Just to clarify, these days people call the graphics card a GPU, but the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) refers to the actual chip on the card and what's inside it. So I am not saying "World's First Graphics Card" of course :) As for what a GPU is, Nvidia defined it in 1999 as "The technical definition of a GPU is "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second." I hope this helps to avoid confusion and drama :)
compared to the TNT2 Ultra the Geforce 256 SDR was not much of a gain when it came out. Especially with the first few drivers the Geforce was slower in some games. The Geforce 256 with DDR was the real deal for me at that time, because in my opinion that was the first card usable to play in 32bit color. Yes the TNT1/2 could do 32 bit color too, but they had not enough memory bandwith. So you had only the choice between playing 16bit @ 1024x768 or 32bit @ 800x600 for high framerates. In short the DDR Memory was the "must have"-feature and TnL the "nice to have"-feature I think.
And the SDR version was the opposite, a huge disappointment considering the price. A friend of mine bought the ELSA Erazor X when it came out and we felt it was pretty much wasted money.
@@zsideswapper6718 Correct PS1 was a system at least 6 years older. PS2 was basically getting built at the time so it can be shipped next year, so PS2 is the more correct comparison.
@@Just_another_Euro_dudecompare ac unity with ac mirage u will see very minor graphical look in anyone one of them only in texture little bit rest is pretty much same.Games released before 2013 don't look gorgeous.
So if I had kept my card I would have gotten my money back. Bummer! Loved this card. When you played Counter-Strike on it when heavily overclocked, to the point where it created artifacts, you could see players through flashbangs and smoke :)
Blast from the past! My first REAL computer (a 1999 compaq presario) had one of these bad boys in it. Was mindblowing at the time. Half life, unreal tournament and quake 3 at max settings!
Imagine people seeing the 3090 today and seeing what they think. It has been so long and we have come this far. That's pretty amazing that we look at this like primitive technology.
As a person that lived all of this tech and was reading computer magazines all excited about this Geforce 256, i will tell you that looking at monster cards like the 4090 for example does not exactly bring me pleasure for our progress. Sure there is a lot of power and many games today look mesmerizing but in the old days you got the top stuff by getting that little GPU with her little fan. Now you need to built a house to support the GPU and a power grid station for the energy it needs. I expected that as tech advanced that we will simply get more powerful cards with the same from factor. Not start to build such monstrosities. I guess you can take a small single slot card now and it will still be much stronger than the 256, so we did progress in the direction i dreamed as well but the top cards feel a little unpleasant.
i had a geforce 256 pro (ddr), with an amd slot a k7 700mhz, the fastest cpu on that time was 1ghz... ohh man that pc just blow my mind playing everything at 1024x768... it was the equivalent of todays 4k... :D
Surprised you didn't use the Geforce 256 with half-life. As an owner of a Creative Labs Annihilator 256, and Half-Life releasing around the same time as the Geforce 256 cards and being a well received and popular game for years to come... Half-Life got the most gameplay on many Geforce 256 cards at the time, along with it's mods Team Fortress and Counter Strike and expansions (blue shift, opposing force), at least on my and my friend's computers. Also other games which were extremely popular at the time which you didn't do any gameplay/testing with was Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Alien vs Predator. I do remember playing these games for many hours back during this time with a Geforce 256. I believe these 4 games alone and similar released around the time or later are reasons why many gamers purchased a Geforce 256 or the following Geforce 256 Pro and owners of the new Geforce 256 cards definitely played these games or similar released at the time from 1999-2000. You did show Serious Sam though, however by then I probably already had a Geforce 2 or higher.
Exactly. Back in the day my brother and I owned a Geforce 256 SDR running on a (comparably slow) Intel Celeron w/ 433 MHz, and on a LAN party our setup totally demolished a Voodoo 3 3500 running on an Intel Pentium II w/ 450 MHz in Quake 3 timedemo 😎. The GPU truly allowed our Celeron a „second spring“ in games with TnL support, thus sort of reviving and holding up to the initial idea of 3D graphic cards like the Voodoo 1 to be able to skip a CPU Update just for gaming. Of course when playing non-TnL games, our CPU more and more became a painful bottleneck, so we eventually upgraded to an AMD Athlon with 1 GHz. Man, those were interesting times… 🤓
@@dannyocean3191 everything became obsolete in just 3 years. 2002 geforce, geforce 4, completely destroyed g256 for example. Such an amazing progress back then. So enjoyable to watch and participate in those changes.
the first real "GPU" was the Rendition Vérité V1000 released in 1996 but because Nvidia coined the term "GPU" for this card people think this is the first graphics accelerator or something.
ITT: People that don't know the history of the term 'GPU' Great vid man, your title wasn't misleading at all, just too many folks these days ignorant of where it came from.
Wow blast from the past. I still have this card on a system I built way back when it was all new. I am surprised anybody would actually buy one these days though i guess if you are running AGP on an old MB you not exactly spoiled for choice. Thanks for the memories Phil.
Phil, what are you talking about? Transform is not "converting a 3D scene to 2D". Please don't take your information from a poorly interpreted Wikipedia article. Transform is the polygon setup phase of a drawing a scene (ie the Meshes), lighting is the vertex calculation of those meshes (ie textures, shaders and the like).
the transformation phase in T&L cards does the clipspace conversion as well so it converts the 3d scene to 2d (plus depth) coordinates. It basically did what you do in modern vertex shaders: you have a stream of vertices and a model-view-projection matrix and the card transforms all the vertices by that. So it's converting from 3d to 2d
Ah the good old days, remember getting a 256 ddr to replace my Voodoo 2 , it was an awesome card for the day CS Beta enjoyed the extra power,. Great video keep it up
you will not believe it, but we waited on voodoo2 till 2002 Morrowind and upgraded to geforce 4 in that time. I must admit, years 2001-2002 on voodoo2 was quite harsh, but 640x480 x16 bit handled it , also to mention, it was on K6-2 500. Hehe.
I have an Asus V6600 Geforce 256 with 32MB of RAM that I purchased back in 2000 for about $300 Canadian dollars. It was a killer graphics card. That card lasted me through two different PC builds. I still have it too.
I remember reading an article in PC Gamer I think about this new thing called a "GPU", the GeForce 256, and how it would be the future of game graphics processing. It was exciting! Also, some new games were unplayable without a hardware T&L card. Took me a couple years to afford one but when i did, the programmable shaders blew my mind! With the Doom 3 gameplay reveal, we finally got to see some of the graphical innovations made possible by GPU's like programmable shaders, bump mapping and normal mapping everwhere and more dynamic real-time shadows.
This video made me dig out my Geforce 2 GTS that I presumed dead. Fired right up into some UT99 and it worked great. Now I'm torn between this and the Voodoo 3 2000 for my 98 rig. Damn!
Looking at these benchmarks, just brings to mind the surprising results I got when I played around with testing some of this era cards in a PIII system. Most cards capped out on performance with PIII 800MHz, but strangely enough, the Matrox G400 MAX kept scaling as I went up to a Tualatin 1400MHz. I was only comparing pre-T&L cards though, so GeForce256 is of course a faster and better card for most purposes.
I was wrecking my head around a build that has been with me for a while now, a 1999 PC with a 933 PIII using a voodoo 3 velocity 8mb with 2 TMUs enabled. I was searching for a GPU replacement because in all honesty the V3 simply doesn't bring good results, it's mostly decent and mind you for me it was the same even while i had a V3 3000. For some reason though even at the time i never even tried going for a Gf 256, as you said phil, the GPU looks like a stop gap measure now but i started revaluing this card, after checking what actually was released in the gaming market in 1999 i noticed that this card can play everything at 1024x768 32bit starting from 30fps and in many cases way better than that. This GPU is as i see it the perfect 1999 high end card historically, compatible with everything, feature complete for that year (detailed textures and cube maps where way more interesting than T&L in 99) providing both Opengl and DX natively.
You lucky man! I've actually got one Intel vs AMD video ready to go, but at the moment I'm "stuck" with this era and would like to continue if that makes sense. I have big plans for this series though, so it will happen.
No one will pair a "fast" GeForce 256 with a slow cpu now , but back in 2000 I had the Pentium 3 866Mhz not the Pentium 4 you are using in you test so the argument that hardware TnL will help with a slower processor sounds right.
exacltly Thanasis. And he also dont know, how expensive were components outside australia/USA. One often had even overclocked Celeron 300A to 450. In end of 1999, when they heard T&L will take out more load of CPU, so games will run faster on slower CPU, it was super fortunate news for many, and actually choosen Geforce because of it. Although I agree, to take SDR and not wait for DDR version was mistake. Or wait till june 2000 and take Geforce 2 MX, that after overclocking almost matched Geforce 256 DDR, but price was 130$ in june 2000 vs 300$ in october/december 1999 for Geforce 256. (geforce 2 MX also drew 4x less power, and generate much less heat, Geforce 256 was quite power hungry, and some motherboards didn't handled AGP voltage good, and results was instability) I would say, 7 months waiting for G2 MX was well worth in that time.
