3dfx Voodoo5 6000 Revival

erek

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
Messages
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Check out this amazing story! Happening currently! A picture is worth a thousand words @

"Today I have received a pair of Voodoo5 6000 3700 A in dead condition for fixing from Germany. First impression is not good besides Chip Hint in both cards is dead seems there are more components damaged.

I will see what I can do. What amazing card though! I LOVE her. #3dfx"

https://twitter.com/oscar_barea/status/1268489038895493122
 
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Just because I have to...
Screenshot_20200605-005357~2.png
 
What I think is amazing is there was a time when there were five different GPU makers.

I was sad when 3DFX went away, they pretty much brought 3D to the personal computer. I remember playing the original Doom with a 3DFX card at 640x480 on a CRT thinking, "wow, 3D is amazing."

Shooters are boring to me now, but back then it was something new. Before that we only had arcade games like Asteroids and Pac-Man or TV consoles with games like Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. Consoles couldn't come within a mile of what a PC could do after 3DFX came on the scene. Took consoles many years to catch up.
 
I was sad when 3DFX went away, they pretty much brought 3D to the personal computer. I remember playing the original Doom with a 3DFX card at 640x480 on a CRT thinking, "wow, 3D is amazing."
Doom did not have 3d acceleration. It did not even have correct software 3d (I'm not referring to the 2.5D map layout that people usually refer to. I mean the perspective is actually incorrect, try looking up or down in heretic/hexen to see what i mean).
You might be referring to Quake?
 
Doom did not have 3d acceleration. It did not even have correct software 3d (I'm not referring to the 2.5D map layout that people usually refer to. I mean the perspective is actually incorrect, try looking up or down in heretic/hexen to see what i mean).
You might be referring to Quake?

Yeah, GLQuake was the first time I remember properly rendered 3D FPS being a thing.

MechWarrior II was one of the games with an early patch for my Matrix Mystique 3D back then as well as I recall.

There was also some motorcycle game that came with the Mystique, that was 3D "light" reminiscent of something you'd see on a first gen PlayStation. I do recall that motorcycle game being the first time I felt smooth framerates though!

Edit:

After some googling I am fairly certain that the motorcycle game that shipped with my European Matrox Mystique version was Moto Racer.



I remember it being somewhat of a boring game, but at the same time I remember being very impressed with the smooth framerate for the time.
 
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Doom did not have 3d acceleration. It did not even have correct software 3d (I'm not referring to the 2.5D map layout that people usually refer to. I mean the perspective is actually incorrect, try looking up or down in heretic/hexen to see what i mean).
You might be referring to Quake?

Heretic and Hexen were fucking amazing. I'd love to see those have a comeback. That, and Rise of the Triad.

I had the Matrox m3D for my first 3D experience with Unreal. It was unreal. Just blew me away. Never wanted 3Dfx over the TNT series because it only did 16 bit color (or 24? I can't remember) for the longest time. I was petty as fuck.

Those really were the days, though. Going from software 3D to hardware accelerated 3D. Those days are long gone where it wasn't an evolutionary change, it was revolutionary. It was some major, huge difference over the previous versions.
 
I think legacy doom had a glide renderer before OpenGL but that was well after quake iirc.
 
dogs4gw for the win!!!

Now if you remember that particular program... ;)

But if I remember correctly the first game to come out with a real 3d feel that even had jetpacks and such was duke nukem 3d right?
 
Yeah, GLQuake was the first time I remember properly rendered 3D FPS being a thing.

MechWarrior II was one of the games with an early patch for my Matrix Mystique 3D back then as well as I recall.

There was also some motorcycle game that came with the Mystique, that was 3D "light" reminiscent of something you'd see on a first gen PlayStation. I do recall that motorcycle game being the first time I felt smooth framerates though!

Edit:

After some googling I am fairly certain that the motorcycle game that shipped with my European Matrox Mystique version was Moto Racer.



I remember it being somewhat of a boring game, but at the same time I remember being very impressed with the smooth framerate for the time.


