[HN Gopher] 3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023)
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3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023)
Author : kristianp
Score : 207 points
Date : 2025-03-07 04:07 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Relevant: This is my lengthy presentation on porting Rogue
| Squadron 3d from 3dfx glide over to Vulkan.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcmKy-72_2U
| panick21_ wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for this.
| snide wrote:
| There was a brief period of time where having one of these 3D
| cards in quake led to a pretty heavy advantage for gamers.
|
| I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading
| up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see
| THROUGH THE WATER.
|
| Sniper's paradise!
| glitchc wrote:
| You also needed a fast connection to minimize latency. 400 ms
| on dial-up was common.
| atonse wrote:
| I used to play games like Starsiege (the mech game) on
| dialup. With our 250ms pings, your brain just learned to
| compensate for the delay and click that much earlier to
| shoot.
|
| But yeah, those lucky people with their DSL modems and 60ms
| pings would wipe the floor with us.
|
| Nowadays, everyone has a < 10ms ping.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I loved playing starsiege back in 2000. I had a wired
| college campus connection, but shared with so many
| students, my pings would go anywhere from 50 to 500
| depending on time of day. Near-timeouts showed the client
| side prediction code in action, with mechs sliding around
| and then freezing in place.
| agumonkey wrote:
| There was also a perverse effect on some games. With a graphics
| card, your gameplay could be altered and you had to unlearn all
| the reflexes you built on CPU rendering alone. Moto Racer
| (1997) was like that. The gameplay with a graphics card was
| completely different, even trajectories (I assume lag made the
| cpu accept a little bit more rounding errors).
| strictnein wrote:
| Moto Racer was one of the few games that supported the
| PowerVR card. I had one and it looked so good. Such a fun
| game.
| somat wrote:
| If I remember correctly to get transparent water the level also
| had to be re processed through the "vis" program with a
| transparent water flag set.
|
| vis did a precalculation for where a level segment(the
| partition in binary space partition) could be seen from any
| other level segment. the end effect was that while glquake did
| have a option for transparent water, the geometry would not
| draw on the far side. making the effect useless without a bit
| of extra work. But I have to admit I have no idea if
| entities(other players) would draw or not.
|
| update: found this https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-
| help/general-help/4754-visp...
|
| Apparently there is a no_vis option to run without the visible
| set optimizations.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > I can very clearly remember installing the card and then
| loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being
| able to see THROUGH THE WATER.
|
| Searching for "2Fort4" in YouTube yielded some interesting
| videos for people curious what the original Quake Mod version
| of the map looked like:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJh36LuKwVQ&pp=ygUGMkZvcnQ0
|
| As someone who _still_ spends at least 3 hours a week playing
| 2Fort on the current Team Fortress 2, it 's fascinating to see
| how the core of the map is still basically the same after 20
| years.
|
| EDIT: Another video which goes into more detail about the
| history of each 2fort version, going back to its original
| inspiration from a Doom 2 level:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid9QwAOlng&t=375s
| cogman10 wrote:
| Interesting, didn't realize this design was that old. Feels a
| little like teapot :).
|
| The video also misses that there was a pretty popular 2fort
| for half life 1.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I spent so much of my early 20's in that map/mod on Q1. I
| don't think I've had that level of just fun in any
| game/map/mod since then.
| macintux wrote:
| On a very different scale, but I recall playing bzflag decades
| ago and discovering that I simply could not jump my tank to the
| second level. My graphics card was so slow that something
| wasn't working correctly, and no matter how many times I tried
| from different distances I would _almost_ make it, but not
| quite.
| stanac wrote:
| More recent example: In GTA SA in a mission I wasn't able to
| reach an airplane before it took off unless I lowered the
| resolution of the game.
| taeric wrote:
| This and the overwhelming advantage conveyed from fast internet
| connections was hard to really appreciate when you were there.
| garciasn wrote:
| Even having a solid dial-up connection with a ~180-185ms ping
| was a ridiculous advantage when most HPBs were ~350ms,
| particularly in clan invitationals for Q1CTF. We were playing
| as LPBs in the dorm at ~45-60ms and 180ms wasn't that much of
| a concern, aside from sliding around corners more than
| expected, but at 350ms you were basically shooting
| predictively at where you assumed they'd be next, not where
| they 'were'.
| yawgmoth wrote:
| Subspace/Continuum also used lag in its gameplay, with
| players warping to recently exploded spaceships so they
| could continue to invade. It was an established technique
| and had to be defended against.
|
| Edit: typo
|
| Shout out to any EG players!
| nickpeterson wrote:
| My first gpu ever was a voodoo 2 8mb. I remember starting up the
| original unreal and getting it working. Shortly after we got a
| cable modem. 12 year old me was having a total blast. ;)
| glitchc wrote:
| I still have a Diamond Monster Fusion kicking around somewhere in
| my stash. It was the first GPU I ever bought using my own money.
| elif wrote:
| I remember my first like 5 paychecks when I was a teenager
| scooping ice cream went to a voodoo3 from compUSA. I don't even
| think it had a fan, and I remember being shocked how small the
| pci was as id been accustomed to mostly ISA "daughter boards"
|
| Wow what a trip down memory lane
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm consistently amazed at how massive video cards are today...
| it really feels like it's often excessive for the sake of being
| excessive over any real need. I was actually happy to see the
| depth shrink of the Meshify C case, now I'm disappointed I'm
| probably going to have to swap the case for a new GPU... it's
| too hard to find options that fit beyond mid-range, and even
| then.
| sejje wrote:
| My first Linux experience was trying to get a 3dfx to work.
|
| Also no Internet because I hadn't gotten that far.
|
| I ran back and forth to Steven's house and searched Altavista for
| the answers.
|
| Good times.
| polartx wrote:
| I was an infoseek.com man myself, but we probably still could
| have been friends.
| sejje wrote:
| gkrellm, konqueror, irssi, xmms
|
| of course i had to dual-boot windows so i could still program
| in vb6 and be a general shit on AOL
| dguest wrote:
| Have we crossed the threshold where more "Graphics Processing
| Units" are sold for ML than for graphics processing?
|
| I remember thinking it was funny that gaming ultimately
| subsidized a lot of the major advances in ML for the last decade.
| We might be flipping to a point where ML subsidizes gaming.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The 'death' of PC computing has been rather exaggerated. Each
| year hundreds of millions of PCs are still sold, and that's
| exclusively referring to prepackaged stuff. There's then the
| increasingly large chunk of people that simply upgrade a
| frankenputer as necessary. As for gaming Steam has users in the
| hundreds of millions and continues to regularly grow. And while
| that is certainly going to encompass most people, I'm sure
| there are some oddballs out there that game but don't use
| Steam.
|
| So GPUs sold primarily for ML probably still make up a tiny
| share of the overall market, but I expect they make up a huge
| chunk of the market for cards like A100. Gaming hasn't been
| bleeding edge (in terms of requirements) for a very long time
| and card prices drop quickly, so there's just no point in
| spending that sort of money on a card for gaming.
