Yeah, 'lazy' is probably a good way to put it. This was such an odd attempt at a budget card, and in the end the only real limitation was the memory size (sometimes). The SGRAM difference is fairly interesting though, which makes me wonder how Voodoo3 3000 PCI cards fare against their AGP cousins, since they predominantly used SGRAM and suffered no performance penalty on PCI. Very good video!
I still have mine (and another one I found on a scrap pile years after). I bought it back in 1999 or 2000 for like $50 as an OEM card (no box, no doc, no nothing) and it was a true gem. Nobody seemed to care back then but I still think it was one of my better purchases ever. The 2 TMU trick worked like a charm.
I actually own a Voodoo 1000, so I found this particular video of great interest 😀According to Everest Home Edition, it’s AGP 2x has 16MB of SGRAM and the GPU is clocked at 125MHz, and I can confirm it has no heat-sink attached. I had no idea that it was an OEM type card that came with Gateway computers. I picked this up by itself some time ago and in a completely bizarre twist of fate I ended up fitting it to a Pentium 3 450 “Gateway” motherboard. You could almost say it found it’s way home… After seeing this video, I decided to run a couple of benchmarks with it and got some interesting results. In comparison to your result in 3D Mark 2000 of 1357, I received a result of 2236, which is considerably more, and I just ran the default benchmark. I also ran the Quake 2 benchmark exactly the same as yours and got a result of 64.2. You got a result of 69.8, but I believe you’re running a CPU twice the speed of mine. I also noticed I have two TMU’s, I must have unlocked this a while back as I don’t remember doing it… Anyway, just thought I’d share 😁
A fun thing about this card is that it has Win 3.x drivers which also work with the rest of the Voodoo 3's, I think they only let you use 8 of the 16MB of the higher models' RAM but it still is plenty enough for a Win3.x desktop.
I have a V3 1000 16MB 125MHz no heatsink pulled from an old Compaq Presario 5900Z. I installed a heatsink but the card runs pretty cool and is a decent GPU for free. Great video didn't even know about the TMU locked out.
Regarding the activation of the second TMU: yes, it was very easy to do, but probably very few people did it, because of two things. First: those cards were sold in OEM machines, people who bought them weren't exactly tech savvy, they just needed a computer to do "stuff". Second: it was around year 2000, so internet wasn't quite common. But it was a weird move to disable the TMU, I think that halving the RAM size to only 8 MB was enough. Plus, some cards were clocked lower than 143 MHz... Disabling the second TMU was too much, it was basically an overclocked Voodoo Banshee at this point, not a V3.
I still have mine! It is the 16MB Voodoo 3 2000 version, but it is PCI slot and not AGP. I believe that my PC at that time may not have come with an AGP slot and that's probably why I got the PCI slot version. I actually installed my own cooling fan on the heatsink just to keep it a little cooler. The first card I got from CompUSA was defective at the time and burned out after about a week. It actually smelled funny too when I took it out of the box and I had the feeling it was not going to last. Luckily for me it went out before the return policy was up and they gave me a new card. I still have the original box sans the bar code which I probably sent in for some type of rebate. I remember that I used some special modified drivers for it to get better results, but I can't remember the driver name or who created them at the time. I must have them on one of my backup drives somewhere.....🤔👍👍
It's interesting that Quake 3 is seeing it as Voodoo Banshee since Voodoo3 was basically a Banshee with higher clock speeds and an additional TMU. Also, it's interesting to know that Creative's 3DBlaster Voodoo Banshee used SGRAM, so maybe there's something there, too... I remember reading somewhere a loong time ago (like almost quarter of a century ago, literally🙂) that Voodoo3 was initially going to be a successor to Banshee (like Banshee 2) and that "real Voodoo3" (next-gen product) was going to be what became of VSA-100 (Voodoo4 and 5). And this actually makes sense, when you think about it, because VSA-100 was a real generational jump forward compared to Voodoo2 (and Voodoo2 itself was basically a higher clocked Voodoo Graphics with a second TMU) since it allowed so much more (32-bit rendering, FSAA, about 10x higher texture resolution...) and a basis for several products down the line. So even Voodoo4 and 5 were basically just something that was churned out to buy some more time on the market before 3dfx could develop Rampage (a *real* next-gen product, which 3dfx worked on since 1998.). Unfortunately, by late 2000. and going into 2001, 3dfx was out of time and went under because of bad management and being unable to adapt to the new market reality of more frequent product cycles and failing to take advantage of OEM). Basically, ideally, it should've been like this: Voodoo Graphics->Voodoo2->Voodoo3 (but based on VSA-100 instead of upgraded Voodoo Banshee core)->Rampage (which was to be based on VSA, but with hardware T&L support to compete with GeForce256). Sadly, we never got that and instead we got a stop-gap product (namely Avenger) and a failed market strategy, which led them to bankruptcy and getting acquired by Nvidia.
I didn't know that you could actually unlock these into a pseudo-2000! Too bad that doesn't make it any easier to get Voodoo cards without selling your soul. 😭 Great video.
If you search a while you will get one for 70-100€, I don't think it's so expensive, i just bought voodoo 3 3000 for 60€ missing one capacitor i soldered already. I am located in the Netherlands
As far as I'm aware- the Voodoo 1000 isn't the same as the Velocity cards. My Compaq Voodoo 3 1000 is different- it has 8x SGRAM chips for a full buswidth and 16MB VRAM, and lacks a heatsink (Like the ones you picture in the video online). It is effectively an underclocked Vooodoo 3 2000. The Velocity cards seem to be cut-down variations of this. EDIT: It could just be up to the OEM as well how it's marketed.
Yeah there really just doesn’t seem to be any clear indication as to which name goes with which version of the card. I’m guessing your theory is probably correct about OEMs getting to name it whatever they wanted.
There are even more differences between the 125mhx and 143mhz models, which is that the 125mhz models typically use 2TMUs where the 143mhz one has only one. Like you said too, the 143mhz one also only has 8mb of memory while the other has 16mb. When talking about the two unique models, I typically call the 125mhz model the Voodoo 3 1000, and the 143mhz one the Velocity 100.