Another great video, Phil! Don't let a few people's semantic arguments get you down. You're producing some of the most interesting, not to mention comprehensive, retro PC hardware content on TH-cam. Can't ever wait to see what's next from you in my sub box!
I got this card as soon as it came out back in the day. It was the first graphic solution that decisively made me drop my 32mb TNT2ultra and Voodoo2 SLI combo. Not soon after that, I upgraded to the 64mb DDR version. What memories.
Fun fact - there were 18 generations of GeForce cards made, no less. And if we count the Nvidia cards before the GeForce, that would make a good 23 generations of graphics cards from them. They came a long way, but ATi (now AMD) and Intel are even longer in the graphics card game (already from the 80s), although Intel dropped dGPUs after the i740 and went full iGPU.
As for availability the problem is that IIRC a lot of these were sold with OEM PCs att, like the voodoo3, so many must have ended in recycling centers and stripped down for materials which is a shame.
It's only the worlds first if you define GPU the way nVidia did at the time, to include integrated transform and lighting into the graphics chip. Nvidia was the first to do that.
Something interesting to note about the Voodoo 3 series, it actually was able to get closer to the intended 24bit color through dithering. It was more like 22bit, but that was still amazing. From Wikipedia. "The Voodoo3's RAMDAC, which took the rendered frame from the framebuffer and generated the display image, performed a 2x2 box or 4x1 line filter on the dithered image to almost reconstruct the original 24-bit color render. 3dfx claimed this to be '22-bit' equivalent quality.As such, Voodoo3's framebuffer was not representative of the final output, and therefore, screenshots did not accurately portray Voodoo3's display quality which was actually much closer to the 24-bit outputs of NVIDIA's RIVA TNT2 and ATI's Rage 128." And to properly play any quake game with a Voodoo 3 you need to utilize Glide. Remember that Glide, which OpenGL is a derivative of, was created by 3DFX. That is where the 3DFX cards shined. Considering the generation difference it is not surprising that the Voodoo 3 was outmatched by the Geforce 256. The Geforce 256 was the first card to actually give the Voodoo 3 a true run for its money.
Farinhir The Voodoo 3 cards had excellent display quality in 16 bit. The TNT2 had 32 bit support but you lost some 30-40% of the frame rate in most games switching from 16 to 32 bit and you needed a microscope to notice the picture quality improvements.
PhilsComputerLab Half Life and another game that was played by everyone and used the same engine.. Counter Strike. Also in Counter Strike the Voodoo 3 was way faster than the TNT2, almost as fast as the Geforce 256 SDR or Gerforce 2 MX.
PhilsComputerLab I believe you are correct on Half-Life. It was basically a heavily modified version of the quake engine called GoldSrc. Only goes to show how much we truly owe to John Carmack, even if he did kill college LANs with Doom. lol.
Yeah, Counter strike was a mod of Half-Life. I actually never owned a TNT. I had a Voodoo 3 3000 as my first graphics card (coming up from a 286). It was in an AMD K6/2 machine which I hardware overclocked (very risky) by about 50mhz. Poor thing ran rather warm. I think my first nVidia card was one of their first 128MB cards. I think it was the Geforce 4 TI 4600? It has been years since I had that. It was my first AGP card. Yeah. My Voodoo 3 remained fairly relevant to me that long.
I have looked around on ebay and local Craigslist posts for the geforce 256 but never found one. I thought it would be a big step up from the tnt2, I'm glad you made this video because now I can look for a more proper card for my project. I'm thinking geforce 3 ti500 is going to be my next purchase
First, I'd just like to say that I understand what you meant by "first GPU". I actually bought one of these cards (the 64MB DDR version actually) not too long ago for 3,70€ shipped locally. The thing is it wasn't advertised as that card. It was just an ad for a "graphics card", but I managed to identify it by the pictures. I was really happy because I'd never seen an original GeForce for sale over here before. These seem to be rare everywhere! I think that if you can find one cheap it's still a great addition to any computer collection.
Look at all these people who are freaking out about the usage of the term "GPU". Guess what? If you were around back then, yes, this was marketed at the world's first GPU. Before that you had graphics cards, 2d accelerators, and 3d accelerators. THIS was the first card to have a hardware T&L unit aimed at consumers specifically for games. THAT'S why it's referred to as the first GPU. Prior to this, hardware T&L was non-existent outside very specific workstations focused on CGI and design, and none of them had any support for accelerating games. So please, kids, stop screaming, as it shows just how little you know about the history of PC gaming hardware. (edit: grammar)
Oh the times of Unreal, UT, DeusEx, Quake 3, MidtownMadness etc...i wish i had one of these. Today i have both the DDR and SDR in my collection though.
My very first GPU that I bought was a 3dfx Voodoo 2 or 3. It had 16 mb vram and I remember buying it in July of 1999 from a Wal-Mart super center, (early supercenter days).
I remember about 2008 picking up an old dual processor 2Ghz PC server with 1GB of DDR1 and a 128MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285 for £100, it played Serious Sam and other older games like a dream, I kept that PC for daily use until late 2010 when I built myself a higher end gaming PC for the day to play then newer titles like Dragon Age Origins.
Lately, i am watching videos like this. As someone who used to be using riva tnt, voodoo2 and similar graphics cards, this is something that really throws me back thursday (1999) :D
Me too. A lot of Phil's videos feature technology that I knew about at the time but in most cases could not afford (I had a Voodoo3 but never a Voodoo or Voodoo2 or Voodoo5; I had a Geforce2 MX but not a Geforce or a GF2GTS; I had a Matrox Mystique but never a Millennium (though I did get an m3d on clearance at CompUSA for like $20 - wish I still had that as I see them at >$100 on Ebay)). It's got a certain nostalgia factor and it is a welcome change from all of this information sitting in our brains, never to be used or discussed again.
Wanted to add some purchase data to the video. I purchased my GeForce 256 DDR (an ASUS V6800) on eBay (in the USA) for $150.14 shipped to my door. Since, I have seen others come up for sale periodically. Some for less money and some for more money. I consider mine to be exceptional condition thus I justify the price. To date, it runs great. I would expect viewers to pay a similar price now in 2024. They are still hard to find, not cheap, so if you find one at a good price always buy it!
As always, very interesting video ! TY. I love this card ! It could be fun to compare with the DDR version. It seems that the gap is important. Just one thing about the processor. IMO, P4 is a too strong processor for this card. It could be interesting to see the benefits of the geforce on a 99 or 00 machine (PII 450 or PIII 500 ?).
Ah see my retro rig is an old IBM PC300PL that uses the NLX form factor.. So I was quite limited as far as AGP graphics cards go. The most powerful card I know in existence so far that uses NLX is actually a Quadro SDR (the ELSA GLoria II). I found mine for about $5; it's currently paired with a 1 GHz Coppermine Pentium III on a Slot 1 socket adapter :)
I'm sure your video is great, but the 256 was also called the "NV10" because it wasn't even NVidia's first GPU. About 4 or 5 years prior there was the NV1, the ATI Rage 1, and the Voodoo 1.
my dad got me this card, i where only 15 years old. got it in a local shop some days after release, the price was around the price of a 1080gtx today. atleast in denmark. i played alot of quake 2 on this card, renemeber it burned everything in that game. like over 135 fps in the quake2 benchmark. left the TNT2 cards in the dust ;) where alot of fun.
I remember my friend had the GeForce 256 SDR in his 'new' rig' back round late 1999-2000 and playing UT on it was really, really good. It was an exciting time for video cards during this time as there were so many vendors (Matrox, S3, ATI, nVidia, 3dfx) to pick from. If only he had that many manufactures now.
I'm not sure about prices in Australia at launch, but an Anandtech review from October, 1999 stated that the price of the GeForce256 was "$220+," which I'm taking to mean that the MSRP was around $220 USD, but that it was hard to find one for that price. Another article from Anandtech written only two months later (and both articles were written by Anand himself) mentions a "minimum $249 cost of a card based on the GeForce." I'm also having a hard time finding the cards on American ebay/Amazon. It's weird, I remember seeing some on there a few months ago, but now I only see a single Amazon listing for around $105. Edit: Also thought I should mention that the Wayback Machine at archive.org has archived copies of Newegg going back to December 2000 or so, although they are incomplete snapshots. That might prove useful to you and your viewers at some point.
I had good luck with the wayback machine when getting prices for the Qusdro 2 cards. But find it very hard for 1998 and 1999, especally CPU prices with almost monthly price cuts.
