1999 PC GPU Upgrade! Diamond Stealth S3 Savage4 Pro+

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Damn I would not have expected that texture compression to have such an effect in Unreal.

[@enigma776]

Yeah it was one of the advantages of the Savage line, which is odd as Unreal/Unreal Tournament was the pack in game usually for Voodoo Cards.

[@thumbwarriordx]

You wouldn't immediately think texture compression would IMPROVE the textures either, while UT implemented it this way to use bigger textures, Quake 3 just used it to crunch down the regular textures for performance. So a lot of people would have assumed texture compression degraded quality and never thought about it again. It didn't enable itself automatically when the later GeForce and such cards supported S3TC either. You had to go into the OGL/D3D section in the INI file and add the missing S3TC variable to it.

[@ZanderLexx]

OMG It's almost like software rendering vs hardware rendering wow.

[@salamand3r-]

S3TC was so good, it was integrated into both DirectX 6 and OpenGL 1.3. It still exists in the APIs today, in fact, and was responsible for some of the larger jumps in image fidelity between DX6 and earlier versions. It's actually kind of an amazing legacy for an otherwise forgotten company.

[@rakrakrakrak]

It caused some problems on VooDoo cards though. Weird shit like doors appearing closed when they were really open, and certain things being invisible.

[@fvw1187]

I listen to this guy while I fall asleep. Such a jovial and smooth voice. Fantastic narration interesting and most importantly, relaxing.

[@buffintl]

I remember having this. Decent 3 was awesome on this back then.

[@rasslebaby]

I literally thought I was the only one.

[@marvinnation]

I thought i was the only one!!

[@ChrisCahill17]

Me too! Earbuds on. Everything you said - he is very calming and perfect pace of narration. Also, I think one of the many great things in LGR is that: should an ad pop-up, it is at the right moment. And I wish more KZbinrs did that.

[@christyshultz6443]

And when I was a kid and it was the weekend and Bob Ross was on You know The Joy of painting he put me to sleep. and it wasn't that I didn't love his show it's just that it was the weekend and I was tired and as a teenager I'd probably wouldn't sleep much through the week so yeah definitely tired and definitely put me asleep every time.

[@crazyjak56]

I love seeing weird stuff like this. One, a graphics card that isn't amd or nvidia, that alone interesting but the fact that a game will just look flat out different on another brand's hardware is a strange concept.

[@LGR]

And I am amused by this kind of thing being odd now since it was so normal at the time! Super fun to go back and revisit this era due to all the competing APIs and such.

[@Ripcord303]

I remember this card amazing! Diamond was everywhere back then.

[@BryonLape]

I remember that being the norm.

[@crazyjak56]

The only one of those I remember is ati.

[@AnkMyrandor]

not exactly true. diamond would in most cases use nvidia technology but write their own drivers ( I remember my viper V550 ) :( I was really mad because they released them 5 months after the nvidia's came out. very bad for the gaming experience. but when the detonation drivers released, you could install them anyway and get rid of slow waiting for drivers. ( even though the card wasn't really compatible ) nowadays 3rd party companies like XFX etc still make cards. they just don't bother with writing the drivers anymore.

[@StAlchemyst]

Man I miss the days of software rendering and then seeing the "holy crap", as you so eloquently put it, of what a 3D accelerator card could do! Now-a-days your staring at an FPS counter saying "um..wow i guess that frame rate is better." Ahhhhh. the good old days.

[@bucharestbiketraffic]

I always lusted this card back then. Instead, I ended up with the S3 Trio 64 with the full, amazing, 2MB of memory. I remember playing a demo of Half Life with the old engine on a Pentium 1 166Mhz MMX. Man, I miss those days... thanks for bringing back those memories, Clint.

[@mbogucki1]

I love how graphics cards in 2017 have like three GIANT fans all working at Mach 3 just to keep cards cool while this thing a little itty-bitty heat sink.

