RIP 3dfx - RIP Voodoo

[Anonymous No.7177960]

20 years ago today 3dfx went bankrupt. Never had a more sturdy and bugfree performance since from a GPU than from Voodoo cards.

Convinced my father to buy a Voodoo 1 (or was it a 2?) bundled with Mech Warrior 2 when I was in third or fourth grade, so I could play Jedi Knight. No idea how I managed that. A few years later I had many of my formative gaming experiences on a Voodoo 3: Half-Life, DeusEx, Thief, Blood 2.

Sucks that Voodoo 4/5s are relatively expansive. Never owned one and would like to build a PC with one but +$400 for a 20 year old card is a bit much for me.

Post your 3dfx memories.

[Anonymous No.7177964]

This is a Nintendo board.

[Anonymous No.7177972]

>>7177964
Snes9x ran great on Voodoo.

[Anonymous No.7178252]

>>7177964
The first playable N64 emu UltraHLE relied on 3dfx glide to run

[Anonymous No.7178275]

>>7177960
shouldn't have fucked with sega

[Anonymous No.7178279]

I do not miss the days of having to use glide wrappers.

[Anonymous No.7178281]

Should I try to get a Voodoo card for my retro PC or are there better GPUs for Windows 98/Pentium III era stuff?

I may also try to run an older OS as well, just for the record.

[Anonymous No.7178319]

>>7178281
Would go with Voodoo. Riva TNT2 is decent if you want to go with Nvidia and you can still get the Detonator drivers from Nvidia's website. Anything else from this era you can ignore (sorry ATI Rage)

[Anonymous No.7178505]

>>7177960
I loved my Voodoo3, it's when 3DFX got their shit together and produced a solid card. But by the time V4 and V5 came out they were over taken by team red and blue

[Anonymous No.7178554]

I remember classmate was telling stories, that with 3dfx if you come close to the wall (like in doom), the wont be made of big square pixels. This was the time, when Quake in 320x200 was the best one can run (only consoles people have at the time were Mega Drive and rarely PSX). Everyones opinion wss that he was lying. And then I've seen Quake2 in 800x600 glide mode in computer club - it was mindblowing. Got a Voodoo 3 some years later, remember playing Earth 2150 glide, it looked much better than directx, but 16 bit colors only. Also spent countless hours in Unreal Tournament with it.

[Anonymous No.7178618]

Voodoo 2 SLI.

[Anonymous No.7178650]

>>7177960
>No one will ever need more than 16-bit color. Let's max out the Voodoo 3 at that rate!
>threaten authors of glide wrappers
https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/04/08/1345204/3dfx-attacks-on-glide-wrapper-authors-rage-on

They deserved to die a horrible death

[Anonymous No.7178667]

Did they get rid of it . Because it was too good ?

[Anonymous No.7179328]

>>7177960
I had a Voodoo3 3000 PCI that was a hand me down from a friend who felt bad that I was scrapping by with a RAGE 128.

[Anonymous No.7179364]

It surprises me what old GPUs can go for. I have a fondness for this 6800gt and thought maybe I could finally own one without spending much money these days, but it seems I won't ever own one, unless I luck upon one in person. When is the best window to buy stuff like this anyway? Like 5-7 years after release?

[Anonymous No.7179425]

>>7177960
>(or was it a 2?)
It was a 1.
>>7178554
>I remember classmate was telling stories, that with 3dfx if you come close to the wall (like in doom), the wont be made of big square pixels.
I remember, bilinear filtering was such a huge thing at the time. Blurry as fuck, but not seeing huge pixels was absolutely mind-blowing at the time.

[Anonymous No.7179457]

>>7177960
still have mine

[Anonymous No.7179460]

>>7178281
I'd say do both.
Voodoo 2, maybe SLI, plus a good 2D GPU that runs the games the Voodoo can't.
Exactly what the other card should be depends entirely on what you're playing. Back then every game had its own incompatibilities and the workaround for issues was always "just buy a different card sucker!"
For general compatibility with Windows 98 games I'd say a Geforce 2. If you're willing to make sacrifices for the sake of speed then Geforce 4 or FX-series. If running a Pentium 3 faster than 550Mhz forget about compatibility anyways and just get the fastest Geforce FX or earlier you can.
If you don't care for later 9x-era stuff but wanna play DOS games that require a Voodoo 1? Then an S3 card even a later one is fine combined with a Voodoo 1.
A Voodoo 3 is fine for a beginner build. If you decided to go with separate 2D and 3D cards some games require fucking around you may not like but a V3 is all in one card so it doesn't need such things but it sacrifices a lot of compatibility especially in non-Glide games.
As for other brands, ATI Rage was good on Mac and fucking amazing in Linux but absolutely worthless on Windows. Radeon didn't get good till the XP-era. Matrox is the king of image quality but you probably don't care about it and compatibility wise they're only useful for early Windows 95 games.
Everything else like Kyro usually has one or two games that have their absolute best version exclusive to those cards but are complete garbage otherwise. And ain't saying if those couple games are any good no matter what card you're playing on.

[Anonymous No.7179562]

>>7179328
Yea. Base Rage 128 was Shit. Rage 128 Pro would have been about the same as the 3000 minus Glide.

[Anonymous No.7179567]

>>7179364
Ohhh.. An AGP 6800gt. Yea.. You'd have to spend at least fifty bucks to get one of those. They usually go for closer to 80 to a hundred. I got an AGP 6800 Extreme I've yet to put into a system.

[Anonymous No.7179570]

>>7179457
Offf... You bought the AGP instead of the PCI.

[Anonymous No.7179580]

I just found this Saturday. I had a tub I hadn't looked at in almost a decade. And I found a treasure trove of cards I don't remember having all just thrown in there with a bunch of other junk. This was in there. I'm pretty sure it's dead at the moment, but I'm thinking about warming it up with a hair dryer and moving the big IC's shorted legs away from each other with out breaking them to see if that's why this was thrown in there.

[Anonymous No.7179581]

>>7179570
AGP is better if you have multiple expansion cards in your system to reduce the need for fucking around with bus mastering.
The card is internally PCI anyways.

[Anonymous No.7179592]

>>7179581
I could see that, but for most AGP systems I'd rather put in something more powerful than that.

[Anonymous No.7179601]

>>7177960
Even the Box for the 3000 pci is bad fucking ass.

[Anonymous No.7179603]

>>7179580
Anybody have any tips on moving bent legs on those Big 3DFX chips with out breaking them? Should I skip trying to use something steel and see if I can find something thin enough made out of plastic or wood?

[Anonymous No.7179614]

>>7179567
Yeah, it sucks that I wanted the evga one with the mermaid specifically too. It probably seems dumb but my ti4200 and fx5500 were from evga back then and I just wanted that exact card really bad back then. (Nvidia really needs to make a tech demo with a cute fairy/mermaid character again.)

[Anonymous No.7179674]

>>7179614
No, my old DDR Geforce was a Creative Card and I really like buying Creative Graphics Cards when I can.