Back then, like you say, T&L was the new hype but I wasn't buying it. For a little while longer the CPU performance available still made the Voodoo cards more attractive. I stuck with 3dfx until the Voodoo 5 5500 (best antialiasing even to this day, seriously) and was very happy. It wasn't until the Geforce 3 came out, and 3dfx unfortunately folded, that the T&L performance was finally helping those cards outpace a Voodoo & fast CPU.
PhilsComputerLab I lived with that card from the time it came out until I was finally tempted by the GF3, and that was quite a long time. I got very used to the AA that card was capable of. And it took all of about 5 seconds after installing the GF3 and firing up Counter-Strike to groan in disappointment at the poor AA. Everything was shimmering and polygon popping plagued every scene. It was very annoying to take a step back like that. And I'm 100% serious when I say that no card to this day does as good of a job as the Voodoo 5 did. Higher sampling rates and newer methods exist, but in some cases still fail where it succeeded. Polygon popping especially. Unfortunately the method it used also was a performance killer. Using 4x looked amazing, but cut your FPS literally to 1/4th when fillrate-limited. So, if you had some fillrate headroom it wasn't bad. But if fillrate was the bottleneck it was pretty slow. 2x looked pretty good, and still better than the GF's 4x, believe it or not. But again, if fillrate-limited it cut your framerate in half. I still have my Voodoo 5 5500 here somewhere. Actually, I have two, but one was a failed card from my cousin. Mine still worked the last time it was in a machine. Whether that means it still works now is another matter. Hehe. I still have my Voodoo 2 12 MB cards in SLI somewhere, too, come to think of it. And the Voodoo 3 3500. Could never bring myself to get rid of them. Haha :)
Clayton Macleod It might be just nostalgia for you. The voodoo 5 was a really bad card from the launch on, they just put a lot of memory on it. The chipset and performance were really bad for the time and full of bottlenecks.
It all depended on two things: the CPU you could pair it with, and how much any given game depended on fillrate. If you had a beefy CPU and weren't limited by fillrate it was great. Then by the time the GF3 came out it offloaded a lot of work in a lot of titles by that time via the T&L processing it could do. All the non-T&L work that cards have to do the 3dfx was still great at. But by the GF3 era lots of devs were supporting and using T&L quite a bit, and it just had no hope any longer. But nostalgia still had nothing to do with the superior AA quality. ;)
V5 wasn't a bad card at all, but very expensive. There wasn't even excessive memory on it, both chips only had 32 MB at their disposal. I ran it very successfully, until Grand Prix Legends mods got too heavy for it.
In 2001 I replaced my S3 Savage 4 with GeForce 256 SDR, I had Duron 750mhz and 64 mb back then. It was a huge improvement. I loved the GeForce, I also loved my Savage don't know why, but I did. :)
Can't wait to get home and give it a watch the Gigabyte Geforce 256 was the first 3D card I bought with my savings , it was a fantastic card and I went from a TNT1 to a 256 :3 sure it wasn't the DDR version but that card rocked my T&L world :D Still have it, it's in my Voodoo 2 Sli rig , best of both worlds 3DFX and T&L
A friend had a K6-2 and when he upgraded his TNT 2 with a GeForce 2, the hardware T&L did help with Empire Earth which isn't on the Wikipedia list of T&L supporting games so don't take it as definitive. The 256 is indeed in a way the first modern card, but like the GeForce 3 Ti they were never massively popular. I hope you make videos on the ST Kyro and Kyro II.
I see that a faster CPU can make wonders for the games shown in this video, Max Payne seems to run a lot better in your setup than on my PIII 750mhz Tualatin + Geforce 4 Ti4600 128mb+ Soyo Via chipset motherboard
These games were very CPU bottlenecked back then. I still have my old Slot 1 Pentium II 450mhz IBM that was the family PC back in late 1998 and I put a pair of Voodoo 2s in SLI in it. I found my FPS did not at all correlate with graphics settings or screen resolution, but only with how much was going on in the scene. Most games were still very smooth but some CPU intensive titles like Unreal would occasionally see frame rate dips when the action heated up. I then bought an Athlon XP rig and ran the same Voodoo setup and the occasional FPS dips turned into locked 60+ FPS on titles era appropriate for the Voodoo 2.
Maybe first consume card with TnL but not the first, if I'm not mistaken N64 GPU (yes) already had TnL, thanks to SGI, so a concept that already existed (among other things). Not denying Nvidia's merits anyway.
When I was still in the "retro business" back in 2012 I could buy a voodoo card every week. I had to search for months until I could get a Gef 256. Of course we are talking about Hungary. I saw a few on Ebay too.
He's included a Hercules Kyro card with some of his benchmarks in the past, though I haven't seen a full review on it. I remember wanting a Kyro at the time but the driver support wasn't very good.
Took me a long time to find a GeForce 256 DDR. Supposedly there's an ULTRA rare 64MB variant out there. Not sure you're right about the lack of demand. There's a slight difference between those building systems for retro gaming, and graphics card collectors (though a lot of overlap between the groups). Collectors really like this card, then you combine that with overall rarity, as this card was replaced in the market by the GeForce 2 GTS only about six months later.
I agree, I'm more of a collector than a retro gamer, and I'm always happy to find a GeForce 256. I only have three, an Asus V6800 and two identical 3D Prophet SE 16Mb SDR models (which seem very uncommon). But $70 for a GeForce256 is crazy. I wouldn't use eBay as a reference for the average prices. I'm sure most collectors buy graphics cards only when good deals occur. I buy all of mines in cheap untested job lots or I find them dumpster diving. If I had bought all of my 450 graphics cards at the price some ask on eBay, my collection would have cost me $10,000 :P
how did you feel after 7 months, when Geforce 2 MX came out? DIdnt you feel bad, like was those 7 months worth it, or was better to wait for Geforce 2 MX, and save 150-170$?
Nice video :) Keep it up! I am pretty sure the only reason why the 3dfx card performed rather well versus the geforce is the cpu. Run the same test with a 500MHz Pentium3 and the GeForce 256 gains much more from the TnL unit. Back in the day we used lots of finetuning (like WickedGL miniports) to gain the last bit of speed from our trusty Voodoos :)
Actually it's mostly because the Voodoo 3 doesn't do 32 bit colours. It was more geared towards speed at the cost of a little bit less image quality. But it had this "22 bit equivalent" post processing filter which made 16 bit look much nicer. IMO is was a good move as the performance at the time wasn't good enough for smooth 32 bit gaming.
I prefer games from this time period, they don't look butt-ugly like PS1/N64 era 3D games, but they still look like games. Games today look far too realistic.
for anyone that wants to know the N64 had the graphics chip called the Reality CoProcessor based on the N64 CPU and it could do T&L back in early 1996!
It's interesting that Voodoo3 3500 managed to beat GeForce 256 in MDK 2 since that game explicitly supported TnL (I remember the "TnL" checkbox when starting the game, if memory serves me right). Also, 3DMark2001 - V3 the fastest card. It seems to me you're testing on a way to fast CPU, not available in 1999. BTW, for the record, I'm a huge 3Dfx fan and I was rockin' V3 and V5 back in a day, but this seems a bit unrealistic. :)
Welcome to the world of graphics cards reviews :) Don't get me started on Nvidia driver versions... Keep an eye out for my build videos, they might interest you like this one for example: th-cam.com/video/D_CPYUvTK9g/w-d-xo.html
The geforce sdr should never have existed, other than as a budget version, which is what it is. The memory bandwidth of the ddr cards is almost double that of the sdr cards. This was instantly realisable in most games as increased fps and higher playable resolutions. Worth far, far more that the T&L capabilities. I assume that Nvidia didn't have enough ddr modules at the time, so rushed the sdr cards out the door for the Christmas season, knowing full well that they would have ddr versions only a few months later. My Asus Geforce DDR rocked. I don't recall having problems with any games, and I played in 1280X1024X32bpp all features on. Quake 3 looked stunning! It will definitely make an excellent retro graphics card.
10 million polygon/s, that seems laughably slow now but it was pretty good back then. How do you get your old hardware which are still in working condition?
The DDR version didn't actually quite double memory bandwidth - the stock speed of it was 150MHz (so 300MHz DDR). There were also 64MB versions available, although 32MB was far more common.
oh the memories. i had a riva tnt back then and was saving for a better card. by the time i had the money, the geforce 2 gts was out and i got that one. the difference was huge compared to be tnt. but even a year or so later, the gts started to struggle. hardware ageging was bad back then
man, you're catching some flak for this one. I like the video anyways as you usually focus on how the item performs. I did have a question that maybe I missed, but in your graph for the power consumption (liked this addition btw); was this measured in Watts? Also, can your power monitor also show amperes?