[@dukenukem6137]

Yup! Back in the old days if a graphics card had a fan on it, you knew it had to be good 😅

[@Phenom98]

@@dukenukem6137 Yeah, around 2001 shit started to get real and almost every card had a fan if i remember correctly

[@TheVanillatech]

@@Phenom98 First 3D accelerator card I owned with a fan on it was a Viper V770 (TNT2 Ultra based cards shipped by Dell in OEMs in the late 90's). After that my Radeon VE had a fan as did my Geforce 2 Ultra (obviously). Previous to me coming into the Viper cards, I had a Matrox Mystique paired with a 3Dfx VooDoo (both fanless). I would guess for the majority of people, 2000-2001 would be about right when GPU's pretty much all needed a HS+FAN. Even the lowly FX5200! XD

[@scottrich976]

I used to add fans to my cards, even made an effective heat pipe for the geforce 4 460

[@ReiHinoSenshi]

@@TheVanillatech still have my TNT 2 Card PCI based sitting in a drawer as im running 2 GTX 1080 TI's slied one water cooled in my main system

[@64h29]

Absolutely can confirm the reaction to seeing S3TC textures for the first time being genuine. The first time I saw those I though me AND my graphics card were having a coordinated stroke.

[@SuperNova-mp5zp]

Man I just love your reviews and stuff it's just so calm (especially with your great music choice) I also love the fact that I learn some new stuff I've always loved computers but haven't every gone super in-depth but this stiff is just really great (it even made me look up some stuff on my own out of curiosity)

[@fearless1000]

I forgot that I ever had this card until that horrible right click menu turned up. Oh yes, I remember THAT!

[@armorgeddon]

That could've been any card made by Diamond though.

[@iNubpwn3r]

Clint, please do more videos like this, that nostalgia is warmly hugging my heart and you always bring me back to my happy years... I had Voodoo 3 PCI 2000 16Mb myself and it was glorious. ... I was born in 1982, so your videos clicks with me on all fronts. Love you and looking forward to your next video. Could you maybe do Heretic 2 on Voodoo 3? Just suggestion. Thanks a lot for all your time and effort.

[@eckomind]

Max Payne blew me away when I first played it. It was a masterpiece.

[@BigEightiesNewWave]

Agree.

[@KittyFae-]

Hah nice, this was the first 3d accelerator card that I had growing up, upgraded from a matrox millennium. The thing that blew me away was how the stained glass windows looked like in UT compared to before I was floored.

[@nicklager1666]

I do enjoy the box art on the graphic cards from that time period. It just said get this and you will be golden as far as gameing goes.

[@coffee115]

Nick Lager that you could experience what was actually on the back of the box was... The best thing. Then Crysis happened and none of us ever saw what was on the box.

[@tileslasher]

You know something? So I'm 50 and I swear you so remind me of my best friend in high school, except we were 20 odd years before you. We used to screw around on the computer stuff back in the 80s and if things were as far along in our day as they were in yours we'd have had a life pretty close to what you describe in this video. I like this channel so much because I know you are a true thru and thru geek. You were right there, you were right at the forefront of the very first awesome things that were happening in computers. It's totally cool to listen to you talk about this stuff. I have always had a computer for just about most of my adult life, at least from the 30's on. Not so much in my 20s because I was in my 20s in the 90s and I was more or less entertained with stuff like video games and girls. But it's a trip to hear from someone your age that was totally into computers right when stuff really was coming on. Man I love this channel, you are a welcome content creator and have been for a long time. I can see from all your subs that there are tons of people that feel the same as me. I've been a sub for about a year at least now. Your topics never fail to entertain even when you are talking about something that back then was so plain. But now it's like that was actually one of the coolest things ever. Just awesome stuff

[@EposVox]

This is honestly what I was hoping to see in the sea of CES coverage.

[@EposVox]

I was hyped for the Intel-Vega combo. Otherwise... yeah. I saw the LG V30 get a few awards and that came out LAST YEAR. Razer's phone laptop won a LOT of awards but we've seen that product concept for like 2-3 years now - HP even launched one - so I'm not sure how it was so worthy of praise.

[@rakrakrakrak]

Came here for the Unreal Tournament...was not disappointed.

[@JoshuaSabourin]

HAHAHA, I laughed like hell when you flipped it off. God does that bring back memories of the Windows 95/98 days. Can't tell you how many times I gave mine the finger when all troubleshooting steps were exhausted. I think I went through a few keyboard/mice during those days as well since they often got banged/slammed around during my frustration.

