The 3DFX NetVista Auction is now live at: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/264777687005 - 100% of the profit goes to BrighterFutures, a charity supporting NHS Hospitals in my area. Thank you for your support! Neil - RMC
The "softening" of the picture also comes from a filter the 3Dfx cards apply to make the dither less obvious as they render at 15bit precision. It works pretty well.
What ever happened to AGEIA PhysX? I was watching an old video from 2006 showing off it's capabilities and was pleasantly surprised. It's got quite the history too. Have you any experience with this tech RMC?
@@leebumble nVidia bought them, pretty much. The tech got integrated into their GPUs but it never really took off, neither before nor after the acquisition. It had its weaknesses (awful fluid physics, for example) and the dedicated hardware was ridiculously expensive for what you got. There wasn't a lot of development, and competing tech pushed forward making PhysX a relatively obscure tech in the end.
@@RMCRetro Yeah. That employee was doing Gods Work. If only programers were more plentiful along the spectrum of friendly and useful ship mates. Its proven a barren darwinian island fest of men. Many with no sense of honor.
Remember seeing Unreal's castle flyby opening for the first time on my friend's Voodoo2. Instant jaw drop, burned into memory forever. (Also that amazing mod music by Alexander Brandon and Michiel Van Den Bos).
Neil: "I burned this onto a cd for them - the emulator, definitely NOT the roms, I definitely DID NOT give them roms" Officer: "He's lying. Get Nintendo on speed dial and I'l send the boys in."
First thought seeing you lying on the floor: "Self-Isolation has effected him far more then we ever thought!" Second was : "He's probably hurt his back in some way!"
My 3DFX card of the 90s was my first true jaw dropping experience when playing Quake via Voodoo hardware. This card not only provided severely enhanced effects, but improved your PCs framerate.
Played Quake 2 to completion with the software renderer multiple times. Then got a Voodoo2 and OMG the coloured lighting alone was worth it. Used to great effect (one great example was early on in the second zone where you pull a power core and the white overhead lighting is replaced by dim, red coloured “emergency” lighting from the floor).
When I think about the 3DFX, only 2 games pop into my mind. One of course being original Unreal. To this day no other game has wowed me as much as that did. My oldest brother used to play it with software rendered graphics first because we couldn't afford a 3DFX card, but we eventually saved up for one and the difference can't be described with words. The other game is a more obscure one, and that's Montezuma's Return. I could never afford to buy the full game since I was just a child and I remember playing a demo of it over and over and over again. I was so in love with that game, and I can still remember those 2 stages the demo allowed you to play inside and out to this day :D My jaw dropped so hard onto the floor when I tried it in 3DFX mode for the first time and saw all the incredible enhancements it brought with it. Smooth edges, much better lighting, high resolution textures, the 8 year old me was in complete trance. Unfortunately I never managed to save up enough money to buy the full game, but that demo and those 3DFX graphics will forever stay in my heart as one of the biggest WOW moments I ever experienced in gaming. I miss those days so much. No new generation of tech has even come close to that wow-factor the 3DFX brought to me. Thanks for the nostalgia trip with your personal picks with the 3DFX experience Neil. :)
I had the original Voodoo (in an Orchid Righteous flavour) before moving up to a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. Motorhead and Sports Car GT wear my racers of choice in that golden late 90's era. I'll always have a place in my heart for 3DFX.
I always love the logic of "We don't want anyone swearing, but I'm going to plow through all these pedestrians, scattering blood and brains on the road" :D
The nervous farty wreck he was. Even when the door was shut his head used to poke through 😂 then doing double jump backflips round the main hall after turning on the music player. Aah nostalgia.
Remember having 2 of Voodoo 2 cards in SLI with Matrox G200 card . That was a beast then to run games 1024x768 resolution. First i remember getting an Elsa Voodoo 2 card with 12 mb, like just few day after launch , but it had some weird glitches and issues in my setup so replaced it 2 Diamond cards, and they run perfectly. Next in the line was Voodoo 3 3500 TV VIVO with that blue thick cable that came out of the graphics card to be placed on the desk with all in and outs. what a time it was.....
I had a Pentium 90 and played Carmageddon on it in software mode. Later on I upgraded to a Celeron 333 and installed a Voodoo Banshee into it and my life changed forever. I'll always miss you 3DFX 😘
I had P200mhz with Matrox Millenium 2D card back in 96 or so. Oh boy when i got 3D Diamond Voodoo card! Played Tomb Raider and Carmageddon all day long;) 3D from voodoo really blew my mind, there was nothing before that what could do 3D even close. That was nice time to game.
4:30 PowerVR? Yeah I had one of those. A really early one. It was also 3D only so it used your regular 2D card through the BUS! Yup! It had to contend for bus bandwidth with everything else when sending frames to your video card. Unbelievable! Of course the Matrox demos worked great! NO GAMES AT ALL WORKED. :D
Some huge nostalgia here! That said, I was mostly about the FPS games in the Voodoo era.. which meant Quake, basically :) The Voodoo2 was the ultimate upgrade for Quake 2, it was just such a huge improvement that it became almost standard hardware... even better if you had two in SLI. Anyone remember the predecessor to Battlefield 1942, Codename Eagle? Weird game, had a pretty fun multiplayer though - great at LANparties back in the day. Like you Voodoo2 was as far as I went though, TNT2 Ultra after that and then Geforce cards.
