A Stroll Down Memory Lane: Best 3Dfx Glide Games

[Guest]

My first video card was a Voodoo 3. (I still have it in storage.)

Funny story: About 6 years ago, the video card in my PC died (an ATI Radeon). I didn't have another PCIe card & no built-in video, and I absolutely had to use my computer for something (probably check email), so I dug out my old 128MB PCI Voodoo 3 and plugged it into my XP machine.

Damn if it didn't work! It was dog slow, I couldn't run above 1024x768 and it didn't support DirectX, but XP included Voodoo drivers on the install CD so I could use it.

I used my PC like that for about a week (even watched TV in a 640x480 window). Amazing piece of hardware.

 

[Guest]

Tribes. I had a PII 400mhz, and tribes looked like crap, added a 2nd hand voodoo2 8mb and switched it over to glide rendering, and it changed everything.

 

[Reavance]

I hate that I know this, but that screenshot of Tomb Raider 2 is actually from Tomb Raider 1.

No, it isn't.

 

[Guest]

Of course UNREAL 1 ...most groundbreaking Title in 3d Gaming EVER

WARZONE 2100 , the BEST RTS and imho the first one that was on 3DFX

 

[Eddo22]

Still got my original Voodoo 3 2000 agp, Voodoo 5 5500 agp.

Picked up since then:

Diamond Monster 3d II 8 mb
Maxi Gamer 3d2 Voodoo 2 12 mb
Voodoo 3 3000 pci
Voodoo 5 5500 pci

I've also got a few old machines set up so I can use them if I want.

Oh yeah and D3d sucked bigtime back then. Whitewash textures galore.

With WickedGl you could usually get a nice fps boost in Opengl and even in the Voodoo 5 days most games still supported Glide.

Now days you just grab Nglide and you can run Glide in 32bit color with AA and AF...whereas 22-bit color was the previous best.

Speaking of Nostalgia, you can go to http://www.zeus-software.com/galleries/nglide and check out single pics of old glide based games.

 

[OortCloud]

Remember the first time I ran up unreal on my Diamond Voodoo2 and the start menu screen did that swooping camera ride around a castle with burning torches and reflective marble floors. Exciting times!

 

[red1776]

When I saw Mech Warrior's screenshot I thought it was Starsiege.

Man, that game was amazing.

I am proud to own some of the games on this list, even though I never owned a real graphics card (3dfx) in the past.

Ahhh Starsiege I keep waiting for that game to be brought up. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had seen . Remember when everyone would gang up on the guy with the slow ping time?
hehe. I still have the inch thick manual for it. it was option rich for its time.

 

[Cooper mckay]

For my 13th birthday I got a K62 450mhz 64 mb ram and eventually a 3DFX Voodoo Banchee! Good times.

 

[PatrickCT]

Quake2 never had glide support, not did Q1. They had a miniGL driver for voodoo cards, as did half life, and the other Q1&2 engine games. The miniGL was a subset of of OpenGL commands that the voodoo cards could execute. The V5 was the 1st 3dfx card to have full OpenGL implementation. Descent3 had glide support. My 1st card was a V3 and I played a host of circa 2000 games with it: Unreal, UT, half life, AvP, Draken, Q1, Q2, Q3, Thief, and I'm sure others that I can't remember. Unreal wasn't the quake killer, it was the quake2 killer; it's graphics and immersion blew Q2 out of the water. It was the glide showpiece. And the masterpiece that was (and still is imho) UT. I still have a V5 and a 1.4GHz P3 setup, waiting for thief2, system shock 2 and deus ex!

 

[Guest]

Turok 1

 

[ET3D]

Never had a 3dfx. My first 3D card was a ViRGE DX 3D decelerator. Tomb Raider was amazing with bilinear filtering (though slower than with software rendering). I later had an ATI Rage II+ DVD. My only discrete video accelerator was a Matrox M3D (PowerVR).

 

[Nobina]

I remember playing NFS 2 SE as a kid. What a great game.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

"The year was 1998. It was Christmas time and I had just received my very first computer".
Still a noob eh? I remember my first proper personal computer was an Intel 8088 which replaced my Apple IIe which I still have stashed away somewhere.

 

[MarkHughes]

Amd K6-2 500Mhz, Voodoo 3 and Rainbow Six, had them then and still do today.
A gamer since the days of pong, seeing the graphics evolve has been interesting.
Hope I live long enough to experience the holodeck.
Thinh I'll go play some Red Storm Rising on my Commodore 64, now that was a game.

Same here, Started on the Atari 2600 with Combat, Pong and PacMan and worked up through the C64 and Amiga's. My first PC had a K62 500 (IIRC) but I was still using my Amiga 1200 until 2008 ish.