[@drg5352]

That was the default mode for interacting with Windows machines up until XP. Not that XP was good, but it was better than 95, 98, ME, and 2000 by a long shot. At one point, I think we just didn't bother with trying to fix whatever issue Win95/98 had and just did complete reinstalls. Didn't work on the Gateway 2000s I picked up once, which kept losing video entirely. I started looking for an alternative to Windows due to 98 and the Norton virus. So about the only thing I can think fondly about it other than games for me is discovering Linux, which I've ran as dual-boot for ages until about 5 years ago, when I went all in and abandoned Windows entirely.

[@alaric_]

Yeah, fun times... In retrospect :D One particular incident was with my modem. It just plainly refused to work. Until i found out a work-around. I had to start computer, go to Windows, oc it didn't work but i had to wait until it stopped flashing it's lights. Then i would restart and remove it and go to windows. Then restart again and install the card, go to Windows and then it would work! Everytime! But that was the only way i could ever get it to work. Talk about blood pressure when i was fighting that problem! It worked as long as i kept my computer on but when i shut it down while it was working, it would not in the next restart.. Weird, i know! Oh, the day when i got a new one and it worked like normal! :D

[@F32Koto]

3:59 - I would listen to an ASMR of old computers starting up...I don't know what it is about them, maybe my nostalgia, but hearing them always brightens me up and make me smile :)

[@miskone1044]

it always amazes me just how many old tech items/games you manage to come across in boxes!

[@antothemanto77]

Yay a post on my birthday!! Thanks Clint for making such great content. It is always thought provoking, interesting, informing, and even a little nostalgic. Fantastic video, as always!

[@theseob]

I remember it’s predecessor the Daimond Stealth II s220 pretty fondly. Love that card, together with my Daimond Monster 2 12mb it was a nice combo.

[@Freezier134a]

I so loved this era of excitement in the pc world, processors, graphics cards, something new was coming out all the time!

[@Diablokiller999]

You should have mentioned that no other than Raja Koduri of AMD (former ATI and Apple and now Intel) was responsible for the S3TC feature, one of his achievements for the graphics industry :3

[@Diablokiller999]

As I mentioned, now Intel emploxee :)

[@ThunderTHR]

I love these kinds of videos, I would love to see you make more of this kind of stuff, comparing popular games of the time with popular graphics cards of the time. I'd totally tune in to see that.

[@kosmosyche]

S3 Savage had notoriously bad drivers at the time of it's release. But the texture compression algorithms, implemented in their hardware (S3TC) were so good, they became standard in DirectX and, as far as I know, on consoles too. And they weren't free either, which means manufacturers were paying licensing fees to S3 for decades for this technology.

[@LGR]

Yes indeed! In fact, the patents for S3TC only expired a few months ago: www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=S3TC-Patent-Expires-Next-Week

[@DarkLinkAD]

Man your on top of this.. Jeez

[@michalzustak8846]

kosmosyche S3 Savage was a damn fine piece of hardware killed by 3 factors: 1. Bad rep from the Virge "3D decelerator" era. 2. Bad initial drivers. 3. The S3 Savage 2000 tried hardware Transform and Lightning, but did it so badly it was actually faster and prettier to just turn it off.

[@yukatoshi]

kosmosyche S3’s 3D drivers were all over the place.

[@dizzym9554]

4. They branded a number of really, really crippled onboard chipsets on AMD motherboards with "S3 ProSavage". I had one and it couldn't handle the textures in half the games I played, including *Soldat* which was 2D.

[@mytube9182]

I once had this in AGP version, later sold it for Voodoo 3 card. One of the lifetime biggest mistake ! What I loved most about this card is its driver that allowed me to set color profiles individually for each game.

[@Poki3]

That PB is cursed.

[@Chaos89P]

That's Packard Bell for you, what the British call "utter shite."

[@ZanderLexx]

It's that mother(fucker)board , back in 98 I had a FIC VA-503+ Baby AT Super socket 7 Motherboard 3 ISA slots, 3 PCI and AGP, VIA Apollo MVP3 Chips. Never had any issues with it . I had a K6-2 300 Mhz on it. But I had only a S3 Virge Gx2/DX with 4 megs . This was my first computer in octomber 1998 .