I loved my 3dfx card - i still remember putting on Tomb Raider and being blown away by the difference it made over the software version. A few years on and I had dual voodoo 2 cards, good memories!
"At a time when the Nintendo 64 was Nintendos current console just imagine if that happened today" it has with two different emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx. Both play all the top Switch games really well. Although you have to have a beefy PC for good frame rates
Same, felt cheated at the lack of EF2K (after showing two different versions boxed too!) I had the original when it came out, was a really immersive sim which never seemed to get as much attention as it deserved. Perhaps because it wasn't American or portraying an American jet? Still got it and the TACTCOM upgrade along with all the manuals etc... sadly although I have the box for my 3DFX Voodoo 1 card the actual hardware has gone missing (I was so sure it was in there too for years!)
Viper Racing and the original TOCA were my favorites at the time, mostly because of the damage management. I had a Logitech force feedback driving setup that worked perfectly with them! Good times! A lot of fun!
Back then I had Hercules Stingray 128/3D (Voodoo Rush). The transition from software renderer to 3DFX was mind blowing... Loved to play Star Wars Dark Forces II Descent: Freespace Shadows of the Empire Johnny Herberts Grand Prix Championship 1998 and later NFS Porsche 2000 (the best NFS imo)
I used to love Toca 2 as a kid. (Or ToCA2, or however you stylise it...) Toca became Race Driver, then Race Driver GRID, then just GRID, and now we have GRID Autosport. I'm personally holding out for Autosport: Toca, but the likelihood seems slim...
I used to use the Amiga 1200 to play Formula One Grand Prix and found playing it late at night was a bad idea.Asleep,all i saw was those pesky centre line markers coming towards me...............................
After much time playing Quake in a tiny window on my Pentium 75 I upgraded to a P2 300 (it was going to be the 266 but the 300 came out the week I was buying the parts) and a 3DFX card. After weighing the processor (because it really was that huge in the cartridge format) and getting it all put together the first game I installed - Quake - and when it ran in 3DFX for the first time - WOW! I didn't play for ages, just stood staring at the intro. Then - Unreal - Uber WOW! - never ever went back to software rendering - except for the odd retro experience in recent years.
Matrox G200 was released in 98, much later than V1, it was lauched after V2. Matrox wanted to competed with 3dfx, but G200 was slower than V2 (a lot slower, especially with the first few drivers). It was just a bit faster than V1, it's performance improved with later drivers, but it was never been able to reach V2 performance, not even TNT (which it alos was slower than V2).
My very first 3D card was voodoo2, then voodoo3 3000 and 3500. The 90s were the best for gamers not like the 21st cent. I remember Carmaggedon was banned in many European countrys because of hitting pedestrians, later they swapped pedestrians to zombies. I played a lot NFS Porsche 2000 on my PC, it was one of my favorite racing games and the music is stunning.
I basically lived off of cover CDs during my foray into PC gaming, I remember Sin being rather terrible before patches. :\ I was quite pleased to start 3D acceleration with a Voodoo1, they really had their act together compared to other makers bitd. Yeah doesn't sound like much now but 480p was a lot better for 3D graphics than 240p, and actually being able to turn effects on heh.
TOCA Touring Cars was quite a game at the time, TOCA2 was ok, TOCA Race Driver laid the foundations for Codies' racing games more-or-less until now with it's career mode. It's an acquired taste, one which I haven't really enjoyed, but TOCA was groundbreaking both in terms of graphics and sound.
When I first started working in IT we got a single Voodoo card (voodoo 1) in for a client, I still remember my boss calling us all in after he had it all set up in the client's PC to show us how awesome it was. A few years later we sold a few systems with the Voodoo Rush, I believe Voodoo 2 was already available but the rush was marked down. I salivated over the voodoo cards for years until I got my hands on an Nvidia Riva TnT2 and finally got a taste of true 3d acceleration. People think GPUs are expensive today, back then they cost an absolute fortune. A voodoo rush would have set me back 2 months salary, 3 if I payed bills. Today, you can pick up a mid range or even a mid/entry level GPU for between $100 and $200 and experience the same architectural capabilities as a $1000 card (excluding RTX obviously). In the early days, entry level meant a different architecture and almost always, a totally different vendor. An S3 Virge or ATI 3d Rage was "affordable" but in a completely different, lower league. I both miss and don't miss that era, on one hand, it was exciting and full of innovation and new tech breakthroughs but on the other, you payed through the nose to actually experience them and more often than not, they were out dated in less than a year.
Good old memories. I had a Pentium 200 MMX, with that same sound card. Creative Voodoo 2 and a S3 Virge DX. I bought the Voodoo 2 to play Final Fantasy 7. It was awesome. I also played a little gem called Shogo: Mobile Armor Dividion. I still have goose bumps when I watch the opening theme.
The 3DFX Voodoo cards hold special memories for me. My first job out of University in '98 was at Codemasters on the Brian Lara Cricket team, the first thing I was tasked with was to port the game's software renderer over to the Glide API. I still remember the joy of getting those first textured triangles rendering on the Voodoo. A little relieved too, maybe they hadn't made a mistake hiring me after all! The card's separate video output was actually really handy for a dual monitor setup, one for debugging, and one for the 3D output.
