3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 + Matrox G400 MAX + NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra - popular 1999 graphics chips!

[@alonso9706]

Thumbs up for this nice Heavy Metal F.A.A.K. 2 benchmark scene! 😍

[@TheVanillatech]

Another legendary use of the Quake III engine! XD

[@welpi1983]

Da ich damals total auf Unreal fixiert war, habe ich meine G400Max wieder für eine V3 verkauft ;) Zusammen mit dem K6-III 450 war das schon eine gute Kombination. Hachja, schöne Zeiten!

[@Michael.Virtus]

Nuclear Nostalgia Explosion

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

I cant believe voodoo3 with half of vram of the competitors cards performs so well !.

[@alexandernorman5337]

You should have took off triple buffering for the G400MAX on the Mercedez-Benz truck racing test since it wasn't enabled on the other cards. You gave the Matrox card a huge disadvantage in FPS by forcing it to hold onto three frame buffers in VRAM. I bet it would have held its own just fine against the TNT2 and V3 in that game with that one setting changed to be like the others.

[@efpcvintageplanet3406]

the three queens of 1999. The color quality of Matrox (superb with expendable even if it is not in review), the power of the TNT2 Ultra and the swansong of the glide titles with the 3500. Nice useful and exciting comparison🤩

[@mikv8]

I would have chosen G400 MAX back then and I actually did. The best all-round card from the competition. Not the fastest one but very close, it has unique for the day Dual monitor support, and all that unmatched Matrox quality. Too bad it was their last decent card with respectable performace. Actually their last attempt to hit the gaming market was Parhelia 512 but it was too late and too pricey to compete with Ti4600 and the 9700 Pro

[@3DfxAslinger]

The G400 MAX has also less performance losses in 32 Bit than the TNT2 Ultra. You can see it here in Incoming.

[@shuc7662]

It reminds me of my dinosaur G400 dual head with amazing bumb mapping...

[@albertrynkowski3599]

I remember when I went from crappy Riva 128 zx 8mb (that couldn't run none of unreal engine games) to a Stb Riva tnt 1 16mb. A game changer for me back in the days.

[@patrickct9386]

Really informative results; straight to the point. RE: turning off hi-res textures in Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing for V3. A HUGE weakness of the v3 was it's texture size limit of 256X256. I don't know if this is responsible for the "slideshow". Afaik, they chopped larger textures down to this limit. Strange that a company that got the basics so right stuffed up here. They were right not bothering with 32bit colour, but the enhanced detail for which larger textures cater make a big visual difference. And this when Matrox introduced hardware bumpmapping on the G400, which was used to impressive effects by some games at the time! Besides this, the card is impressively fast and well-balanced. I think 3dfx should have made the 3k5 version as the V3 ultra, and based the TV card on the 3k or 2k versions. This would have made the V3 ultra cheaper for hardcore gamers. I think most people interested in TV or combo cards are not in that category. Maybe 3dfx didn't have enough 183MHz chips. Anycase, imo, you have the best V3 version. The V3 postfilter was a stroke of engineering genius.If you ever add tests to the video, it would be interesting to see the fps difference between V3 16bit and "22-bit equivalent ". Also, tests at 1280X1024X16 will be instructive. I usually played comfortably at this res on my V3 3k.

[@mesicek7]

Hardware back then was progressing so fast. You bought a fast machine then more than a year later it was almost entry level. :/

[@humphrex]

you bought it brand new. brought it home and after you finished installing, it was already obsolete

[@Digi20]

18 Month were indeed the difference between a 500mhz Pentium 3 with a TNT2, and an 1400Mhz Athlon with a Geforce 2 Ultra. And more than double the amount of much faster Ram. The time was nuts. Would happily travel back in time :)

[@Erik.Lundberg]

Yep but Voodoo2 hold up pretty well. If you bought one in summer 1998 you could add another one after a year and run them in SLI. Voodoo2 SLI performed identically to Voodoo3 2000 if you were ok with 1024x768 as maximum resolution.

[@mesicek7]

@@Erik.Lundberg Voodoo 2 in sli was around 5% slower than voodoo 3 2000 not to mention the power consumption and the dedicated 2d card.

[@Erik.Lundberg]

@@mesicek7 In Forsaken the Voodoo2 SLI performs better. kzbin.info/www/bejne/epavYYqLq5mFjpI

[@Twintania]

currently I have a Riva TNT alongside a Voodoo 2 in my Pentium ii system so far the TNT is a bit slower than I was expecting so looking for something a bit faster while still staying around the 1999 era thinking a Matrox 400

[@3DfxAslinger]

The G400 non MAX is easier to find, but look for the 32 MB version!

[@Twintania]

@@3DfxAslinger Thanks for the advice :) by the way do you have any advice on getting Croc working under glide mode? have tried a Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 and the game either gives me a "unsupported video mode error code 3" error or will just hard lock the system I tried replacing some of the DLL files like many people suggest but not really doing much

[@3DfxAslinger]

I only have played Croc with a Voodoo 1. Do you have removed the old glide files in the game folder? This files only works with a Voodoo 1 card.

[@Twintania]

@@3DfxAslinger I removed the 2 glide files I could find in the directory but that didn't help neither did copying the newer version of the files from the windows directory that get installed by the drivers

[@3DfxAslinger]

Do you use Windows 95/98 or ME or NT based system? I only have found this: dege.freeweb.hu/Patches/CrocPatch_DDrawGlide.zip It fixes a menu crash on newer operating systems.