[@PistonAvatarGuy]

They were all cursed, Pukerd Hells were just garbage.

[@dizzym9554]

s/That PB/All PBs/... I say this as someone with a fondness for Packard Bell as his first two proper PCs were Packard Bells. They're objectively garbage :P

[@linklovezelda]

Peanut butter? Personal best?? Piranha Bytes???

[@ChrisFu7]

Holy cow flashback to Christmas day 1999 when I got this exact same PCI card (no AGP on my P233) to play NFS3....and it locked up the game within 5 seconds of loading the menu. Long before we had home internet so I didn't get to play it for 6 months before I finally got new drivers from a buddy with AOL. Clint I can't believe you did a video on this EXACT card!

[@chillhour6155]

Have you tried turning it..., Oh it's a Packard Bell, then my work here is done

[@PadreAbraham28]

Quentin Els hahaha indeed, here in the Netherlands PB was also equal to crap.

[@1x4x9]

@@PadreAbraham28 In North America they pulled out entirely at the end of the 90's because of their terrible customer service and poor QA. My first PC was a PB. For every day it worked it would spend a week and a half on my desk broken.

[@TheRogueMaverick]

6:10 I just lost it laughing when he gave the computer the bird!

[@TheRealFobican]

If the functinality is this bad, you can always make it into a sleeper build to get rid of the achilles heel. After all, the interior does have a distinctive look to it not seen other cases as I have seen before.

[@acoffeewithsatan]

Midtown Madness 2 Extreme member here - none of the Madness series games supported 32 bit color. Not that long ago, MM2 received a mod that allows so, though, available on MM2X. The same can't be said about MM Chicago Edition, since both games can't run properly on Windows 8 and 10, yet only the latter can after some workarounds discovered a couple of years ago. Considering the community is getting smaller over time and that fewer people still have a dedicated PC running Win7 or older, not many modders dedicate any time to that game anymore.

[@LGR]

Good to know for sure then!

[@acoffeewithsatan]

You should try this graphics enhancing mod for Midtown Madness too! www.mm2x.com/page.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloaddetails&cid=117&lid=1418&ttitle=MM1_Revisited_V3#dldetails

[@garyhanson655]

I love when you talk about midnight madness. Me and my best friend would play that game for hours. I never new it was supposed to look that good. Dang.

[@dave1135]

I had a guy bring me a Packard bell desktop that the onboard sound had died. I figured, no prob, just install a aftermarket sound card, which I had a dozen in stock. None...of.. Them...would...work!!! I was like you, tried everything, no go. I had to tell a heartbroken customer his option was either live with no sound, buy a new computer, or get a new motherboard. And since it was a older PC, you could replace the motherboard, but you'd have to use a newer board, then you go down the rabbit hole of where do you stop? Might as well upgrade the processor, but then you need more memory....and hard drive is small...need a higher wattage power supply... Time you're done, all thats left original is the case, so might as well bought new to begin with...

[@modelrailpreservation]

Onboard sound or an expansion card? I remember some older motherboards (Socket 370 and Super Socket 7, yes, that old) that expansion sound cards would not work at all unless the onboard sound option was set to disabled in the BIOS. Even set at "Auto" expansion sound cards sometimes did not work. I also remember on old Pentium 2 (And I think some of the P3) Compaq machines, the sound card sometimes threw fits if on any PCI slot other than slot 3. I don't remember if it was just Compaq or if other brands had that issue.

[@dizzym9554]

A lot of those Packard Bell machines had a proprietary sort of motherboard layout too, so you might have had to replace the case (if you went for an off-the-shelf mobo)...

[@ronnieb8382]

I remember troubleshooting my own build back in the day. The motherboard I bought needed to take the refurbished Pentium 2 Xeon I got surprisingly cheap. But it also had something like 8 pci slots. I found that when the computer boot up, IRQs were conflicting on the various cards (modem, NIC, sound). I had to inspect the IRQ ranges for each device in safe mode, and then arrange them on the motherboard in an order that eliminated the IRQ conflicts. I seem to recall that IRQ11 was the pesky one that was requested by the sound card and something else but the other card could also get assigned a different IRQ and still work. The trick was to stick the sound card in a later slot. When the CPU booted up, it would assign IRQs to devices it found starting in slot 1. I installed the other device to get detected and assigned before the sound card and made sure that when the sound card was detected, the IRQ it wanted was available. It worked fine after that.

