It was fun reading this. I don't think we got the same article here in the U.S. in Next Generation, but I'd have to look.
The year: 1996 The card: Voodoo 1 The game: Tomb Raider The resolution: 640x480 I remember what impressed me when this card came out, was that there were no jaggy lines, it was very smooth looking and unlike the PS1 version, had longer view distance and was much easier to see where you needed to go. I first saw the Voodoo 1 in action at Hills dept store on a PC which I think was an IBM, running this game. And who can forget the nature demo on 3dmark 2001? shown here at 1:22, I was so immensely impressed with this demo but it wasn't until Oblivion came out that I ever saw this level of lush details and foliage. You can see it ran rather rough on a Voodoo 3. Another impressive contender was Matrox in 2002 with their Parhelia card showing off it's prowess of quad texturing, pixel shader 1.3 and vertex shader 1.1 with their Reef demo. I remember how badly I wanted to play a game like this demo. You have to admit, it still looks pretty decent today as we don't see too many underwater scenes with this much going on. I believe this was Matrox's last foray into competitive gaming market if I recall correctly.
Yep, don't think I've ever owned a computer hardware piece as magical as the Voodoo Graphics card I had. Good times! How things change, Nvidia/Ati were barely competitive back then. 3Dfx and Videologic/PowerVR dominated as far as I remember. Former being better ofc Matrox is missing from the competition list, they had the Mystique card I think at the time. It had superior image quality IIRC but lost performancewise to 3Dfx and PowerVR.
unfortunately my first pc had a trident 3d video chip in it...... thing was a potato.. so many flashing textures....
My first computer was an AMD K6?? and had an SIS chip, games were literally unplayable except for some point and click games but even Blade Runner stuttered. I upgraded the Ram and got a Diamond Riva TNT but since I had no internet, I had no updated drivers so it still ran like crap. I had a lot of learning to do, coming from a life of consoles. I literally got online for the first time using AOL just so I could download updated drivers, then I was going to cancel it...but after browsing a couple sites I got hooked, even started meeting a few local girls using AOL instant messenger, been online every since.
Here's a recent upload of the Matrox Parhelia Reef Demo - In YouTube it can be set to 720p60, 1080p60 or even 1440p60
Well, it took about 10 years for games to actually look like these graphics demos. That's from 2002, but the graphics look like 2012-ish era games. Or maybe I think it looks way better than it actually does. Don't know, it's kinda weird. The graphics are good but there's still something "very old" about them...
Here's Next Generation article from March '97 on the 3Dfx / Obsidian XS-100. An EDGE article from June '97 on Sega's Black Belt with 3Dfx (the Dreamcast prototype that got shelved in favor of PowerVR2). And an August '97 Next Generation article, on Sega deciding between 3Dfx or PowerVR, not long before news of the final decision was made.