I miss the 3dfx gaming days :(

M

Murry

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 24, 2005
Messages
215
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgU6cUXlr-M&feature=related"]YouTube - ‪3dfx tribute video (Surrimugge)‬‏[/ame]
 
I miss the hours upon hours of time I would spend playing Carmmaggedon on my first Voodoo card. Sigh.
 
the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament were the "Glide Bomb"....and Grand Prix Legends

DSCF6712.jpg


DSCF6726.jpg


DSCF6727.jpg


HAHA...I still have some of those games...OUTLAWS was a fun multiplayer! I still have it and others loaded on a machine
 
Last edited:
My buddy's gaming rig used to have dual Voodoo II's back in the day.

My first gaming capable rig (an eMonster 500) came with the Voodoo3 and ran Q3A like a sonofabitch; I'll always have a fondness in my heart for 3dfx. :(
 
What, seriously? Not ONE of Jane's Combat Simulation games? Those were *all* Glide titles. Longbow, Longbow 2, Jane's F-15, Jane's Fleet Command, Jane's WWII Fighters, etc.

And no 'Tribes', either. That was actually the reason I bought my first 3d card, for T1! (Well, that, and to get 3d graphics in Longbow 2)
 
I liked their box art as well as performance back then.

Voodoo 3 was my first real gfx card. Picked it up at Best Buy for 180.00, ran Unreal Tournament and Half-Life / TF amazingly well for the time.
sn151766100t.jpg
 
nice collection.

nVidia should release another VooDoo card.
 
I've been meaning to fish my old Voodoo PCI out of the attic next time I make it back home.
 
idea: head everything GPU under the voodoo name and all the arm/chipset(well, they're not doing this anymore are they?)/etc stuff under the nvidia name :p

well, its not going to happen but it would be neat!
 
Spare-Flair said:
Whiplash is my favorite racing game of all time.
Click to expand...

I can't believe I'm reading this. I too loved whiplash. It was one of a kind and not many people ever played it. Interplay FTW.

There are other fun racing game memories though.

MegaRace 2
Carmageddon 1, 2, and TDRK2000.


My favorite game of the time was Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Awesome!
 
I swear 3dfx took a dump no longer than a week after this ad was created.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o72T8qQr7GE"]YouTube - ‪3dfx all white meat commercial (gen16.com)‬‏[/ame]
 
Man I miss my sli voodoo 2s playing grueling hours of q2 online on my hpb 56k connection.
 
Who could talk 3DFX racing and not mention F1RS and MGPRS? I loved racing those titles way back in those days. I still own a complete fully working SLI setup, consisting of two 12MB Diamond Monster II cards, an AGP3500 complete with dongle, and a 2000 AGP card. I sold one of my SLI kits to a guy in Denmark about six years ago for a retro system he was building. He was 'over the moon' to have it. I still have all the games and manuals as well. One of these days, I'll build a 'retro' system just for the heck of it.
 
Golden era of PC gaming that I will cherish forever. My Voodoo 5500 lives on in an old P4 machine hooked up to a CRT, my lil bro' is learning what real gaming was all about. Bringing him up on Quake 3, UT, Half Life, Age of Empires etc.
 
This one is my favorite 3DFX commercial

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwWodYjcg9E&feature=related"]YouTube - ‪Funny Voodoo video card commercial‬‏[/ame]
 
Three commercials in one

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E311nNuhy34"]YouTube - ‪Games FTW!‬‏[/ame]

I don't think the 1:00 has been posted yet.
 
Wow this does bring back some memories!

I still have my Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3 in my basement. Ah the good ol' days of the 3DFX playing away on G-Police, Battlezone, Descent, Quake, Carmageddon, Half Life, Mechwarrior, Outlaws, POD, Skynet, Red Neck Rampage... Can't we go back lol?
 