[@BanCorporateOwnedHouses]

Amazing video as usual Clint. The history of graphics cards is something else to me, a 20 something year old. I was always the console gamer until recently, and I could say with confidence that the late 90s PC scene seemed very exciting at the time. The added competition just produced advancement so quickly.

[@Dukefazon]

It always feels weird to see a CPU or video card without a fan. Simpler times...

[@Infernape7890]

Dukefazon Back then, those parts didn't generate as much heat as they do now. Not sure when CPUs began needing coolers. I know the Pentium 4 needed one.

[@5roundsrapid263]

I had a Voodoo3 and it didn’t, either. If you mounted a 486 fan from Radio Shack on it you could overclock it. I did.

[@MattExzy]

...and just a little bit earlier than this, heatsinks on a CPU were an exotic concept as well. I think once 486s hit 66MHz, heatsinks were becoming necessary.

[@MJ-uk6lu]

Raspberry Pi still doesn't need heatsink.

[@zOMGREI]

Mantas Jurksa Define "need", because you sure as hell need heatsinks on several of the chips if you're using it in anything other than a low power situation. Just doing a full speed file transfer over ethernet will burn out the network controller in short order if you don't slap a heatsink on there ASAP. Just because it doesn't come with them doesn't mean it doesn't need them.

[@foxiadis]

Nice video Clint! I was very excited with these video graphic comparison situations back in the day. So much fan!

[@MistaMaddog247]

Those S3 textures in Unreal Tournament are awesome. I got them on my current PC using the latest unoffical patch and custom video renderers from oldunreal.com

[@nfinzer22]

I'm so nostalgic for this era for so many reasons.

[@izzieb]

I remember Diamond products, but I always ended up with Voodoo cards. Not that I ever needed them anyway. My Dad always justified needing a powerful computer for work.

[@ShaunDreclin]

Izzie "work" 😂 that's the excuse my dad used too

[@FireFox705]

Love old hardware and also love the way you made this video, almost like the card is a newly released product and you're reviewing it. Fucking awesome :)

[@Caarajack]

Back in those days GPUs had rad extra names such Savage, Rage, Voodoo, Prophet. Also those box cover arts got you pumped that this thing can do real 3D! Awesome to see Max Payne, one of the best early 2000s shooters as a benchmark game. Too bad that they sold rights to Rockstar Games and that Packard Bell survived after such terrible machines.

[@bluustreak6578]

11:44 Wait! I was messing around in the Unreal Editor back then, and found those high res textures, and forced it to use those on my integrated crap graphics chip, which worked fine! But only when launching the level through the editor. I never knew how to enable them by default, but you're saying that I only had to get a better graphics card? :D

[@johndeere2208]

I genuinely believe that this guy was put on this earth to be LGR. Nobody else could make these videos and make them as enjoyable as they are.

[@ChiefKeith.]

i love the way you showed the comparisons in this video. great work.

[@achaycock]

I remember having the Savage 4 back in the day, it was a lot cheaper than the Voodoo 3 at the time. It's performance was not too bad, but the poor drivers really did a number on it, making it much worse than it needed to be. 3DFX always had better drivers on the whole. Both cards have something crucial for legacy gaming though - full VESA mode support, meaning that DOS games will render really well. I appreciate the video here.

[@paulmorphy6187]

This has been one of my favourite videos you have made...brings back memorys of running games just to benchmark them against a new graphics card...what was that all about?

[@JeffStukas]

UT was so much fun back in the day.

[@drgusman]

Even today the good old Unreal Tournament is one of the best shooters you can find...

[@crabman3144]

I concur, it still is.

[@TehSquare]

This video makes me want to reinstall it.

[@blazer666del]

I'm installing it now... after 15 years or so, thanks LGR

[@michalzustak8846]

Jeff Stukas My 19 year old cousin still plays it.

[@ukranaut]

Yep, there was a time when a game was a real magical world, but you couldn't fully run it on your machine and, after long time of anticipation, you've finally installed an upgrade and behold it in its full glory. What a great experience was that.

[@JohnVance]

Hahah, welcome to the fun of working with a Packard Bell system!