1st gpu was Voodoo 2 PCI on Intel P2 300mhz 64mb ram by Dell Dimension. Friend came over to see my new system. Told me, do you want to see this system blow away your N64 ? Yes ! Get this graphics accelerator. Unreal and Blood 2 were the first games I tried. Calling up all my friends to come over and see how good the graphics were.
In Unreal Tournament detail textures and volumetric light (fog) are turned on by default only in Glide, and off in Direct3d and opengl. If you turn those setting off in glide too, just like in direct3d and opengl, the performance increases by 25-35%. You can turn detail textures and volumetric light on or off by pressing ~ and typing preferences, than select Glide and from there you can turn them on or off. The results you got in Unreal Tournament were biased in favor of the M64 because of this.
We could also say that UT99 results were biased in favor of 3DFX cards, because default D3D and OpenGL renderers were very bad compared to glide in this game. Back in 2001, I remember installing a new D3D renderer that gave me a huge performance boost on my Geforce 2MX. With this patch the game was playable at 1024x768x32 + detal textures and volumetric lighting and with default D3D renderer it was a bad experience.
@@PabloB888 UT was optimized for Glide just like Quake 3 was optimized for Transform and Lightning. All games were optimized for certain cards or APIs but to run the game with different levels of detail is really unfair especially because UT can be run with the same level of detail on all cards, by disabling Detail Textures and Volumetric Light for the Voodoo’s in Glide.
@supermario8416 I understand what you are saying, and I also think that reviewers should test video cards with the same graphics settings, but still, the default D3D renderer in UT99 (or should I say in all Unreal Engine 1 games) was really bad, so 3DFX cards had an artificial advantage here anyway. Thanks to improved D3D renderer my results skyrocketed and then Glide results in this game no longer look that impressive to me.
@@PabloB888 Total non-sense. By the same logic you could say that the Geforce cards have an artificial advatage in all Quake 3 engine games because of the support for Transform & Lightning and because of this the Geforce cards should run with higher details when tested against 3dfx or other cards without T&L support.
@supermario8416 In my previous comment, I said very clearly that reviewers should test games with the same settings, so dont suggest that I want to test games with different settings on different hardware, because that would be ridiculous indeed. 3DFX had no secret sauce that would boost performance to ridiculous levels (like in UE1 games) just on their cards. Other developers had no problems optimizing their games for both Glide and D3D. The Unreal Engine 1 D3D renderer was simply unoptimised, if not broken. Improved D3D renderer improved performance and also fixed glitches and colours (default renderer had washed out colours even in 32bit). I dont like drawing conclusions about GPU performance based on broken D3D API support, but that's just me.
Which driver are you using for this card? Is it the voodoo 3 1.07 or something else? Awesome video. I wish I knew this card existed. I paid 30 dollars for a used tnt2m64 pci and I always wanted a voodoo 3 3000. I saw how half life ran on my friends system with glide and was so jelly at the time.
Great GPUJune2 vid👍 And your voice is very pleasant to listen. I wonder why 3DFX equip the card with assumingly more expensive and faster SGRAM instead of generic SD-RAM.
Nice tip on the MTU, was not aware. I also have the V1000 with 16 MB of SGRAM, no heatsink, no OEM brand on it, just the V3 1000 v2.15.05 sticker. Most listing I see suggest it comes from CompaQ. BIOS bootup for this card was just a black screen, but managed to flash the bios to v2.15.11 without a problem. This made BIOS post showup again for the card, revealing the 16 MB. Real curious to see if I could push this with a bit of overclocking by mounting a heatsink and a fan, or maybe even to go as far as flashing a 2000 bios on this.
The Velocity 100 and Voodoo 3 1000 are actually two distinctly different cards. 143mhz, 8mb ram, one disabled TMU=Velocity 100. 125mhz, 16mb ram, NO disabled TMU=Voodoo3 1000.
@@NTGTechnology If I had to explain their motivations, I'd answer in line with your own conclusions about how they went about disabling that 2nd TMU: When it came to the Velocity 100, 3dfx was lazy. An AnandTech article mentions the release of the card, citing it as a separate product from Voodoo3 but still clearly a spin-off. It suggests the Velocity was positioned for business users so they may not have cared about the details. The 3rd page notes that its drivers are basically just Voodoo 3 drivers with a modified .inf file, and concludes that "it sounds a lot like the Velocity is a Voodoo3 in disguise." Although they relate it more closely to a Voodoo 3 2000 with half the RAM than to the OEM Voodoo 3 1000, "Velocity 100 makes an excellent budget alternative to the Voodoo3 2000." "With both TMU’s pumping out pixels, the Velocity 100 also performs identically to the Voodoo3 2000 in nearly all situations." www.anandtech.com/show/401
I'm REALLY surprised you managed to get V3 2000 performance from this card! In my case I found a significant increase in card performance from soldering in 16MB of ram over the stock 8MB in an AGP on-board unit.
Excellent video and benchmarks. The Velocity 100 has only 1 TMU activated in Glide and Opengl and 143 mhz. The Voodoo 3 1000 has 2 TMUs activated in all APIs and 125 MHz. The Velocity 100 in 1999 was in my opinion, by far, the best budget card, much better than its Nvidia rivals M64 and Vanta. Your results just confirm that.
The card I have is very clearly labeled as a 1000, both on the card itself and in the BIOS when the card first boots up it's displayed as a "Voodoo 3 1000G." And mine also only had 1 TMU enabled by default and runs at 143 MHz, so I'm not sure where you're getting this info.
Hex 2 is on, 1 is off. Btw, its all very easy when you have internet. This happened in the original nviida 8 series too, with the 8600 being able to be updated to increase the tmus.
So much was phoned in in those days. It was a long learning curve. Even today IT is wild. ( Source: I work IT for my government. It's not as buttoned up as you would think even today)
The V3 1000 Velocity 200 has two enabled unit and 16mb ram, only underclocked to 125mhz. The V3 1000 Velocity 100 has one unit and 8mb ram. I think the 200 better choice in affordable league.