Last edited:
I wish I never gave away my Monster Voodoo 2 8meg, I'm such an idiot. Watching Jedi Knight 2 Dark Forces load up with my Voodoo 2 vs software rendering was a pinnacle moment in my life.
 
you guys are making me want to start a 3dfx collection of my own. I have enough stuff I don't use :mad:
 
I have Voodoo2 SLI in my P3 system. It can't play Crysis.
 
If nVidia were to bring back the Voodoo name as a "Special 3dfx Edition" or "Anniversary" series of cards with slightly bumped up specs...... they would make mad loot...




...and I would be one of the first to buy a couple for "Scan Line Interleaving".
 
Dark Prodigy said:
If nVidia were to bring back the Voodoo name as a "Special 3dfx Edition" or "Anniversary" series of cards with slightly bumped up specs...... they would make mad loot...




...and I would be one of the first to buy a couple for "Scan Line Interleaving".
Click to expand...

Well, given that 3dfx was pretty much ALWAYS putting multiple chips on their cards (I think only the Voodoo 3 didn't), it might make the most sense...if nVidia were to re-use the branding...to use the 'Voodoo' label for the multi-GPU cards.

As it is, it's kinda hard to tell by name alone which cards are single-chip cards, and which are multi-GPU on one card.

I mean, seriously, "Geforce 285, Geforce 295, Geforce 560, Geforce 580, Geforce 590" etc...can you pick out which of those are dual-GPU and which aren't? (I mean, yeah, okay, WE can...but there is no outward indication of that)

Branding the multi-GPU cards as 'Voodoo' in some way might be pretty cool use of the term. "Geforce 690 Voodoo" has an okay ring to it...

[As to actually resurrecting the VSA-100 chip design in any way...I doubt it. Even if it'd be cheap as chips to do with modern processes, one only has to look at how GODAWFUL the 16-bit texture dithering support is in nVidia and ATI's current drivers to see that 'legacy games' have absolutely no interest to either manufacturer.]
 
Dark Prodigy said:
Love them or hate them, nVidia has 3dfx Voodoo soul.
Click to expand...

I'll respectfully disagree. nVidia has nothing close to having anything to do with 3dfx soul. 3dfx soul (to me) is great performance, low price. In that regard, AMD/ATi has more 3dfx soul than nVidia does, not only today but over the last few product cycles.

I'm not an nV hater by any means (hell I own 2 260s, an 8800GT and an 8400GS) but they really do need to get their ass kicked one of these generations just to get knocked off their high horse and start doing more with what they've got. AMD is killing them on price/performance, dating back a year +. But that's a topic for another thread. :)
 
zero2dash said:
3dfx soul (to me) is great performance, low price.
Click to expand...
Huh? Low price? My Voodoo2-SLI and Voodoo 5500 are the most expensive videocards I ever bought.

zero2dash said:
nVidia has nothing close to having anything to do with 3dfx soul.
Click to expand...
True! The very thought would've been sacrilege on the good old 3dfxgamers forum! Ah, the good old days of endless discussions about voodoo3's 'superior' "looks like 20-bit" 16-bit color versus TNT2's real 32-bit color! 3dfx Zombies versus Nvidiots....
 
I used to run a hardware review site waaaay back in the day, and I remember getting my hands on a Quantum3D Obsidian 24mb card... now that my friends was badass. This was before Voodoo 2 was available, with better performance... :)

It's a shame I stopped doing that, now I have to pay for my toys :)

q3d_100sb_4440.jpg
 
3dfx_zombie said:
True! The very thought would've been sacrilege on the good old 3dfxgamers forum! Ah, the good old days of endless discussions about voodoo3's 'superior' "looks like 20-bit" 16-bit color versus TNT2's real 32-bit color! 3dfx Zombies versus Nvidiots....
Click to expand...

Bah, the 32-bit color thing on the TNT2 was irrelevant. NOTHING performed well at that color depth, and games were written for 16-bit, anyway.