Yes the reading is in Watts! If I left out the units, I'll make sure I'll fix that up when producting the next video (which might be a while as I have a few ready to go). I think it can show A as well. The LCD monitor was not included, basically just the lead coming from the PSU.
Phil, one thing to keep in mind with that power meter by the way and retro PCs. That meter, being inexpensive, is probably not going to handle all power supplies properly. With retro PCs you will have power supplies that either do not have power factor correction (PFC) or have PFC that is not as good as modern power supplies. This can throw your results off by as much as around 30%. It's still reasonably valid to compare results between 2 different video cards with the same power supply. Not trying to hate - inexpensive power meter is better than no power meter - just wasn't sure if you were aware of this. And the reason I bring it up is because xiardark's question about amperes had made me think, "the calculation to get amperes would be easy with a resistive load, but would probably be inaccurate with an older PSU." The formula for a resistive load would simply be the measured power divided by the line voltage (which I believe is 230V in Australia?). So you can get a ballpark figure by dividing his numbers by 230, but again just be aware that it could be a bit off because of the power factor.
I appreciate the info! The benchmarking station will be using the same FSP PSU, I make sure. And I have this model twice, so I can use it for other projects to compare.
You will have to give him a whole PC because he wouldn't be able to do anything with a RTX3080 other than look at it. Seriously though i like how those old cards didn't need extra supply and weren't so huge. Just a small fan was enough. I wonder how much performance can we get building a card like that now. The best example i have is the 1050Ti.
Yes I watched it right to the very end to make sure I didn't just miss you saying it at the end or something. I guess I just didn't pay any attention at that moment or forgot that is was mentioned a few minutes in.
the title is not misleading. its not his fault people don't know what a GPU is... a graphics card is not the same as a gpu... the voodoo banshee is a graphics accelerator that also features 2d graphics. the gpu is ONLY the chip thats on the card. the graphics processing unit. that is just one integrated circuit. and this is the first one that has that. before this card you only had graphic accelerators. this IS the first GPU. on cards before this a lot of the graphics were still generated by the cpu. but this card does handle all the graphics. you could just say that was nvida marketing though. they coined that term.
It is not smart to use a term that will confuse people, I mean you gotta be a fool to think people won't get confused by that, unless you're trying to pull some loose click bait that is.
Just as a side note: For me back then in 1999 Nvidia was not on my radar and I bet this is true for many people. 3DFX was king and ATi was all the rage (pun intended)... When the Geforce 2 came out everybody was talking about Nvidia. I actually first heard about this card a few years later when I already had my Geforce 4200 Ti.
Actually around 1999 gossips started to appear that there's this new card called TNT2 which was only supposed to serve as a cheap replacement for 3dfx but turned out it's actually on par with Voodoo3. Sounded silly at first but the rest is history.
your vids are great, thanks for your time, creating knowledge about old tech is awesome. sorry for dumb people who does not know about history of pc gaming
A bit of nitpicking but Serious Sam: The First Encounter was released in 2001, not in 2002. I remember trying to play the demo on my K6-2 450MHz and Voodoo 3 2000. It ran like 15fps at 400*300 resolution. I bet most of the butthurt in the comments stem from peoples personal feelings towards NVIDIA, not from facts (GeForce was the first GPU available to PC consumer market). IIRC V-Rally 2 which you are playing in the video had a split screen multiplayer and that was pretty awesome back in the day. I don't remember if I played it with my K6-2 rig or the Celeron I upgraded to in 2001.
www.nvidia.com/page/geforce256.html August 31, 1999 marked the introduction of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for the PC industry-the NVIDIA GeForce 256.
Phil, back in the day as well as today there's one thing I still wonder A LOT and maybe you will too; I used to have a K6/2 that was just crippled in some games compared to Pentium 2 and 3's, but ran a lot of games on a TNT2 Ultra. I slways wanted to know just how much the hardware T&L in a GeForce would offload my CPU and give BIG fps boosts in games... I could never afford it for that build, but mind giving it a try? :)
I can't speak for Phil , but my I did briefly run Geforce 256 DDR AND an ATI 8500 along side K6-III 400 (VIA MVP3+, 256 Ram, SoundBlaster Live Value, Windows 2000, 1024x768 @ 60 Hz). Comparing to Intel i740 (decidedly less capable than TNT2 Ultra)-- Despite being able to enhance the visual quality there was little discernible difference. So, in theory, you'll be able to maximize any visual enhancement, but not much with frame rates. The K6-2/III already had near parity with Intel in DirectX. It gets crushed in OpenGL and Glide titles.
Thanks for sharing that knowledge :) on my k6/2 500mhz back in the day, the latest game I got playable on it *mostly* was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. But all those Quake 3-based opengl games took advantage of T&L which is pretty floating-point intensive, and I was curious how much fps difference it would have made on that particular cpu.
apparently a gpu is a piece of hardware thats separate from the motherboard that has its own processor and ram dedicated to processing graphics. Youd get better performance because the main CPU and ram it's freed up to do other things like maintaining the operating system.
Wow...I had a 3dfx in my PC back in 1999. I think i upgraded to a Geforce MX 32mb, a few years later because i couldn't play Operation Flashpoint circa 2001? 20 years....I think i had a 800mhz Duron as my CPU.
![DF Retro: The Story of Nvidia GeForce 256 - The Original 'GPU' [Sponsored]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7JEAoKlFvrc/mqdefault.jpg)
![DF Retro: The Story of Nvidia GeForce 256 - The Original 'GPU' [Sponsored]](/img/tr.png)
Just to clarify, these days people call the graphics card a GPU, but the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) refers to the actual chip on the card and what's inside it. So I am not saying "World's First Graphics Card" of course :)
As for what a GPU is, Nvidia defined it in 1999 as "The technical definition of a GPU is "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second."
I hope this helps to avoid confusion and drama :)
lol, amd was selling VPU (visual) but never was popular
Yep got on that bandwagon years prior to this card.
A GPU is a single chip, the definition is not made by Phill, this was well known already, just not by you.
uzimonkey Your TNT does not have a fully integrated pipeline. It uses software TnL and has no shader capability.
>
This card (well the DDR version) was I N S A N E when it came out
I should follow up with a short video on the DDR version.
Yes, and include Quake 3 FPS comparison, the DDR was a monster at quake 3 compared to the competing voodoo3
compared to the TNT2 Ultra the Geforce 256 SDR was not much of a gain when it came out. Especially with the first few drivers the Geforce was slower in some games.
The Geforce 256 with DDR was the real deal for me at that time, because in my opinion that was the first card usable to play in 32bit color. Yes the TNT1/2 could do 32 bit color too, but they had not enough memory bandwith. So you had only the choice between playing 16bit @ 1024x768 or 32bit @ 800x600 for high framerates.
In short the DDR Memory was the "must have"-feature and TnL the "nice to have"-feature I think.
+Martin Klinge i feel for you bro
And the SDR version was the opposite, a huge disappointment considering the price. A friend of mine bought the ELSA Erazor X when it came out and we felt it was pretty much wasted money.
Crysis 3 on ultra seting and 4K ?
87 framesperdays easily.
SMGJohn when the reply get more likes, good one ;)
87fpd might be a little generous :)
WaybackTECH nice to see you here
HAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAH
SO ORIGINAL I'M DYING
I'm surprised how good these graphics look. Back then I was playing on PlayStation 1 and games on that system did not age well.
pc master race
Well, the PS1 was from 1994 and PS2 came out around these days.
@@zsideswapper6718 Correct PS1 was a system at least 6 years older.
PS2 was basically getting built at the time so it can be shipped next year, so PS2 is the more correct comparison.
I am a long time PC gamer, for many MAAAANY years now and these graphics don't look good, lol. 😅😅😅😅 They look like comedy, cardbords.
@@Just_another_Euro_dudecompare ac unity with ac mirage u will see very minor graphical look in anyone one of them only in texture little bit rest is pretty much same.Games released before 2013 don't look gorgeous.
So if I had kept my card I would have gotten my money back. Bummer!
Loved this card. When you played Counter-Strike on it when heavily overclocked, to the point where it created artifacts, you could see players through flashbangs and smoke :)
Blast from the past! My first REAL computer (a 1999 compaq presario) had one of these bad boys in it. Was mindblowing at the time. Half life, unreal tournament and quake 3 at max settings!
Imagine people seeing the 3090 today and seeing what they think. It has been so long and we have come this far. That's pretty amazing that we look at this like primitive technology.
We`ve come an extremely long way, i was only 16 yo in 98 and would have been amazed at these graphics.
As a person that lived all of this tech and was reading computer magazines all excited about this Geforce 256, i will tell you that looking at monster cards like the 4090 for example does not exactly bring me pleasure for our progress.