People seem to forget about Rendition's Verite V1000 chipset -- I was playing Quake with accelerated 3D (VQuake) on my 3D Blaster PCI months before the Voodoo crew was! Yes, 3dfx was ultimately the one that popularized 3D-accelerated first-person shooters, but it wasn't the first.
 
People seem to forget about Rendition's Verite V1000 chipset -- I was playing Quake with accelerated 3D (VQuake) on my 3D Blaster PCI months before the Voodoo crew was! Yes, 3dfx was ultimately the one that popularized 3D-accelerated first-person shooters, but it wasn't the first.


You are right. I had completely forgotten about them

It's crazy that there were so many competitors all trying to make 3D chips back then:
- 3D Labs
- 3DFX
- ATI
- Matrox
- Number Nine
- Nvidia
- PowerVR (NEC/Videologic)
- S3
- SiS
- Rendition

It's kind of sad that there are only two real contenders these days. Two competitors is not enough for a truly competitive market.
 
You are right. I had completely forgotten about them

It's crazy that there were so many competitors all trying to make 3D chips back then:
- 3D Labs
- 3DFX
- ATI
- Matrox
- Number Nine
- Nvidia
- PowerVR (NEC/Videologic)
- S3
- SiS
- Rendition

It's kind of sad that there are only two real contenders these days. Two competitors is not enough for a truly competitive market.

That seems to be the way tech shakes out, unfortunately: there's two companies that rise to the top in a given category, and the rest flounder. Apple and Google, AMD and Intel... it's just a question of which companies and whether they'll dominate in any other areas. The console market is something of an exception, although in terms of raw sales Nintendo and Sony are out front.

On that note, Matrox is still around -- it's just much more focused on business customers and doesn't have illusions of beating GeForce and Radeon cards at their own game. A bit like BlackBerry in that it's a shadow of its former glory, but likely safer because of that.
 
The console market is something of an exception, although in terms of raw sales Nintendo and Sony are out front.

Whaa? It seems like only yesterday I was hearing stories about how Nintendo was down and out, and the only consoles that mattered were the Xbox and the Playstation.

I haven't heard or seen anything of interest from Nintendo in AGES.

On that note, Matrox is still around -- it's just much more focused on business customers and doesn't have illusions of beating GeForce and Radeon cards at their own game.

Yeah, they seem to have focused on basic graphic chips with large numbers of video outs in order to support video walls these days.

They are a sad shadow of their former glory.

I remember when the MGA Matrox Millennium was the best SVGA card money could buy, in large part to their class leading RAMDAC's
 
Whaa? It seems like only yesterday I was hearing stories about how Nintendo was down and out, and the only consoles that mattered were the Xbox and the Playstation.

I haven't heard or seen anything of interest from Nintendo in AGES.

Switch sales have been strong from the get-go, and they've been surging through the pandemic -- it's really tough to buy a standard Switch right now, and even the Switch Lite isn't guaranteed to be available. Turns out people really like a system they can use as both a living room and a handheld console, and which has lots of well-known games that are family-friendly.
 
Yes, 3dfx was ultimately the one that popularized 3D-accelerated first-person shooters, but it wasn't the first.

Hmm, I thought 3DFX developed hardware accelerated 3D and brought it to market first. So who invented the idea?

That seems to be the way tech shakes out, unfortunately:

Sad but true, then if one bows out we're done for competition. Another area where that seems to be happening is retail motherboards. There used to be more makes than you could count on your fingers and toes. Now there's four, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, Asus.
 
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Hmm, I thought 3DFX developed hardware accelerated 3D and brought it to market first. So who invented the idea?

Nah, That stuff had existed for some time in arcade boxes. The only reason 3DFX was able to do what they were able to do in 1996 was because all of a sudden RAM that was fast enough to support rendering pipelines became much cheaper than it had previously been. Same reason the original Playstation, which had some hardware supported 3D acceleration came out in the mid 90's.

There were a whole bunch of companies working on 3D accelerated PC video cards at the time (see my previous post). They all invented their own little designs of it, but the concept overall was not new at the time. Just prohibitively expensive for consumer applications. Matrox cards had some form of limited 3D acceleration for the CAD/Professional market years before 3DFX.