| adastra22 wrote:
| GPUs for data centers makes up a vastly larger portion of
| NVIDIA's sales.
| somenameforme wrote:
| These are very different stats. He was referring to unit
| sales of GPUs, not $ sales. The A100 is a $8000+ video card
| and so cards like it are going to dominate in revenue, even
| if their sales numbers are relatively low. For contrast the
| most popular card, per the Steam hardware survey, is
| (inexplicably - probably because of prepackaged kits) the
| RTX 4060, which is a $300 card.
| genewitch wrote:
| 4060 was probably the only 4000 series GPU available for
| a while, too.
|
| I have a 3090 for AI and gaming and I haven't seen a
| reason to "upgrade" yet. In fact, I might try and get a
| 3090ti instead.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It is the stat that matters in business. NVIDIA is now an
| AI company with a small graphics card side hustle.
| oblio wrote:
| In 2024 256 million PCs were sold but only 40 million of
| those were desktops. Excluding the fact that some PCs (hard
| to say a number but I'd be surprised if it weren't over 40%)
| are office PCs with crappy GPUs, most laptops also have a
| bad, integrated GPU.
|
| There's a chance that this year or the next one more GPUs
| will be sold for AI than for graphics.
| adastra22 wrote:
| We hit that a few years ago. That's when NVIDIA's stock
| skyrocketed.
| panick21_ wrote:
| When the reveal the information about SEGA the whole leadership
| team should have been on a plane to Japan the next day, all to
| apologize bow and scrape.
|
| And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an
| incredible self own.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just
| an incredible self own._
|
| ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the
| strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't
| sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing
| that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or
| before?
| panick21_ wrote:
| The problem is, they already had a large group of board
| providers, it was a big market advantage for them.
|
| If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many
| of these providers jumped ship.
|
| Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful,
| and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.
| speed_spread wrote:
| The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI
| before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch
| by having total control over the hardware (minus the CPU, obv).
| Essentially building customer-oriented x86 SGI machines,
| branching out of the gaming market and challenging workstation
| vendors. A 64 bits Opteron+Voodoo based Windows machine would
| have been something to behold. But the Sega thing probably
| torpedoed the funding that would have been required for them to
| become independent of graphic card vendors.
|
| They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage
| eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck
| with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper
| implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily
| marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I think the whole 'moat prison' thing is overrated. They
| could release future version that support DirectX and Glide.
|
| They simply didn't focus enough on the next generation chip.
| reginald78 wrote:
| Yes, I remember toward the end it seemed like they were
| just releasing souped up versions of last year's product. I
| don't know if it was a resources issue or they just didn't
| expect the market to advance so fast.
| fidotron wrote:
| Having encountered some of the 3dfx people involved with that,
| bowing, scraping or apologizing was not really their m.o.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I worked for an elevator manufacture that killed somebody,
| they fucked up the whole apologize in Japan thing too. Even
| if it wasn't actually their fault.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| I loved playing No One Lives Forever 1&2 on my Voodoo 5 5500.
| That was the height of my PC building days. Now as a wizened old
| man, I'm stuck with these Apple Macbook Pros/Airs and they do
| well enough. But I do miss building my own machines...
| bee_rider wrote:
| How wizened? If you are close to retiring, maybe you can build
| a pc and play some games. Keep the brain running, and stay in
| touch with friends (if they'll do multiplayer).
| ckozlowski wrote:
| This was posted on HN the other day. Enjoy!
|
| http://nolfrevival.tk/
| nfriedly wrote:
| FWIW, you can build a fully functional desktop for ~$400 with
| integrated graphics (that can play most modern games on lower
| settings), or maybe $600 with a discreet GPU. Less if you go
| with used parts.
| blindriver wrote:
| The first time I lost all my money in the stock market was when I
| went all in on 3dfx stock against nvidia. Ah, the good ol'days!
| guax wrote:
| ouch, I am certain some people did the same for nokia against
| android/apple :P
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| anti-matter-millionaires
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Previously discussed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026862 (2 years ago, 376
| comments, 671 points)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| My first 3D card was a Righteous Orchid 3d. It had a mechanical
| relay in it to switch between 2d and 3d modes, so it made a
| distinctive click[0] when you loaded Quake3D.
|
| Or, too many times, it didn't, and I had to try again.
|
| [0] https://riksrandomretro.com/2021/06/07/the-righteous-click
| 42lux wrote:
| I have more memories of my 3dfx Voodoo cards than of any other
| old hardware. The OpenGL implementation was so buttery smooth
| that there is simply nothing to compare it to. Quake 2 at 120fps
| on a 90Hz CRT was just something else entirely. It felt like
| there was no input latency at all and even with a higher ping of
| 80-100 in RocketArena it felt smoother than modern shooters on a
| 144hz panel.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Funny thing is it was probably 40fps but you remember it
| feeling like 120fps.
| 42lux wrote:
| The voodoo 4 4500 could push up to 140fps at 800x600.
|
| https://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-shootout-
| projec...
| trashface wrote:
| It was truly jaw dropping firing up quake 1 for the first time on
| 3dfx voodoo1. Double the resolution of software and super smooth
| framerate, and much better quality texture mapping too. I recall
| tweaking some setting (gl_flashblend?) so that I could see pretty
| glowing orbs around my rockets (and strategically, also everybody
| else's rockets).
| rob74 wrote:
| I was the unfortunate owner of an S3 ViRGE card at the time -
| the (in)famous "3D decelerator". I managed to get Quake running
| on it, and it looked nice, but was slower than with software
| rendering...
| matwood wrote:
| It's hard to convey just how revolutionary the original voodoo
| cards were. There aren't many times in my life where there was
| a clear line of before and after, but this was one of those
| times.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| They also had the most recognizable unified box art style
| from all HW makers[1]. When you saw those eyes staring into
| your soul off the shelves, you knew it was a 3dfx GPU. They
| also had the best ads. [2] HW vendors today don't have the
| balls anymore to use designs like that, it's all flat sterile
| corporate nonsense.
|
| [1] https://www.ixbt.com/img/r30/00/02/08/90/boxes.jpg
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/41r1wj/3df
| x_w...
| drooopy wrote:
| Unless I'm mistaken, those cards were all produced by 3dfx
| after their acquisition of STB. Regardless, that box art
| blew my 14 year old mind back in the day.
| hylaride wrote:
| That's something I haven't seen in awhile! I remember as a
| kid staring at those in the store, not being able to afford
| them.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I sold my used 3DFX Voodoo 5500 with original box in 2015
| for about 290EUR. It is probably in a collector's shelf
| now.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I sold my used 3DFX Voodoo 5500 with original box in
| 2015 for about 290EUR._
|
| Bruh. That's like selling your bitcoins in 2009 for two
| pizzas.
| khedoros1 wrote:
| I think mine went into a computer that we donated to a
| school, or something. Around 2002 or 2003, my dad and I
| put together a bunch of working systems out of spare
| parts and donated them.
