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videomodule for Quantum3D Obsidian 200sbi

S3 Virge, hah! Literally a 3D decelerator.

My first 3D card, a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000?, used a Virge. Virge was my introduction to 3D gaming, and there was really no reference comparison because the whole concept of 3d hardware accelerated gaming was novel at the time. I briefly held a Number 9 (literally a day) before I took it back and swapped it for the more superior Stealth 3D. So technically, the Number 9 was my first 3D card.

Outside the demo disc it came with, I think I maybe got to play a handful of games using the Stealth 3D prior to the Voodoo1 dropping and crushing everything under its might foot. I remember playing retail Descent II and Mechwarrior 2 on the Virge quite a bit. As an early 3D adopter, you weren't too picky back then about framerates, but seeing hardware texture filtering for the first time was quite the eye catcher.

To be fair, my experience with the Virge made the Voodoo1 a no brainer once they showed up on the shelves. So while I bash the Virge for being a decelerator, I still recognize it as having a special place in history. It was definitely one of the firsts.
 
You're right. The thing about the ViRGE was that it was capable of making a legitimate improvement over a software renderer on an early Pentium, but only if you were implementing a software-quality renderer. The more you asked it to do - bilinear filtering, perspective correction, on-chip z-buffering, hardware transparency, and so on - the more it bogged down, to the point of running 640x480 slower than an optimized software renderer could manage. It just looked better doing it. The 3D component of the ViRGE was implemented within the space freed up on a die-shrunk S3 Trio64, and one of the priorities of the ViRGE was to be an economical drop-in replacement for that previous generation chip. Given all of those constraints I thought the Descent II port worked heroically well on a 2MB ViRGE, but the card was soundly beaten by a Rendition Vérité 1000 at everything but VGA gaming.

This, though. OP has linked to a weird piece of hardware, essentially a Virge-in-a-box that works with a single board Voodoo1 SLI solution. I haven't thought about these things in 20 years. Thanks, erek!
 
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Interesting links, never realized these actually did exist.

And yeah, while the Virge was garbage for 3D in it's day, it is now regarded highly in the retro-gaming communities for it's cheap price, wide availability in the used market, and most importantly......very good 2D/DOS gaming performance and compatibility. I keep a PCI Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 4MB around for this purpose myself.

Interesting article: https://vintage3d.org/virge.php Too bad S3 didn't set the default clock speeds higher, as these did gain nicely from overclocking in many games!
 
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Yeah, it was an amazing 2d card - just not 3d. Pair it with a Voodoo 1 and you were off to the races - especially compared to the Verite V1000 I had, which did better 3d - and sucked at anything not SVGA 2d.
 
lopoetve said:
Yeah, it was an amazing 2d card - just not 3d. Pair it with a Voodoo 1 and you were off to the races - especially compared to the Verite V1000 I had, which did better 3d - and sucked at anything not SVGA 2d.
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The desktop 2D wasn't awful, though I remember weird banding in 16-bit color. Its VGA emulation flat out sucked, though - I remember it being too slow to max out Doom's framerate on a fast Pentium.
 
Halon said:
The desktop 2D wasn't awful, though I remember weird banding in 16-bit color. Its VGA emulation flat out sucked, though - I remember it being too slow to max out Doom's framerate on a fast Pentium.
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Yep. Desktop 2D tended to use SVGA - which it did fine at. It just REALLY sucked at true VGA for some reason - non VESA, that is. I had the V2200 as well, which was... also not amazing. I loved those cards though. Then I had a mish-mash: NV1, PowerVR, ATI, S3, Number 9, etc... before finally a TNT1 -> 2 -> etc :)
 
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LOL I still have a STB Virge pci card in my closet somewhere. I have used it for troubleshooting old motherboards. I think it has the memory expansion module so it rocks 8mb of Virge power!
 
Burticus said:
Yep they are known to be awful. My card is about twice the size of that diamond one, LOL. Needless to say, all it ever did was put up a 2d desktop and I had a Voodoo for gaming :)
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That was a solid combo - S3 for 2D (and SciTech Display Doctor for VESA 2.0+ modes since DOS games were still around), Voodoo1 for 3D.
 
Burticus said:
LOL I still have a STB Virge pci card in my closet somewhere. I have used it for troubleshooting old motherboards. I think it has the memory expansion module so it rocks 8mb of Virge power!
Click to expand...

Jesus, 8MB? At least that’d let you push 1600x1200, though I don’t know how well the RAMDAC would accommodate it.
 
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