[@dukenukem6137]

I had a friend who had a compact computer and it was terrible too 😂

[@ChairmanMeow1]

why do I love these types of videos so much

[@jaxnean2663]

I used to own a Diamond Rio MP3 player, 32mb of storage!

[@ClassicTrialsChannel]

Still have mine

[@wolfchacer0139]

I ran this very card with a monster II 3d accelerator for years and will be my go to setup when I get my current Win98 retro rig ready. My monster 3d2 was an 8mb version back then but recently I obtained the 12Mb upgrade card to pair with this S3 card. Was able to run everything at full back then and the Monster also doesn't glitch the max pain intro with the snow.

[@TheNostalgiaMall]

Packard Bells from the '90s are amazing and fun computers...but only the ones made before about 1998. Once you get into the Windows 98 era stuff, that's when the quality greatly drops, sadly.

[@LGR]

So true. I really do want to just enjoy these later PBs for what they are, but... the headaches I've had. Oh the unexplained hardware and software headaches.

[@DFX4509B]

Weren't earlier Packard Bells rife with proprietary hardware IIRC? Plus they coined the term, 'bloatware,' pretty much.

[@kirbyyasha]

Very true, my older "Frog Style" Packard Bells are amazing. The ones that shipped with Win3.11 or Win95. I still use it to this day to play my MS DOS games and it runs just fine. Even The Sims runs fine on it with the 200 MHz Pentium MMX. Great all around computer. The newer ones were just garbage and was sad to see, even that case looks like shit :(

[@spiff2268]

Well, if you just integrated the gazorpazorp into the frappulater everything would run perfectly. Bet you didn't think of that, losers!

[@AngryDavid808]

Yay! TNM commented on a LGR video!

[@WarOnCOD]

You and the 8 Bit Guy are my two favorite channels. You bring me back to my past better than AVGN does.

[@indubitably_]

I was lucky enough to own a Voodoo 5 5500 in AGP and remember that card completely waking up many of the PC games at the time. Software rendering of Half-Life compared to hardware was night and day. It's crazy to me that these 18 year old video cards cost the same as they did then. I remember even when I finally had to upgrade, I didn't want to let it go.

[@pauls4522]

Voodoo 5500 was a serious card back then, especially when paired with a 1ghz or better cpu. The only card which could surpass it was Geforce 256 SDR/DDR. Ati and Matrox could not come near it in 2000.

[@alexander.mihalicyn]

Simply... one of the better channel on KZbin. Thank you man. Really interesting content!

[@BubishTheSmokingPine]

I had the AGP version of that card and as I recall it had a wonderful smell, in a chemically kind of way.

[@alifm4309]

THANK YOU for all your effort and enthusiasm.

[@Xeogin]

Ah, reminding me of my old laptop. Had a S3 Savage MX with 8 MB SGRAM. Was awesome for playing Unreal and after a lot of work I'76 Nitro. :)

[@aaronsomers7337]

Allowing for us to hear old machines boot is one of the many reasons I love this channel. Keep up the great work.

[@LightyNourT]

I just look at that thumbnail and I can ensure an instant satisfaction will occur.

[@syy8976]

I spend hours watching your videos lol. There so interesting, and its sweet to see what kind of computer technology was going on in the 90s and such.

[@drgusman]

3Dfx had a hidden weapon, the Glide API, for that moment was the most optimized API as it was a bare-metal API. Basically is what Vulkan is nowadays. Good old days...

[@drgusman]

randomguy8196 Why? It was a lot more fun to program those days, today you use a precreated engine (boring) or you create your own engine (a mammoth task). On those days you created your own engine and was a not-so-hard task, and it was a lot simpler, if you remember in that time the gpus used a fixed pipeline, no shaders to program...

[@drgusman]

randomguy8196 Well, if you create today your own engine is the same: OpenGL, DirectX and Vulkan, on that time you had: DirectX, OpenGL and Glide, so the work is the same (but in that time an engine was extremely simple compared with modern ones).