|
| Mine was the PCI version of the card. Crazy looking on
| Ebay how much even the bare card goes for now, let alone
| when someone has the full boxed set.
| epcoa wrote:
| Still blows my mind that it was just a flash in the pan. At
| the time it felt that 3dfx was certainly going to be a
| dominant force in computing for years. And although they
| lingered a bit, the whole event was barely over 2 years.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I remember reading a historical piece where the voodoos
| success was partially luck. At the time the first
| generation cards were being developed edo ram was super
| expensive so most competitive designs were hamstrung trying
| to do things with very little ram. By luck edo ram prices
| crashed right as they released making them far more
| affordable to manufacture than 3dfx could have reasonably
| expected. That gave them an early and massive lead with
| their initial design.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think everyone understood that having it be 3D-only (and
| requiring a separate graphics card to do normal 2D desktop
| graphics) was a half-solution, and 3DFX's long term success
| would depend on their ability to provide a full 2D/3D
| solution before existing competitors like NVIDIA, ATI, and
| Matrox could catch up with their own 3D accelerators.
| ta1243 wrote:
| At various points and machines I had a Voodoo 2 (with the
| VGA handbag from a 2d card), a Voodoo banshee, and a
| Voodoo 3.
|
| The latter two were 2d+3d in one and well before any real
| competition.
| bombcar wrote:
| They really needed to buy Matrox and make multi-monitor
| 3D a thing.
| BennyInc wrote:
| I would compare it with the move from HDDs to SSDs -- a night
| and day difference.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That took a lot longer really as well... I remember seeing
| SATA SSDs around 2009, paying a massive amount for my 64gb
| Intel drive (that ate itself just over a year later)... I
| hated moving/symlinking so much... but, fortunately by the
| time it died, I could go to 256gb or 512gb (don't quite
| remember which) for not too much more.
|
| Even then, I was still seeing most Desktops sold with
| spinning rust for several years later.
| Narishma wrote:
| > much better quality texture mapping too
|
| Debatable. I always preferred the crisp look of the software
| renderer to the washed out GLQuake. Same with Quake 2. I think
| it because textures back then were too low resolution so
| filtering just makes them look muddy.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Even today I think a lot of Doom clones look better (or more
| nostalgic) with software rendering and texture mapping rather
| than OpenGL. There's an intensity of saturation to the colors
| that's lost. Fireblu is never quite so eye burning as when
| it's in software.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's also because the VGA signal quality from the 3dfx Voodoo
| wasn't very good.
|
| It didn't have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so it
| needed another graphics card for rendering the desktop (any
| non-accelerated apps really), and this was connected to the
| Voodoo using VGA passthrough. There was a noticeable image
| quality loss from this arrangement.
|
| A Matrox card would give you crisp VGA with nice saturation,
| but the 3D acceleration was nearly worthless. Choices...
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I really disagree. There were some nice Matrox cards. They
| weren't as good at 3d as 3DFX but for the time they really
| improved gaming. I developed Battlezone on G200. In those
| days we tried to have everyone have a different graphics
| card because the companies would just give them to us and
| we wanted to work with every card.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Matrox had great hardware, but the software drivers took
| too long to catch up. I was on the OpenGL team and my
| life's mission was to get Quake running as fast as the
| G200 and G400 was capable of. We finally caught up and
| got parity with Nvidia's TNT2, and then bam, they
| released the GeForce 256 series, and it was curtains for
| Matrox because their next gen hardware wasn't ready yet.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Personally I think even Half Life looks better with the
| software renderer today. Maybe that's just because it's the
| way I first played it.
| wmil wrote:
| It's low resolution plus the cards only supported bilinear
| filtering, which turns things into a blurry mess.
|
| Overall it looked better, but a lot of Quake 2 players
| weren't aware of a lot of the small details that were put
| into the textures.
| basfo wrote:
| I agree that the washed-out textures haven't aged well.
|
| But at the time, not having pixelated textures was the first
| thing people looked at when judging graphics quality. I
| remember that being a HUGE selling point of the N64 and
| something that made the console look almost a generation
| ahead of the PlayStation and Sega Saturn to kids back then.
|
| Today, I think I prefer the PSX look, thoug. Maybe with
| Z-buffer correction to avoid the warped textures of the
| PlayStation.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Plus Super Mario 64 was so colorfully saturated!
| StillBored wrote:
| I came here to comment similarly, the lower pixelated
| software rendered Quake seems to work well with the textures.
| They have a bumpmappy fuzzy feel that gets lost with the
| sharp corners everything is super flat texture mapped and
| filtered version that one got from the 3d accelerators of the
| time. I guess my brain just adds context to the low res
| images.
|
| Before unreal, I had a s3-virge for 2d and a powerVR 3d
| accelerator pair, and I was always flipping between software,
| virge and powerVR depending on game. Which at the time were
| largely hexen/heretic. The powerVR was higher resolution and
| clean/sterile but never seemed like a lot better experience.
|
| But then there was unreal, the first game I think was
| absolutely better on an accelerator (voodoo2 in my case). Its
| also pretty much the last of the serious software renderers
| and outside of the voodoo's definitely did a better job with
| software lighting /texture mapping/etc than any of the
| previous (affordable) accelerators. Which is why I ended up
| finally replacing the powerVR with the voodoo2. The results
| were 'unreal'. Some of that might just be bias, I played
| insane amounts of doom/etc but never really got into quake.
| Quake just seemed like doom rehashed to me, so I was off
| playing warcraft/diablo/hexen/etc.
|
| And frankly, outside of FEAR, I stopped playing 1st person
| shooter games for 20 years, the graphics improvements were so
| incremental, I just kept seeing flat low polygon models
| everywhere. And I don't think that looks good. Even after all
| the tessellation/bump mapping/endless tricks I kept seeing
| frames where I could play "count how many polygons are
| onscreen right now" games. Its gotten better the past few
| years, particularly some of the lighting, at least the
| screenshots/cut scenes are no longer obviously not in game
| rendering. The UE5 demo is slowly becoming reality in actual
| games, so maybe its time to revisit a few of them.
| drooopy wrote:
| Replaying Heretic 2 back in 1998 with my first Voodoo (banshee)
| was a borderline otherwordly experience, compared to my first
| playthrough of the game using software rendering. Nothing has
| blown my mind the same way since.
| fullstop wrote:
| I have had three experiences like this in my life:
| 1. PC Speaker -> Sound Blaster: Most games that I had were
| instantly upgraded 2. Doom: my first "real" fluid
| 3D experience, with stairs, etc, compared to maze-like maps
| in Wolfenstein 3. Software Rendering -> 3dfx
| (Canopus Pure3D): Transparent water surfaces in Quake (if you
| re-vis'd the maps), smooth and fluid visuals, it was amazing.
|
| The closest thing to this, in modern gaming, has been the
| boss fights in Elden Ring: https://i.imgur.com/gzLvsLw.mp4 --
| visually, they are quite epic.
