absolute game-changer that provided a significant upgrade from graphics cards like S3. It could effortlessly handle most 3Dfx games, eliminating the need for multiple graphics cards to handle 2D and 3D graphics separately. This was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time, as gamers could now enjoy superior graphics performance with just one card.
This was my first PC upgrade in 1998/1999, and lord what a difference made it back then! I played Incoming and Pod racer many hours with it. I had the PCI Version from Creative labs. But i soon found out after 2 years it became obsolete very fast... And my K6-2 300mhz aswell.. i still own the card!
loved my banshee agp card back in the day.. got me through many great games.. will always remain a cherished purchase.. although i migrated to nvidia after the banshee.
I remember how I got the card for christmas in like 99 and paired it with my Pentium 3 500 and I freaking loved it. Finally I was able to play the 3Dfx only games and they ran wonderful.
I was an engineer from 3dfx. (And yes the AGP as all the functions that was turned off). Avenger turned it on. Sad that it was a loss at that point, but there was a level bus power problem.
I don't think AGP features would've made that much of a difference on the Banshee. Even the Voodoo 3 cards didn't see a huge difference and a Voodoo 2 SLI setup could easily keep up with a Voodoo 3 2000, despite it managing two cards sharing the PCI bus. I would've loved seeing Rampage and VSA-101 in action. The Voodoo 6000 was impressive, and later community effort made it run stable, in some cases even up to 200 MHz. The fact that Rampage would've had 4 pipelines, DDR RAM and 200 MHz out of the box... And whatever would've come after that. A Spectre successor with DX8 that would compete with a Radeon 8500 and Geforce 3 at that level, with hardware T&L
@@HappyBeezerStudios I'm sure agp could be useful. Especially if everything is "prepared" . PCI 66 was good, but 2 to 4x the speed was the intention. (Mind you, I wrote that a long long long time ago... 1997 actually). I'm pretty sure that it could be used in any function, 2d, memory, VGA, overlay, etc...) . Alas, no one used it....
I haven't used other groups. And I detest fb. Hahahahaha. I can ask, but it probably don't have all the info you'd like. A was one of many people on this project.
Had a 3D Blaster Banshee as my first ever graphics card in my first ever self-built computer. Chose it due to the fact that the first Nintendo 64 emulator performed best on GLiDE. Was a little workhorse and rock solid stable.
I had the Banshee for few months, just before jumping to RiVA TNT. Indeed this 3Dfx product was a year late, particularly from OEM perspective where things like single-chip 2D/3D solution with all the up-to-date check-box features mattered. At that time, Nvidia was already dictating the release cycle of delivering all those bullet points to the OEMs and retailers. Avenger (Voodoo3) could have been the 3Dfx's savior in 1998.
I didn't have extra PCI slots for two graphics cards so ended up with the awful, unstable Voodoo Rush. I was so happy to sell that and get this when it was released. It worked great with my PII, 266.
There's nothing to hate about Banshee IMO - very good budget-friendly option for mainstream users at the time. It was exactly what they neededback in 1998. People just expected another powerhouse, and Voodoo Banshee never supposed to be one.
Back in the day I had a K6-300 with Voodoo 2 and a friend of mine a K6/2 350 and a Banshee. But all the games seemed to preform almost the same. But we never compared the frame rate 🤷
some banshee cards overclocked extremely well, too. I had a diamond version that did 166mhz without breaking a sweat. Wish I still had the card, would be fun to do some volt mods and see how far it could really go.
Nice to see these old cards which were unaffordable at the time, had to use onboard SiS graphics like SiS 5598 & SiS 651 for a long time until I was finally able to buy an used Geforce 4 440MX in 2006
Unloved? This was my first proper 3D accelerator (had an S3 Virge prior) and it was a massive step up for people like me - it's true it didn't perform as well in certain games/scenes due to the lack of a second texturing unit, but the faster clock speed meant it performed admirably in a lot of titles. I remember grabbing my PC Gamer demo discs and trying all the games I previously couldn't play because they required 3D acceleration.
@@sprucemaroose IIRC it was adopted pretty heavily in the OEM PC market so I imagine a fair number of people had a Banshee. I remember it playing Half-Life quite well, and I could even push 1024x768, though I think I remember dropping back down to 800x600 for performance. It handled pretty much everything I threw at it quite well by my standards, but then I was coming from an S3 Virge so any proper accelerator would have been a huge step up.
I really enjoy the Banshee. It is in my opinion the perfect card for a build targeting games up to 1998 (it looses too much steam in anything newer). I personally treat it as a Voodoo 1+, something that the Rush should have been in the first place. Great image quality, great compatibility, doesnt cause problems with early AGP systems, the late drivers just work. Perfect card for SS7 systems. Very convinient package that ships everything one needs for Win95 gaming in a single card.
Great video I like the presentation. A great and affordable vga in my oppinion. I had the Voodoo 3 16MB AGP back in the day with a P3 450MHz and after that the GeForce 256. Great times :-) and the music is gorgeous.