Practically a Velocity 100 was just a Banshee with 143/143 mhz. A GA630 Banshee with 110/130 mhz is of course slower than a Velocity 100 at 143/143 mhz. But at the same frequency the Banshee performs the same as a Velocity 100.
Thanks for pointing that out. I compared it to some other photos and it does seem to be missing one. The card seems pretty stable, guess it must not be that important.
Its nor logical a compagny Who downgrade His own product when the rival Do a fuck war of french against every position you own.The chief ingenior of 3dfx migrated on Nvdia,and Hé kept the same Tactics.
Yeap, Greg Ballard had no idea how to run that kind of company. Starting with STB acquisition, 3dfx was doing nothing but wasting their previous profits. Also, telling people that they don't need things like 32 rendering instead of just giving them isn't good marketing strategy, and having kickass flagship product is essential, Since people are buying budget options to have something "close enough"
@@TurboMMaster Voodoo 3 was still a very good and successful product despite supporting only 16-bit color and 256x256 textures, because back then not many games had support for 512x512 (NFS5, Quake3, Expendable), and 32-bit color performance wasnt good on TNT2 cards at (except for some older games, or lower resolutions like 800x600 or 640x480). TNT2 owners were playing in 16-bit color anyway and 16-bit color looked better on 3DFX cards thanks to dithering. Voodoo 5 should be however much better. 3DFX planned to use 4x chips in their V5 6000 just to match single Geforce2Ultra chip performance, and geforce 3 was already out :P.
imagine that a New GPU for 49 f**kin $$$ now the only place where you can get that is in Ebay used and abused I still remember a time when gaming GPU flagships were less than 500$ then Jensen got the I am a Greedy MF sickness and steadily raised the prices over the years and now it's at 1600$ can't wait for the next gen to be at 2000$+ at the rate it's going.
Sir, I believe that card is called 3Dfx Velocity 100 and not Voodoo 3 1000. The Voodoo 3 1000 has only 16Mb model (I have this card along with Voodoo 3 3000) while the Velocity 100 has only 8Mb model.
Agree, here's results from creative 3D blaster TNT2M64 review and even in 32color bit results in Quake 3 were better than 27fps in his video review: Quake 2, 1024x768x16 TNT1- 37fps TNT2M64 - 41fps TNT2M64 OC - 53fps TNT2 - 58fps Even in 32 color bit this game was playabale (over 30fps) TNT1 - 27fps TNT2M64 - 34fps TNT2M64 OC - 44fps TNT2 - 50fps
@@PabloB888 It's been a long time since I left the comment so I don't remember anymore, but a newer driver might explain it. The later detonator drivers meant for the geforce 4 and FX series really hurt CPU overhead on older cards like the TNT2.
I own the Compaq version of this card with 16mb and lacks the heatsink. It also comes up as voodoo3 1000 in the boot bios when you turn on the computer. I may have to check the tmu in Q3 to see if it's set to 1 or 2. Either way, it a great card for a P2 build or an early P3 build
I'm not sure, I've never heard that there was any specific reason they couldn't have. Maybe they felt it was unnecessary? The Voodoo 3 only supported 256x256 textures when the rest of the industry had moved on to larger textures, so maybe that has something to so with it.
Your TNT2M64 results look really bad, maybe you were using TNT2 vanta? I had M64 and I'm pretty sure that quake 2 was absolutely playable on it. For example results from IXBT "creative 3D blaster TNT2M64" review: Quake 2, 1024x768x16 TNT1- 37fps TNT2M64 - 41fps TNT2M64 OC - 53fps TNT2 - 58fps Even in 32 color bit this game was playabale (over 30fps) TNT1 - 27fps TNT2M64 - 34fps TNT2M64 OC - 44fps TNT2 - 50fps
I don't recall the M64 mentioning it was a Vanta, but something to keep in mind is that there's such a wide variety of them out there with different clock speeds and ram configs that it's inevitable some are going to be bad and some will be okay. It could also be down to the driver version I was using or the platform (this is a VIA chipset afterall). Or maybe I got my numbers wrong, but I'm pretty sure I double checked everything before I made the graphs.
@NTGTechnology Fair enough. There were indeed many TNT2M64 variants and also drivers could make a difference. I had creative 3D blaster TNT2M64 and with OC this thing wasnt much slower than regular (stock) TNT2, but of course TNT2 could be also OC'ed. In 1999 M64 was a very decent card and I was very happy with M64 performance, becasue I could play every game in 1999 at 1024x768x16 with over 30fps, while some of my friends still played in software mode, or at sub 30fps even at 640x480. I had TNT2M64 only till 2001 when I bought geforce2MX. Back then progress in GPU technology was just insane, you could buy a new PC today, and it was obsolete 2 years later LOL 😁. In 2003 I already had Geforce 3 and that card was over 10x faster than my TNT2M64. In quake 3 I had 5-10fps at 1600x1200x32 on TNT2M64 32MB, and around 100fps on Geforce 3ti200 128MB (OC'ed to almost ti500 clocks). These days you can buy 5 year old GPU and it will still play games just fine.
A very flawed review. Nobody played games at 1024x768 even with the voodoo 3 3000. I know since I had one back in 1999. Testing should have been done at 800x600 so that the V3 1000 wouldn't hit it's 8mb memory limitation which it clearly did in most of his benchmarks at 1024x768.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people were playing in 1024x768 on Voodoo 3 (even on my TNT2M64 I was playing all my games in that resolution). But the V1000 should be tested at 800x600 for sure because it only has 8MB (like Voodoo2).
