"Is 3Dfx here to stay?" - 1997 interview after Sega contract was terminated

Discussion in 'Videocards - 3dfx' started by ThunderForce, Jan 21, 2016.

  1. Fender178

    Fender178 Ancient Guru

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    Last edited: Feb 15, 2016
  2. passenger

    passenger Master Guru

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    ...

    Thanks Fender.
     
  3. CarolMasters

    CarolMasters Guest

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    Voodoo was so freakin awesom in the day, first 3d card I had before TNT2. Good article.
     
  4. F1refly

    F1refly Ancient Guru

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    I remember my first computer at home, I bought it after seeing games like Unreal..etc playing so smoothly on a tech TV show called ZDTV. I soon realized I had to buy a card since the integrated SIS chip wasn't going to play anything. I knew just enough to know that Voodoo 2's could run together in SLI but little else and wanted the most power I could get.

    Went to Circuit City and was very naive, this guy told me I could run a Voodoo 2 and a Voodoo 3 3000 together in SLI and get more power that way. opened both boxes only to realize I couldn't so I was going to keep the V3 and send the V2 back. Took it back and they wanted to charge me a restocking fee for opening the box. I argued that I only bought it because of what their own employee told me. They argued that the info on the back of a receipt mentioned about the restocking fee, to which I responded with stating that it's not a contract and I did not sign it plus it was given to me after the exchange of money after I was lied to by one of their own employees. All they knew how to do was keep repeating that so I gave in.......still makes me mad.

    Unreal didn't exactly play butter smooth maxed out but looked better through Glide and still the V3 was a good card at the time. Most of the newly released, graphical heavy games back then never ran near 60 fps for me unless it was on an older engine, even the 5500 AGP wasn't spectacular with the latest games. Some games like Omikron never ran at good frame rates for me until the Geforce 3 came out....now that was a great card. Another tough game to run for quite some time was Draken: Order of the flame.
     

  5. passenger

    passenger Master Guru

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    Voodoo3 never had problem with sustaining 60fps in Glide games like Unreal/UT(except on slow cpu, of course), 3dfx Glide was the smoothest ride in PC history.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
  6. F1refly

    F1refly Ancient Guru

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    Show all the graphs you want but I did not have the latest, greatest MOBO, CPU or Ram and absolutely did not get no 60fps. You're just looking at best case scenario's but most gamer's in the real world don't get the optimal experiences that graphs show even today.
     
  7. passenger

    passenger Master Guru

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    You can get those 60fps on Voodoo3/4/5 in Glide in unreal/UT with midrange hardware like Celeron & Duron cpu's. I had Celeron 600 with Voodoo3 3500 and I had 60+ fps easily in Glide games.

    3dfx Glide API is low-level api, less demanding and better looking than D3D. In that era 3dfx hardware was always faster and had better iq.
     
  8. scrapser

    scrapser Master Guru

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    That's exactly what I still have to this day albiet some newer components mixed in (new case, PS, SoundBlaster, brand new MB from back then that was never used until I bought it, etc.). I like 3DFX for Unreal, EAW, M1 Tank Platoon 2, StarSiege, etc.

    Looking at the big picture and what we now have today, it makes you wonder if all the amazing tech back then was really meant to survive. I mean, the graphics tech we have today seems to be so advanced it makes the older stuff seem almost irrelevant or at least just a stepping stone so to speak.

    Still, I wish 3DFX had been the leader to the present. Matrox wasn't bad either.

    Incidently, you can still play Unreal on Win 7 (maybe later versions, too) using the amazing "Old Unreal" upgrade. You need the original game to do this. You get widescreen support and hi-res textures, the sequel and a lot of other goodies for tweaking the game.
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2016
  9. sean8102

    sean8102 Guest

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    I have fond memories of 3DFX. The first individual piece of computer hardware I ever got was a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI as a birthday gift for my parents first computer, a packard bell with win 95. I was to scared to try and install it my self so we actually took it to a PC shop and had them do it. I learned shortly after how to do it my self. That's what got me into PC gaming I suppose. I remember being amazed by the difference when I ran Hexen II in glide mode.
     
  10. InfinityX

    InfinityX Guest

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    Great article and very nostalgic. Please post more like this.

    I had a Righteous3D plugged in on the VGA loop cable to a cheap ass Cirrus Logic 5446 (with 2MB framebuffer upgrade!)... and an AMD K6-2 CPU. Was a killer 3D gaming rig back then. Shortly after went for a Voodoo2 SLI to play Half-Life and Counterstrike Alpha/Beta in 1024x768! I never went the Voodoo3 route, I think I picked up an Nvidia TNT2 Ultra instead.
     

  11. A M D BugBear

    A M D BugBear Ancient Guru

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    Speaking about unreal gold, and this was in my 980ti vs 1080ti sli videos.

    If you all loved unreal, you will all faint after viewing this video I uploaded, Totally Unreal:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKXqAMMGOmE&t=302s

    Check out the sli video too as well.

    Also, check out my playlist here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX2r...yDXvEF92tuO0_Z
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2017
  12. quantum hacker

    quantum hacker Guest

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    Honestly, I didn't really get wowed by 3d graphics until the mid 2000's around the time Riddick, FEAR, Doom 3 came out with all the neat shadows and bump mapping.

    Also, never was wowed by Quake until the custom engines came out with shadows and HD textures.

    Can't lie yall

    I mean, I did like the upgrade from software to hardware rendering, but even then when it was new, I wasn't blown away or anything like that. I was more just glad that it didn't look as crappy as software rendering, but even then I could tell 3d gfx had a long way to go. Framerate and smoothness was probably more important to me then, or I should say, the most visceral pleasure I had back then was just from getting a good framerate.

    Probably the main time I was really "wowed", or I should say, the -most- strongly impressed, to any extent by 3d graphics during the 90's time period was by the virtua racing arcade game, not any PC game. Even today, the simple styling of that game without even having textures has a unique visual harmony and artistic quality that I think was missing from the later games in the 90's with blobby low res blurred textures
     
    Last edited: Sep 14, 2018
  13. AsiJu

    AsiJu Ancient Guru

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    I had forgotten how insane the performance jump from Voodoo to Voodoo 2 was!

    640x480 performance is 3x faster than Voodoo. Granted 3d acceleration was so new that generational leaps were possible but still impressive.
     
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