| cloudking wrote:
| Core memory unlocked! Good times
| gattr wrote:
| I've experienced only three improvements in video games that
| felt ground-breaking & jaw-dropping:
|
| 1. Sprite-based -> 3D sandbox world (in my case: _Stunts_ ,
| _F29 Retaliator_ , _Gunship 2000_ , _Wolfenstein 3D_ )
|
| 2. Hardware 3D rendering (I had the NVidia RIVA 128ZX)
|
| 3. Fast-paced real-time multiplayer ( _Delta Force: Black Hawk
| Down_ )
|
| The 4th might be the usage of LLMs or similar technology for
| (mostly-)unattended content generation: NPC dialogue etc.
| louthy wrote:
| Always thought the original software renderer looked much
| better. It didn't have the bilinear filtering, so the textures
| didn't look all smooth and 'washed out', which suited the
| environment more imho
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Yeah same here. Always preferred the software renderer for
| Quake and Quake 2. Even over the modern stuff.
|
| The software renderer has this gritty feel that is integral
| to the art I feel.
|
| That said, the 3dfx was impressive at the time, and I was
| very jealous of my buddy who got one.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Mostly agree, but the RTX version of Quake 2 is very
| impressive to play.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I'd be interested in a RTX-enhanced software renderer. Ie
| replace the baked lighting with the GI raytracing, but
| otherwise keep the rest of the software renderer. Have a
| feeling that could be an awesome blend.
|
| Would be a bit challenging with the palette but should be
| doable.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Doable, but not at a playable framerate without hardware.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Yeah that's what I was thinking. Like do a RT-only pass
| doing lighting (no textures), then do the software pass
| using the RT-lighting rather than baked lightmaps.
|
| Latency would be slightly higher but I guess one could
| implement the important parts[1] of the software renderer
| on the GPU.
|
| [1]: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_re
| nderer.p...
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| I can't speak for the original GLQuake on 3dfx hardware, but
| on OpenGL-compatible Quake engines (which include modern
| Quake source ports such as Quakespasm, Ironwail, and
| vkQuake), bilinear texture filtering is an option that can be
| turned off.
|
| I play on vkQuake with nearest-neighbor texture filtering,
| square particles, and the "classic" water warping effect and
| lighting effects, alongside 8x MSAA, 16x anisotropic
| filtering, high-resolution widescreen, etc. This keeps the
| art style consistent with the look of the original Quake,
| while still allowing for the benefits of hardware 3D
| acceleration.
| christkv wrote:
| I dreamt about having the vodoo but i could not afford it. Went
| with a rendition verite based one. It was underpowered compared
| to the vodoo but I really consider it the first real GPU as it
| was a RISC processor.
| goykasi wrote:
| Same here. I can still vividly remember the experience of
| loading in with a voodoo2 for the first time. It was night and
| day -- mind completely blown. The late `90s really established
| a new version of the gamer; consoles were fun, but computer
| gaming was a different world. It made me a junky for reading
| about hardware, overclocking and gaming.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| For me it was Carmageddon. I bought it later on an ipad and it
| may have just been rose tinted glasses of being completely
| blown away back in the day but the ipad version never seems
| quite as crisp...
| basfo wrote:
| I remember how i was amazed when i got my first 3d card, a Voodoo
| 2. It was like having an arcade at home.
|
| The 3dfx logo spining up when you launched a GLide game was
| something.
|
| Unreal in particular was amazing, i remember as a kid just
| watching the lighting and the water.
|
| At that time every light in a game had to be colored, just
| because it could be done. Small rooms with green, red and blue
| lights moving all over the place, so 90s.
|
| I never had that "Wow" factor again, from there everything felt
| like incremental instead of revolutionary. How an absolute market
| leader disapeared in 2 years is incredible.
|
| I think i only got the same wow factor the first time i tested a
| VR headset.
| rayiner wrote:
| Crazy illustration of "nothing happens anymore." 3dfx seemed just
| as dominant in the 1990s as NVIDIA does today. But from founding
| to selling to asset sell-off, the company lasted just six years.
| Meanwhile NVIDIA has been king of the hill since the GeForce was
| released in 1999, which was _25 years ago._
| mywittyname wrote:
| AMD overtook Nvidia at times in the gaming space. I'd say that
| Nvidia has been king of the hill since the introduction of
| CUDA, since that's what really cemented their position in the
| tech sector.
| hylaride wrote:
| Pre-AMD acquisition ATI also often had better hardware specs
| than NVIDIA, but their drivers were so often buggy and
| terrible. By the time they'd been fixed the reviews were long
| since done on the initial release versions.
|
| AMD seems to run a better software shop, at least.
| reginald78 wrote:
| The 90s was an absolutely crazy period for PC hardware. So many
| flash in the pan companies making a novel devices and then
| dying entirely as their niche became obsolete. There used to be
| tons of display board manufacturers and very few of them
| survived the 3D acceleration introduction.
| tverbeure wrote:
| You'd buy a computer magazines and it almost felt like the
| performance of CPUs and GPUs when up month by month.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I have one question: wasn't the 3dfx a graphics postprocessor? I
| thought it didn't render the image in higher quality, but it did
| postprocessing only... Never had opportunity to have voodoo, but
| later, when got a decent NVIDIA, I played Need for Speed 2, which
| had demo videos "rendered in 3dfx" with snow etc, and my graphics
| was crispy and no-snowy. I tried to look up why my NVIDIA does
| not have those effects, and I learned that they were overlayed
| over the original image only by 3dfx voodoo...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| No it's definitely a 3D renderer. Glide was a competitor to
| OpenGL and Direct3D that was proprietary to 3dfx. Don't
| remember why the quality was higher.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Yeah, the earliest models are literally 3D only as discussed
| in the article, they have separate pass through cable for
| your existing 2D graphics because even just making a flat 2D
| window isn't viable directly, Glide really wants to render
| only textured triangles which is fine for Quake but no good
| for Windows.
| jrootabega wrote:
| I had one of those 3D-only cards on my first computer. I
| didn't know about the passthrough and got pretty annoyed
| that my games sucked and never worked with the hardware 3D
| stack. I don't know if they didn't document it correctly,
| or if I just missed it. But when some support person
| finally told me, I was so pumped. I spent a while manually
| moving the cable to the 3D card when playing a game, until
| I finally got a passthrough cable.
| pavlov wrote:
| The Voodoo was a 3D-only accelerator. It didn't have a
| traditional 2D graphics core at all, so you needed another
| basic video card which plugged into the Voodoo using VGA
| passthrough. When an accelerated game was launched, the Voodoo
| took over and replaced the 2D card's output completely.
|
| That's probably why you remember it being a post-processor. It
| didn't apply effects to the 2D signal, but it needed it for all
| non-accelerated programs.
|
| 3dfx also supported more blending modes than most competing
| cards at the time. That could be why the snow effect didn't
| work on your card.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I was playing around with building retro game VMs with qemu
| and pci passthrough awhile back and dusted off my old canopus
| pure 3d to try out with a pci to pcie adapter board. It was
| kind of amusing you'd have the windows desktop running in
| virt-manager and when you fired up unreal tournament the
| desktop would just freeze and only then would the card
| actually output anything.