@@PabloB888 You may be pretty sure but I'm 100% sure since i lived though this time period and bought a voodoo 3 back in 1999. Nobody played at 1024x768. The vooodoo 3 just wasn't fast enough for smooth gameplay and that garbage TNT2M64 you have couldn't even play all games smooth at 800x600 due to the crippled clock speed and 64bit memory bus
@EvoPortal Dude, just because you had a bad day it doesn't mean you have to be a jerk to people :P. Nothing you wrote is true, and I will prove it. I still remember 1999 like it was yesterday and I'm ABSOLUTELY SURE that people back then considered 30fps to be a very playable experience (after all Voodoo 1 could barely hit 30fps and yet it was a massive success). The voodoo 3 cards (from V3 2000 and up) i. 1999 were easily able to hit well over 30fps at 1024x768 resolution, therefore voodoo 3 owners could play in this resolution and most did it. You are the first Voodoo 3 owner that I have heard of who was running games at 800x600 on this powerful card. The Riva TNT2M64 32MB wasnt a high end card like Voodoo 3, but it was certainly a decent midrange card in 1999. The riva TNT2M64 card had the full TNT2 chip, but with a reduced memory bus / bandwidth. At lower resolutions, performance was much better than on the older TNT1, because memory bandwidth wasnt a huge bottleneck, but of course at higher resolutions like 1024x768 memory bandwidth was a massive bottleneck, so performance dropped to TNT1 levels. Thanks to memory OC however (increase in memory bandwidth) it's performance skyrocketed at higher resolutions like 1024x768. Results from creative 3D blaster TNT2M64 benchmarks (IXBT site review): Quake2 1024x768x16 TNT1 - 37fps TNT2M64 - 41fps TNT2M64 OC - 53fps TNT2 - 58fps Shogo 1024x768x16 TNT1 - 33fps TNT2M64 - 36fps TNT2M64 OC - 44fps TNT2 - 48fps Incoming 1024x768 in 32bit color TNT1 - 28fps TNT2M64 - 36fps TNT2M64 OC - 52fps TNT2 - 59fps 3DMark99 1024x768 32bit color TNT1 - 2085 points TNT2M64 - 2316 points TNT2M64 OC - 3168 points TNT2 - 3401 points A regular TNT2 was still faster, but not that much. In 1999 I have played EVERY SINGLE GAME at 1024x768x16 with over 30fps, deal with it dude. At 800x600 I could also play games in 32bit color, but I wasnt willing to do so, because even on my CRT the difference between 800x600 and 1024x768 was just too big (that's also the reason why most people who had Voodoo 3 played in 1024x768 as well). I was very happy that my parents bought me TNT2M64, because some of my friends still played in software mode, or on some extremely slow D3D cards like intel i740 that could barely run 640x480 and had glitches / artifacts in some games. My TNT2M64 32MB despite being cheaper card than 3DFX voodoo 3 had higher resolution textures support, so games like NFS5, Expendable, or Quake 3 looked way better on my TNT2M64. Also voodoo 3 image quality wasnt better compared to my TNT2M64, because voodoo 3 cards were still limited to 16-bit color. Of course 3DFX tried to mask this imperfection with their fake 22-bit color (it was just dithered 16-bit), but this feature blured fine details on the textures (very noticeably), so it wasnt better picture quality compared to true 32-bit color for sure. I still remember how blurry Quake 3 looked like on Voodoo 3 cards. Not only textures were at lower resolution (256x256), but also this dithering fitler was bluring them even further. All TNT2 cards were good products and Nvidia were able to match 3DFX products. Dynamite TNT2Ultra in particular run at 195MHz core clock and could win even with the Voodoo 3500. Add to that more features (32bit color and higher resolution textures) and no wonder 3DFX started to lose market share so quickly. Back then progress in GPU technology was insane, so 2 years later my TNT2M64 (including regular TNT2 and voodoo 3 cards) was obsolete anyway :P. I had geforce2MX already in 2001, and Geforce 3 in 2002. My fps in quake 3 (1600x1200x32) went from 5-10fps on TNT2M64, to 20-25fps on geforce2MX, and to around 100fps on Geforce 3. Over 10x more performance in just 3 years. Back in 1999 my TNT2M64 was awesome card, but in 2001 it was just too slow. I know some people still game on TNT2M64 cards even after 2001, but then it certainly wasnt a good experience.
@EvoPortal Benchmarks from 1999 proves you are wrong. If you really had V3000 and only played at 800x600 then you were dumb as dirt, because every single game at 1024x768 run well above 30fps even on V3 2000, and back then no one played at 60 fps anyway, because CPUs were too slow and could barely run 30fps. Because of CPU bottleneck voodoo 3 owners were forced to play at 30fps in both 800x600 / 1024x768. Every single voodoo 3 owner I knew played at 1024x768 simply because that resolution looked much better and run pretty much the same.
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Yeah, 'lazy' is probably a good way to put it. This was such an odd attempt at a budget card, and in the end the only real limitation was the memory size (sometimes). The SGRAM difference is fairly interesting though, which makes me wonder how Voodoo3 3000 PCI cards fare against their AGP cousins, since they predominantly used SGRAM and suffered no performance penalty on PCI.
Very good video!
Thanks! I didn’t know the PCI versions used SGRAM. Would make for an interesting comparison indeed.
I still have mine (and another one I found on a scrap pile years after). I bought it back in 1999 or 2000 for like $50 as an OEM card (no box, no doc, no nothing) and it was a true gem. Nobody seemed to care back then but I still think it was one of my better purchases ever. The 2 TMU trick worked like a charm.
I actually own a Voodoo 1000, so I found this particular video of great interest 😀According to Everest Home Edition, it’s AGP 2x has 16MB of SGRAM and the GPU is clocked at 125MHz, and I can confirm it has no heat-sink attached. I had no idea that it was an OEM type card that came with Gateway computers. I picked this up by itself some time ago and in a completely bizarre twist of fate I ended up fitting it to a Pentium 3 450 “Gateway” motherboard. You could almost say it found it’s way home… After seeing this video, I decided to run a couple of benchmarks with it and got some interesting results. In comparison to your result in 3D Mark 2000 of 1357, I received a result of 2236, which is considerably more, and I just ran the default benchmark. I also ran the Quake 2 benchmark exactly the same as yours and got a result of 64.2. You got a result of 69.8, but I believe you’re running a CPU twice the speed of mine. I also noticed I have two TMU’s, I must have unlocked this a while back as I don’t remember doing it… Anyway, just thought I’d share 😁
I have the same card no heat sink.