[@DeeDeeKL]

.kkrieger ... and now go to sleep :-P

[@drgusman]

andomguy8196 Whawhawhat?? Oh man, how wrong you are. DirectX is exclusive for Windows while OpenGL is universal, every single accelerated device supports opengl: PC's with non-windows operating systems, consoles, tablets, phones, etc etc, even toasters support OpenGL XD. So no, today the usual is to have both, DirectX and OpenGL because of the portability, and latest games also are including Vulkan because it gives a big performance boost on AMD cards. At the end developers nowadays still program three different pipelines.

[@YAUUN]

Except OpenGL was a royal pain in the ass to code for. DirectX/Direct3D by comparison were a joy to code, with comparatively well designed & copiously documented API's and a choice on Windows of several IDEs that didn't suck. It was rather difficult to find proper documentation or example code that actually worked for OpenGL or the raft of middleware that claimed to take the pain out of using OpenGL.

[@nfijef]

One of my favorite things to do in VR is just look at textures.Some of the wooden tables really make feel like ""I'm there". Hope it gets continued support and improvement. Great video as always Mr. Clint.

[@Kirix]

I had the Creative 3dfx Banshee and loved how it made Quake2 run so much better than Software

[@steven-vn9ui]

"Its Payne!" Great video Clint. Memories!

[@buuza7406]

I love how he goes off on Packard bell and gets so pissed lmfao

[@wave_mds]

Wow, Clint is reviewing something I had finally! It was my first graphics card. in a Quantex P3 500Mhz, 128mb RAM. Ran Quake III like a dream. Always wondered why no one else ran Windows 98 in 1024x768. Good times. Thanks, Clint!

[@subjektivenoise]

" Exciting software included : Adobe Reader..." LMAO

[@Stupha_Kinpendous]

Your post has made my day. Well done, sir.

[@timking3587]

Mpeg decoder card ? Darn that bring back memories I forgot about. 😂

[@lewisveasey1674]

I had one of these cards in a Toshiba laptop and in desktop form. I was able to get unreal 2004 to play with a somewhat modest frame rate. I was even able to run system shock 2 with high rez textures and models, it ran perfectly fine! I still have the laptop so, I should be able to prove it provided it still works.

[@hin3sher0es70]

Reminds me of the days of playing Quake in software rendering mode until NorbertNoBacon got a 3DFX card (i think it was a voodoo chipset, can't be sure, it was a loooong time ago) and with that it was like we were playing a totally different game lol =D

[@MJunioR9]

It's just unreal the difference between hwr vs swr back in that time, I'm always impressed to check what devs had to do to bring compatibility with lower spec systems back then. Also great choice of GPU, there's not much content related to the Savage4.

[@Daehawk]

First PC was 1994. Came with a Trident onboard chip with 512k video memory. First video card I bought was a Diamond Stealth 3d S3 Virge 4 meg. Yeah the DEcelerator lol . Got it as Circuit City. Was about $200. 6 months later I added a Diamond Monster 3D 3dfx card from Electronics Boutique. It also had 4 megs of memory and cost about the same $200. Quake 3D never looked better. Fun times.

[@dan_loup]

I had a 2MB version of the virge. it ran tomb raider 2 at a quite playable rate in 800x600. But it was because the frame buffer and Zbuffer wasted the whole memory and the game didn't loaded any textures, so everything was rendered with white gouraud shading triangles. The other option was to play in 320x240x16 that actually loaded the textures.

[@markleuck]

Almost same setup here except my Trident only had 64k and you could add standard memory chips to bring it up to 128k. Ended up with a Diamond Speedstar and the Monster 3D, man we went through some shit back then

[@mjsoukup]

Can’t get enough of ur vids tnx

[@cavalen]

Cool !! ... do you have a PowerVR Kyro 2 cards to test? I remember those cards being awesome and a rival to Nvidia at the time .. My first "real" graphic card. Before that I used to play using the crappy Soft rendering

[@serb86kv]

The moment I saw your desktop with those old school icons the nostalgia hit me like a train...

[@Ray2Jerry]

I'm having Vietnam-like flashbacks to messing with Windows 95/98/ME drivers... so... many.... broken drivers. When it made a difference if you got the "Win98" or "Win98 SE" version of a driver. What a mess.