I picked up a random beige box for a few bucks recently. It had one of the worst motherboards ever made, one of the PC Chips “BXpro” ones that over reports the FSB and crashes if you try to run it at the advertised 100MHz. Expectations weren’t high as I removed the AGP card to find out what it was, so my eyeballs nearly fell out when from within the dust and cat hair the sacred inscription “3dfx” rose up. The mystery trashbox had a Banshee in it🙂 Now I’m a convert. Love ‘em. Great to see more pixelpipes👍 really enjoyed the calming montages.
Great video as always! It's definitely a card that gets passes up too often. Solid for any retro machine of the era and this summed it up great. Nice creativity with the shots and music!
I remember there was a driver that allowed 2D on Voodoo 2 without external 2D card. When pc was powered on, nothing was on screen until windows booted up, and then desktop showed and it worked to some degree.
Great video! I'm glad that you mentioned the technology link, where the Banshee acted as a stepping stone between the original architecture and the later cards. While it's not as interesting from a marketing perspective, it's a crucial step for R&D that most people don't think about, and it also provides valuable feedback to tweak the architecture in later releases (which 3dfx did do - much of what they learned from the Banshee was modified and integrated into the VSA-100, which is clear from the die shots). By the way, the 2D engine being 128-bit was another way to say that it could do 4 pixel per cycle raster operations (which were far simpler than 3D). But the operations done were highly specialized to cover all of the niche cases needed by CAD programs like AutoCAD. None of that stuff is done in hardware anymore though, which makes it seems even more cryptic. A slight nitpick, the TMUs operated in passes consisting of multiple clock cycles, where the throughput was 1 per cycle. So the Voodoo 2 could apply two textures in a single pass, at a rate of one pixel per cycle that contained two textures. The actual pipeline depth was variable due to the FIFOs, but it was likely on the order of 60-100 cycles per pixel (for comparison, I believe the Geforce256 had a depth of 220 cycles, and modern GPUs are thousands of cycles).
Paired with a P233 mmx, my Banshee played any glide game I threw at it smooth as silk. Got mine at the quarterly computer fair just a tad under $100, Diamond included a $30 rebate in the box as well, so more like $70 brand new. Whats funnier was that the following year I grabbed an unboxed OEM Dell Voodoo 3 for about $40, dems were the days indeed.....
I still have a Voodoo Banshee, i swap it out with my Voodoo 3500TV on one of my retro rigs all the time. In the day i had 2 Voodoo12s and a banshee as my 2D card.
I loved my Vodoo Banshee back in the days, lots of games from Pentium 2 era worked like a charm with it. Yes, FPS like Quake3/Unreal didn't work well on this card but these are Pentium-3 games anyway.
3DFX's main innovation was to trim the fat to the bone; that one trick made them popular early on, but later they failed to add the fat back in a timely manner and they did not understand the value of "ticking boxes" for the marketing critters at places like Dell (e.g. "AGP 2X support" and "AGP texturing support" are boxes to tick, even if they didn't matter one iota; 32 bit rendering didn't really matter for the voodoo 3, it looked better than TNT2 16 bit with its painful dither anyway and you would have used 16 bit colours on both, but it ticks a box). Not having a 2D core or T&L drastically simplified the chip. T&L was a standard feature in high end graphics since the early 80's (see e.g. flight simulators like the Evans and Sutherland CT5, it then trickled down to workstations and then to arcade machines and so on). Games in 1996 had to assume most people would use software rendering, so they couldn't use very high polygon counts. World polygons in something like quake is up to a few hundred visible at the same time, with light maps applied as a second texture; models were less restricted but also very low polygon (~low hundreds per model). T&L was not *that* costly to perform on the CPU with such low polycounts and certainly nothing compared to just perspective correct texturing of triangles where vertex parameters (light values, normals, U-V texture coordinates etc) were interpolated across the triangle and then the texture value was bilinear filterered by interpolation between the 4 nearest texels in the correct MIPMAP level. 3DFX found the very minimum feature set they possibly could and made the minimum viable product and it was pretty cheap and faster than pretty much anything else. After that one trick played out with the voodoo 1 and voodoo 2 they never were quite able to anticipate the market and keep up. Already in 1998, software rendering had become a bit of a joke and every OEM was trying to find a cheap 2D windows GUI accelerator + 3D accelerator combo card that would run current games reasonably, ticked a bunch of boxes even those that didn't matter(e.g. AGP texturing), had a reasonable RAMDAC that could output an acceptable image at a reasonable desktop resolution (even a Riva 128 from 1997 supports 1600x1200). The banshee was just too late.
I had a card like that at the time in the PCI version, and I loved it, the games ran well, the name of the card was scary Diamond Monster Voodoo Banshee! good times when my pc ran games better than my friends
i sure like the exposed circuitry and components vs. todays mother boards and cards that are all covered up, kinda like car engines from back in the day compared to todays modern cars with a big plastic cover on the engine.