The non-velocity variants have the two TMUs unlocked by default in my experience. It's only the Velocity that has one locked
A fun thing about this card is that it has Win 3.x drivers which also work with the rest of the Voodoo 3's, I think they only let you use 8 of the 16MB of the higher models' RAM but it still is plenty enough for a Win3.x desktop.
Yep, I actually used this for DOS/Win 3.1 for this exact reason for quite a while
Very interesting, I've definitely never heard of this model before.
I have a V3 1000 16MB 125MHz no heatsink pulled from an old Compaq Presario 5900Z. I installed a heatsink but the card runs pretty cool and is a decent GPU for free. Great video didn't even know about the TMU locked out.
Thank you very much for your Review :-) - Regards from Germany!
Regarding the activation of the second TMU: yes, it was very easy to do, but probably very few people did it, because of two things. First: those cards were sold in OEM machines, people who bought them weren't exactly tech savvy, they just needed a computer to do "stuff". Second: it was around year 2000, so internet wasn't quite common. But it was a weird move to disable the TMU, I think that halving the RAM size to only 8 MB was enough. Plus, some cards were clocked lower than 143 MHz... Disabling the second TMU was too much, it was basically an overclocked Voodoo Banshee at this point, not a V3.
I still have mine! It is the 16MB Voodoo 3 2000 version, but it is PCI slot and not AGP. I believe that my PC at that time may not have come with an AGP slot and that's probably why I got the PCI slot version. I actually installed my own cooling fan on the heatsink just to keep it a little cooler. The first card I got from CompUSA was defective at the time and burned out after about a week. It actually smelled funny too when I took it out of the box and I had the feeling it was not going to last. Luckily for me it went out before the return policy was up and they gave me a new card. I still have the original box sans the bar code which I probably sent in for some type of rebate. I remember that I used some special modified drivers for it to get better results, but I can't remember the driver name or who created them at the time. I must have them on one of my backup drives somewhere.....🤔👍👍
It's interesting that Quake 3 is seeing it as Voodoo Banshee since Voodoo3 was basically a Banshee with higher clock speeds and an additional TMU. Also, it's interesting to know that Creative's 3DBlaster Voodoo Banshee used SGRAM, so maybe there's something there, too...
I remember reading somewhere a loong time ago (like almost quarter of a century ago, literally🙂) that Voodoo3 was initially going to be a successor to Banshee (like Banshee 2) and that "real Voodoo3" (next-gen product) was going to be what became of VSA-100 (Voodoo4 and 5). And this actually makes sense, when you think about it, because VSA-100 was a real generational jump forward compared to Voodoo2 (and Voodoo2 itself was basically a higher clocked Voodoo Graphics with a second TMU) since it allowed so much more (32-bit rendering, FSAA, about 10x higher texture resolution...) and a basis for several products down the line. So even Voodoo4 and 5 were basically just something that was churned out to buy some more time on the market before 3dfx could develop Rampage (a *real* next-gen product, which 3dfx worked on since 1998.). Unfortunately, by late 2000. and going into 2001, 3dfx was out of time and went under because of bad management and being unable to adapt to the new market reality of more frequent product cycles and failing to take advantage of OEM).
Basically, ideally, it should've been like this:
Voodoo Graphics->Voodoo2->Voodoo3 (but based on VSA-100 instead of upgraded Voodoo Banshee core)->Rampage (which was to be based on VSA, but with hardware T&L support to compete with GeForce256). Sadly, we never got that and instead we got a stop-gap product (namely Avenger) and a failed market strategy, which led them to bankruptcy and getting acquired by Nvidia.
It's amazing how much performance that's left on the table without that reg change, this would be a great card for a Pentium 2 build as well!
Also great for a Super Socket 7 build. Great performance and driver optimization while avoiding AGP compatibility issues.
@@NTGTechnology Ahh yes indeed! They often have AGP sockets with specific Voodoo Jumpers on the motherboard.
@@NTGTechnologyI had a K6-2 400, then 500 with a Voodoo3 2000 at 3000 speed. It was FAST. The 3DNow drivers were incredible, especially in UT99.
I believe the nVidia drivers for the TNT series were called "Detonator".
I didn't know that you could actually unlock these into a pseudo-2000! Too bad that doesn't make it any easier to get Voodoo cards without selling your soul. 😭
Great video.
If you search a while you will get one for 70-100€, I don't think it's so expensive, i just bought voodoo 3 3000 for 60€ missing one capacitor i soldered already. I am located in the Netherlands
Nice video dude! I never hear anybody talk about the 1000.
Nvidia drivers were called: detonator
As far as I'm aware- the Voodoo 1000 isn't the same as the Velocity cards. My Compaq Voodoo 3 1000 is different- it has 8x SGRAM chips for a full buswidth and 16MB VRAM, and lacks a heatsink (Like the ones you picture in the video online). It is effectively an underclocked Vooodoo 3 2000. The Velocity cards seem to be cut-down variations of this.
EDIT: It could just be up to the OEM as well how it's marketed.
Yeah there really just doesn’t seem to be any clear indication as to which name goes with which version of the card. I’m guessing your theory is probably correct about OEMs getting to name it whatever they wanted.
There are even more differences between the 125mhx and 143mhz models, which is that the 125mhz models typically use 2TMUs where the 143mhz one has only one. Like you said too, the 143mhz one also only has 8mb of memory while the other has 16mb. When talking about the two unique models, I typically call the 125mhz model the Voodoo 3 1000, and the 143mhz one the Velocity 100.
1st gpu was Voodoo 2 PCI on Intel P2 300mhz 64mb ram by Dell Dimension. Friend came over to see my new system. Told me, do you want to see this system blow away your N64 ? Yes ! Get this graphics accelerator. Unreal and Blood 2 were the first games I tried. Calling up all my friends to come over and see how good the graphics were.