Edit:

According to Wikipedia the first hardware accelerated raster graphics was called SuperPaint and was developed by Xerox PARC in 1972. One of the develoeprs of this system later went on to join (Richard Shoup) later went on to join Industrial Light and Magic in 1980, and was among the founding members of Pixar.
 
Wait, was this a real product that consumers could buy?

No

It was a joke in MaximumPC magazine.

Or are you talking about the Voodoo 5 6000 it was making fun of? Then also no.

It was repeatedly delayed and never made it to market before they folded.

Rumor had it it would have beat a GeForce 2 Ultra had it launched, but the profit margins would have been razor thin with it's complex design compared to Nvidias and ATI's single chip designs.
 
It's crazy that there were so many competitors all trying to make 3D chips back then:

- PowerVR (NEC/Videologic)

Power VR is still around , though really just in the mobile space. Their new IMG A-Series looks pretty impressive as a new graphics IP
 
Whaa? It seems like only yesterday I was hearing stories about how Nintendo was down and out, and the only consoles that mattered were the Xbox and the Playstation.

I haven't heard or seen anything of interest from Nintendo in AGES.



Yeah, they seem to have focused on basic graphic chips with large numbers of video outs in order to support video walls these days.

They are a sad shadow of their former glory.

I remember when the MGA Matrox Millennium was the best SVGA card money could buy, in large part to their class leading RAMDAC's

I ran a G400 Max, really loved that card
 
I had the Matrox m3D for my first 3D experience with Unreal. It was unreal. Just blew me away. Never wanted 3Dfx over the TNT series because it only did 16 bit color (or 24? I can't remember) for the longest time. I was petty as fuck.

While the TNT and TNT2 cards could do 32 bit color, they took a considerable performance hit doing so. If using period correct hardware, you had to drop the resolution down to 640x480 to run 32 bit color at playable performance. Even though the Voodoo2/3 only did 16 bit color, it tended to look fine in most games, the only issue was the blurry textures.

I built up a Windows 98 machine on my test bench last night and tested four different cards video quality. All cards were run at 1024x768 32 bpp except for the Voodoo3 obviously. All cards except for the Matrox G200 were in OpenGL mode, the Matrox had horrible artifacting in OpenGL mode, which I expected because Matrox sucked with OpenGL. All of my Matrox cards have issues with OpenGL.

Voodoo3 3000:
yHSYN0k.png

Nvidia TNT:
Gg9bogO.png

Nvidia TNT2:
drATbHD.png

Matrox G200:
KjTIl3b.png

Ran them on:

iWill VD-133
PIII 550
256 MB PC-133

tUMPm9qh.jpg
OCeJ98Mh.jpg


Matrox wins the quality award, but 9 fps is not at all playable, even for expected standards back then. Voodoo3 3000 wins the performance award. I tried to toss the Kyro II in but the drivers didn't want to behave.
 
What I think is amazing is there was a time when there were five different GPU makers.

I was sad when 3DFX went away, they pretty much brought 3D to the personal computer. I remember playing the original Doom with a 3DFX card at 640x480 on a CRT thinking, "wow, 3D is amazing."

Shooters are boring to me now, but back then it was something new. Before that we only had arcade games like Asteroids and Pac-Man or TV consoles with games like Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. Consoles couldn't come within a mile of what a PC could do after 3DFX came on the scene. Took consoles many years to catch up.
PC's did a lot of shit between Donkey Kong and Doom, and no Doom wasn't even 3DFx accelerated. Quake was the first I think with a patch.
I question your legitimacy here. You seem to be missing decades. LOL!
 
While the TNT and TNT2 cards could do 32 bit color, they took a considerable performance hit doing so. If using period correct hardware, you had to drop the resolution down to 640x480 to run 32 bit color at playable performance. Even though the Voodoo2/3 only did 16 bit color, it tended to look fine in most games, the only issue was the blurry textures.

I built up a Windows 98 machine on my test bench last night and tested four different cards video quality. All cards were run at 1024x768 32 bpp except for the Voodoo3 obviously. All cards except for the Matrox G200 were in OpenGL mode, the Matrox had horrible artifacting in OpenGL mode, which I expected because Matrox sucked with OpenGL. All of my Matrox cards have issues with OpenGL.