I second that. Unfortunately, the average user doesn't want to see any of this, it is too scary. Same goes for boot screens actually showing useful information, like memory test. At least it is still possible to configure Linux to show the boot log.
I always liked my banshee was pretty cheap at the time and worked well enough, think i went from a ATI rage II card to the banshee so made a huge difference haha. I never had that much money then so was always trying to find the cheapest upgrades. Really wanted a Voodoo 2 SLI setup back in the day but way out of reach of my paper round money haha.
I loved my Voodoo Banshee :) I had a Skywell Magic Twinpower, I have 3 in my collection now including a boxed version of the Maxi Gamer Phoenix PCI like the one shown in your video :) Great to see all the Banshee love haha :)
Excellent video 😌
Thank you! 😃
Excellent indeed ♥
I remember I had the Graphics Blaster Banshee, and damn, I loved this GPU =)
The Banshee had fantastic 2D output for the time, when I later switched to a GeForce 256 there was a noticeable downgrade in 2D image quality in terms of sharpness and stability
The actual sharpness of the 2d was determined by the analog filtering on the card. Most venders just used the cheapest that was possible where as 3dfx actually enforced some standard on it. In the digital realm the nvidia 2d engine of the GF256 was close to the banshee. Though I do agree it was not as feature complete or as fast.
I have a Matrox G200A, a Voodoo 3 2000, and a GeForce 256 (3D Blaster Annihilator Pro) and they all give good 2D image quality at 1280x1024. I also had a GeForce 2 MX 200 from ELSA and that card was absolutely terrible at higher resolutions, blurry and such, so I got rid of it.
@@lordwiadro83 Creative tended to put some decent components on their cards at the higher end. This was also often reflected in the price.
Yes, I had the same feeling, fortunately I only borrowed it from my classmate just to see how it performed.
I had the Voodoo 2/Nvidia Riva128 and upgated to the Matrox G400 (dual VGA head) and then to the GeForce 2-Ti. The 2D/3D image, sharpness and colours on the Matrox were amazing and the 2D/3D image on the GeForce2-Ti was terrible with washout colours and badly blurred. The colours could not be fixed however removing the "EMI/RFI" ceramic filter capacitors (signal to ground) on the RGB video traces to the RGB connector fixed the blurred image making it nice and sharp!
The production quality of this channel is top notch
My first 3D accelerator ever and the only 3Dfx card i owned back in the day : the allmighty Gainward Dragon 4000 16Mb AGP. Paired with a AMD K6-2 300Mhz CPU was my gaming machine from 98 to 2000. It was such a pleasure to play games like FIFA99, Unreal, Quake 2, Half-Life, Shogo and many, many other gems from the period. Great card in my opinion!
Same here as well the Voodoo Banshee was nice but if memory serves slower in 3D.
-Banshee doesn't take advantage of agp bus.
-Banshee better then single voodoo 2 in games that don't use multitexturing. (higher clocks)
-Voodoo 2 better then banshee in games that use multitexturing. (most games at the time)
-voodoo 2 in sli vastly superior to banshee.
-Banshee has more texture memory, which can reduce stuttering compared to Voodoo2 in some games.
-Banshee has more resolution flexibility.
-Banshee can do 3D in a window.
-Banshee has excellent VGA and GUI acceleration.
These are from two old forum posts from the time.
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing.
@@GodKitty677 I have 2 Banchee cards today. My first, which I got for Xmas around 98 or 99 and it was PCI, But than later picked up a 2nd card that was AGP. So Banchee "Can" work with AGP...
Call back to the K6-2 300Mhz w/ 3dNOW!!!!
My 1st BIG PC UPGRADE XMAS!!!!
I begged everyone in my family to buy me the upgrades on my Xmas list, and I got them. All becuase I spilled milk into the keyboard of my good old pentium 133 socket 7 system, and it shorted the KB port in just the way the sys would turn on but not let me pass the "NO keyboard Detected"... So my dad took me to the local shop and got me a new main board that would work with all my existing parts, including the Pentium 133 I already had... But this new Shuttle Board would work with the K6-2 300, so that's what went on my Xmas list. Along with Creative Voodoo Blaster Banchee, PCI Sound Blaster Live Gold, a 4X Internal CDRW drive, and another small upgrade which got me upto 32MD's of SIMM ram.... I had a VisionMaster Pro 22in CRT back then and I could just watch for day after day playing Quake, Unreal, Quake 2, Full Throttle, and a bunch more. Thanks for the strole.
@@jameswiz It works but as stated back in the reviews. The board doesn't take advantage of the extra agp performance.
I just got my first 3dfx card 2 days ago, and it happens to be a 16mb Voodoo Banshee PCI! What splendid timing for this video!
Also, I love the classy garden footage of the cards. Very relaxing.