In Unreal Tournament detail textures and volumetric light (fog) are turned on by default only in Glide, and off in Direct3d and opengl. If you turn those setting off in glide too, just like in direct3d and opengl, the performance increases by 25-35%. You can turn detail textures and volumetric light on or off by pressing ~ and typing preferences, than select Glide and from there you can turn them on or off. The results you got in Unreal Tournament were biased in favor of the M64 because of this.
We could also say that UT99 results were biased in favor of 3DFX cards, because default D3D and OpenGL renderers were very bad compared to glide in this game. Back in 2001, I remember installing a new D3D renderer that gave me a huge performance boost on my Geforce 2MX. With this patch the game was playable at 1024x768x32 + detal textures and volumetric lighting and with default D3D renderer it was a bad experience.
@@PabloB888 UT was optimized for Glide just like Quake 3 was optimized for Transform and Lightning. All games were optimized for certain cards or APIs but to run the game with different levels of detail is really unfair especially because UT can be run with the same level of detail on all cards, by disabling Detail Textures and Volumetric Light for the Voodoo’s in Glide.
@supermario8416 I understand what you are saying, and I also think that reviewers should test video cards with the same graphics settings, but still, the default D3D renderer in UT99 (or should I say in all Unreal Engine 1 games) was really bad, so 3DFX cards had an artificial advantage here anyway. Thanks to improved D3D renderer my results skyrocketed and then Glide results in this game no longer look that impressive to me.
@@PabloB888 Total non-sense. By the same logic you could say that the Geforce cards have an artificial advatage in all Quake 3 engine games because of the support for Transform & Lightning and because of this the Geforce cards should run with higher details when tested against 3dfx or other cards without T&L support.
@supermario8416 In my previous comment, I said very clearly that reviewers should test games with the same settings, so dont suggest that I want to test games with different settings on different hardware, because that would be ridiculous indeed.
3DFX had no secret sauce that would boost performance to ridiculous levels (like in UE1 games) just on their cards. Other developers had no problems optimizing their games for both Glide and D3D. The Unreal Engine 1 D3D renderer was simply unoptimised, if not broken. Improved D3D renderer improved performance and also fixed glitches and colours (default renderer had washed out colours even in 32bit). I dont like drawing conclusions about GPU performance based on broken D3D API support, but that's just me.
Which driver are you using for this card? Is it the voodoo 3 1.07 or something else? Awesome video. I wish I knew this card existed. I paid 30 dollars for a used tnt2m64 pci and I always wanted a voodoo 3 3000. I saw how half life ran on my friends system with glide and was so jelly at the time.
Yeah it was 1.07
Great GPUJune2 vid👍 And your voice is very pleasant to listen. I wonder why 3DFX equip the card with assumingly more expensive and faster SGRAM instead of generic SD-RAM.
Nice tip on the MTU, was not aware.
I also have the V1000 with 16 MB of SGRAM, no heatsink, no OEM brand on it, just the V3 1000 v2.15.05 sticker. Most listing I see suggest it comes from CompaQ. BIOS bootup for this card was just a black screen, but managed to flash the bios to v2.15.11 without a problem. This made BIOS post showup again for the card, revealing the 16 MB.
Real curious to see if I could push this with a bit of overclocking by mounting a heatsink and a fan, or maybe even to go as far as flashing a 2000 bios on this.
I found an old review in a German magazine from December 1999. The 8 MB 143 MHz for 150 DM (ca. 75 EUR). For the price a really nice card.
Good to find this, i also have one and indeed was not on par with the 2000 and 3000, now know why. Thanks
The Velocity 100 and Voodoo 3 1000 are actually two distinctly different cards. 143mhz, 8mb ram, one disabled TMU=Velocity 100. 125mhz, 16mb ram, NO disabled TMU=Voodoo3 1000.
Ok, but then why is my supposed “Velocity 100” listed as a Voodoo 3 1000 in it’s BIOS when it boots up and in the driver?
@@NTGTechnology If I had to explain their motivations, I'd answer in line with your own conclusions about how they went about disabling that 2nd TMU: When it came to the Velocity 100, 3dfx was lazy. An AnandTech article mentions the release of the card, citing it as a separate product from Voodoo3 but still clearly a spin-off. It suggests the Velocity was positioned for business users so they may not have cared about the details. The 3rd page notes that its drivers are basically just Voodoo 3 drivers with a modified .inf file, and concludes that "it sounds a lot like the Velocity is a Voodoo3 in disguise." Although they relate it more closely to a Voodoo 3 2000 with half the RAM than to the OEM Voodoo 3 1000, "Velocity 100 makes an excellent budget alternative to the Voodoo3 2000." "With both TMU’s pumping out pixels, the Velocity 100 also performs identically to the Voodoo3 2000 in nearly all situations." www.anandtech.com/show/401
I'm REALLY surprised you managed to get V3 2000 performance from this card! In my case I found a significant increase in card performance from soldering in 16MB of ram over the stock 8MB in an AGP on-board unit.
Excellent video and benchmarks. The Velocity 100 has only 1 TMU activated in Glide and Opengl and 143 mhz. The Voodoo 3 1000 has 2 TMUs activated in all APIs and 125 MHz. The Velocity 100 in 1999 was in my opinion, by far, the best budget card, much better than its Nvidia rivals M64 and Vanta. Your results just confirm that.
The card I have is very clearly labeled as a 1000, both on the card itself and in the BIOS when the card first boots up it's displayed as a "Voodoo 3 1000G." And mine also only had 1 TMU enabled by default and runs at 143 MHz, so I'm not sure where you're getting this info.
Hex 2 is on, 1 is off. Btw, its all very easy when you have internet. This happened in the original nviida 8 series too, with the 8600 being able to be updated to increase the tmus.
So much was phoned in in those days. It was a long learning curve. Even today IT is wild. ( Source: I work IT for my government. It's not as buttoned up as you would think even today)
Thx! Not a Forceware, it's called Detonator :)
Was it lazy on the part of 3dfx, or was it a cost issue, binning, or not having the time to resping stuff?