Sure there is a lot of power and many games today look mesmerizing but in the old days you got the top stuff by getting that little GPU with her little fan.
Now you need to built a house to support the GPU and a power grid station for the energy it needs.
I expected that as tech advanced that we will simply get more powerful cards with the same from factor. Not start to build such monstrosities.
I guess you can take a small single slot card now and it will still be much stronger than the 256, so we did progress in the direction i dreamed as well but the top cards feel a little unpleasant.
3:56 just look at the drivers’ faces!
ps1 hagrid style
i had a geforce 256 pro (ddr), with an amd slot a k7 700mhz, the fastest cpu on that time was 1ghz... ohh man that pc just blow my mind playing everything at 1024x768... it was the equivalent of todays 4k... :D
Surprised you didn't use the Geforce 256 with half-life. As an owner of a Creative Labs Annihilator 256, and Half-Life releasing around the same time as the Geforce 256 cards and being a well received and popular game for years to come... Half-Life got the most gameplay on many Geforce 256 cards at the time, along with it's mods Team Fortress and Counter Strike and expansions (blue shift, opposing force), at least on my and my friend's computers.
Also other games which were extremely popular at the time which you didn't do any gameplay/testing with was Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Alien vs Predator. I do remember playing these games for many hours back during this time with a Geforce 256.
I believe these 4 games alone and similar released around the time or later are reasons why many gamers purchased a Geforce 256 or the following Geforce 256 Pro and owners of the new Geforce 256 cards definitely played these games or similar released at the time from 1999-2000. You did show Serious Sam though, however by then I probably already had a Geforce 2 or higher.
The Geforce 256 was the nail in the coffin for 3DFX. I had a Voodoo 3 that struggled with Quake 3. For the Geforce 256 Quake 3 gave much better fps.
Exactly. Back in the day my brother and I owned a Geforce 256 SDR running on a (comparably slow) Intel Celeron w/ 433 MHz, and on a LAN party our setup totally demolished a Voodoo 3 3500 running on an Intel Pentium II w/ 450 MHz in Quake 3 timedemo 😎.
The GPU truly allowed our Celeron a „second spring“ in games with TnL support, thus sort of reviving and holding up to the initial idea of 3D graphic cards like the Voodoo 1 to be able to skip a CPU Update just for gaming.
Of course when playing non-TnL games, our CPU more and more became a painful bottleneck, so we eventually upgraded to an AMD Athlon with 1 GHz.
Man, those were interesting times… 🤓
@@dannyocean3191 everything became obsolete in just 3 years.
2002 geforce, geforce 4, completely destroyed g256 for example.
Such an amazing progress back then. So enjoyable to watch and participate in those changes.
the first real "GPU" was the Rendition Vérité V1000 released in 1996 but because Nvidia coined the term "GPU" for this card people think this is the first graphics accelerator or something.
Amazing video, Phil! Thank you!!! :) Had one of these back then! Awesome card!
ITT: People that don't know the history of the term 'GPU'
Great vid man, your title wasn't misleading at all, just too many folks these days ignorant of where it came from.
Thanks man!
Wow blast from the past.
I still have this card on a system I built way back when it was all new.
I am surprised anybody would actually buy one these days though i guess if you are running AGP on an old MB you not exactly spoiled for choice.
Thanks for the memories Phil.
Phil, what are you talking about? Transform is not "converting a 3D scene to 2D". Please don't take your information from a poorly interpreted Wikipedia article. Transform is the polygon setup phase of a drawing a scene (ie the Meshes), lighting is the vertex calculation of those meshes (ie textures, shaders and the like).
>< Noted. I will do you research better next time.
You mean like a rasteriser? That's the last stage of the pipeline. Not the triangle setup.
the transformation phase in T&L cards does the clipspace conversion as well so it converts the 3d scene to 2d (plus depth) coordinates. It basically did what you do in modern vertex shaders: you have a stream of vertices and a model-view-projection matrix and the card transforms all the vertices by that. So it's converting from 3d to 2d
It's funny to see people getting their panties in a bunch about the term "GPU"
Ah the good old days, remember getting a 256 ddr to replace my Voodoo 2 , it was an awesome card for the day CS Beta enjoyed the extra power,.
Great video keep it up
you will not believe it, but we waited on voodoo2 till 2002 Morrowind and upgraded to geforce 4 in that time. I must admit, years 2001-2002 on voodoo2 was quite harsh, but 640x480 x16 bit handled it , also to mention, it was on K6-2 500. Hehe.
I have an Asus V6600 Geforce 256 with 32MB of RAM that I purchased back in 2000 for about $300 Canadian dollars. It was a killer graphics card. That card lasted me through two different PC builds. I still have it too.
I remember reading an article in PC Gamer I think about this new thing called a "GPU", the GeForce 256, and how it would be the future of game graphics processing. It was exciting! Also, some new games were unplayable without a hardware T&L card. Took me a couple years to afford one but when i did, the programmable shaders blew my mind! With the Doom 3 gameplay reveal, we finally got to see some of the graphical innovations made possible by GPU's like programmable shaders, bump mapping and normal mapping everwhere and more dynamic real-time shadows.
This video made me dig out my Geforce 2 GTS that I presumed dead. Fired right up into some UT99 and it worked great. Now I'm torn between this and the Voodoo 3 2000 for my 98 rig. Damn!
For retro PC goodness i would always go Voodoo because of native Glide support.
Idk what you're remembering but I remember that game running fine on my Voodoo2 and Riva TNT (first, non-TNT2) cards. So the V3 2000 should be okay?
Looking at these benchmarks, just brings to mind the surprising results I got when I played around with testing some of this era cards in a PIII system. Most cards capped out on performance with PIII 800MHz, but strangely enough, the Matrox G400 MAX kept scaling as I went up to a Tualatin 1400MHz. I was only comparing pre-T&L cards though, so GeForce256 is of course a faster and better card for most purposes.
I was wrecking my head around a build that has been with me for a while now, a 1999 PC with a 933 PIII using a voodoo 3 velocity 8mb with 2 TMUs enabled.
I was searching for a GPU replacement because in all honesty the V3 simply doesn't bring good results, it's mostly decent and mind you for me it was the same even while i had a V3 3000.
For some reason though even at the time i never even tried going for a Gf 256, as you said phil, the GPU looks like a stop gap measure now but i started revaluing this card, after checking what actually was released in the gaming market in 1999 i noticed that this card can play everything at 1024x768 32bit starting from 30fps and in many cases way better than that.
This GPU is as i see it the perfect 1999 high end card historically, compatible with everything, feature complete for that year (detailed textures and cube maps where way more interesting than T&L in 99) providing both Opengl and DX natively.
Another video, GREAT! :)))
Will the new 'amd vs intel' series come???
P.S. I found geforce 256 for 3$ :)
You lucky man!
I've actually got one Intel vs AMD video ready to go, but at the moment I'm "stuck" with this era and would like to continue if that makes sense. I have big plans for this series though, so it will happen.
WHERE?!?!?! I've been searching for one and haven't even seen a single card on ebay :o (UK)
Think I have my old one in a box of old stuff somewhere
Probably gonna be the same with Geforce 1080 after 20 years
No one will pair a "fast" GeForce 256 with a slow cpu now , but back in 2000 I had the Pentium 3 866Mhz not the Pentium 4 you are using in you test so the argument that hardware TnL will help with a slower processor sounds right.
i had the 256 ddr in a k6-2 550mhz lol in 1999/2000
exacltly Thanasis. And he also dont know, how expensive were components outside australia/USA. One often had even overclocked Celeron 300A to 450. In end of 1999, when they heard T&L will take out more load of CPU, so games will run faster on slower CPU, it was super fortunate news for many, and actually choosen Geforce because of it. Although I agree, to take SDR and not wait for DDR version was mistake. Or wait till june 2000 and take Geforce 2 MX, that after overclocking almost matched Geforce 256 DDR, but price was 130$ in june 2000 vs 300$ in october/december 1999 for Geforce 256. (geforce 2 MX also drew 4x less power, and generate much less heat, Geforce 256 was quite power hungry, and some motherboards didn't handled AGP voltage good, and results was instability) I would say, 7 months waiting for G2 MX was well worth in that time.
Another great video, Phil! Don't let a few people's semantic arguments get you down. You're producing some of the most interesting, not to mention comprehensive, retro PC hardware content on TH-cam. Can't ever wait to see what's next from you in my sub box!
Dang! I'm off to bed with some happy thoughts now :D
I got this card as soon as it came out back in the day. It was the first graphic solution that decisively made me drop my 32mb TNT2ultra and Voodoo2 SLI combo. Not soon after that, I upgraded to the 64mb DDR version. What memories.
