I miss the 3dfx gaming days :(

I don't get the nostalgia for 3dfx.

They fucked up and the company died. If they'd remained competitive they would still be around.

Though I still remember being impressed walking outside of the ship in Unreal just after I installed my Creative Labs Voodoo Banshee.
 
bart1975 said:
Good thing you can get a good glide wrapper and relive the experience.
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Not the same as playing on an old retro box with 3dfx era hardware in it.

V5-5500 FTW.

Too bad I don't have the time to do gaming on my retro box... Been sitting in the corner for over a year just collecting dust.
 
Decibel said:
I don't get the nostalgia for 3dfx.
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You'd have to have experienced going from software mode to hardware mode to appreciate the nostalgia.

I remember running Motoracer for the first time with a orchid voodoo1 and it was just amazing. The framerate was so smooth i could finally play the game the way it was meant to be played.

Then I played Tombraider with the 3dfx patch and it was just a land slide from there. I just couldn't get enough of it.

3dfx as a company may have been crappy but 3dfx as one of the major pioneers of modern gaming can't be dismissed. Just to put it into perspective. If we would have stayed on software rendering, it wasn't until cpus hit 2.2Ghz were they finally able to match Voodoo2 speeds.

there is a great video with 3dfx employee interviews, if you haven't watched them check out

Part1
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIPStpvkSwE"]YouTube - ‪3dfx employee interviews 1997 vintage (PART ONE)‬‏[/ame]

Part2
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDD4PlqHIbs"]YouTube - ‪3dfx employee interviews 1997 vintage (PART TWO)‬‏[/ame]

Part3
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbKkbL6u0qw"]YouTube - ‪3dfx employee interviews 1997 vintage (PART THREE)‬‏[/ame]
 
Brent_Justice said:
Best combo I ever had was an ATI Radeon Xpert@Play 8MB and a Diamond Monster Voodoo2 12MB. The Xpert@Play (Rage Pro GPU), allowed 32-bit color D3D support, superior 2D image quality and MPEG-1 hardware acceleration, but the drivers sucked at OpenGL. The Voodoo2 therefore came in and allowed superior 3D acceleration performance with Glide and OGL at better resolutions when gaming. It was the best combo, and I'll never forget it.

Shout out to the times when we had a separate 2D video card and 3D video card accelerator
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You had seperate my First PC had a Ti ISA video card, and I bought a Riva 128 ZX in 97 to replace it lmao. I went 2d single card to 3d single card.

pxc said:
LOL, I was thinking more about that this morning. There were many boneheaded decisions and very late cards hurt a lot, but the STB debacle stands out too.

For people who don't remember:
At the time, STB was Nvidia's largest customer. STB made Nvidia-based cards for major computer manufacturers and also its own branded retail cards (STB Velocity). The closest current company I can think of in the same position is MSI, but it doesn't have nearly the market share that STB had.

Nvidia was 3dfx's chief competitor, and a very successful one (to the horror of f-boys). What 3dfx decided to do was buy STB to cut off Nvidia's biggest customer and hopefully take back sales to computer manufacturers it had been losing to Nvidia, along with a strategy to manufacture its own cards. That didn't work out at all.

Firstly, computer manufacturers didn't dump Nvidia in favor of 3dfx, they simply changed suppliers (MSI + others won big there). Next, with 3dfx's announcement that only it would make new Voodoo card models from then on caused 3dfx's own customers to defect pretty immediately... to Nvidia. That was Diamond, Creative and Hercules IIRC, pretty big names at the time. They got served.
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Remember Aopen? I remember I had an Aopen TNT2.
 
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