The V3 1000 Velocity 200 has two enabled unit and 16mb ram, only underclocked to 125mhz. The V3 1000 Velocity 100 has one unit and 8mb ram. I think the 200 better choice in affordable league.
How IT versus the Banshees at 130 MHz?
Practically a Velocity 100 was just a Banshee with 143/143 mhz. A GA630 Banshee with 110/130 mhz is of course slower than a Velocity 100 at 143/143 mhz. But at the same frequency the Banshee performs the same as a Velocity 100.
Your card seem to be missing a cap on the top right corner!
Thanks for pointing that out. I compared it to some other photos and it does seem to be missing one. The card seems pretty stable, guess it must not be that important.
Its nor logical a compagny Who downgrade His own product when the rival Do a fuck war of french against every position you own.The chief ingenior of 3dfx migrated on Nvdia,and Hé kept the same Tactics.
Yeap, Greg Ballard had no idea how to run that kind of company. Starting with STB acquisition, 3dfx was doing nothing but wasting their previous profits. Also, telling people that they don't need things like 32 rendering instead of just giving them isn't good marketing strategy, and having kickass flagship product is essential, Since people are buying budget options to have something "close enough"
@@TurboMMaster Voodoo 3 was still a very good and successful product despite supporting only 16-bit color and 256x256 textures, because back then not many games had support for 512x512 (NFS5, Quake3, Expendable), and 32-bit color performance wasnt good on TNT2 cards at (except for some older games, or lower resolutions like 800x600 or 640x480). TNT2 owners were playing in 16-bit color anyway and 16-bit color looked better on 3DFX cards thanks to dithering. Voodoo 5 should be however much better. 3DFX planned to use 4x chips in their V5 6000 just to match single Geforce2Ultra chip performance, and geforce 3 was already out :P.
imagine that a New GPU for 49 f**kin $$$ now the only place where you can get that is in Ebay used and abused I still remember a time when gaming GPU flagships were less than 500$ then Jensen got the I am a Greedy MF sickness and steadily raised the prices over the years and now it's at 1600$ can't wait for the next gen to be at 2000$+ at the rate it's going.
are those 5.5ns SG modules? 😮😎
Sir, I believe that card is called 3Dfx Velocity 100 and not Voodoo 3 1000.
The Voodoo 3 1000 has only 16Mb model (I have this card along with Voodoo 3 3000) while the Velocity 100 has only 8Mb model.
TNT2 M64 score looks surprisingly low; did you run it in 32 bits because that really hurt performance?
I'm pretty sure I ran everything at 16 bit because of the Voodoo 3s not supporting it.
Agree, here's results from creative 3D blaster TNT2M64 review and even in 32color bit results in Quake 3 were better than 27fps in his video review:
Quake 2, 1024x768x16
TNT1- 37fps
TNT2M64 - 41fps
TNT2M64 OC - 53fps
TNT2 - 58fps
Even in 32 color bit this game was playabale (over 30fps)
TNT1 - 27fps
TNT2M64 - 34fps
TNT2M64 OC - 44fps
TNT2 - 50fps
@@PabloB888 It's been a long time since I left the comment so I don't remember anymore, but a newer driver might explain it. The later detonator drivers meant for the geforce 4 and FX series really hurt CPU overhead on older cards like the TNT2.
I own the Compaq version of this card with 16mb and lacks the heatsink. It also comes up as voodoo3 1000 in the boot bios when you turn on the computer. I may have to check the tmu in Q3 to see if it's set to 1 or 2. Either way, it a great card for a P2 build or an early P3 build
I wonder would it be possible for 3dfx to relase 32 MB Ram of Voodoo 3. Was Avenger able to handle more than 16 mb of ram in general?
I'm not sure, I've never heard that there was any specific reason they couldn't have. Maybe they felt it was unnecessary? The Voodoo 3 only supported 256x256 textures when the rest of the industry had moved on to larger textures, so maybe that has something to so with it.
Don't forget the Geforce 4 MX which is literally a Geforce 2 MX with the Geforce 4s better memory management and AA system.
The 16 Meg of Ram version,exist.
was all voodoo 3 2000-3000 series, PCI and AGP
I actually have this card even with the driver cd but the box got lost somewhere
Your TNT2M64 results look really bad, maybe you were using TNT2 vanta? I had M64 and I'm pretty sure that quake 2 was absolutely playable on it. For example results from IXBT "creative 3D blaster TNT2M64" review:
Quake 2, 1024x768x16
TNT1- 37fps
TNT2M64 - 41fps
TNT2M64 OC - 53fps
TNT2 - 58fps
Even in 32 color bit this game was playabale (over 30fps)
TNT1 - 27fps
TNT2M64 - 34fps
TNT2M64 OC - 44fps
TNT2 - 50fps
I don't recall the M64 mentioning it was a Vanta, but something to keep in mind is that there's such a wide variety of them out there with different clock speeds and ram configs that it's inevitable some are going to be bad and some will be okay. It could also be down to the driver version I was using or the platform (this is a VIA chipset afterall). Or maybe I got my numbers wrong, but I'm pretty sure I double checked everything before I made the graphs.
@NTGTechnology Fair enough. There were indeed many TNT2M64 variants and also drivers could make a difference. I had creative 3D blaster TNT2M64 and with OC this thing wasnt much slower than regular (stock) TNT2, but of course TNT2 could be also OC'ed. In 1999 M64 was a very decent card and I was very happy with M64 performance, becasue I could play every game in 1999 at 1024x768x16 with over 30fps, while some of my friends still played in software mode, or at sub 30fps even at 640x480. I had TNT2M64 only till 2001 when I bought geforce2MX. Back then progress in GPU technology was just insane, you could buy a new PC today, and it was obsolete 2 years later LOL 😁. In 2003 I already had Geforce 3 and that card was over 10x faster than my TNT2M64. In quake 3 I had 5-10fps at 1600x1200x32 on TNT2M64 32MB, and around 100fps on Geforce 3ti200 128MB (OC'ed to almost ti500 clocks). These days you can buy 5 year old GPU and it will still play games just fine.