Hahahhaahah that thing is pre historic
This is one of my favorite GPU's for a DOS gaming PC. The great 2D engine and Glide support make it fantastic for this era. The Voodoo3 is much of the same with better 3D performance.
Yeah it was not so bad. My main coputer at the time was a Celeron 450A and i had a voodoo2 and Matrox G200 Marvel for 2d. And used a monitor with two inputs so I didn't have to worry about the loopback. My second computer was a Celeron 400@500 on the 83mhz bus and a pci banshee on an intel 810 based board. And honestly both computers played very good. The banshee in that computer was overclocked slightly, to something like 110 or 115. And it pulled some good numbers compared to my main box.
@@wishusknight3009 Loved those old celerons. I was an avid overclocker back in the day and had a lot if fun with those cpus. My main system was a P2 300, S code was SL2W8. These chips were famous for being underclocked 450mhz models. I was able to hit well over 500 with mine. A couple years later I took a coppermine celeron from 600mhz to 1087mhz.
The VESA support for DOS 2D was quite good, though I seem to remember there being glitches at 400x300 and 512x384 modes, which were carried forward to the Voodoo3. Still a heck of a card at the price point considering how many flawed to awful options were in the market in 1998.
Agreed ♥
Lets not forget that there were many Banshee cards sold with higher frequencies. For example the Gigabyte GA630 runs with 110/130 mhz instead of the standard 100/100 mhz, being 15-20% faster than the standard version. The Monster Fusion Banshee run with 105/120 mhz, being also much faster than the standard version.
I have amnesia when it comes to remembering the video cards I had from ‘95-‘01. But a lot of these names are jogging my memory. Man I miss those days.
The first look of this Graphics Card in 1998 got when my tech magazine reviewed it. And I believe it as top line gfx of time, if not exceptional ofcourse
Cool to see a new video from you man. I bought a Banshee back in the day for my HP Pavilion K6-2 and was pretty happy with it for about a year, not bad considering how fast things were moving back then
I'm loving the music choice for the montage
Thanks! I definitely took a chance with it 😅
@@PixelPipes not what I would call typical of this type of content, but it was refreshing!
Just found your channel. Love these trips down memory lane. I got my first computer about 2001, it was my dad's old computer had a Pentium III 900mhz, 128mb ram, Geforce4 Ti 4200 128mb graphics card. Loved playing Hellbender and Fury 3 with the Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick. Had the Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Sim City 2000, Sim Farm. Had a game called Ice and Fire that was really cool would love to play again. I got my dad's old PC cause he upgraded to a Pentium 4, 512mb ram, Radeon 9800xt 256mb. I remember staying up late the day we got a 10/100 switch and figuring out how to share files with each other....lol
A much beloved card for its time. It was the only card I could afford back then, one which filled a very needed cab until my Voodoo 3
A lot of people confuse the banshee to the actually hated on rush. Banshee was the shit up until u played multi textured games. So underrated. Pretty much for the try hard 3dfx fan on a budget.
Your Content is absolutely lovely.
Greetings from Austria!
Wonderful video... Still remember buying that Maxi Gamer Phoenix pci. Coming from an awful 2d only SiS VGA card, it gave my already aging pentium 1 a nice boost and the ability to discover all those 3d games of the era, even some friends had voodoo 2 even sli, it was more than enough to really enjoy the gameplay
Very nicely put together, with lovely b-roll. I'll waltz myself down to the lab with the music of the opening sequence in my head to try and get the last piece of footage I need.
Loved the music sequence! Here's the song name for anyone that's interested: It Had To Be Moonglow (feat. Neil Richardson Orchestra & Singers)
Oh interesting! I ripped it off an old record we found at Goodwill, and it went under a slightly different name, but it's exactly the same. Never heard of that particular release!
I enjoyed every second of it.
In 1998 just two things was important for me to buy Banshee. 1)It was 3Dfx. 2)It had huge 16MB VRAM. Back in a days that was enough to make a choice:)
Similar as 16 gb as nowadays :)
Also, it was a Voodoo card that runed 2D - if you wanted to own 3Dfx and had to replace your 2D card (It was clear that cards like S3 Trio couldn't support new 2D games in 1998) then Voodoo Banshe was quite a good deal in general.
I remember this card because i had a Voodoo Rush this time and when i able to upgrade i didnt want two VGA cards in my PC but when i read the first test in some magazine i decide to buy a S3Trio 4MB and a Voodoo II 12MB instead of a Banshee :)
God. The music and glamour shots are perfect
I had a blast playing on my first Pentium II 350 and Banshee PC. NFS Porshe Unleashed, Monster Truck Madness, Tomb Raider... Fun times.
The video is a piece of art!
A friend had a Voodoo Banshee back in the day and it performed awesome to us. We never got the hate.
Great video!
I feel like most of the people saying the Banshee was disliked likely were not around at the time the card was actually out. The Banshee was very popular for budget builds. I owned one at the time and I knew several others that did. An SLI Voodoo 2 setup was beyond the reach of most teenagers in 1998.