Fun fact - there were 18 generations of GeForce cards made, no less. And if we count the Nvidia cards before the GeForce, that would make a good 23 generations of graphics cards from them. They came a long way, but ATi (now AMD) and Intel are even longer in the graphics card game (already from the 80s), although Intel dropped dGPUs after the i740 and went full iGPU.
As for availability the problem is that IIRC a lot of these were sold with OEM PCs att, like the voodoo3, so many must have ended in recycling centers and stripped down for materials which is a shame.
It's only the worlds first if you define GPU the way nVidia did at the time, to include integrated transform and lighting into the graphics chip. Nvidia was the first to do that.
I got the GeForce DDR right when it came out. I had been a 3dfx loyal before then. Amazing card for its time.
Something interesting to note about the Voodoo 3 series, it actually was able to get closer to the intended 24bit color through dithering. It was more like 22bit, but that was still amazing.
From Wikipedia. "The Voodoo3's RAMDAC, which took the rendered frame from the framebuffer and generated the display image, performed a 2x2 box or 4x1 line filter on the dithered image to almost reconstruct the original 24-bit color render. 3dfx claimed this to be '22-bit' equivalent quality.As such, Voodoo3's framebuffer was not representative of the final output, and therefore, screenshots did not accurately portray Voodoo3's display quality which was actually much closer to the 24-bit outputs of NVIDIA's RIVA TNT2 and ATI's Rage 128."
And to properly play any quake game with a Voodoo 3 you need to utilize Glide. Remember that Glide, which OpenGL is a derivative of, was created by 3DFX. That is where the 3DFX cards shined. Considering the generation difference it is not surprising that the Voodoo 3 was outmatched by the Geforce 256. The Geforce 256 was the first card to actually give the Voodoo 3 a true run for its money.
Farinhir The Voodoo 3 cards had excellent display quality in 16 bit. The TNT2 had 32 bit support but you lost some 30-40% of the frame rate in most games switching from 16 to 32 bit and you needed a microscope to notice the picture quality improvements.
Agreed. And many games only supported 16 bit, and here the Voodoo simply rendered a nicer image :) I think Half-Life is such a game?
PhilsComputerLab Half Life and another game that was played by everyone and used the same engine.. Counter Strike. Also in Counter Strike the Voodoo 3 was way faster than the TNT2, almost as fast as the Geforce 256 SDR or Gerforce 2 MX.
PhilsComputerLab I believe you are correct on Half-Life. It was basically a heavily modified version of the quake engine called GoldSrc. Only goes to show how much we truly owe to John Carmack, even if he did kill college LANs with Doom. lol.
Yeah, Counter strike was a mod of Half-Life.
I actually never owned a TNT. I had a Voodoo 3 3000 as my first graphics card (coming up from a 286). It was in an AMD K6/2 machine which I hardware overclocked (very risky) by about 50mhz. Poor thing ran rather warm.
I think my first nVidia card was one of their first 128MB cards. I think it was the Geforce 4 TI 4600? It has been years since I had that. It was my first AGP card. Yeah. My Voodoo 3 remained fairly relevant to me that long.
I have looked around on ebay and local Craigslist posts for the geforce 256 but never found one. I thought it would be a big step up from the tnt2, I'm glad you made this video because now I can look for a more proper card for my project. I'm thinking geforce 3 ti500 is going to be my next purchase
I had a Geforce 1 DDR which I used up until the end of my athlon 1000 Mhz.
First, I'd just like to say that I understand what you meant by "first GPU".
I actually bought one of these cards (the 64MB DDR version actually) not too long ago for 3,70€ shipped locally. The thing is it wasn't advertised as that card. It was just an ad for a "graphics card", but I managed to identify it by the pictures. I was really happy because I'd never seen an original GeForce for sale over here before. These seem to be rare everywhere!
I think that if you can find one cheap it's still a great addition to any computer collection.
Look at all these people who are freaking out about the usage of the term "GPU". Guess what? If you were around back then, yes, this was marketed at the world's first GPU. Before that you had graphics cards, 2d accelerators, and 3d accelerators. THIS was the first card to have a hardware T&L unit aimed at consumers specifically for games. THAT'S why it's referred to as the first GPU. Prior to this, hardware T&L was non-existent outside very specific workstations focused on CGI and design, and none of them had any support for accelerating games.
So please, kids, stop screaming, as it shows just how little you know about the history of PC gaming hardware. (edit: grammar)
Oh the times of Unreal, UT, DeusEx, Quake 3, MidtownMadness etc...i wish i had one of these. Today i have both the DDR and SDR in my collection though.
Killed more of these than I would like to say must have been 4 or so ended up back with ati
Those games you mentioned, along Half-Life... fun times. I made that UT logo out of wood in back in high school.
My very first GPU that I bought was a 3dfx Voodoo 2 or 3. It had 16 mb vram and I remember buying it in July of 1999 from a Wal-Mart super center, (early supercenter days).
I remember about 2008 picking up an old dual processor 2Ghz PC server with 1GB of DDR1 and a 128MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285 for £100, it played Serious Sam and other older games like a dream, I kept that PC for daily use until late 2010 when I built myself a higher end gaming PC for the day to play then newer titles like Dragon Age Origins.
hey Phil awesome video :) what's that Rally game you're playing?
Lately, i am watching videos like this. As someone who used to be using riva tnt, voodoo2 and similar graphics cards, this is something that really throws me back thursday (1999) :D
Me too. A lot of Phil's videos feature technology that I knew about at the time but in most cases could not afford (I had a Voodoo3 but never a Voodoo or Voodoo2 or Voodoo5; I had a Geforce2 MX but not a Geforce or a GF2GTS; I had a Matrox Mystique but never a Millennium (though I did get an m3d on clearance at CompUSA for like $20 - wish I still had that as I see them at >$100 on Ebay)). It's got a certain nostalgia factor and it is a welcome change from all of this information sitting in our brains, never to be used or discussed again.
I'm Aussie too.. I love your accent :D
Good video!
Wanted to add some purchase data to the video. I purchased my GeForce 256 DDR (an ASUS V6800) on eBay (in the USA) for $150.14 shipped to my door. Since, I have seen others come up for sale periodically. Some for less money and some for more money. I consider mine to be exceptional condition thus I justify the price. To date, it runs great. I would expect viewers to pay a similar price now in 2024. They are still hard to find, not cheap, so if you find one at a good price always buy it!
one thing i realised watching your (and RGHD) videos.. almost all the stuff you present are my "habenmuss" dreams from the past :-) ...
Woot, mentioned together with RGHD :D Thanks man!
RGHD? Searched for it, found many.
RandomGaminginHD...
DeeDeeKL answered me, that RGHD means RandomGamingHD, but that answer doesn't appear here. Thanks to DeeDeeKL though!
Wow. 1280x1024 is actually my current desktop resolution
As always, very interesting video ! TY. I love this card ! It could be fun to compare with the DDR version. It seems that the gap is important.
Just one thing about the processor. IMO, P4 is a too strong processor for this card. It could be interesting to see the benefits of the geforce on a 99 or 00 machine (PII 450 or PIII 500 ?).
Yes I could do a follow up video with the DDR.
+Mael actually many were on Duron 600@850 in that time. But many not (that didnt want upgrade motherboard too). Also K6-2 500 was quite spread to.
Ah see my retro rig is an old IBM PC300PL that uses the NLX form factor.. So I was quite limited as far as AGP graphics cards go. The most powerful card I know in existence so far that uses NLX is actually a Quadro SDR (the ELSA GLoria II). I found mine for about $5; it's currently paired with a 1 GHz Coppermine Pentium III on a Slot 1 socket adapter :)
I bought one when it came out. Creative Labs Annihilator 256 DDR. Cost $299 at CompUSA.
I'm sure your video is great, but the 256 was also called the "NV10" because it wasn't even NVidia's first GPU. About 4 or 5 years prior there was the NV1, the ATI Rage 1, and the Voodoo 1.
my dad got me this card, i where only 15 years old. got it in a local shop some days after release, the price was around the price of a 1080gtx today. atleast in denmark.
i played alot of quake 2 on this card, renemeber it burned everything in that game. like over 135 fps in the quake2 benchmark. left the TNT2 cards in the dust ;) where alot of fun.
I remember my friend had the GeForce 256 SDR in his 'new' rig' back round late 1999-2000 and playing UT on it was really, really good. It was an exciting time for video cards during this time as there were so many vendors (Matrox, S3, ATI, nVidia, 3dfx) to pick from. If only he had that many manufactures now.