Should at least attempt using the AmigaMerlin V2.9 or 3dHQ V1.09.00 Beta10 drivers
How IT perform compaired to the best Banshees?
ps, at that resolution, you're testing CPU performance.
So basically vodoo 1000 is oem card
v3-1000 have no radiator on chip
A very flawed review. Nobody played games at 1024x768 even with the voodoo 3 3000. I know since I had one back in 1999. Testing should have been done at 800x600 so that the V3 1000 wouldn't hit it's 8mb memory limitation which it clearly did in most of his benchmarks at 1024x768.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people were playing in 1024x768 on Voodoo 3 (even on my TNT2M64 I was playing all my games in that resolution). But the V1000 should be tested at 800x600 for sure because it only has 8MB (like Voodoo2).
@@PabloB888 You may be pretty sure but I'm 100% sure since i lived though this time period and bought a voodoo 3 back in 1999. Nobody played at 1024x768. The vooodoo 3 just wasn't fast enough for smooth gameplay and that garbage TNT2M64 you have couldn't even play all games smooth at 800x600 due to the crippled clock speed and 64bit memory bus
@EvoPortal Dude, just because you had a bad day it doesn't mean you have to be a jerk to people :P. Nothing you wrote is true, and I will prove it. I still remember 1999 like it was yesterday and I'm ABSOLUTELY SURE that people back then considered 30fps to be a very playable experience (after all Voodoo 1 could barely hit 30fps and yet it was a massive success). The voodoo 3 cards (from V3 2000 and up) i. 1999 were easily able to hit well over 30fps at 1024x768 resolution, therefore voodoo 3 owners could play in this resolution and most did it. You are the first Voodoo 3 owner that I have heard of who was running games at 800x600 on this powerful card.
The Riva TNT2M64 32MB wasnt a high end card like Voodoo 3, but it was certainly a decent midrange card in 1999. The riva TNT2M64 card had the full TNT2 chip, but with a reduced memory bus / bandwidth. At lower resolutions, performance was much better than on the older TNT1, because memory bandwidth wasnt a huge bottleneck, but of course at higher resolutions like 1024x768 memory bandwidth was a massive bottleneck, so performance dropped to TNT1 levels. Thanks to memory OC however (increase in memory bandwidth) it's performance skyrocketed at higher resolutions like 1024x768. Results from creative 3D blaster TNT2M64 benchmarks (IXBT site review):
Quake2 1024x768x16
TNT1 - 37fps
TNT2M64 - 41fps
TNT2M64 OC - 53fps
TNT2 - 58fps
Shogo 1024x768x16
TNT1 - 33fps
TNT2M64 - 36fps
TNT2M64 OC - 44fps
TNT2 - 48fps
Incoming 1024x768 in 32bit color
TNT1 - 28fps
TNT2M64 - 36fps
TNT2M64 OC - 52fps
TNT2 - 59fps
3DMark99 1024x768 32bit color
TNT1 - 2085 points
TNT2M64 - 2316 points
TNT2M64 OC - 3168 points
TNT2 - 3401 points
A regular TNT2 was still faster, but not that much. In 1999 I have played EVERY SINGLE GAME at 1024x768x16 with over 30fps, deal with it dude. At 800x600 I could also play games in 32bit color, but I wasnt willing to do so, because even on my CRT the difference between 800x600 and 1024x768 was just too big (that's also the reason why most people who had Voodoo 3 played in 1024x768 as well). I was very happy that my parents bought me TNT2M64, because some of my friends still played in software mode, or on some extremely slow D3D cards like intel i740 that could barely run 640x480 and had glitches / artifacts in some games.
My TNT2M64 32MB despite being cheaper card than 3DFX voodoo 3 had higher resolution textures support, so games like NFS5, Expendable, or Quake 3 looked way better on my TNT2M64. Also voodoo 3 image quality wasnt better compared to my TNT2M64, because voodoo 3 cards were still limited to 16-bit color. Of course 3DFX tried to mask this imperfection with their fake 22-bit color (it was just dithered 16-bit), but this feature blured fine details on the textures (very noticeably), so it wasnt better picture quality compared to true 32-bit color for sure. I still remember how blurry Quake 3 looked like on Voodoo 3 cards. Not only textures were at lower resolution (256x256), but also this dithering fitler was bluring them even further.
All TNT2 cards were good products and Nvidia were able to match 3DFX products. Dynamite TNT2Ultra in particular run at 195MHz core clock and could win even with the Voodoo 3500. Add to that more features (32bit color and higher resolution textures) and no wonder 3DFX started to lose market share so quickly.
Back then progress in GPU technology was insane, so 2 years later my TNT2M64 (including regular TNT2 and voodoo 3 cards) was obsolete anyway :P. I had geforce2MX already in 2001, and Geforce 3 in 2002. My fps in quake 3 (1600x1200x32) went from 5-10fps on TNT2M64, to 20-25fps on geforce2MX, and to around 100fps on Geforce 3. Over 10x more performance in just 3 years. Back in 1999 my TNT2M64 was awesome card, but in 2001 it was just too slow. I know some people still game on TNT2M64 cards even after 2001, but then it certainly wasnt a good experience.
@@PabloB888 lol Im not being a jerk Im just being correctl
@EvoPortal Benchmarks from 1999 proves you are wrong. If you really had V3000 and only played at 800x600 then you were dumb as dirt, because every single game at 1024x768 run well above 30fps even on V3 2000, and back then no one played at 60 fps anyway, because CPUs were too slow and could barely run 30fps. Because of CPU bottleneck voodoo 3 owners were forced to play at 30fps in both 800x600 / 1024x768. Every single voodoo 3 owner I knew played at 1024x768 simply because that resolution looked much better and run pretty much the same.
I have a 2000 pci version. I flashed it for a StarMax (Mac clone). I’m working on changing it back for a 98 machine.