Christ, Ultima IX. The Glide version of that is the only one that runs reliably. Direct3D either ran like a dog, crashed repeatedly, glitched like crazy or, if you were incredibly unlucky, all of the above. The D3D implementation is so bad that the GOG.com version literally just emulates a 3DFX card.
17:00 "It's in the game!" I thought the same thing. :) My first PC (1999) came with an i740, but I picked up a Voodoo Banshee card at an auction later that year and it was magical. Sure, the textures could be a bit chunky, and IIRC the colour depth in 3D was 16-bit, but the framerates were always high and consistent. The 2D performance was remarkably good too. I remember many hours immersed in Unreal, Driver, Star Wars Episode I Racer. It seemed to be worth seeking out Glide games specifically as they ran so well. Oh, anyone else remember Trickstyle?
I played EF2000 a lot, but can't remeber if it was Voodoo or TNT2 card then. I know my first Voodoo experience was with the NHL series, it looked incredible!
Those days of the Voodoo 1 cards were amazing. Every month I'd check the cover disks on PC Format and other PC gaming magazines to see what new 3DFX patches had been released, as some of those patches were quite large to download.
Screamer 2 is just tricky to get working at all in my experience. Which is a shame since it's such an excellent racing game. I always liked it much better than the needs for speed and actually every other racing game I tried in the mid to late nineties. After having played S2 so much, none of the others felt "right". Sure, other games might have looked more pleasing and had more variety to the courses, but for me S2 beat them all by a mile in pure driving pleasure. If anyone happens to know a reliable way to play the game on a modern system, especially in Glide mode, I'd love some tips.
My brother and I played so much Carmegeddon on our old Pentium 200 back in the day. Looked so much nicer after we saved up our christmas money and got a voodoo card with a whopping 16 MB of video memory.
And what is wrong with Active Desktop lol. Good move to turn that off :). I enjoyed this video. I sometimes forget how good the 3DFX games were. I would put a bid on the machine, but shipping to Australia would make it prohibitive.
About the Ultima series, I'm pretty sure I stopped playing after VII and VII part 2. Don't even remember there was either an eighth installment nor a ninth... Lucky me :)
Need for speed 2 special edition was really great fun and good looking with the Voodoo glide settings. Driving around as a big T-Rex, never gets old LOL!!!
Remember the bug with the installer? It would detect if you had a Voodoo 1 and copy over the glide version of the executable but if you had a Voodoo 2 it didn’t. You had to install the game, then grab the glide exe off the cd and run that one.
I never had a 3DFX card because as a teenager they were too expensive cause you needed a 2D card. I used an ATI Rage 2 with the cheaper EDO RAM but it did the trick. DirectX kind of changed things because it unified what was needed to run games.
Ah, the NFS Porche Challenge. I had it as a kid, but mine was special version - the only language it supported was swedish and no one in my family spoke sweden.
Wing Commander Prophecy was the game I saved up all my allowance to buy a Voodoo video card. It was so worth it, I loved that game and the graphics were so beautiful for the time!
On your comment about the N64 emulator coming out when the N64 was current Yuzu is a Nintendo Switch emulator that works almost full speed for most games
For me - The Need For Speed II 3dfx edition was the biggest shock. Quake I, Terminal Velocity. I was very disappointed by pass through cable and my Diamond Monster + Tseng ET6000 pair was replaced by TNT, the rest is history ;). I had high res 17" ADI monitor running at 1280x1024 res at 85 Hz. Over pass through cable it was just a blurry mess. And Windows NT 4 support was poor.
1996 Tomb raider time fly's. Never actually played the game , but i think i installed a free trial version off one of the cd's that come with magazines at the time
I don't remember a 3DFX patch for Tomb Raider existing. I just remember playing it to death and back again both on the PlayStation 1 and in software render mode on PC. I do remember though the first game I played with native 3DFX support was 1999's Unreal Tournament. I didn't have a 3DFX card, and while I did have a Matrox Millenium G400 card, I don't think UT supported D3D at the time, so I was stuck playing UT in software mode as well. I do now have the Steam version of UT and I do like having 3D3 support in that and how much better UT looks with it. But yeah I never had the luck of having a 3DFX card back then.
Incoming was the very first thing I saw on 3dfx when i worked in a computer shop and i was amazed. Just got myself a voodoo3 agp card, will be playing through unreal first i think.
Had a voodoo 1 in my p133, I remember starfleet academy being massively improved, well going from unplayable to working! My next card was a voodoo 3 in my p3? 733 and my memory of that is playing wing commander prophecy. Still have my voodoo 3 somewhere I think, sold my old cpu though
yuzu emulator can already run some switch games at full speed. Damn impressive i think considering that new games are just in development. Emulating these games at day one is mindblowing
My computers back then never had any sort of 3D accelerator which made me sad sometimes as I couldn't play games like Driver originally nor did PS1 emulate at full speed but seeing those games running on - well - retro machines from today's standpoint made me smile since I know just how hard it was to run most games back in the day. A feeling that went lost and only really can be achieved when trying to play games at 4k resolutions with fast framerates really. Not even VR is all that demanding anymore, really. But that's how times change and I was happily watching this video for over half an hour. Thank you!
You can only lock the butler in the freezer in the second and third Tomb Raider games :) . Speaking of TR2, it originally required a 3DFX card to run in hardware mode but then they made a patch for it to work with DirectX 7 or newer.