Sure journalists that got video cards for free bagged on it. Also most of the forum complainers were likely just kids that were fanboying.
Also the whole argument about poor driver support I don’t recall being an issue in the time. It ran every game I wanted to play.
I am glad you pointed out games like Quake 3. It was really amazing at the time to play that game and UT99 on such a humble graphics card.
Great video.
I love my Banshee. It was a great replacement for my Stealth ii. I even convinced a friend or two to purchase one. Much loved by me. I had the lovely Phoenix model.
the intro with Voodoo Banshee in the bushes is pure gold (and that music) take five 🍻
Banshee is a cool card. I wrote it off at first but its a great card for mid 90s gaming.
very nice video ! All effort you put in worth it ! Really like the jazzy retro computer 90' thingy... Thanks for this time capsule
love the into cinematography and soundtrack lmao
I went with a Matrox G400. Dualhead in 1999 on 2x 17" Viewsonic monitors was amazing. Better 2D, as well.
And I got good framerates in Descent 3 and Quake 3 Arena. :D
My first 3D card. A proper 2D and 3D card that best every other card at the time but ignorance of many who loves to criticize because they had Riva TNT with crappy 2D and awful directX who had to compete with glide. People who had much more expensive voodoo 2 also with their 2 tmu loved to criticize. Banshee brought voodoo experiences to the mass.
I am emulating the Banshee in PCEM so this was very enlightening. Thanks, Excellent job!
I actually sold both of my Voodoo2 12MB cards recently because I had decided the Ensonique Banshee I have is "good enough" Voodoo for me in my PII 450MHz rig.
The 2D video quality through the loopback cable on the V2 sucked. So, while 3D games were great I had to deal with a sub-par Windows desktop. Games are not the only thing I use this computer for so the poor visual was a deal breaker.
The Banshee 2D quality is superb...extremely crisp. Games (to my eyes) look just fine and the lack of the second texture unit really does not bother me at all.
And, it is natively supported in BeOS 5 which was another plus for me at least. This machine also functions as a BeBox.
So yeah, I really love this card. It is overall a fantastic 2D and 3D card and worthy of owning.
I have nothing but fond memories for my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee.
Unreal, unreal tournament, GLQuake, quake three Arena, King pin.
Winamp with the amp can visualizer.
So many good memories. And all the games were guaranteed to be screamers for performance on the Banshee if you could run them in glide.
Well I don't know about other people but I upgraded a Matrox G200 with a 3D Blaster Banshee back in the day and I couldn't be happier. In fact I just got another for a retro build I'm putting together.
I owned a banshee back in the day and enjoyed it. It was a budget friendly alternative that hit a sweet spot for me...
i had a trident 1mb VLB, and when upgrading my computer jumped from that to a voodoo banshee (1998) ... i loved that card. never had any issues with it.
my next upgrade was to a geforce 2 32mb (2000) ...
Had a banshee before upgrading to a voodoo4 when it came out, it was my first real 3d card
I loved the Banshee so much, I bought one a few days ago in a fit of nostalgia.
I had a VOODOO 1 attached to a Matrox Mystique (For those who don't know, the VOODOO 1 didn't offer any 2d output. It had a passthrough port for that)... Then I upgraded to the Creative 3d Blaster Banshee (a Voodoo Banshee from Creative Labs) and I LOVED IT!!! It was fast, worked with all my older games, the only downfall I had was the early drivers were junk for Windows98. But this was fixed around 1999 and with internet it was easy to update. It worked GREAT after and I still have it. I don't use it in my retro machine, as I have a 64mb VooDoo 5 that I can use for that. I still love playing Quake 1 with the KQP (Killer Quake Patch) and using my 3dFx Card which just makes it look GREAT!!! I play multiplayer with friends on my local network using my old Pentium 3- 1.3Ghz with 256mb Ram, 128gb SSD and Voodoo5... Runs fast and looks great!!!
The banshee was my 3rd gpu ever and to go from a 1megabyte pci ATI to the banshee on agp and 16 megabytes was huge. From 800x600 to 1024x768 was wow factor. I wish I still had it.my fourth gpu was a radeon 9600xt which I still have.
Welcome back!
I had a Quantum 3D Banshee and I loved it. I had it running alongside my Pentium 166MMX and then when I upgraded to an AMD Duron 700, it went into that until I upgraded to an Nvidia MX 400.
Woo. been waiting for this one. :D very well done.
Thanks man!
In the late 90s I had a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 2 card. One of my best friends had a Voodoo Banshee. I remember it feeling really crippled when playing the same games, but thinking back it was probably because we were running the same games in 1024x758 whereas my Voodoo 2 topped out at 800x600. I bought a Voodoo 3 like the day they came out after seeing all of the hype. I stuck with that until upgrading to a Geforce 2 a year or two later.
Love the production in this video Nathan, what song did you use for the nature shot?