| time0ut wrote:
| In early 2000, I cobbled together a gaming PC from used parts
| that I bought or traded for. It had a K6-2, a Voodoo 2, and 192
| MB of RAM. It was amazing and such an upgrade over my family's
| Celeron. The big games were TFC, Counter-Strike, Unreal
| Tournament, and StarCraft. We LAN'd every weekend. It was heaven.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I recall Unreal has an option to switch to use the 3dfx card, and
| if IIRC, it has some additional features like more colourful
| lights and such.
|
| Unreal was such a beast back in the day that it completes beats
| Quake 2 and other contemporary FPS even on software rendering.
| TBH it still looks beautiful even by today's standards, if you
| ignore the low polygon counts.
|
| I'm not a person who cares too much about graphics, even for FPS
| (I don't really enjoy most of the modern FPS except Wolfenstein,
| which has interesting gameplay), and I argue that too much
| graphics eye candies simply decrease the overall quality of the
| game, but 3dfx definitely was a huge bang back in the day.
| ido wrote:
| the performance boost also made a significant difference in how
| well the game played: i remembered when the voodoo 1 came out i
| had a 100mhz pentium and running quake (in low resolution) was
| "fine" but ran at like 20-25fps. With a voodoo that game ran at
| a smooth 60fps which made it so much more fun for such a fast-
| paced game (while also running at a higher resolution with
| smooth textures and improved lighting effects). It made a huge
| difference on multiple axes.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Yup it was really a huge difference. FPS really needs 60 FPS
| and up. Anything less feels clunky.
| genewitch wrote:
| Playing diablo II (R) now on a 2k 165hz display with a card
| that can run it that fast makes it real pretty. A lot of
| love went into that game.
| ben7799 wrote:
| The percentage change in resolution you ran the games at was
| also absolutely mind blowing too.
|
| For the most part we went from running the game at 320x200 or
| 320x240 to 640x480 in that first round of acceleration. I
| think in terms of % change it is a bigger leap than anything
| we've really had since, or certainly after 1920x1080.
|
| So you suddenly had super smooth graphics, much better
| looking translucency and effects, and the # of pixels
| quadupled or more and you could just see everything so much
| more clearly.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Yeah that's true. Software rendering at low resolution is
| not a good sight to look at.
|
| I remember back in 1997, when Quake 2 was just out, I sit
| in a net bar (where you pay to use a computer) and played
| an hour of Quake 2 in software rendering. The game was
| interesting, but I felt a bit sick, half due to the
| resolution, half due to the almost infinite brownish
| colour. A girl behind me murmured, "This is not as half fun
| as Duke Nukem", and yeah I completely agreed with her.
|
| I think I still agree with her somewhat. Quake 2 is a great
| game, but Duke3d is a fun one.
| codethief wrote:
| > I don't really enjoy most of the modern FPS except
| Wolfenstein, which has interesting gameplay
|
| Which Wolfenstein?
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Both the 2009 and the more recent reboot trilogy (old blood,
| the new order and II).
| p_l wrote:
| Unreal had a small menu where you could switch between
| different renderer backends precisely because of things like
| different cards having different... Driver quality let's say.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Yeah exactly! OldUnreal guys did a lot of work for this
| classic game. I believe they even have access to the source
| code.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I still remember these massive performance jumps you could get
| around the turn of the millennium. First it was Pentium 166 MMX
| (SIMD FP math), then it was 3dfx Voodoo, then it was GeForce 256
| (hardware T&L) and AMD Athlon Thunderbird (just blasting past
| anything Intel could offer).
| Sesse__ wrote:
| MMX wasn't actually that useful. The vectors were only 64 bits
| wide, you had no float support and the supported operations
| were kind of uneven... SSE and especially SSE2 were a much
| bigger leap.
| ido wrote:
| what gave the pentium mmx the big speed boost (I also
| remember it being quite significant) was probably the bigger
| 16kb cache (pentium classic had only 8kb) rather than mmx
| itself.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| Yup. More cache, higher clock speeds, slightly more
| flexible instruction pairing. Few applications used MMX
| anyway, I think.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I remember upgrading from Cyrix 5x86 to the aforementioned
| Pentium and suddenly being able to play Carmageddon.
|
| I've been thinking it was due to MMX for almost 30 years!
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| The ad campaign from which the quote "So powerful, it's kind of
| ridiculous" came:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| My memory is that during late 90s, whenever a game supports
| glide, 3dfx card will always render smoother and with noticeably
| better texture than NVIDIA and ATI cards, even benchmark will
| give you similar numbers. So we constantly envy the roommates
| with a voodoo card.
| mpalfrey wrote:
| I still am a bit of a 3dfx fanboy. Ended up emailing 3dfx at one
| stage and got sent a load of posters and case stickers (remember
| those?).
|
| I had a Voodoo Banshee which was a fairly decent card (not quite
| as good as a Voodoo 2, but better than a Voodoo Rush as a
| combined 2D/3D card). Paired to a Pentium P133 - very overkill on
| the GPU. Ended up using the same card on a AMD K6-2 500 in the
| end which was a bit more evenly matched.
|
| Then ended up buying a cheap Voodoo 5 5500 after they went under
| (only paid PS50 for it).
|
| Sadly both of them went in a dumpster a long time ago. Wish I'd
| kept them both. I ended up moving to nVidia cards for a while,
| then had an ATi Radeon. Nowadays I just run a Macbook Air for my
| personal machine - life got in the way of much gaming!
| phkahler wrote:
| >> This tale brings up many "what ifs." What if 3dfx had gotten
| the SEGA Dreamcast contract? Would both companies have been
| better off? What if 3dfx had continued simply doing chips and not
| gotten into the board business? Would 3dfx then have brought its
| products to market more quickly?
|
| What if Atari had continued with its rasterizer chip from 1983s
| I,Robot? They also had their "mathbox" for geometry
| transformations since the late 1970's. They were well equipped
| technically to enter the broader 3D graphics market in some way
| but that never happened.
| christkv wrote:
| From what i understand the chips they were offering SEGA was
| technically inferior to the Power VR ones.
| cdaringe wrote:
| Sometime in the late late 00s, i put my voodoo card on
| Craigslist. I got pinged immediately, told me he'd pay double if
| i reserved it for him. The cards were precious for keeping some
| arcade game cabinets running, and with the company no more, my
| used card was a lifeline. I wanna say it was a golf game like
| golden tee? I was delighted to make the sale and happy to charge
| him the original (not double) price
| tgtweak wrote:
| I remember upgrading to a creative labs 3dfx voodoo banshee and
| it was actually stunning - I don't think there has been a
| generational leap quite as apparent as seeing everything before
| and after that upgrade. I think I had a matrox card before that
| and it wasn't even that old. This was on a Celeron 400...
|
| I don't think we'll see a generational leap like that in the
| future.