Pentium 3 is often faster than earlier P4s, though I didn't look into which P4s those other machines had. If there's one old tech I do not miss it is Netburst.
I have the same CT4830 Soundblaster Live! in my windows 98 PC, works great! I even, strangely, have a blue shielded CD audio cable like yours. You have to be careful when getting these cards, the Dell OEM version of this card DOES NOT have SoundBlaster legacy support, like SB16, it's missing other stuff too!
Great video but a bit heavy on racing. I would have thrown in decent or forsaken into the mix which was 360 degree action and software rendering in cramped area would show off power vr or 3dfx better for the geometry. Imho of course
I have to admit that I prefere the software look over the 3dfx accelerated one. But in those days, the real cool thing about voodoo cards was the frame rate. Unbeatable
I had two home built machines both AMD K6-2 processors one a 350mhz with a voodoo 2 card, the other a 450mhz with a voodoo3, I then net worked them with a a couple of old BNC network cards and this lead to some epic half life multiplayer battles with friends. Both voodoo cards looked great on all the half life games, I also played a lot of carmageddon 2 and quite a few flight sims like microsoft combat flight sim. On my better machines I had a sound blaster live 124 and even splashed out on the 4.1 cambridge sound works speakers it was all super high tech but I still lusted after a penguin II or III
I remember having a Orchid Voodoo 1 card which I loved, I thing upgraded to the Orchid Voodoo 2... while at a friends LAN night one chap was running a PowerVR(?) card... and it looked terrible, I sold my Voodoo 1 card to him and he was amazed...
I remember playing Carmageddon on my Pentium 100 with its Matrox Mystique graphics card. Ran fine from memory but then I also remember Frontier on my stock 1200 being silky smooth. Screamer 2 for me is one game were (I think anyway) the software renderer looks better as running it on my Voodoo 3 there is a lot of tearing in the track. I see you raised a fair chunk of cash from the sale of this machine. Congratulations on doing so, its for a very worthy cause.
Oh wow thanks for raising this Dan. I have a policy of no more than 1 advert every 15 minutes (and 0 adverts for patrons) - I'd somehow missed this video. TH-cam injects how many videos it thinks is suitable (in this case about 11 adverts!) and I manually remove most of them before release. I've fixed it now.
@@RMCRetro Great to hear! Unfortunately, this policy by YT is starting to alienate a lot of it's audience, and I know it has upset many content providers.
Wasn't the butler in Tomb Raider 2? I played only TR2 of that era and remember quite well locking the poor guy in the freezer. As for Viper Racing, I loved it despite having only demo version.
A favourite of mine I think from 98 is MotorHead. They worked wonders with the software renderer but the 3D mode(s) were just magic... made even better by several patches.
Goddamn I still keep getting upset about Ultima 9. FFS, Origin, why'd you have to fail so hard I'd still feel sad and angry more than twenty years later!
The 3DFX NetVista Auction is now live at: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/264777687005 - 100% of the profit goes to BrighterFutures, a charity supporting NHS Hospitals in my area. Thank you for your support!
Neil - RMC
The "softening" of the picture also comes from a filter the 3Dfx cards apply to make the dither less obvious as they render at 15bit precision.
It works pretty well.
What ever happened to AGEIA PhysX? I was watching an old video from 2006 showing off it's capabilities and was pleasantly surprised. It's got quite the history too. Have you any experience with this tech RMC?
Thank you for thinking of the NHS Neil :D
@@leebumble nVidia bought them, pretty much. The tech got integrated into their GPUs but it never really took off, neither before nor after the acquisition. It had its weaknesses (awful fluid physics, for example) and the dedicated hardware was ridiculously expensive for what you got.
There wasn't a lot of development, and competing tech pushed forward making PhysX a relatively obscure tech in the end.
Looks like the perfect candidate for ArcaOS.
Doesn't want someone swearing, proceeds to run over tons of pedestrians.
Scrolled down to comment exactly that :D
loved the easter eggs you left on the LGR machine lol the voices were epic.
Thanks, I was giggling like Ron Swanson while loading them up
@@RMCRetro You're a dork. A lovely, funny, dork. ;-)
@@RMCRetro
I have entered the chat.
@@RMCRetro
Yeah. That employee was doing Gods Work. If only programers were more plentiful along the spectrum of friendly and useful ship mates.
Its proven a barren darwinian island fest of men. Many with no sense of honor.
@@RMCRetro
The PC Master Race is largely unaware of my power levels exponential cambrianogenesis.
Remember seeing Unreal's castle flyby opening for the first time on my friend's Voodoo2. Instant jaw drop, burned into memory forever. (Also that amazing mod music by Alexander Brandon and Michiel Van Den Bos).
Neil: "I burned this onto a cd for them - the emulator, definitely NOT the roms, I definitely DID NOT give them roms"
Officer: "He's lying. Get Nintendo on speed dial and I'l send the boys in."
First thought seeing you lying on the floor: "Self-Isolation has effected him far more then we ever thought!"
Second was : "He's probably hurt his back in some way!"
A bit of pot B and a lot of pot A
My 3DFX card of the 90s was my first true jaw dropping experience when playing Quake via Voodoo hardware. This card not only provided severely enhanced effects, but improved your PCs framerate.
Played Quake 2 to completion with the software renderer multiple times. Then got a Voodoo2 and OMG the coloured lighting alone was worth it. Used to great effect (one great example was early on in the second zone where you pull a power core and the white overhead lighting is replaced by dim, red coloured “emergency” lighting from the floor).
