They were great. Offered high performance. Their death... well a lot of things. Bad decisions, bad management, didn't get the new tech one when they should.... For example they didn't have32bit color when the rest started pushing it. Or hardware T&L. It is said that the share holders decided to sell the company just 3 days before the engineers could present their new card which was supposed to be the company's saver
The 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 cards were absolute monsters performance wise when they were "released" (around 1000 test models were ever made), they were still doing well when the GeForce 3 came out (beating it in some cases), but obviously without any official driver support. Shame though that they were (and still are) almost impossible to get hold of.
Wow, I've stumbled on a flashback if ever here! I remember coming home on the bus with my brand new 12Mb Voodoo2 the week they came like a dog with two tails lol Highest I remember having it clocked with no cooling was 105Mhz in a PII-400 based system, Quake2 @ 100+fps :banana: Never ran it SLi but ended up with a Voodoo3 which enjoyed a short while under the spotlight If that's true what you say Glideman about the company 3 days before the release of a new card it's a shame, I think there was a bit of competition from the GeForce (1?) card either at the time or soon after that time period?. The GeForce 2 was a very popular card!! I still have my V2, box it came in, driver disc and the game , I'd have to check but I'm sure it was Formula 1 97? Good to know there are still folks out there who remember those GPUs, the first of our 3D gaming really Regards, Esskie
I remember one of the caps falling off my V3 2000 pci (which i still have somewhere.. and one of the Matrox M3D Power VR based cards) .. and the card still functioned perfectly for 6 months after that point until i replaced it with a Geforce 2.
exact same thing happened to my XFX 128Mb Ti-4600 while I was messing about taking HDDs in & out I still have the capacitor, even know exactly where it goes but the legs are way too short now to solder back. I've often thought a new cap (few pennies) & soldering it back on but have never bothered. I don't do any gaming on any systems with an AGP slot so no incentive to bother?, suppose it would be cool just to have it there working? Never had any of the Matrox cards, the 550 was ok in it's day, was it the G550?
i had the V3 and V5500. anyone remember banshee? i think they wouldve died out even if shareholders didnt sell the Matrox Parhelia was technically a monster on paper but didnt fair as well in many games performance wise, but their reef demo was pretty amazing. 512bit gpu and 16x per pixel AA...that was amazing for its time. it just wasnt clocked high enough to beat the geforce 4 performance wise but beat it visually wise.
They should just stayed a chip manufacture buying STB was one of their bad moves in the graphics market. Banshee was an awesome card I had the Diamond Monster Fusion reference card. Still have it and it still works even after overclocking in the day
I still have a pair of Orchid 12mb Voodoo 2's lurking about somewhere in the shed... Wow, that was a revelation to be able to play Unreal in 1024x768 and see those shiny surfaces for the first time! Amazing.... from what I remember they cost 200GB Pounds each at the time too, which was a very big chunk out of my wages!
I very much miss when cards like these were top of the line. I remember playing Theif on my TnT2 Pro and being amazed. Haha :nerd:
I had Voodo 2 + Voodo Banshee ( one was acceleretor , or something like that oO, i didnt know much about tech there, i was a kid -.-, it was like SLI now i think ;o ) i remmber it was extremaly fast compared to Riva that time. Also i was runnig AMD CPU , it was K6-2 450Mhz, it was possible to OC it to 550Mhz. (correct me here). My friends were laugting at me because of that CPU. Games i played that time : Driver, Heroes 3, C&C Tiberian Sun, Age of Empires 1/2!! And Red Alert 1. Alot more but i remmber these were very good. (ofc i played alot older games but these i remmber running on Voodo card). And hey guys! Do you remmber that 3D logo before you lounched game ? this : 3DFx Logo spining ! .
Oh my the memories... sniff! What a bloody shame... glide was soooo cool really and things would surely be cheaper if there were three players fighting in the ring, ho hum. I remember the last drivers (dx7) for the voodoo that had to be "hacked" for them to work on the Athlon processors of the day.... when they were king too!
I don't want to be a party pooper but Voodoo cards were hardly keeping up with GeForce 2 GTS cards. With only advantage of slightly better performance at very high resolutions and better FSAA algorithm. When GeForce 3 came out it was pretty much all over for 3dfx... that was also the point where ATI took over with Radeon 8000 series and pixel shader era started...
I remember playing UT99 on my Voodoo Banshee, that was heaven, Glide was amazing (in terms of performance and image quality) Shame I lost that copy of UT GOTY Edition though, got the Unreal Anthology version now and I miss the high-res (S3TC) textures
Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro AGP/Voodoo 3 3000 AGP/Voodoo 5 5500 AGP/GeForce 3/GeForce 4 Ti4600/ATI 9800XT/nV 6800GT/nV 6800GT SLI/nV 7900GTX/nV 7900GTX/nV 8800GTX OC2 That's a list, in order, of all the cards I've had, and nothing was more exciting than the first time I fired up the Voodoo 3 3000. RIP V3 3000, you will never be forgotten.
