The History of the Modern Graphics Processor, Part 2: 3Dfx Voodoo, the game-changer

[Guest]

I remember it all really happening at once, OS advancements, graphics advancements, high bitrate digital audio, the internet and seamless networking!

 

[Guest]

I still fondly remember getting my first 3Dfx card - Maxi Gamer 3Dfx with a whopping 4MB of memory. The excitement of loading up my first 3Dfx enabled games, seeing that little 3Dfx logo spin up when the driver initialized and the game started.

It was right around the time that I was going to my friends house most weekends for LAN parties (this is before we had broadband at home, so LAN gaming was the only real way to play against each other) and enjoyed classics like Carmageddon, Quake, Unreal, etc... honestly I absolutely loved computing back then - the endless improvements and seeing drives going up from hundreds of megabytes to what we have now - terabytes!

Nice little nostalgia trip - thanks.

 

[Eddo22]

Fan of the 3dfx stuff here. My 1st purchase was the V3 2000agp and I overclocked it to 183mhz with a small fan on the heatsink. 2nd was the V5 5500agp. Never overclocked it but I was using minigl drivers for opengl which improved opengl performance quit a bit...aka it wasn't far off of the Nvidia Geforce 2 GTS and still had Glide support which most games used or supported. D3d sucked back then, it was a whitewash mess.

T&L and 32 bit rendering were overrated back then. While I can't deny their value, the Tnt2 could barely run the few games that supported 32bit rendering and most people were forced to use 16bit rendering..while 3dfx users had superior 22-bit rendering. Also, basically no games suppored T&L when the Geforce 1 came out.

Yes I'm still bitter about the whole demise situation. Would kick butt to see 3dfx competing again even under a slightly different name.

 

[Guest]

Someone needs to fire their fact checker because the article states that the Voodoo 2 was a 2D/3D card when it was not. The Voodoo 2 still had to be connected to a 2D capable video card via a pass through cable just like the original Voodoo Graphics.

 

[Per Hansson]

Someone needs to fire their fact checker because the article states that the Voodoo 2 was a 2D/3D card when it was not. The Voodoo 2 still had to be connected to a 2D capable video card via a pass through cable just like the original Voodoo Graphics.

Can you quote the context in where you read this?
Because I can't find it now and nor did I catch it when I read the article after it was posted...
Actually what I found is: "3Dfx introduced the Voodoo 2. Like its predecessor, it was a 3D only solution"
Edit: Ahh I see it now further down in that paragraph, looks like a honest mistake to me considering the above quote

 

[Jos]

"The boards sported two texturing ICs, which allowed for the first example of multitexturing found in graphics cards, and as a result it used a total of three chips instead of one and combined 2D/3D capabilities like competing cards."

@Guest above Per, if that's the part you are referring to, it only says that competing cards used a single chip and combined 2D/3D capabilities. Maybe there's a comma missing in there so I can see why you might have been confused. I tweaked the wording a little bit for clarity. Now it says "... and as a result it used a total of three chips, instead of just one combining 2D/3D capabilities like competing cards."

There, no need to fire anyone. Maybe you should hire a reading comprehension teacher

 

[Neutronman]

Wonderfully detailed article, just what I've come to expect from Techspot. Brings back so many memories, especially as you embedded the tech demo's I downloaded and ran on new hardware. I still have a bunch of Rage and Rage Pro cards in my workshop.I wonder what else I have saved.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane.

 

[yannus]

All this history of competition to reach the point where AMD and NVIDIA are the only options left. The Matrox 3dfx S3 ATI PowerVR... era was so different.

 

[BigRedPDX]

I had the 3DFx Voodoo 2 card, and I played way too much Need for Speed on that thing. After that I went to a Ti4200. After that it's a blur lol

 

[STbob]

Nice trip down memory lane. I don't think the writer lived this era like many of us. I rode that wave from 1977 to today. I was on #1 US Quake II CTF team and the set up was
Tseng Labs ET4000
3DFX Voodoo 2

He never even mentioned the ET 4000. It was the fastest 2D card around for games like Myst. So you combined the ET 4000 + a 3D card (VooDoo) To get the best of both worlds.

3D was not really a thing until the VoodDoo and Verite Came out.

I had 5,000 shares of 3DFX stock that was suppose to be traded 2 for 1 for Nvidia stocks.
meaning 10,000 shares. But Nvidias creepy lawyers found a better way. They decided not to kill off 3DFX entirely that way they did not have to trade shares. They screwed all the stock holders then after they did that they sent of letters offering them (us) to buy our own stock back at market price. Meaning 3DFX went to near zero and they had the never to offer up the stock they promised to trade. Do the math 5,000 shares at year 2000 prices + all the nvidia stock spilts since then x current price. You can see why many people were not happy with Nvidia.