|
| Glide was nuts on games that supported it - it was night and day.
| It took several generations of hardware for directX to surpass
| openGL.
| strictnein wrote:
| Just to add my experience to the pile: when I went to college I
| was able to convince my parents to get me a custom PC from a
| company called GamePC. Among the specs in 1998:
| 400Mhz Pentium 2 128MB Nvidia Riva TNT 3DFX
| Voodoo2 CDRW (4x4x24 I think) Syquest SparQ
| (Awesome, but had major issues) Internal Zip Drive
|
| Just a ridiculous system for the time. Quake 2 and Starsiege
| Tribes were really popular in our dorm and that system was just
| perfect for it. Also popular was burning lots of pirated games,
| so we'd order CDRs in bulk from this really random site overseas.
| High quality "gold" CDRs and they were far more reliable than any
| of the ones you'd find in stores in the US for about half the
| cost.
|
| Halfway through my freshman year I decided to swap the
| motherboard and CPU for a crazy motherboard/CPU combo. There was
| a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you
| from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz Celerons
| overclocked to ~433mhz (sometimes up to 533mhz, but that was less
| stable) and started playing around with OSs like Linux and BeOS
| to actually take advantage of them.
|
| edit: corrected the amount of memory
|
| /end reminiscing about a simpler time
| tgtweak wrote:
| Tribes was the game I remember that showcased the card best -
| you had a legitimate competitive advantage if you were running
| this card.
|
| (also, shazbot)
| foxyv wrote:
| Nothing like eating a disc to the face while you are lagging
| in mid-air on a dialup connection. <3
| tgtweak wrote:
| There was a moniker for the few people with high speed back
| then - LPB - low ping bastards. All those fortunate enough
| to live in a city with adsl or cable high speed in the
| early days (or gaming at work or university on the T1)
| goykasi wrote:
| It was deeper than that. That was just the way we were
| all classified back then: hpb (high), lpb (low), slpb
| (super-low?). When we got a cable modem in `99, I felt
| like hot shit to leave the hpb shame behind.
| genewitch wrote:
| I had something like 2-7ms ping to any server anywhere
| near Los Angeles for a _real_ long time.
|
| I was also pretty good at a lot of competitive online
| games, so accusations of botting or other shenanigans got
| old.
|
| Recently my ping to 1.1.1.1 went down to 12ms and I got
| excited.
| jorvi wrote:
| Interestingly enough, these days it's often an advantage
| to have high ping, because modern games make client-side
| hit detection authorative. With Apex Legends, Respawn
| uses the argument that playing against laggers but with
| client-side hit detection makes the bullshit that happens
| "symmetrical" and they want to keep the game accessible
| for people with poor connections, but anyone that plays
| against laggers knows that is absolutely not the case.
|
| I wish modern games would just include a Ping Lock toggle
| in the matchmaking. "Do not match me with anyone with
| poor connection quality" (>100 ping, >1% packet loss).
| With a big fat pop-up warning that it'll increase
| matchmaking times.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| That and high speed internet. I played for a couple of years
| on 28.8K. The day I got a better graphics card was great. No
| more choppiness. The day I got cable internet was life
| changing in Tribes (and Tribes 2)!
|
| I think I still have a pic somewhere of the infamous NoFix
| scolding "LPBs"
|
| "Shazbot!" "The enemy is in our base!" "Woohoo!"
| tracker1 wrote:
| I remember when Cable internet started showing up... I'd
| cart my computer to a friend's house once a month to play
| LAN party for the weekend and run updates.
|
| Back then, updates over modem took _hours_ to run, it was
| kind of crazy considering how many easily exploited bugs
| existed back then.
| superkuh wrote:
| vgh! Except that texture transparency worked with glide
| (voodoo) cards and not with opengl or software rendering. So
| if you made a custom skin with transparency texture there was
| a brief time in the Tribes 1.1 to 1.2 era where you could be
| somewhat invisible to people with voodoo cards (if your skin
| was in a skin pack that everyone had).
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I think I played Tribes 2 for more time than the time I've
| spent on every other game combined. Years!
| bombcar wrote:
| > Halfway through my freshman year I decided to swap the
| motherboard and CPU for a crazy motherboard/CPU combo. There
| was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent
| you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz
| Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz (sometimes up to 533mhz, but
| that was less stable) and started playing around with OSs like
| Linux and BeOS to actually take advantage of them.
|
| Half of HN alive at the time probably had that motherboard -
| ABIT BP6 was the reason I got my hands on a copy of W2K, and
| also started playing with Linux.
| spydum wrote:
| agree -- that dual celeron setup (often with a peltier
| cooler) was suuuper common, I knew so many people who rushed
| out to get them and run at 500? it was my second exposure to
| SMP though: First was dual socket Pentium Pro 200mhz which
| ran nt4.0 for the longest time (which I still keep that hefty
| cpu around on my desk for laughs)
| mizzack wrote:
| I also had a BP6 with two Celeron 400As. Stuck on Win98 for
| a while until Win2k graphics drivers got good enough for
| gaming.
| bombcar wrote:
| Are you me? I also started with a dual socket PPro that I
| picked up somewhere cheap (it was decent, though getting
| outdated).
|
| The only reason (I feel) all this stuff worked was because
| of how bad the P4 stank at the time, otherwise we'd all
| have been climbing the clock speed.
| kaidon wrote:
| Had pretty much the same thing... but only one overclocked
| Celeron to 433. Was amazing upgrade from my pentium 133 with
| a Matrox Millenium; which I somehow used to complete Half
| Life in low FPS agony.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I still have distinct memories of "playing" CS in 640x480
| on a PII with the same card, which didn't do 3D at all
| iirc. 12-15 fps with the software renderer, depending on
| how many bots you had.
| goykasi wrote:
| It was a cool board. I didnt technically have one, but I
| built my dad a W2K server on a BP6. I always wanted to hack
| on it and overclock with it. But after I handed it over, I
| wasnt allowed to touch it, "you'll burn up my processors."
| Since he didn't care about overclocking he had dual P2-400s
| or maybe 450s. It was a beast. He could run SQLServer and
| compile Delphi apps so hard.
|
| I got my kicks though with a BF6 and a 300A. Those were the
| times; atleast until the AthlonXPs (AXIA -- anybody?) were
| released.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm still bummed that CPU manufacturers basically killed off
| the third party chipset industry. Maybe it was inevitable
| when memory controllers moved on-die, but I remember when
| there was actual competition in the chipset business.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Like Cyrix and AMD? I don't recall any other mainstream x86
| alternatives.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Chipset, not CPU. For example, Nvidia was a well known
| chipset manufacturer around this time, shortly before
| memory controllers went on package and 3rd party chipsets
| died off.
| jorvi wrote:
| I'm slightly confused, how would games of that era benefit
| from a dual CPU setup?
|
| Old games were decidedly single-threaded and built for a
| single-core world. It was only in the mid-to-late 2000s that
| games started to be more optimized for multi-core CPUs. And
| multi-CPU is even more difficult because there isn't any
| cache sharing.