@securitycountercheck "computer updated"
Just an FYI... Toca touring cars evolved into Toca Race driver, Then Evolved into GRID.
'Fun' fact: 3Dfx headquarters is now a church.
sounds like my kind of church... lol
The Church of Glide?
When I think about the 3DFX, only 2 games pop into my mind. One of course being original Unreal. To this day no other game has wowed me as much as that did. My oldest brother used to play it with software rendered graphics first because we couldn't afford a 3DFX card, but we eventually saved up for one and the difference can't be described with words.
The other game is a more obscure one, and that's Montezuma's Return. I could never afford to buy the full game since I was just a child and I remember playing a demo of it over and over and over again. I was so in love with that game, and I can still remember those 2 stages the demo allowed you to play inside and out to this day :D My jaw dropped so hard onto the floor when I tried it in 3DFX mode for the first time and saw all the incredible enhancements it brought with it. Smooth edges, much better lighting, high resolution textures, the 8 year old me was in complete trance. Unfortunately I never managed to save up enough money to buy the full game, but that demo and those 3DFX graphics will forever stay in my heart as one of the biggest WOW moments I ever experienced in gaming. I miss those days so much. No new generation of tech has even come close to that wow-factor the 3DFX brought to me. Thanks for the nostalgia trip with your personal picks with the 3DFX experience Neil. :)
Montezuma's Return (PC) Cutscene - Ending (HD): th-cam.com/video/Sh0nR2cj4Ss/w-d-xo.html
28:36 Oh, this car handles like a Boat! - Mr. "I definitely NOT give them ROMs", 2020
Carmageddon was superb it also kept me going back. :)
Used to love Viper Racing, remember having to write a patch to make it run under Win2k/XP. Retro hacks! Great video.
I hope your back gets better soon!
Thank you!
I had the original Voodoo (in an Orchid Righteous flavour) before moving up to a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP.
Motorhead and Sports Car GT wear my racers of choice in that golden late 90's era.
I'll always have a place in my heart for 3DFX.
I always love the logic of "We don't want anyone swearing, but I'm going to plow through all these pedestrians, scattering blood and brains on the road" :D
point to Lara and says "definitely had the jaggies" without a hint of irony. Polygons were scarce in the 90s
7:57 Thought that was Tomb Raider 2.
It is indeed, and that's why I couldn't find him :D
The nervous farty wreck he was. Even when the door was shut his head used to poke through 😂 then doing double jump backflips round the main hall after turning on the music player.
Aah nostalgia.
Looks like Tomb Raider 1 first, then TR 2.
TR2 and no Venice Violins?
Ah, POD Gold, MDK, Wingcommander IV.... so smooth in glide...
0:09 I feel your pain brother.
Remember having 2 of Voodoo 2 cards in SLI with Matrox G200 card . That was a beast then to run games 1024x768 resolution. First i remember getting an Elsa Voodoo 2 card with 12 mb, like just few day after launch , but it had some weird glitches and issues in my setup so replaced it 2 Diamond cards, and they run perfectly. Next in the line was Voodoo 3 3500 TV VIVO with that blue thick cable that came out of the graphics card to be placed on the desk with all in and outs.
what a time it was.....
You're a good guy, my friend, with a big heart!
I had a Pentium 90 and played Carmageddon on it in software mode. Later on I upgraded to a Celeron 333 and installed a Voodoo Banshee into it and my life changed forever. I'll always miss you 3DFX 😘
I had 2 Voodoo 2's in SLI. Sometimes they didn't mesh correctly, but when they did, it was 90's heaven!
Me too. I had two Diamond Voodoo 2's. I can't remember if it was the 8 Mb or the 16 Mb cards I had.
SLI let you use 3DFX games at 1024x768 too!
I had P200mhz with Matrox Millenium 2D card back in 96 or so. Oh boy when i got 3D Diamond Voodoo card! Played Tomb Raider and Carmageddon all day long;) 3D from voodoo really blew my mind, there was nothing before that what could do 3D even close. That was nice time to game.
4:30 PowerVR? Yeah I had one of those. A really early one. It was also 3D only so it used your regular 2D card through the BUS! Yup! It had to contend for bus bandwidth with everything else when sending frames to your video card. Unbelievable! Of course the Matrox demos worked great! NO GAMES AT ALL WORKED. :D
Some huge nostalgia here!
That said, I was mostly about the FPS games in the Voodoo era.. which meant Quake, basically :) The Voodoo2 was the ultimate upgrade for Quake 2, it was just such a huge improvement that it became almost standard hardware... even better if you had two in SLI.
Anyone remember the predecessor to Battlefield 1942, Codename Eagle? Weird game, had a pretty fun multiplayer though - great at LANparties back in the day.
Like you Voodoo2 was as far as I went though, TNT2 Ultra after that and then Geforce cards.
30:18
It actually has happened today, im playing Mario Oddyssey and Pokemon Sword for the Switch on my PC!
I loved my 3dfx card - i still remember putting on Tomb Raider and being blown away by the difference it made over the software version. A few years on and I had dual voodoo 2 cards, good memories!
all games looked better and ran faster, the difference was like going from ps1 to ps2, it was insane!!.