[@richardchantlerrico]

Ah back in the day when "Plug and Play" really meant "Plug and Pray"

[@HungryHungryShoggoth]

Holy crap watching that Unreal flyby intro took me waaaaay back... love this channel for moments like that

[@donnierussellii4659]

Driver disc drivers are always buggy. Once a graphics driver caused my system to crash whenever I accessed the D: hard drive.

[@tompepper4789]

Great video! I enjoyed every second. Great memories.

[@realLuisGiordano]

"life-like 3D image quality"

[@SuperDenizor]

I remember... I had drivers problems too when i bought it in 1998 (approximatively... ), great video man, thanks to you ! ;-)

[@halflife352011]

Yeah I still remember turning on opengl on my voodoo 3. That was the day I became a pc snob.

[@jabba334]

Ah, nostalgia! I remember drooling over this card back in the day but couldn't afford it. My current Nvidia GTX970 laughs at this card, but only for one clock cycle.

[@ClassicTrialsChannel]

I loved my 2x Diamond voodoo 2 in sli, I still have them boxed in my spare room

[@Yasharvl]

Thanks for bringing back all these sweet memories! I remember well that on my old tower (233MHz MMX Intel CPU and "S3 Savage 4" ) Max Payne looked and felt exactly the same!

[@Yasharvl]

btw, while playing Max Payne, I always had the feeling of using or being in "Bullet Time" mode!

[@DustinBatchelor]

Oh man, I remember selling these when new. They were underwhelming.

[@woodgoblin1234]

I remember trying out the Diamond Monster 3D for the 1st time. First true gaming card imo. Had 4MB of vram and ran in parallel to your existing video card. 90’s nostalgia : )

[@nullvalu]

"Install the drivers, ya moron" - every video card manual I ever bought

[@maelstromexceptions5984]

Had one back then, Awesome card, thanks for sharing.

[@Blood-PawWerewolf]

32MB of memory?!? Damn I feel old...

[@TheAdatto]

Bobby Albert Matrox Millennium 4mb Wram for 1200. I feel old

[@DarkLinkAD]

most of my schools pc's had 4mb integrated and my P4 had a decent 32mb SiS integrated GPU. Edit P4 Sony Vaio.

[@jedits1988]

Hmm, I remember upgrading from 256k to 512k during the VGA era. I actually upgraded my 386 from 1989's ATI VGA Wonder card from 256k to 512k just last year. No real performance difference. Actually, it's a pretty awful card, a Trident or (gasp!) Oak 512k outperforms it char/sec wise.

[@dremias]

Thanks for sharing this. What I remember the most about S3 was the driver causing text to be cut off when typing. It was very annoying to the point that I took the card back to best buy and got a TNT or TNT2... I don't remember since it's been so long. I kind of miss the days of S3, ATI, Matrox, etc.

[@SassyPaddy]

Dare i say that the Software Rendering on MM1 look cute for some reason?

[@LGR]

It's quite charming, for sure

[@justgrady2192]

Love all the old school computer tech!!! Keep it up LGR

[@ShougHell]

7:45 Is it bad that I legitimately thought this was footage of an original DS game?

[@FoZeusMaximus]

OMG that was my second vigeo card, after Vodoo 2. I love this card . Unreal tournament (1999) with special S3tc texture was looks amazing. Seriously my freinds come to me, and when they see it everybody want a DIAMOND card.. :D Thx for the upload

[@jeremyjohnson8844]

God, the OGL ICD and geometry engine were so bad. I was so disappointed upon buying this card in 99 (your Max Payne example is a good one), but shortly after got a Voodoo3 3000 and was much happier despite its lackluster DX support. Glide was an amazing API, and even today has a very unique and featured TEV/color combiner. By the way, 3DFX AGP cards did not use AGP bus features, so had zero advantage over PCI counterparts.

[@armorgeddon]

Lackluster DX support? Also AGP gave some advantage over PCI since it's higher clocked and AFAIK doesn't share any bandwith with the PCI-bus, but I think it resulted in framerates just 3% higher or so.

[@jeremyjohnson8844]

armorgeddon Yes. Although it supported DX, implementation of functions was relatively poor (e.g., lack of support for the MODULATEx functions). 3% is being generous, and any clock discrepancies can be overcome by OCing; the hardware on both boards is equal.

[@crippled82]

Finally we can understand and explore all older technology without the need of a fortune. Cool channel