5 mo. ago • 98%

3dfx Voodoo - the graphics card that revolutionized PC gaming

www.pcgamesn.com 3dfx Voodoo - the graphics card that revolutionized PC gaming

Reflective surfaces, smooth frame rates and the awesomeness of GLQuake. We explore how the 3dfx Voodoo 3D accelerator changed everything..

40 comments

For those that weren't around at the time, this was like the jump from prop planes to jets. Such a large leap from what had come before.

Reading the resolution and FPS numbers it doesn't seem that impressive, but doubling both FPS and pixels and adding a bunch of new things like reflections and water at the same time was just incredible.

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- i remember getting my first one. it was an amazing time. played a lot of games back then. not so much now. i just can't keep up with the upgrades, so i just play older ones every now and then.
  
  a modern equivalent would be moving from an old pc with hdd to a new one with nvme ssd.
  
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  That is an excellent comparison!
  
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I was there, 3000 years ago, the smooth textures in Quake & NFS, and the lighting effects in Unreal and Quake 2.
Tomb Raider had Glide too. So perfectly pointy.

I have the fondest memories of those days & 3Dfx as a brand. I still have my Voodoo 2s (2×12MB) connected in SLI, I should get them a better display (case?) actually.

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- you forget the amount of time needed to bake Quake translucent water patch.
  
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  I didn’t know about batching at the time so would wake up every few hours to start the next level converting, so I could get it completed during midterm :)
  
  End product was amazing! I still have the converted levels to this day.
  
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- Unreal... That was my jam. Voodoo Banshee 16mb and that game was beautiful.
  
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- I remember having Glide powered screensavers.
  
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  Voodoo Lights!
  
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Cards had such neat names back then too.

Voodoo Banshee Rage 3D Pro Ensoniq Soundscape (soundcard)

I'm kinda glad it didn't get to the point of "throbbing purple speedster" or whatever, shit's kinda boring now

19
- Fire GL 1000, Monster 3D, Matrox Millennium
  
  5
- Box art was also awesome. Now they can just shit on the box and people will still pay $2k for a new gpu.
  
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  I mean, I don't buy a GPU for the box...
  
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I remember when these came out. People playing Quake complained that the clear water it made possible, was cheating.

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- It took me so long to bake all the maps and future map updates from Mods(threewave mostly) and publish on our dorm FTP. People that still play on CPU is at disadvantage for sure.
  
  But after a while anyone that plays 3d game already have one. It basically trickle down to other players. (ie my voodoo1 was sold cheap to one of my friends back then when I got the voodoo2.)
  
  4
  
  Ah man, it was after that, but you just reminded me of people who would raid their HDD so maps would load faster for ut2k4.
  
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- I had a friend who said it was cheating.
  
  When we would LAN he would just get the lightning gun and jump in the water if there were people in it.
  
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The Voodoo and Descent was a match made in Heaven.

14
- We need to go back to the 6DF games. So much more fun to be mined there.
  
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  I started looking into that. Descent 1&2, Feespace 1&2, Forsaken, it's a big empty world now. I did find Forsaken Remastered. It updated some of the graphic abilities, but it's still 20 year old triangles.
  
  Freespace 3 needs to be a thing.
  
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  Try No Man's Sky in VR - it's mind bending!
  
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I only had software rendering until after Half-Life came out and it required a dedicated graphics card. I completely missed the 3DFX era but always wished I had one.

12
- HL supported software mode, it used the same render from quake for it. It was however very slow. For more modern CPUs it would be fine but for common CPUs at the time 15fps would be a good experience.
  
  3dfx was good but the cards started to struggle with the likes of HL and UT. Both were playable, but not super smooth.
  
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Matrox Millenium gang!

Crazy resolutions for your CRT was possible, but not textured 3D :-/

11
- Heyoo!
  
  There must have been dozens of us.
  
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I was slightly too young to get one, but I remember them coming out. I didn't get my first GPU until AGP became a thing, when I was able to get a Voodoo Banshee (which was the 3rd? Generation) from these guys.

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- I loved the banshee.
  
  Everyone mocked me for the idea of having one graphics card that can do both the 2D and 3D at once. Clearly an idea that'd never catch on
  
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  i think i had a banshee at one time too, omfg im old
  
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Not only PC gaming, but coin-op gaming, too.

I had one of these back in the day, held on to it for way too long. Eventually was doing some cleanup, and included it in a craigslist post for $10, along with a handful of other things that someone might still be able to use. I got a hit on it almost immediately, from someone with an email address at midway.com. Apparently, these were used in some number of coin-op games, and they're like gold.

So - if you have one in a drawer somewhere, it's probably worth some money today to the right person.

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- Holy shit I think I threw it away
  
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I still have mine. What an amazing card that was when it came out.

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I think I might still have some of these laying around somewhere. Good times.

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i cant remember what voodoo 3dfx i had, but seem to remember it was a good one. i even took off the original heatsink and put on my own cooler with fan (it had none, or a super small one if i remember right)

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I was a PowerVR kid.

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The great first video card, remember it well.

It came with a kick-ass poster for its time as well.

_Anti _{Commercial-AI} _license _(CC _BY-NC-SA _4.0)

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- Did you mean to link to a creative commons license?
  
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  Some people mistakenly think it'll poison AI scraping. It'll take about 2 seconds to filter that out of a dataset.
  
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