Voodoo3 3000:
View attachment 251423

Nvidia TNT:
View attachment 251424

Nvidia TNT2:
View attachment 251425

Matrox G200:
View attachment 251426

Ran them on:

iWill VD-133
PIII 550
256 MB PC-133

View attachment 251427
View attachment 251428


Matrox wins the quality award, but 9 fps is not at all playable, even for expected standards back then. Voodoo3 3000 wins the performance award. I tried to toss the Kyro II in but the drivers didn't want to behave.
G200? Come on. Make an even play field with a G-400 MAX.
 
While the TNT and TNT2 cards could do 32 bit color, they took a considerable performance hit doing so. If using period correct hardware, you had to drop the resolution down to 640x480 to run 32 bit color at playable performance. Even though the Voodoo2/3 only did 16 bit color, it tended to look fine in most games, the only issue was the blurry textures.

I built up a Windows 98 machine on my test bench last night and tested four different cards video quality. All cards were run at 1024x768 32 bpp except for the Voodoo3 obviously. All cards except for the Matrox G200 were in OpenGL mode, the Matrox had horrible artifacting in OpenGL mode, which I expected because Matrox sucked with OpenGL. All of my Matrox cards have issues with OpenGL.

Voodoo3 3000:
View attachment 251423

Nvidia TNT:
View attachment 251424

Nvidia TNT2:
View attachment 251425

Matrox G200:
View attachment 251426

Ran them on:

iWill VD-133
PIII 550
256 MB PC-133

View attachment 251427
View attachment 251428


Matrox wins the quality award, but 9 fps is not at all playable, even for expected standards back then. Voodoo3 3000 wins the performance award. I tried to toss the Kyro II in but the drivers didn't want to behave.

Honestly, they all look the same to me.
 
That seems to be the way tech shakes out, unfortunately: there's two companies that rise to the top in a given category, and the rest flounder. Apple and Google, AMD and Intel... it's just a question of which companies and whether they'll dominate in any other areas. The console market is something of an exception, although in terms of raw sales Nintendo and Sony are out front.

On that note, Matrox is still around -- it's just much more focused on business customers and doesn't have illusions of beating GeForce and Radeon cards at their own game. A bit like BlackBerry in that it's a shadow of its former glory, but likely safer because of that.

I remember reading some research a while back that depending on the market, you need 3-4 true competitors for free market competition (capitalism) to work. Can't seem to find it right now.

It kind of explains why the CPU and GPU markets are so broken, and have been for decades.

The thing is, these large corproate conglomerates don't want to compete. They want a cosy little niche to sit in and jack up prices so customers have to pay and they don't need to do much to innovate. Thats why you see so many of these businesses dropping out of markets if they cant take the #1 or #2 spot, and it's a crying shame. I think we have business schools to blame for that.
 
Honestly, they all look the same to me.

That was the sentiment of most people at the time, the detail differences were not that far apart so they opted for the better performer, which would have been a 3dfx card until the Geforce came along.

There are detail differences between all four images, you just have to know what you're looking for.

qW6ygmL.png

Here's an example with the light and the computer panel, as well as the eye scanner. The Voodoo3 and TNT2 has some weirdness going on with dithering. The TNT2 seems to have different "LODs" that just step the texture detail with three different steps. The G200 has a linear detail falloff and looks better.

The eye scanner shows far away detail, which surprisingly the TNT wins at. I'd say the G200 is second, TNT2 third and the Voodoo3 last.

What I didn't get a picture of is the Z fighting issues on the Voodoo3, which is pretty bad in some areas.
 
I remember reading some research a while back that depending on the market, you need 3-4 true competitors for free market competition (capitalism) to work. Can't seem to find it right now.

Not trying to derail the thread, but makes sense to me. When we had 4 companies life was good. But now.....eh.

I think the problem is that any corporate entity by nature will attempt to be dominate. That means it will seek to conquer the competition. With computers it happened insanely fast. One small mistake can be enough to bankrupt a company. That means little room for recovery....and mistakes will happen.
 
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