"At a time when the Nintendo 64 was Nintendos current console just imagine if that happened today" it has with two different emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx. Both play all the top Switch games really well. Although you have to have a beefy PC for good frame rates
D'aaw i wanted to see EF2000 gameplay.
I went straight to Voodoo 3, didn't have money for a 3d card before that.
Same, felt cheated at the lack of EF2K (after showing two different versions boxed too!) I had the original when it came out, was a really immersive sim which never seemed to get as much attention as it deserved. Perhaps because it wasn't American or portraying an American jet? Still got it and the TACTCOM upgrade along with all the manuals etc... sadly although I have the box for my 3DFX Voodoo 1 card the actual hardware has gone missing (I was so sure it was in there too for years!)
Viper Racing and the original TOCA were my favorites at the time, mostly because of the damage management. I had a Logitech force feedback driving setup that worked perfectly with them! Good times! A lot of fun!
Back then I had Hercules Stingray 128/3D (Voodoo Rush). The transition from software renderer to 3DFX was mind blowing...
Loved to play
Star Wars Dark Forces II
Descent: Freespace
Shadows of the Empire
Johnny Herberts Grand Prix Championship 1998
and later NFS Porsche 2000 (the best NFS imo)
what a great, perfectly legal racing move!
I used to love Toca 2 as a kid. (Or ToCA2, or however you stylise it...)
Toca became Race Driver, then Race Driver GRID, then just GRID, and now we have GRID Autosport. I'm personally holding out for Autosport: Toca, but the likelihood seems slim...
I used to use the Amiga 1200 to play Formula One Grand Prix and found playing it late at night was a bad idea.Asleep,all i saw was those pesky centre line markers coming towards me...............................
After much time playing Quake in a tiny window on my Pentium 75 I upgraded to a P2 300 (it was going to be the 266 but the 300 came out the week I was buying the parts) and a 3DFX card. After weighing the processor (because it really was that huge in the cartridge format) and getting it all put together the first game I installed - Quake - and when it ran in 3DFX for the first time - WOW! I didn't play for ages, just stood staring at the intro. Then - Unreal - Uber WOW! - never ever went back to software rendering - except for the odd retro experience in recent years.
Matrox G200 was released in 98, much later than V1, it was lauched after V2. Matrox wanted to competed with 3dfx, but G200 was slower than V2 (a lot slower, especially with the first few drivers). It was just a bit faster than V1, it's performance improved with later drivers, but it was never been able to reach V2 performance, not even TNT (which it alos was slower than V2).
My very first 3D card was voodoo2, then voodoo3 3000 and 3500. The 90s were the best for gamers not like the 21st cent.
I remember Carmaggedon was banned in many European countrys because of hitting pedestrians, later they swapped pedestrians to zombies. I played a lot NFS Porsche 2000 on my PC, it was one of my favorite racing games and the music is stunning.
I basically lived off of cover CDs during my foray into PC gaming, I remember Sin being rather terrible before patches. :\ I was quite pleased to start 3D acceleration with a Voodoo1, they really had their act together compared to other makers bitd. Yeah doesn't sound like much now but 480p was a lot better for 3D graphics than 240p, and actually being able to turn effects on heh.
TOCA Touring Cars was quite a game at the time, TOCA2 was ok, TOCA Race Driver laid the foundations for Codies' racing games more-or-less until now with it's career mode. It's an acquired taste, one which I haven't really enjoyed, but TOCA was groundbreaking both in terms of graphics and sound.
When I first started working in IT we got a single Voodoo card (voodoo 1) in for a client, I still remember my boss calling us all in after he had it all set up in the client's PC to show us how awesome it was. A few years later we sold a few systems with the Voodoo Rush, I believe Voodoo 2 was already available but the rush was marked down. I salivated over the voodoo cards for years until I got my hands on an Nvidia Riva TnT2 and finally got a taste of true 3d acceleration. People think GPUs are expensive today, back then they cost an absolute fortune. A voodoo rush would have set me back 2 months salary, 3 if I payed bills. Today, you can pick up a mid range or even a mid/entry level GPU for between $100 and $200 and experience the same architectural capabilities as a $1000 card (excluding RTX obviously). In the early days, entry level meant a different architecture and almost always, a totally different vendor. An S3 Virge or ATI 3d Rage was "affordable" but in a completely different, lower league. I both miss and don't miss that era, on one hand, it was exciting and full of innovation and new tech breakthroughs but on the other, you payed through the nose to actually experience them and more often than not, they were out dated in less than a year.
Good old memories. I had a Pentium 200 MMX, with that same sound card. Creative Voodoo 2 and a S3 Virge DX. I bought the Voodoo 2 to play Final Fantasy 7. It was awesome. I also played a little gem called Shogo: Mobile Armor Dividion. I still have goose bumps when I watch the opening theme.
ToCA turned into GRiD eventually and is still technically going on.
The 3DFX Voodoo cards hold special memories for me. My first job out of University in '98 was at Codemasters on the Brian Lara Cricket team, the first thing I was tasked with was to port the game's software renderer over to the Glide API. I still remember the joy of getting those first textured triangles rendering on the Voodoo. A little relieved too, maybe they hadn't made a mistake hiring me after all! The card's separate video output was actually really handy for a dual monitor setup, one for debugging, and one for the 3D output.