I'm not sure about prices in Australia at launch, but an Anandtech review from October, 1999 stated that the price of the GeForce256 was "$220+," which I'm taking to mean that the MSRP was around $220 USD, but that it was hard to find one for that price. Another article from Anandtech written only two months later (and both articles were written by Anand himself) mentions a "minimum $249 cost of a card based on the GeForce."
I'm also having a hard time finding the cards on American ebay/Amazon. It's weird, I remember seeing some on there a few months ago, but now I only see a single Amazon listing for around $105.
Edit: Also thought I should mention that the Wayback Machine at archive.org has archived copies of Newegg going back to December 2000 or so, although they are incomplete snapshots. That might prove useful to you and your viewers at some point.
I had good luck with the wayback machine when getting prices for the Qusdro 2 cards. But find it very hard for 1998 and 1999, especally CPU prices with almost monthly price cuts.
Back then, like you say, T&L was the new hype but I wasn't buying it. For a little while longer the CPU performance available still made the Voodoo cards more attractive. I stuck with 3dfx until the Voodoo 5 5500 (best antialiasing even to this day, seriously) and was very happy. It wasn't until the Geforce 3 came out, and 3dfx unfortunately folded, that the T&L performance was finally helping those cards outpace a Voodoo & fast CPU.
Can't wait to check out that AA on the V5 then!
PhilsComputerLab I lived with that card from the time it came out until I was finally tempted by the GF3, and that was quite a long time. I got very used to the AA that card was capable of. And it took all of about 5 seconds after installing the GF3 and firing up Counter-Strike to groan in disappointment at the poor AA. Everything was shimmering and polygon popping plagued every scene. It was very annoying to take a step back like that. And I'm 100% serious when I say that no card to this day does as good of a job as the Voodoo 5 did. Higher sampling rates and newer methods exist, but in some cases still fail where it succeeded. Polygon popping especially.
Unfortunately the method it used also was a performance killer. Using 4x looked amazing, but cut your FPS literally to 1/4th when fillrate-limited. So, if you had some fillrate headroom it wasn't bad. But if fillrate was the bottleneck it was pretty slow. 2x looked pretty good, and still better than the GF's 4x, believe it or not. But again, if fillrate-limited it cut your framerate in half.
I still have my Voodoo 5 5500 here somewhere. Actually, I have two, but one was a failed card from my cousin. Mine still worked the last time it was in a machine. Whether that means it still works now is another matter. Hehe. I still have my Voodoo 2 12 MB cards in SLI somewhere, too, come to think of it. And the Voodoo 3 3500. Could never bring myself to get rid of them. Haha :)
Clayton Macleod It might be just nostalgia for you. The voodoo 5 was a really bad card from the launch on, they just put a lot of memory on it. The chipset and performance were really bad for the time and full of bottlenecks.
It all depended on two things: the CPU you could pair it with, and how much any given game depended on fillrate. If you had a beefy CPU and weren't limited by fillrate it was great. Then by the time the GF3 came out it offloaded a lot of work in a lot of titles by that time via the T&L processing it could do. All the non-T&L work that cards have to do the 3dfx was still great at. But by the GF3 era lots of devs were supporting and using T&L quite a bit, and it just had no hope any longer. But nostalgia still had nothing to do with the superior AA quality. ;)
V5 wasn't a bad card at all, but very expensive. There wasn't even excessive memory on it, both chips only had 32 MB at their disposal. I ran it very successfully, until Grand Prix Legends mods got too heavy for it.
In 2001 I replaced my S3 Savage 4 with GeForce 256 SDR, I had Duron 750mhz and 64 mb back then. It was a huge improvement. I loved the GeForce, I also loved my Savage don't know why, but I did. :)
My first GPU! Paired with a Pentium 3 700mhz, ASUS P3V4X, and 128MB of RAM
Can't wait to get home and give it a watch the Gigabyte Geforce 256 was the first 3D card I bought with my savings , it was a fantastic card and I went from a TNT1 to a 256 :3 sure it wasn't the DDR version but that card rocked my T&L world :D
Still have it, it's in my Voodoo 2 Sli rig , best of both worlds 3DFX and T&L
A friend had a K6-2 and when he upgraded his TNT 2 with a GeForce 2, the hardware T&L did help with Empire Earth which isn't on the Wikipedia list of T&L supporting games so don't take it as definitive.
The 256 is indeed in a way the first modern card, but like the GeForce 3 Ti they were never massively popular.
I hope you make videos on the ST Kyro and Kyro II.
Great suggestion on those cards, I'll see what I can do.
But can it run the beta for the first Crysis? :p Jk, awesome video though. I love old hardware, it's so fascinating.
I see that a faster CPU can make wonders for the games shown in this video, Max Payne seems to run a lot better in your setup than on my PIII 750mhz Tualatin + Geforce 4 Ti4600 128mb+ Soyo Via chipset motherboard
These games were very CPU bottlenecked back then. I still have my old Slot 1 Pentium II 450mhz IBM that was the family PC back in late 1998 and I put a pair of Voodoo 2s in SLI in it. I found my FPS did not at all correlate with graphics settings or screen resolution, but only with how much was going on in the scene. Most games were still very smooth but some CPU intensive titles like Unreal would occasionally see frame rate dips when the action heated up. I then bought an Athlon XP rig and ran the same Voodoo setup and the occasional FPS dips turned into locked 60+ FPS on titles era appropriate for the Voodoo 2.
Maybe first consume card with TnL but not the first, if I'm not mistaken N64 GPU (yes) already had TnL, thanks to SGI, so a concept that already existed (among other things).
Not denying Nvidia's merits anyway.
When I was still in the "retro business" back in 2012 I could buy a voodoo card every week. I had to search for months until I could get a Gef 256. Of course we are talking about Hungary. I saw a few on Ebay too.
Same time PowerVR Kyro came out. I think it's a history worth your coverage.
He's included a Hercules Kyro card with some of his benchmarks in the past, though I haven't seen a full review on it. I remember wanting a Kyro at the time but the driver support wasn't very good.
I'll look into when those cards were released and when I can fit it in!
Took me a long time to find a GeForce 256 DDR. Supposedly there's an ULTRA rare 64MB variant out there.
Not sure you're right about the lack of demand. There's a slight difference between those building systems for retro gaming, and graphics card collectors (though a lot of overlap between the groups). Collectors really like this card, then you combine that with overall rarity, as this card was replaced in the market by the GeForce 2 GTS only about six months later.
I agree, I'm more of a collector than a retro gamer, and I'm always happy to find a GeForce 256. I only have three, an Asus V6800 and two identical 3D Prophet SE 16Mb SDR models (which seem very uncommon).
But $70 for a GeForce256 is crazy. I wouldn't use eBay as a reference for the average prices. I'm sure most collectors buy graphics cards only when good deals occur. I buy all of mines in cheap untested job lots or I find them dumpster diving. If I had bought all of my 450 graphics cards at the price some ask on eBay, my collection would have cost me $10,000 :P
So that's why they are so hard to find :D
Interesting, yes you're right, I socialise with retro gamers / builders mostly.
My first GPU. Geforce 256 SDR.
how did you feel after 7 months, when Geforce 2 MX came out? DIdnt you feel bad, like was those 7 months worth it, or was better to wait for Geforce 2 MX, and save 150-170$?
Nice video :) Keep it up!
I am pretty sure the only reason why the 3dfx card performed rather well versus the geforce is the cpu.
Run the same test with a 500MHz Pentium3 and the GeForce 256 gains much more from the TnL unit.
Back in the day we used lots of finetuning (like WickedGL miniports) to gain the last bit of speed from our trusty Voodoos :)
Actually it's mostly because the Voodoo 3 doesn't do 32 bit colours. It was more geared towards speed at the cost of a little bit less image quality. But it had this "22 bit equivalent" post processing filter which made 16 bit look much nicer. IMO is was a good move as the performance at the time wasn't good enough for smooth 32 bit gaming.
But can it run Chrisis?
No
Hell No*
crysis*
I prefer games from this time period, they don't look butt-ugly like PS1/N64 era 3D games, but they still look like games. Games today look far too realistic.
What do you mean games look far too realistic these days?
for anyone that wants to know the N64 had the graphics chip called the Reality CoProcessor based on the N64 CPU and it could do T&L back in early 1996!
Matrox G400 Max. I miss you Matrox
I have a computer that is dedicated for Counter Strike and I still have the GeForce and I'm happy with it. :)
It's interesting that Voodoo3 3500 managed to beat GeForce 256 in MDK 2 since that game explicitly supported TnL (I remember the "TnL" checkbox when starting the game, if memory serves me right). Also, 3DMark2001 - V3 the fastest card. It seems to me you're testing on a way to fast CPU, not available in 1999. BTW, for the record, I'm a huge 3Dfx fan and I was rockin' V3 and V5 back in a day, but this seems a bit unrealistic. :)
Welcome to the world of graphics cards reviews :) Don't get me started on Nvidia driver versions...