| eblume wrote:
| Well you have to have another core free to run your sick
| winamp skin, otherwise how will you keep up your K/D?
| bombcar wrote:
| That was the fun thing, they didn't really benefit - you'd
| have to get them running on Windows 2000 to even have a
| chance at using that second CPU.
|
| However, once you got that working, you could play your
| game AND listen to music at the same time! Phenomenal.
| metadat wrote:
| ABIT was such an amazing motherboard manufacturer, thanks for
| the KT7-A Thunderbird platform <3 R.I.P.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Abit
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Oh yes, fond memories of my BP6. You just felt like you're
| doing something you're not supposed to, which was fun.
| superkuh wrote:
| Ah, a fellow Tribesplayer. Just so you know, we still play
| tribes. Join us! http://playt1.com/ - the community mantains
| the master server and clients these days. There are good pick-
| up games on fri+weekends.
| tapoxi wrote:
| I love this game, it's also amazing to me how the concept of
| "skiing" was foreign to me when I first played T1 and T2, and
| now its a core game mechanic.
| Duhck wrote:
| Man I have to pick this up again. I was a top CTF, Arena, and
| duel player. I played through college competitively (2008)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really
| prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two
| 366mhz Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz
|
| Was that the BP6 motherboard from Abit?
|
| I had that board, those processors and used to overclock them
| too.
|
| Also ran Linux and BeOS on it (though IIRC you had to patch
| BeOS for SMP support).
|
| Quake 3 ran so smooth on that machine, even without Q3s
| experimental SMP support enabled.
|
| That was actually my all time favourite computer, even to this
| day.
|
| I also had a TNT2 in an earlier machine, but the BP6 machine
| had a GeForce 3.
| rvense wrote:
| > though IIRC you had to patch BeOS for SMP support
|
| The board might have require a driver or patch, but SMP was
| BeOS's entire reason for being! The drawing of each _window_
| on the screen ran in a separate thread. It was their main
| selling point.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Reading the BeOS Bible talking about that is quite a
| throwback:
|
| > As described elsewhere in this book, BeOS uses multiple
| processors with incredible efficiency. If you'll be running
| BeOS most of the time, you'll get more bang for your buck
| by getting two (or more) older processors than by
| installing one superfast CPU. Last year's 266 MHz CPUs will
| always be dirt cheap compared to today's 450 MHz CPU. Thus,
| when running BeOS, you could have 532 MHz for less than the
| cost of a single 450 MHz processor. The catch is that if
| you'll be dual-booting into operating systems that won't
| recognize a second CPU (such as Windows 95/98), you'll end
| up with half of your processor speed being wasted until you
| reboot into BeOS. Chance are that once you start using BeOS
| regularly, you won't want to use anything else, and you
| won't regret buying a multiprocessor machine.
|
| https://birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/ch_hardware1.html
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Lack of SMP was an artificial limitation for the BeOS 5
| Personal Edition (I think it was called). The idea being
| you'd get BeOS for free but you couldn't use it as a proper
| multiprocessor workstation without paying for a license.
|
| This was also the same BeOS release that targeted Intel and
| ran off a virtual disk stored on a Windows FAT32 partition.
| __xor_eax_eax wrote:
| Now that takes me back
| bluedino wrote:
| It was crazy how fast things moved back then. A friend of mine
| had a 233MHz P2 with 32GB and a 2D card, and within two years
| it was a dinosaur, being shown up by machines like yours,
| 400-450MHz, 3D cards, way more memory....
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 32 megabytes!
|
| Even HDDs were smaller back then.
| brotchie wrote:
| Similar experience, I had a Cyrix PR200 which really
| underperformed the equivalent Intel CPU.
|
| Convinced my parent's to buy a new PC, they organized with a
| local computer store for me to go in and sit with the tech and
| actually build the PC. Almost identical specs in 1998: 400Mhz
| Pentium 2, Voodoo 2, no zip drive, but had a Soundblaster Live
| ($500 AUD for this at the time).
|
| I distinctly remember the invoice being $5k AUD in 1998
| dollars, which is $10k AUD in 2024 dollars. This was A LOT of
| money for my parents (~7% of their pretax annual income), and
| I'm eternally grateful.
|
| I was in grade 8 at the time (middle school equivalent in USA)
| and it was the PC I learnt to code on (QBasic -> C -> C++),
| spent many hours installing Linux and re-compiling kernel
| drives (learning how to use the command line), used SoftICE to
| reverse engineer shareware keygen (learning x86 assembly),
| created Counterstrike wall hacks by writing MiniGL proxy dlls
| (learning OpenGL).
|
| So glad there wasn't infinity pools of time wasting (YouTube,
| TikTok, etc) back then, and I was forced to occupy myself with
| productive learning.
|
| /end reminiscing
| rachr wrote:
| I basically did the same upgrade to the Abit BP6, dual Celerons
| and BeOS. That combo was probably the snappiest system I will
| ever use.
| sejje wrote:
| OMG Tribes, totally forgot that existed.
| sporkland wrote:
| Overclocking Celeron's those were the days. Intel binning down
| a bunch of processors capable of reaching higher clock rates
| but selling them as a lower end part was a boon for college
| students everywhere.
| nwallin wrote:
| I recall the legendary Celeron being the 300A. It was 300MHz,
| but was easily overclocked to 450MHz. There were higher clocked
| versions, but regardless of which CPU you got, they ultimately
| were only able to overclock to about the same frequencies.
|
| Also, the celerons of that generation did not have unlocked
| multipliers. The only way to overclock them was to overclock
| the front side bus, which also controlled memory bandwidth. The
| "standard" FSB speed was 66MHz. By overclocking a 300MHz CPU to
| 450MHz, you got a 100MHz memory speed. By overclocking a 366MHz
| CPU to 466MHz, you "only" got 78MHz of memory bandwidth.
|
| My friend in college had one. Windows 98 didn't support SMP, so
| he had to run Windows 2000, which was based on Windows NT, and
| would be the basis for XP. Compatibility with games was
| sometimes...interesting. Windows ME came out about that time,
| but was absolute garbage. All of us either stuck with 98SE or
| experimented with 2k. None of us actually _bought_ it of
| course...
|
| Fun times.
| dmayle wrote:
| So the story originally started with the cacheless 266 Mhz
| Celeron. CPUs were delivered as AICs (add-in-cards) at the
| time, with separate cache chips, so to deliver a budget
| processor, they shipped the same silicon, but without the
| cache chips added. Removing the cache drastically tanked the
| performance, especially on integer work loads (typically
| productivity software), but didn't really affect floating
| point workloads. However, it had the side benefit of removing
| the part of the AIC that was most sensitive to over-clocking
| (the cache). It used a 66Mhz clock with a fixed 4x
| multiplier, and upping the clock to 100Mhz got the Celeron
| running at 400Mhz, which had performance roughly equivalent
| to a 266 Mhz Pentium II with cache for integer workloads, but
| for games, it was almost as fast as the fastest Pentium II of
| the time (which topped out at 450Mhz).