Christ, Ultima IX. The Glide version of that is the only one that runs reliably. Direct3D either ran like a dog, crashed repeatedly, glitched like crazy or, if you were incredibly unlucky, all of the above. The D3D implementation is so bad that the GOG.com version literally just emulates a 3DFX card.
17:00 "It's in the game!" I thought the same thing. :)
My first PC (1999) came with an i740, but I picked up a Voodoo Banshee card at an auction later that year and it was magical. Sure, the textures could be a bit chunky, and IIRC the colour depth in 3D was 16-bit, but the framerates were always high and consistent. The 2D performance was remarkably good too. I remember many hours immersed in Unreal, Driver, Star Wars Episode I Racer. It seemed to be worth seeking out Glide games specifically as they ran so well. Oh, anyone else remember Trickstyle?
I played EF2000 a lot, but can't remeber if it was Voodoo or TNT2 card then. I know my first Voodoo experience was with the NHL series, it looked incredible!
The EF2000 patch was to add the TACTCOM feature and allow you to listen to music from the CD drive.
Those days of the Voodoo 1 cards were amazing.
Every month I'd check the cover disks on PC Format and other PC gaming magazines to see what new 3DFX patches had been released, as some of those patches were quite large to download.
Screamer 2 is just tricky to get working at all in my experience. Which is a shame since it's such an excellent racing game. I always liked it much better than the needs for speed and actually every other racing game I tried in the mid to late nineties.
After having played S2 so much, none of the others felt "right". Sure, other games might have looked more pleasing and had more variety to the courses, but for me S2 beat them all by a mile in pure driving pleasure.
If anyone happens to know a reliable way to play the game on a modern system, especially in Glide mode, I'd love some tips.
An awesome video of an awesome hardware, we can never forget the legacy of 3dfx!
My brother and I played so much Carmegeddon on our old Pentium 200 back in the day. Looked so much nicer after we saved up our christmas money and got a voodoo card with a whopping 16 MB of video memory.
And what is wrong with Active Desktop lol.
Good move to turn that off :). I enjoyed this video. I sometimes forget how good the 3DFX games were.
I would put a bid on the machine, but shipping to Australia would make it prohibitive.
About the Ultima series, I'm pretty sure I stopped playing after VII and VII part 2. Don't even remember there was either an eighth installment nor a ninth... Lucky me :)
Pentium 1 233mhz mmx, voodoo 3 pci 16mb, 128mb of ram chiming in. Even played midtown madness 2. What a beast
Need for speed 2 special edition was really great fun and good looking with the Voodoo glide settings.
Driving around as a big T-Rex, never gets old LOL!!!
Not to mention the music was amazing!
Remember the bug with the installer? It would detect if you had a Voodoo 1 and copy over the glide version of the executable but if you had a Voodoo 2 it didn’t. You had to install the game, then grab the glide exe off the cd and run that one.
I never had a 3DFX card because as a teenager they were too expensive cause you needed a 2D card. I used an ATI Rage 2 with the cheaper EDO RAM but it did the trick.
DirectX kind of changed things because it unified what was needed to run games.
Ah, the NFS Porche Challenge. I had it as a kid, but mine was special version - the only language it supported was swedish and no one in my family spoke sweden.
Can you play Archimedean Dynasty? It's a really cool submarine game that got a 3dfx patch.
I-War is also very nice.
Wing Commander Prophecy was the game I saved up all my allowance to buy a Voodoo video card. It was so worth it, I loved that game and the graphics were so beautiful for the time!
On your comment about the N64 emulator coming out when the N64 was current
Yuzu is a Nintendo Switch emulator that works almost full speed for most games
For me - The Need For Speed II 3dfx edition was the biggest shock. Quake I, Terminal Velocity.
I was very disappointed by pass through cable and my Diamond Monster + Tseng ET6000 pair was replaced by TNT, the rest is history ;). I had high res 17" ADI monitor running at 1280x1024 res at 85 Hz. Over pass through cable it was just a blurry mess. And Windows NT 4 support was poor.
1996 Tomb raider time fly's. Never actually played the game , but i think i installed a free trial version off one of the cd's that come with magazines at the time
I don't remember a 3DFX patch for Tomb Raider existing. I just remember playing it to death and back again both on the PlayStation 1 and in software render mode on PC. I do remember though the first game I played with native 3DFX support was 1999's Unreal Tournament. I didn't have a 3DFX card, and while I did have a Matrox Millenium G400 card, I don't think UT supported D3D at the time, so I was stuck playing UT in software mode as well. I do now have the Steam version of UT and I do like having 3D3 support in that and how much better UT looks with it. But yeah I never had the luck of having a 3DFX card back then.
Incoming was the very first thing I saw on 3dfx when i worked in a computer shop and i was amazed. Just got myself a voodoo3 agp card, will be playing through unreal first i think.
Had a voodoo 1 in my p133, I remember starfleet academy being massively improved, well going from unplayable to working! My next card was a voodoo 3 in my p3? 733 and my memory of that is playing wing commander prophecy. Still have my voodoo 3 somewhere I think, sold my old cpu though
I thought you were saying something rude there at first!
yuzu emulator can already run some switch games at full speed. Damn impressive i think considering that new games are just in development. Emulating these games at day one is mindblowing
Screamer 2 was my JAM back in the day!