I used an old record from the 60s that we found at Goodwill. I posted a picture of it on my Twitter page
@@PixelPipes Awesome! Just had a look and found a full recording on TH-cam
(not sure if you've got links turned off so I'll add it to the Twitter post)
Oh wow I didn't even think to look for it on TH-cam! Figured it was too obscure
Here's the link he found for anyone else curious: th-cam.com/video/s7q8eixjx9s/w-d-xo.html
I upgraded to the Voodoo Banshee from my Diamond Monster (Voodoo 1) card and was quite happy with it. I was disappointed at the time I couldn't get an AGP version. AGP versions were in limited supply.
I later upgraded to a Voodoo 3 3000, Voodoo 3 3500 TV and finally Voodoo 5 5500. The only card I don't have anymore is the Voodoo 3 3000, as I sold that to get the Voodoo 3 3500 TV.
What I appreciated most about 3dfx products was their quality and practicality. Sure TNT had 32-bit rendering, but it was mostly a slideshow and memory limitations meant that texture quality had to be sacrificed. Apparently even the Voodoo 1 would render everything in 32-bit, then down-sample it to 16-bit for storing in the frame buffer.
I had the rush as my first 3d card, then the banshee and I was thrilled to have it, wasn’t at all disappointed with it. But it did start the thirst of the upgrade over the next 20 years !
mmm i yearned for that 32mb for 1024x768 and 32bit color. damn voodoo2 couldn't do squat.
Brings back memories, my first 3D card, the banshee, the later added a voodoo2. The good days. Wish they would've stayed in business. In my opinion, nVidia wouldn't be what they would today without them acquiring 3DFX.
Awesome video! Thank you so much!
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing. I was sharing the PC with my dad at the time and one day it started having some issues and he took it in to the computer shop to have it repaired. The owner told my dad that I had a fire hazard sitting there and had removed the riva128 and replaced that and the voodoo2 with a S3 virge dx card instead. Told my dad, I need to buy a nintendo instead because computers weren't designed for games.
In the late 90's, the Voodoo Banshee was an absolute game-changer that provided a significant upgrade from graphics cards like S3. It could effortlessly handle most 3Dfx games, eliminating the need for multiple graphics cards to handle 2D and 3D graphics separately. This was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time, as gamers could now enjoy superior graphics performance with just one card.
This was my first PC upgrade in 1998/1999, and lord what a difference made it back then! I played Incoming and Pod racer many hours with it. I had the PCI Version from Creative labs. But i soon found out after 2 years it became obsolete very fast... And my K6-2 300mhz aswell.. i still own the card!
loved my banshee agp card back in the day.. got me through many great games.. will always remain a cherished purchase.. although i migrated to nvidia after the banshee.
Love your videos! It get's me right in the nostalgia! Keep it up!
Great video, thanks for telling us the Banshee story \o/
I remember how I got the card for christmas in like 99 and paired it with my Pentium 3 500 and I freaking loved it. Finally I was able to play the 3Dfx only games and they ran wonderful.
I was an engineer from 3dfx. (And yes the AGP as all the functions that was turned off). Avenger turned it on. Sad that it was a loss at that point, but there was a level bus power problem.
I would like a VooDoo Banshee 2, please.
I don't think AGP features would've made that much of a difference on the Banshee. Even the Voodoo 3 cards didn't see a huge difference and a Voodoo 2 SLI setup could easily keep up with a Voodoo 3 2000, despite it managing two cards sharing the PCI bus.
I would've loved seeing Rampage and VSA-101 in action.
The Voodoo 6000 was impressive, and later community effort made it run stable, in some cases even up to 200 MHz.
The fact that Rampage would've had 4 pipelines, DDR RAM and 200 MHz out of the box...
And whatever would've come after that. A Spectre successor with DX8 that would compete with a Radeon 8500 and Geforce 3 at that level, with hardware T&L
@@HappyBeezerStudios I'm sure agp could be useful. Especially if everything is "prepared" . PCI 66 was good, but 2 to 4x the speed was the intention. (Mind you, I wrote that a long long long time ago... 1997 actually). I'm pretty sure that it could be used in any function, 2d, memory, VGA, overlay, etc...) . Alas, no one used it....
Hello Andy! Are are you available via faceb one of the 3dfx groups or vogons maybe? I would like to ask some questions, maybe you can answer them.
I haven't used other groups. And I detest fb. Hahahahaha. I can ask, but it probably don't have all the info you'd like. A was one of many people on this project.
Had a 3D Blaster Banshee as my first ever graphics card in my first ever self-built computer. Chose it due to the fact that the first Nintendo 64 emulator performed best on GLiDE. Was a little workhorse and rock solid stable.
Never had a Banshee. But i remember i really wished i had one since i read about it in PC magazines of the era.
My favorite graphics card of all time
I think I finished Max Payne on a Banshee and it was still a decent experience!