|
| In order to stop the overclocking, Intel decided to add some
| cache back to the CPU, but to save money, rather than using
| cache chips, they stuck a relatively tiny amount of cache
| directly on the CPU die, and released the now infamous
| Celeron 300A
|
| Because the cache was on-die, it could overclock just as well
| as the previous celeron, but this time the 300A was _faster_
| than the equivalent Pentium because the on-die cache ran at
| twice the clock speed of the external caches
| Delk wrote:
| > By overclocking a 366MHz CPU to 466MHz, you "only" got
| 78MHz of memory bandwidth.
|
| I think the PCI bus probably also typically ran at some
| fraction of the front-side bus. The common FSB frequencies
| around those times were 66 or 100 MHz which gave a standard
| ~33 MHz PCI bus frequency with a multiplier of 1/2 or 1/3.
| FSB frequencies that weren't close to a multiple of 33 MHz
| might have caused trouble with some PCI cards. Might have
| depended on how the motherboard or chipset handled the bus
| frequencies, too.
|
| Of course the PCI bus should probably always run at 33 MHz
| but I think I saw it being modified with the FSB speed at
| least on some motherboards.
| balls187 wrote:
| CR+R or CD-R
|
| Big difference.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Aren't you confusing that with DVD?
| thereticent wrote:
| I think the other commenter is right...you're thinking of
| DVD-R vs DVD+R, possibly even DVD-RW and DVD+RW.
|
| Based on the specs listed, OP was in college just before me
| or may have overlapped. The big gold CD-R stacks (you could
| bur in jewel cases, on spindles, or just gross stacks which
| were nice and cheap) were a huge thing with my group (who
| encoded to FLAC & MP3 -V0 and burned audio CDs relentlessly.
| We felt we were archiving our liberal arts college music
| library and radio library for the future! Who knows. Some of
| that "future" is still backed up and on hard disks, and I
| should migrate them to SSD or tape just on principle.
|
| At that point CD-R were cheaper than CD-RWs, and because most
| archiving/distributing didn't require rewriting (not return-
| on-investment wise anyway), we just shared programs on CD-R
| as well. In some ways it was a beautiful technology!
| Particularly fidelity to a spec everyone tried to bend and
| break for a profit angle, when honestly, there was no point
| for many of us using CD-R
| electrosphere wrote:
| I had something similar!
|
| 300Mhz PII - it came in a black cartridge thing.
|
| NVidia RIVA TNT which used the AGP bus on the Intel LX440 mobo.
|
| A whopping 128Mb of RAM and 8Gb HDD.
|
| I recall using a program called WinSplit to split the Nvidia
| driver over several floppy discs on my bosses Win3.1 machine in
| the office. I didn't have internet at home and really wanted to
| play Jedi Knight and Battlezone.
| luke727 wrote:
| Obligatory https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-
| fast/bitchi...
| jweir wrote:
| > While at SGI, Tarolli, Sellers, and Smith had all had some
| exposure to SGI's Reality Engine, and with video games
| (especially the PlayStation) moving toward 3D graphics, all three
| saw the potential for consumer 3D acceleration.
|
| Were they exposed to early versions of the Playstation? It wasn't
| publicly released until after 3dFX was formed.
|
| While working at Virgin games in 92 we did see some demos of 3D
| gaming, but I can't recall who the manufacturer was.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Playstation was in development and was released in japan almost
| a year before 3dfx released their first card. It's reasonable
| to draw that someone could have had experience working on the
| playstation graphics system prior to moving over and creating
| 3dfx. The fact they were building a prototype system for Sega
| as well means they were likely involved in that space before.
| SGI also licensed the CPU to sony for the playstation and back
| then the CPU would have done most of the graphics workload for
| the playstation - similar to an APU today with even less
| segregation between gpu and cpu.
|
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
|
| very good background on the founders up to and at the creation
| of 3dfx... some really interesting stuff in there.
| alberth wrote:
| I had a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra TNT2, I feel like that was a
| turning point in the 3dfx vs NVIDIA battle (and the subsequent
| GeForce marks NVIDIA industrial lead).
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/307
| emeril wrote:
| I had that too - it was the last gaming card I ever had, then I
| became an adult who didn't like games for better or worse
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| They didn't mention dual monitor and S-Video output. Having a
| second display was novel at the time. Using your television as
| another monitor, even more so.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Those SVCD rips looked really good on a television.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I remember so desperately wanting a 3DFX card and not being able
| to afford one (I was 13).
|
| So the next best thing I could do was create a fake boot up image
| that just flashed up showing that the PC had a 3DFX card and
| their logo.
|
| It made me happy
| sejje wrote:
| I saved like 14 months to buy a cd-rw drive. It was a nice
| Sony, I think 12x/4x. I paid like $400-some dollars for it
| around 1998 or 1999.
|
| My computer couldn't keep the buffer filled unless I ceased all
| other activity, killed backgrounded programs, etc. I made a lot
| of coasters.
| the_af wrote:
| Probably what I'm about to say is unfair because it happened
| during the last days of 3dfx, but I remember how disappointed my
| friends and I were when one of us bought a Banshee and tried to
| run some games. It ran like crap.
|
| Everything we tried ran between "very bad" and "average",
| certainly not the "wow" we were led to believe from marketing.
| Then we tried something we had high hopes for: Trespasser, the
| Jurassic Park game (it would later come to be called the "arm
| simulator", but we didn't know this back then).
|
| Trespasser ran appallingly bad with the Banshee. It sucked, plain
| and simple, almost a slide show rather than a game. We were
| sorely disappointed... with the Banshee.
|
| It turned out much later that Trespasser was a very badly
| optimized game, and it had been an unfair test of the Banshee
| because the engine ran poorly on any 3D accelerator on the
| market.
|
| But the Banshee's reputation was forever ruined for us. We still
| joke about this.
| nine_k wrote:
| There is a great instrumental chiptune heavy metal track
| dedicated to 3DFX:
| https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/track/irq-10-3dfx
| kensai wrote:
| The IPO S-1 from 1997. Very promising back then. :p
| https://secfilings.nasdaq.com/filingFrameset.asp?FilingID=46...
| afro88 wrote:
| I remember pining for a 3dfx card, and seeing a second hand Rush
| based card for sale. 13 year old me bought it. Boy was I
| disappointed :) I learnt a good lesson that day.
|
| Ended up getting a GeForce a couple of years later. Still wanted
| a Voodoo 3, but they were a little too expensive.
| dpcx wrote:
| I remember getting a Voodoo5 AGP, not knowing at the time that
| AGP and PCI were different. I couldn't use it for the first
| couple of months that I had it, and then upgraded the motherboard
| to one that could. I remember originally running a Gigabyte
| GA-6BXD with Dual Pentium IIIs, but I don't remember what I
| upgraded to that let me run the Voodoo5.
|
| The V5 was the largest card I'd ever seen that wasn't a
| motherboard, and it ran every game I wanted to play for years!
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