My computers back then never had any sort of 3D accelerator which made me sad sometimes as I couldn't play games like Driver originally nor did PS1 emulate at full speed but seeing those games running on - well - retro machines from today's standpoint made me smile since I know just how hard it was to run most games back in the day.
A feeling that went lost and only really can be achieved when trying to play games at 4k resolutions with fast framerates really.
Not even VR is all that demanding anymore, really.
But that's how times change and I was happily watching this video for over half an hour.
Thank you!
by 98 Everquest was a big 3d Game at the time not sure if it was optimized for 3DFX or glide
You can only lock the butler in the freezer in the second and third Tomb Raider games :) . Speaking of TR2, it originally required a 3DFX card to run in hardware mode but then they made a patch for it to work with DirectX 7 or newer.
Pentium 3 is often faster than earlier P4s, though I didn't look into which P4s those other machines had. If there's one old tech I do not miss it is Netburst.
I have the same CT4830 Soundblaster Live! in my windows 98 PC, works great! I even, strangely, have a blue shielded CD audio cable like yours. You have to be careful when getting these cards, the Dell OEM version of this card DOES NOT have SoundBlaster legacy support, like SB16, it's missing other stuff too!
And as we all know, PCB stands for: Pretty Cramped Back
Doesn't it?
Great video but a bit heavy on racing. I would have thrown in decent or forsaken into the mix which was 360 degree action and software rendering in cramped area would show off power vr or 3dfx better for the geometry. Imho of course
Definitely remember Incoming. I think my family had the ATI Rage edition.
Neil, have you seen the PORT of the decompiled source of Mario64 to native x86? It's amazing. Running a single native .exe file for mario64
I only discovered it recently, and yes it's really an impressive bit of reverse engineering!
Loved seeing a 996 C4S in game! I bought one just before lockdown, my mid life crisis car Neil!
Nack in the day I had a Voodoo 2 card .... and then 2 Voodoo 2 cards in SLI ..... They were awesome at the time on the old 19 inch CRT Monitor
I loved Ultima 9, because i have never played a Ultima game before...
Because after all, PCB stands for Poor Chap's Back, doesn't it?
27:20: That brief moment when the sound loop after the crash makes you wonder briefly if it's still playing properly and just has a killer bass lick.
18:55 Should have pressed the H key and sent your car flying in the sky :D
Yuzu switch emulator runs at more or less full speed right now...
I have a creative blaster banshee right now. too funny. in a retro system of course. great video and well done on the auction!
I have to admit that I prefere the software look over the 3dfx accelerated one.
But in those days, the real cool thing about voodoo cards was the frame rate. Unbeatable
How cool! I haven’t seen a CTX monitor in almost two decades.
I had two home built machines both AMD K6-2 processors one a 350mhz with a voodoo 2 card, the other a 450mhz with a voodoo3, I then net worked them with a a couple of old BNC network cards and this lead to some epic half life multiplayer battles with friends. Both voodoo cards looked great on all the half life games, I also played a lot of carmageddon 2 and quite a few flight sims like microsoft combat flight sim. On my better machines I had a sound blaster live 124 and even splashed out on the 4.1 cambridge sound works speakers it was all super high tech but I still lusted after a penguin II or III
I remember having a Orchid Voodoo 1 card which I loved, I thing upgraded to the Orchid Voodoo 2... while at a friends LAN night one chap was running a PowerVR(?) card... and it looked terrible, I sold my Voodoo 1 card to him and he was amazed...
Test new Nova3D for AmigaOS4? 😎
Screamer 2 works great with nGlide, looks as smooth as Voodoo
I remember playing Carmageddon on my Pentium 100 with its Matrox Mystique graphics card. Ran fine from memory but then I also remember Frontier on my stock 1200 being silky smooth. Screamer 2 for me is one game were (I think anyway) the software renderer looks better as running it on my Voodoo 3 there is a lot of tearing in the track.
I see you raised a fair chunk of cash from the sale of this machine. Congratulations on doing so, its for a very worthy cause.
I've got really deep pockets...too bad they are empty.
YMF-724 can play more Dos games than Live.
10 minutes in and 4 unwanted adverts! I am almost at the end of my tether with TH-cam! They are making stuff I want to watch almost unwatchable!
Oh wow thanks for raising this Dan. I have a policy of no more than 1 advert every 15 minutes (and 0 adverts for patrons) - I'd somehow missed this video. TH-cam injects how many videos it thinks is suitable (in this case about 11 adverts!) and I manually remove most of them before release. I've fixed it now.
@@RMCRetro Great to hear! Unfortunately, this policy by YT is starting to alienate a lot of it's audience, and I know it has upset many content providers.
@@danhoppy5517 It is something we have full control over, we just have to remember to do it. Thanks again Dan
Wasn't the butler in Tomb Raider 2? I played only TR2 of that era and remember quite well locking the poor guy in the freezer.
As for Viper Racing, I loved it despite having only demo version.
Yes, TR2, which is why I couldn't find the poor blighter in this one :D
20:35 - cue Spoony screaming "BETRAYAL!!!" at the top of his lungs...
A favourite of mine I think from 98 is MotorHead. They worked wonders with the software renderer but the 3D mode(s) were just magic... made even better by several patches.
That had a great soundtrack too as I recall. A really great looking game with glide.
Goddamn I still keep getting upset about Ultima 9.
FFS, Origin, why'd you have to fail so hard I'd still feel sad and angry more than twenty years later!
I'm right there with you