I had the Banshee for few months, just before jumping to RiVA TNT. Indeed this 3Dfx product was a year late, particularly from OEM perspective where things like single-chip 2D/3D solution with all the up-to-date check-box features mattered. At that time, Nvidia was already dictating the release cycle of delivering all those bullet points to the OEMs and retailers. Avenger (Voodoo3) could have been the 3Dfx's savior in 1998.
Banshee was my first 3D-card. Liked it a lot.
I didn't have extra PCI slots for two graphics cards so ended up with the awful, unstable Voodoo Rush. I was so happy to sell that and get this when it was released. It worked great with my PII, 266.
Had a Voodoo Banshee back then.
Never regretted the buy.
There's nothing to hate about Banshee IMO - very good budget-friendly option for mainstream users at the time. It was exactly what they neededback in 1998. People just expected another powerhouse, and Voodoo Banshee never supposed to be one.
Back in the day I had a K6-300 with Voodoo 2 and a friend of mine a K6/2 350 and a Banshee. But all the games seemed to preform almost the same. But we never compared the frame rate 🤷
some banshee cards overclocked extremely well, too. I had a diamond version that did 166mhz without breaking a sweat. Wish I still had the card, would be fun to do some volt mods and see how far it could really go.
Nice to see these old cards which were unaffordable at the time, had to use onboard SiS graphics like SiS 5598 & SiS 651 for a long time until I was finally able to buy an used Geforce 4 440MX in 2006
My first GPU, loved that thing
Unloved? This was my first proper 3D accelerator (had an S3 Virge prior) and it was a massive step up for people like me - it's true it didn't perform as well in certain games/scenes due to the lack of a second texturing unit, but the faster clock speed meant it performed admirably in a lot of titles. I remember grabbing my PC Gamer demo discs and trying all the games I previously couldn't play because they required 3D acceleration.
I had one too, but after i had a voodoo 2... my banshee went up in smoke.
Oh it was very unloved.
Same here
Same here. Only one I could afford, and it ran Quake 2, Unreal, Unreal Tournament & Half Life in the glory days of PC gaming. Loved the card
@@sprucemaroose IIRC it was adopted pretty heavily in the OEM PC market so I imagine a fair number of people had a Banshee. I remember it playing Half-Life quite well, and I could even push 1024x768, though I think I remember dropping back down to 800x600 for performance. It handled pretty much everything I threw at it quite well by my standards, but then I was coming from an S3 Virge so any proper accelerator would have been a huge step up.
I really enjoy the Banshee. It is in my opinion the perfect card for a build targeting games up to 1998 (it looses too much steam in anything newer). I personally treat it as a Voodoo 1+, something that the Rush should have been in the first place. Great image quality, great compatibility, doesnt cause problems with early AGP systems, the late drivers just work. Perfect card for SS7 systems. Very convinient package that ships everything one needs for Win95 gaming in a single card.
"Voodoo 1+, something that the Rush should have been in the first place" couldnt have said it better, mate
U r a legend ❤ .. u deserve millions of views
Great video I like the presentation. A great and affordable vga in my oppinion. I had the Voodoo 3 16MB AGP back in the day with a P3 450MHz and after that the GeForce 256. Great times :-) and the music is gorgeous.
I picked up a random beige box for a few bucks recently. It had one of the worst motherboards ever made, one of the PC Chips “BXpro” ones that over reports the FSB and crashes if you try to run it at the advertised 100MHz. Expectations weren’t high as I removed the AGP card to find out what it was, so my eyeballs nearly fell out when from within the dust and cat hair the sacred inscription “3dfx” rose up. The mystery trashbox had a Banshee in it🙂 Now I’m a convert. Love ‘em.
Great to see more pixelpipes👍 really enjoyed the calming montages.
Well put together video love looking back at the older tech
Great video as always! It's definitely a card that gets passes up too often. Solid for any retro machine of the era and this summed it up great. Nice creativity with the shots and music!
Thanks Rik! Definitely a solid card if you don't expect too much from it
Rik Rik!how are you
ps:i have collect voodoo2 and 3.but i don't like banshee T.T
I remember there was a driver that allowed 2D on Voodoo 2 without external 2D card. When pc was powered on, nothing was on screen until windows booted up, and then desktop showed and it worked to some degree.
I burned the bus from my mainboard with the heat emanated from that video card! God damn!
I remember having one for CAD 2D work, it was amazingly fast for that kind of software ironically.
It has much better than Riva. I loved it.
my first real gpu, blew my mind as a kid, especially since I got to pick the second hand pc in the adds
I had one back in the day. It was fine. Not the fastest, not the slowest, but perfectly capable.
Great video! I'm glad that you mentioned the technology link, where the Banshee acted as a stepping stone between the original architecture and the later cards. While it's not as interesting from a marketing perspective, it's a crucial step for R&D that most people don't think about, and it also provides valuable feedback to tweak the architecture in later releases (which 3dfx did do - much of what they learned from the Banshee was modified and integrated into the VSA-100, which is clear from the die shots).
