This brings back memories, i had a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. It was a sweet little card in those days. I think i still have the box somewhere, but i'm not certain.
back in the day pcs were horrible to build i had a few mobos break from just being installed had to have the volts of cpu and set it with jumpers all type of crap to do now its easier then building stuff with legos.
Banshee was a weak card. MUCH better to have a Voodoo2. IIRC correctly, Banshee basically offered Voodoo1 performance + 2d functionality, it was 3DFXs first integrated chip. NVIDIA Focus Group Member NVIDIA Focus Group Members receive free software and/or hardware from NVIDIA from time to time to facilitate the evaluation of NVIDIA products. However, the opinions expressed are solely those of the Members.
You alas are wrong, at least when a single Voodoo 2 is used as a performance compare, and when comparing the Banshee to a Voodoo1. The only time the Banshee took second place to the Voodoo 2 was when SLI was used, or a game needed multi-texturing, which wasn't widely used yet during those cards time periods. Even then the Banshee could more then hold its own still, especially when paired with a good cpu. A Banshee paired with a Pentium 3, Athlon Thunderbird, or Duron in the 650mhz range on up does very well. There were plenty of games where the Banshee beat a single Voodoo 2 card in easily enough. Especially the Sgram versions of the Banshee, like the Monster Fusion. The Banshee also had the benefit of having 16megs of ram onboard compared to a single Voodoo 2's 8-12 megs. On any given day Id take a Banshee over a single Voodoo 2 due to that. Not just that, but the Banshee sported excellent 2d performance. All around it was a really nice card. Makes a good 3DFX entry card too to noobies who want to get into Glide gaming.
I was thinking... Im not really in to this. I was fairly young when all this was the cutting edge technology. But im mature enough to see that only two companies cant do good in this industry. They're too few, we need 3 or four companies fighting for prices, technology, performance. With just 2 we dont have a choise. We need choises so the customer can influence the industry. You can buy a Chevrlolet, Ford, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Renault, etc. And that keeps the industry going, we need something in the PC market. More than AMD and Intel, more than ATi and nVidia.
Hahahaha, I had that S3 Virge too! I added a Diamond Monster 2 and could watch that Unreal's flyby accelerated for the first time! That was so shocking! Yes, my life changed too. That night, I remember, playing Unreal accelerated and all those stunning graphics and lights! Absolutely awesome. No other videocard made me so happy in my entire gamer's life. That was a revolution while my other upgrades were simply an evolution.
I loved those old Voodoo cards, remember getting a new machine: Athlon 500mhz, voodoo3 3000 agp. That was awesome. Still use my voodoo's though v3 3000 and v5 5500... Still work fine for old games and browsing.
It called Evolution mate,as soon as things stop evolving into newer better technology no matter how big or small the progression,its Game Over.
The Banshee was not a weak card, it had the longer lifespan of most of the early Voodoo's... infact, the Banshee was arguably the best 3DFX card ever made, it's certainly my favourite. I remember it ran everything in the day so smooth it was unbelievable, i had a good couple of years out of the card, and my next upgrade was a Voodoo 3... and for some reason, the image quality was never as good as i remembered with the Banshee.
i remember my first voodoo5500. i got it from bestbuy when they kept the cards free open on the shelves, hint hint lol. the good old days. and it was sooo fast from an onboard video back in 2000. if i only can rewind time. i really got the card to play unreal tournament. to bad the new UT didnt make it as big as the old one
Nvidia had Riva TnT2 when the Voodoo 3 arived... The 256 is what nvidia came up with wiping all over 3Dfx. GeForce 2 came later, and GeForce 3 some months after nvidia bought 3Dfx out.
I think the best way to describe the difference between a voodoo 1 and a standard graphic card would be like disabling AF, AA and all other effects on your current graphic card, the voodoo would then add some of all those disabled enhancements to your gaming. The steps in making graphics look better where much higher 10 years ago. Plus that it took others a while to come up with something simular and better. Check out this article from 1998 http://www.thg.ru/graphic/19980121/onepage.html
wow read the entire post NOSTALGIA central the only remnant I have is the original 3dfx voodoo card and a Hercules voodoo 2 12MB despite throwing all of the old components away I still held on to them
I still remember my first card. A Diamond Monster 3D PCI card with 4MB ram, which I believe was based on the Voodoo1. You were supposed to be able to hook up a Sega Saturn controller to the card but I could never get that to work.
Hell ya, I do remember it. Quake I at 640 x 480 silky smoot. Also the first Tomb raider worked with it, and very smooth. I only had a Voodoo 1 b.t.w. But nothing could touch it as far as smoothness went at that time!
so if 3dfx was bombing the videocard market back in the day, how did nvidia came about and overtook them?
Well, I was about to make a bunch of guesses, but after reading the article on 3dfx over at wikipedia... it seems that the acquisition of STB was their downfall (article says "main contributor to [it]"). Their eyes were bigger than their belly...