No, my favorite war from that period was the RAMDAC wars. Remember when it was just assumed that 'video output' meant an analog VGA port, and since the video card worked entirely in digital, the quality of the resulting 'what you see' display was ENTIRELY dependent on how high quality a RAMDAC the card had? Yeah, there were some pretty epic differences in display quality that were really VERY difficult to measure...
 
Still have a pair of V2s, one V3, and a V5 5500. Sadly sold my original Monster Voodoo.

No videocard/gaming experience has matched that first time I hooked up that Monster Voodoo, installed the Quake OGL patch, and played with the eyecandy on. I can't remember how long I stayed up playing. I always have a twinge of buyer's remorse when I buy a new videocard nowadays as I always seem to relate it to the experience of that first Voodoo and Quake.
 
punisher said:
No videocard/gaming experience has matched that first time I hooked up that Monster Voodoo, installed the Quake OGL patch, and played with the eyecandy on.
Click to expand...
VQuake came out first and was the first hardware 3D accelerated version of Quake... and it even supported anti-aliasing. ;) Carmack didn't like the Speedy3D API Rendition cards used, which is why he moved on to miniGL/OpenGL since it was generic and not tied to one manufacturer. The rest is history!

Thank Rendition's crummy API for Carmack's OpenGL decision.
 
dderidex said:
Bah, the 32-bit color thing on the TNT2 was irrelevant. NOTHING performed well at that color depth, and games were written for 16-bit, anyway.
Click to expand...
16-bit blending was ugly and while many games didn't have 16-bit color assets, they could work in 32-bit color depths and even look a bit better in some cases (fog, transparency, etc).

Seriously, I thought that 3dfx apology was long dead. 32-bit was only "bad" because 3dfx didn't support it. Suddenly when 3dfx did support it, it was good. :p Same thing with 3dfx's 256x256 texture limit. It held back progress for years.

This stuff just reminds me that 3dfx was pretty lame in its mid to later years, for those and other reasons. Like crummy drivers and for pushing its gimped GL driver as the best it could do in an effort to cling onto exclusive GLide games. </3

Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 were highlights for the company. Everything else 3dfx produced was far behind the competition in features, and often very far behind in performance.
 
GL-Quake FTW !!!

A Riva 128 with a Voodoo 1 :cool:
 
pxc said:
Seriously, I thought that 3dfx apology was long dead. 32-bit was only "bad" because 3dfx didn't support it. Suddenly when 3dfx did support it, it was good. :p Same thing with 3dfx's 256x256 texture limit. It held back progress for years.
...
Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 were highlights for the company. Everything else 3dfx produced was far behind the competition in features, and often very far behind in performance.
Click to expand...

LOL - hold on a sec, here.

What all did 3dfx release?
Voodoo 1 - 16 bit color, 256x256 textures
Voodoo 2 - 16 bit color, 256x256 textures
Voodoo 3 - 16 bit color, 256x256 textures
Voodoo 4/5 - 32 bit color, 2048x2048 textures

So you are saying that the Voodoo 1 and 2 were 'highlights' but that 'everything else' [that didn't support 32-bit color or was limited to 256x256 textures] was 'far behind'?

That's only the Voodoo 3!

At the time I'd make the argument that "32 bit was just not worth it for the performance loss", the chief competitor was the TNT2 - which just couldn't hack 32-bit color. It was more than a 50% performance loss in most cases, which made 1024x768 unplayable.

In the Voodoo 3 vs TNT2 competition, I'd take the Voodoo 3, any day. The real issue is that the VSA-100 needed to come out BEFORE the Geforce 256...and it didn't. They missed that cycle, and the Geforce 2 ended up being its competitor. Both nVidia (Geforce FX!) and ATI released products that only meaningfully outperformed their competitor's last-gen parts, and yet both survived without issue. 3dfx didn't. (Which is a damn shame, really, as when using 4xAA, the Voodoo 5 actually DID manage to outperform even the Geforce 2 in nearly every case...but almost no reviewer thought FSAA was important at the time in favor of raw framerate, and with no AA, even the Geforce 256 DDR creamed the Voodoo 5)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top