Graphics to this day never cease to amaze me, Though I feel in the last 5 years or so they haven't made the massive jumps they used to it's still fascinating to watch scenes being rendered at 50+ fps that look for the most part like film footage. I think there is still a lot more to come though

 

[EClyde]

The card was a game changer. Did Q2 and NFS.

 

[Endarial]

My very first video card I ever purchased was a Diamond Monster Voodoo 4MB add in card. I remember sticking it in my machine and loading up Star Wars Dark Forces 2 and laughing and giggling at how amazing the game looked and ran. I could finally play it maxed out on my system at 640x480. I used that card right up until I bought my next card, which was a Voodoo Banshee 16MB card.

For me, 2 of the most memorable moments in my PC life were installing that first 4MB Voodoo card and years later, installing my first multi-core cpu.

 

[Bigtruckseries]

My first computer was a HP PAVILION 8570c Pentium III 450MHz with onboard graphics and 96MB of RAM. I had a CDRW and the computer ran Windows 98 which I updated to Windows XP.

I later upgraded to a Voodoo III 3000 and 128MB of RAM, a SONY DVD-RW.

I finally upgraded to a Geforce MX400.

Quake 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun and Half Life were the first PC Games I bought - followed by Aliens Vs. Predator and Soldier of Fortune.

Seeing the jump in graphics using Open GL mode on Quake 2 - rather than Glide (which looked washed out) was astounding.

Nvidia Geforce is a better product than Voodoo, but I have to say that their advertising and marketing was genius.

I'm still upset I never had a chance to get the Voodoo 3 3500TV or the Voodoo 5 5500.

I do still have that tower, so who knows? Maybe I'll give it a final upgrade before putting it back on the shelf.

 

[JudasSheep]

I didn't learn computers until I joined the Mil in 1999 (age 22). My first machine I built for myself was in 2000 and was a 600MHz PII with 128MB ram, with a Voodoo2 (gift from friend) paired with a Matrox 8Mb regular card. This allowed me to play Quake II and Half Life. I have been hooked on PC gaming since. I later upgraded to a second processor as my Mobo was a Dual Slot 1 and I could flash the bios to accept a PIII. To use both procs I had to run Windows NT 4 but still was able to game. Oh those were the days! Counter Strike came to me soon after and using Rodger Wilco for voice was so amazing!

Looking at these pictures, I think holy crap I played that?! Looks like dog s**t on a display!

 

[mcborge]

My first video card upgrade like a lot of users was a TNT2. I kind of miss those early days and all the exciting new hardware we'd see in the magazines of the time. The graphics seemed amazing, and each new game would look better than the last.

Yeah I got one of those for for my first build (k6-2 400) and to play quake 2... Those were the days...

 

[Unearthed]

OMG I had that graphic card.. lol I upgraded from a Hercules Stingray 128bit 3D Voodoo to the Diamond Monster 3d Voodoo 2 graphic card.


Back then I was playing Unreal, Quake 2 and Unreal tournament. Motocross Madness, Sin and Incoming were fun.

Shortly after 3dfx released the Monster 3d 2 I bleieve Nvidia released the Riva TNT and there was no looking back ever since. I've owned almost every generation of graphic card since the 3DFX series.

 

[Jeff Schmidt]

I feel super old looking at this. Because I had a diamond monster voodoo 2 8mb card that I spent 150 bucks on used. Those were 3d "add on" cards.

I then remember spending 250 bucks on a voodoo 3 video card. That I think had a whole 16mb of memory on it. Which probably ran in the single or double digits for speed.

 

[Gamezalot]

Great article! I had nearly all of these games back in the day and I still have an old 3Dfx card in storage with other PC hardware of days gone by! Kids these days just don't know how good they have it!

 

[Ranger1st]

..at that point ij time I had an Evans and Sutherland Real Image 2100 and Evans and Sutherland Tornado 3000 30MB. About $8000 worth of graphics cards right there. Awesome for MAX and Softimage ect. But ridiculously fast for games that supported Open GL.. ( still have both cards as they were apparently very rare. )

 

[lipe123]

Never had a Voodoo, A friend in the dorm had a Voodoo2. I had a Riva TnT2 and it sure worked quite well on those games. Couldn't really tell any difference between my card and the voodoo graphics.
Think I still had a Pentium 2 166 at that point!

Later I got a Geforce 2MX golden sample off some wholesale distributor place and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread lol.

I downloaded and installed the original unreal 1 about a year ago on my new pc and it still worked! The nostalgia lvl was over 9000.

 

[tipstir]

I still have my old 386SX running a Diamond Stealth Graphic card but back then there was so many drivers issues.