Keep an eye out for my build videos, they might interest you like this one for example: th-cam.com/video/D_CPYUvTK9g/w-d-xo.html
Holy sausage, I just remembered I have two of these cards in my storage, had no idea there was any value what so ever in them
SnOpeK Domowei “holly sausage”....jfc
What about the original Riva TnT. Wasn't that considered a GPU? It rendered 3 games by it self back then
The geforce sdr should never have existed, other than as a budget version, which is what it is. The memory bandwidth of the ddr cards is almost double that of the sdr cards. This was instantly realisable in most games as increased fps and higher playable resolutions. Worth far, far more that the T&L capabilities. I assume that Nvidia didn't have enough ddr modules at the time, so rushed the sdr cards out the door for the Christmas season, knowing full well that they would have ddr versions only a few months later.
My Asus Geforce DDR rocked. I don't recall having problems with any games, and I played in 1280X1024X32bpp all features on. Quake 3 looked stunning! It will definitely make an excellent retro graphics card.
10 million polygon/s, that seems laughably slow now but it was pretty good back then. How do you get your old hardware which are still in working condition?
The DDR version didn't actually quite double memory bandwidth - the stock speed of it was 150MHz (so 300MHz DDR).
There were also 64MB versions available, although 32MB was far more common.
oh the memories. i had a riva tnt back then and was saving for a better card. by the time i had the money, the geforce 2 gts was out and i got that one. the difference was huge compared to be tnt. but even a year or so later, the gts started to struggle. hardware ageging was bad back then
This video reminds me my geforce 2 ti that I bought for my PIII @ 750 Mhz performing better than my brother's P4 € 1.8. Cool stuff!
man, you're catching some flak for this one. I like the video anyways as you usually focus on how the item performs. I did have a question that maybe I missed, but in your graph for the power consumption (liked this addition btw); was this measured in Watts? Also, can your power monitor also show amperes?
Yes the reading is in Watts! If I left out the units, I'll make sure I'll fix that up when producting the next video (which might be a while as I have a few ready to go). I think it can show A as well. The LCD monitor was not included, basically just the lead coming from the PSU.
Phil, one thing to keep in mind with that power meter by the way and retro PCs. That meter, being inexpensive, is probably not going to handle all power supplies properly. With retro PCs you will have power supplies that either do not have power factor correction (PFC) or have PFC that is not as good as modern power supplies. This can throw your results off by as much as around 30%. It's still reasonably valid to compare results between 2 different video cards with the same power supply. Not trying to hate - inexpensive power meter is better than no power meter - just wasn't sure if you were aware of this. And the reason I bring it up is because xiardark's question about amperes had made me think, "the calculation to get amperes would be easy with a resistive load, but would probably be inaccurate with an older PSU." The formula for a resistive load would simply be the measured power divided by the line voltage (which I believe is 230V in Australia?). So you can get a ballpark figure by dividing his numbers by 230, but again just be aware that it could be a bit off because of the power factor.
I appreciate the info! The benchmarking station will be using the same FSP PSU, I make sure. And I have this model twice, so I can use it for other projects to compare.
I had a GeForce 210 a couple of moths ago... no regrets.
The game at the beginning is V-Rally 3 ?
Because i have V-Rally 3 for the Game Boy Advance and i recognized the game.
just imagine if you gave some random dude in 1999 an RTX3080. his mind would become a blackhole
You will have to give him a whole PC because he wouldn't be able to do anything with a RTX3080 other than look at it.
Seriously though i like how those old cards didn't need extra supply and weren't so huge. Just a small fan was enough.
I wonder how much performance can we get building a card like that now. The best example i have is the 1050Ti.
I wish today's GPU leaps were as big as the leap from 1998 to 1999.
Hey Phil I am curious as to what CPU you were running in these tests.
Have you watched the video? :D
Yes I watched it right to the very end to make sure I didn't just miss you saying it at the end or something. I guess I just didn't pay any attention at that moment or forgot that is was mentioned a few minutes in.
3:26 :D
Bought a GeForce 3d prophet ddr when they came out.. that card was a beast! Paid $320 for it. Those days are gone!
Is the V-Rally 2 in the background being played on the GeForce 256?
Yup! I always make sure that the footage I show is on the actual hardware the video is about :)
the title is not misleading. its not his fault people don't know what a GPU is... a graphics card is not the same as a gpu...
the voodoo banshee is a graphics accelerator that also features 2d graphics. the gpu is ONLY the chip thats on the card. the graphics processing unit. that is just one integrated circuit. and this is the first one that has that. before this card you only had graphic accelerators. this IS the first GPU. on cards before this a lot of the graphics were still generated by the cpu. but this card does handle all the graphics.
you could just say that was nvida marketing though. they coined that term.
The Diamond Edge 3D card used Nvidia's first 3D accelerator chip GPU the NV1 on PC which came out in 1995, way before this.
It is not smart to use a term that will confuse people, I mean you gotta be a fool to think people won't get confused by that, unless you're trying to pull some loose click bait that is.
Just as a side note: For me back then in 1999 Nvidia was not on my radar and I bet this is true for many people. 3DFX was king and ATi was all the rage (pun intended)... When the Geforce 2 came out everybody was talking about Nvidia. I actually first heard about this card a few years later when I already had my Geforce 4200 Ti.
Actually around 1999 gossips started to appear that there's this new card called TNT2 which was only supposed to serve as a cheap replacement for 3dfx but turned out it's actually on par with Voodoo3. Sounded silly at first but the rest is history.
what is the rally game you are playing in this video?
your vids are great, thanks for your time, creating knowledge about old tech is awesome. sorry for dumb people who does not know about history of pc gaming
A bit of nitpicking but Serious Sam: The First Encounter was released in 2001, not in 2002. I remember trying to play the demo on my K6-2 450MHz and Voodoo 3 2000. It ran like 15fps at 400*300 resolution.
I bet most of the butthurt in the comments stem from peoples personal feelings towards NVIDIA, not from facts (GeForce was the first GPU available to PC consumer market).
IIRC V-Rally 2 which you are playing in the video had a split screen multiplayer and that was pretty awesome back in the day. I don't remember if I played it with my K6-2 rig or the Celeron I upgraded to in 2001.
Ah thank you, 2001 it is :D
do you remember a ATI card with swirling ati logo at start up what model was it pls
The Diamond Edge 3D card used Nvidia's first 3D accelerator chip the NV1 on PC which came out in 1995, way before this.
www.nvidia.com/page/geforce256.html August 31, 1999 marked the introduction of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for the PC industry-the NVIDIA GeForce 256.
Phil, back in the day as well as today there's one thing I still wonder A LOT and maybe you will too; I used to have a K6/2 that was just crippled in some games compared to Pentium 2 and 3's, but ran a lot of games on a TNT2 Ultra. I slways wanted to know just how much the hardware T&L in a GeForce would offload my CPU and give BIG fps boosts in games... I could never afford it for that build, but mind giving it a try? :)
I can't speak for Phil , but my I did briefly run Geforce 256 DDR AND an ATI 8500 along side K6-III 400 (VIA MVP3+, 256 Ram, SoundBlaster Live Value, Windows 2000, 1024x768 @ 60 Hz).
Comparing to Intel i740 (decidedly less capable than TNT2 Ultra)-- Despite being able to enhance the visual quality there was little discernible difference. So, in theory, you'll be able to maximize any visual enhancement, but not much with frame rates. The K6-2/III already had near parity with Intel in DirectX. It gets crushed in OpenGL and Glide titles.
Thanks for sharing that knowledge :) on my k6/2 500mhz back in the day, the latest game I got playable on it *mostly* was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. But all those Quake 3-based opengl games took advantage of T&L which is pretty floating-point intensive, and I was curious how much fps difference it would have made on that particular cpu.
apparently a gpu is a piece of hardware thats separate from the motherboard that has its own processor and ram dedicated to processing graphics. Youd get better performance because the main CPU and ram it's freed up to do other things like maintaining the operating system.
Wasn't 3DBlaster the first 3D acceleration card/GPU?
Personally I had a Intergraph Vertite Rendition Card. Did open GL.
Yep. Had one of those in my PC at the time. Played a lot of Unreal with it. Loved it.
I used to Geforce DDR up to my Athlon 1000
Wow...I had a 3dfx in my PC back in 1999. I think i upgraded to a Geforce MX 32mb, a few years later because i couldn't play Operation Flashpoint circa 2001? 20 years....I think i had a 800mhz Duron as my CPU.
just picked up a Geforce 256 32MB for $20 USD :-) They ARE rare as heck though
Good find!
For performance that’s a horrible trade but for rarity amazing.