By the way, the 2D engine being 128-bit was another way to say that it could do 4 pixel per cycle raster operations (which were far simpler than 3D). But the operations done were highly specialized to cover all of the niche cases needed by CAD programs like AutoCAD. None of that stuff is done in hardware anymore though, which makes it seems even more cryptic.
A slight nitpick, the TMUs operated in passes consisting of multiple clock cycles, where the throughput was 1 per cycle. So the Voodoo 2 could apply two textures in a single pass, at a rate of one pixel per cycle that contained two textures. The actual pipeline depth was variable due to the FIFOs, but it was likely on the order of 60-100 cycles per pixel (for comparison, I believe the Geforce256 had a depth of 220 cycles, and modern GPUs are thousands of cycles).
Thanks for the feedback and clarification!
Great video.
Amazing video!
come back to us!!! we miss your videos!!
Excelente video, que le hace justicia la la Banshee, aún tengo mí digamos monster 3d fusion, saludos y continúa haciendo videos de calidad
Paired with a P233 mmx, my Banshee played any glide game I threw at it smooth as silk. Got mine at the quarterly computer fair just a tad under $100, Diamond included a $30 rebate in the box as well, so more like $70 brand new. Whats funnier was that the following year I grabbed an unboxed OEM Dell Voodoo 3 for about $40, dems were the days indeed.....
I still have a Voodoo Banshee, i swap it out with my Voodoo 3500TV on one of my retro rigs all the time. In the day i had 2 Voodoo12s and a banshee as my 2D card.
I'm using my sli v2's with a g4 mx440 for 2d, might swap it for a banshee for 2d
I loved my Vodoo Banshee back in the days, lots of games from Pentium 2 era worked like a charm with it.
Yes, FPS like Quake3/Unreal didn't work well on this card but these are Pentium-3 games anyway.
3DFX's main innovation was to trim the fat to the bone; that one trick made them popular early on, but later they failed to add the fat back in a timely manner and they did not understand the value of "ticking boxes" for the marketing critters at places like Dell (e.g. "AGP 2X support" and "AGP texturing support" are boxes to tick, even if they didn't matter one iota; 32 bit rendering didn't really matter for the voodoo 3, it looked better than TNT2 16 bit with its painful dither anyway and you would have used 16 bit colours on both, but it ticks a box).
Not having a 2D core or T&L drastically simplified the chip. T&L was a standard feature in high end graphics since the early 80's (see e.g. flight simulators like the Evans and Sutherland CT5, it then trickled down to workstations and then to arcade machines and so on). Games in 1996 had to assume most people would use software rendering, so they couldn't use very high polygon counts. World polygons in something like quake is up to a few hundred visible at the same time, with light maps applied as a second texture; models were less restricted but also very low polygon (~low hundreds per model). T&L was not *that* costly to perform on the CPU with such low polycounts and certainly nothing compared to just perspective correct texturing of triangles where vertex parameters (light values, normals, U-V texture coordinates etc) were interpolated across the triangle and then the texture value was bilinear filterered by interpolation between the 4 nearest texels in the correct MIPMAP level. 3DFX found the very minimum feature set they possibly could and made the minimum viable product and it was pretty cheap and faster than pretty much anything else.
After that one trick played out with the voodoo 1 and voodoo 2 they never were quite able to anticipate the market and keep up. Already in 1998, software rendering had become a bit of a joke and every OEM was trying to find a cheap 2D windows GUI accelerator + 3D accelerator combo card that would run current games reasonably, ticked a bunch of boxes even those that didn't matter(e.g. AGP texturing), had a reasonable RAMDAC that could output an acceptable image at a reasonable desktop resolution (even a Riva 128 from 1997 supports 1600x1200). The banshee was just too late.
Very true, and excellent comment. Thank you!
I had a card like that at the time in the PCI version, and I loved it, the games ran well, the name of the card was scary Diamond Monster Voodoo Banshee! good times when my pc ran games better than my friends
Awesome videos man!
i sure like the exposed circuitry and components vs. todays mother boards and cards that are all covered up, kinda like car engines from back in the day compared to todays modern cars with a big plastic cover on the engine.
I second that. Unfortunately, the average user doesn't want to see any of this, it is too scary. Same goes for boot screens actually showing useful information, like memory test. At least it is still possible to configure Linux to show the boot log.
I always liked my banshee was pretty cheap at the time and worked well enough, think i went from a ATI rage II card to the banshee so made a huge difference haha.
I never had that much money then so was always trying to find the cheapest upgrades.
Really wanted a Voodoo 2 SLI setup back in the day but way out of reach of my paper round money haha.
I loved my Voodoo Banshee :) I had a Skywell Magic Twinpower, I have 3 in my collection now including a boxed version of the Maxi Gamer Phoenix PCI like the one shown in your video :) Great to see all the Banshee love haha :)
The interesting history, the ridiculous yet beautiful B-roll... I love it.