[@andreyansimov5442]

Incoming was included in the box of some Nvidia based VGA... to show its power 😂. My friend has presented disc to me, because he preferred strategies.

[@barbunicolae2711]

Thank you for these in depth review of this iconic GPUs, but missing the ATI Rage Fury (Rage 128 Pro). The first gpu designed for 32bit color space.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

I think I have a matrox that I've never tried out. It doesn't seem so bad perf wise so might give it a go!

[@pankero1]

way back when computers were fun

[@rcarkk]

Yes, the G400 OpenGL was is aquiles heel. The Voodoo 3 advantage was is Glide API and excelent 16bit performance. The 16bit performance on the G400 is almost identical to 32bit. Very low performance impact. If you benchmark the G400 MAX at 32bit, you would see that the TNT2 Ultra would loose in Direct3D, and the higher the resolution, the better for the G400. But i understand the 16bit limitation to include the Voodoo 3.

[@Digi20]

Yes until the Geforce3, the Nvidia Cards suffered from huge performance impacts in 32 Bit. That said, i gladly used 16bit and higher resolutions (1280*1024 on a highly overclocked GF2Ultra was like from another world) until the Radeon9700 hit.

[@PixelPipes]

Would be interesting to see how they compare with like-for-like 16-bit color mode.

[@3DfxAslinger]

The 16 bit colour mode was used in the first games and Incoming in 32 bit mode (Voodoo3 22 Bit) . 🙂 See at 0:39

[@csgosniperelitepro]

4 years later and i have given you the like your comment deserves lol

[@miki476]

I had Matrox millenium 8mb + voodoo 2 12mb,then went for RIVA TNT2 64.Then swapped it for GeForce 2 MX200 i think. Only beacuse some NFS didnt work properly due to lack of shaders on riva .Good ,old times.Never had a brand new component back then,always got them in second hand stores

[@evilqtip7098]

G400MAX WAS THE BEST GRAPHIC CARD I EVER BOUGHT.

[@aceofhearts573]

What is the music used. It is freaking awesome

[@3DfxAslinger]

XL-R8R techdemo from MadOnion

[@aceofhearts573]

@@3DfxAslinger Thanks, still waiting on that Matrox G800, I am sure we will get it by next year .

[@lexingtRick]

The technology of 3 cards are about the same. G400 MAX don't take short cuts like some reflection, the TNT 2 has no conflicts, but the Voodoo 3 3500 ignores some reflection and lightings too. Some textures are blurry. Whatever happened in the past was for a purpose and 3dFX was perhaps not that honest. Gaud cause destruction but stopping the chip output to sell to other companies. However, ATi seems to be more honest then NVIDIA. Who knows what will happen in the future. Perhaps MATROX should climb up back again in PC graffix. Matrox Parhelia was ahead of time and lacked technologies that would have taken the chip GPU better like 8 pixel pipeline. There would be room today for that market. Matrox simply abandoned video games and took contracts with multi-display of 9 screens for businesses. IT seems like everyone took place in the market of electronics.Cool video.

[@ching-chenhuang8119]

There's a "Subversion" for Incoming? Wow, I didn't know about it until now!!.....

[@0371998]

3 good cards born in differents dates. This is an important detail for the producers of theses cards and for the IQs producing each conquest on the science.

[@liamiangaming7931]

8:21 wow look at the difference between the Voodoo 3 3500, and the Matrox G400 MAX/TNT2 Ultra image quality, does it have to do with the actual image quality, or something else like the Voodoo 3 having bilinear filtering on?

[@3DfxAslinger]

The texture size of the Voodoo 3 is limited to 256x256. The G400 and TNT2 supports up until 2048x2048 texture sizes. I think that MDK2 has 512x512 support. The Voodoo 4 and 5 has the same image quality in MDK2 as the TNT2 and G400, because the VSA-100 now supports 2048x2048 max. texture size.

[@liamiangaming7931]

@@3DfxAslinger oh yeah, forgot about that.

[@LaCorvier]

I use matrox g400 max for my graphic dual monitor setup design pc back in 2000... Before geforce 2 mx....

[@universoexpandido5216]

Voodoo 3000 series rocked but those cards didn't have 32-bit color rendering (but it wasn't a true problem, just marketing). So it was outdated when G400 appeared with its BumpMapping. The most interesting card time later was Geforce2 MX. That was awesome for me. Mine was the Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 MX 32MB. It had a Geforce 2 MX400 (better than the new version MX200). I got for 30 € (equivalence in that year) when the MX200 was about 60 €. BTW I got a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP and one Voodoo 3 2000 PCI before the GeForce2MX :P (My boxed Voodoo 3 2000 PCI is still with me in my study and it will always be).

[@Johnnii360]

32 bit Color Rendering marketing?! Seriously?! Google for it and you will see it's not marketing. Here's a "It's just marketing" comparison: imgur.com/a/CHwBGsS

[@B24Fox]

Thank You!!!

[@guest21984]

Does anyone know, was a 3dfx patch ever released for Motocross Madness 2? Direct3D runs terrible

[@evilqtip7098]

THE BUMP MAPPING AND VISUALS BEAT ALL VIDEO CARDS MADE THE GAME WAY BETTER.. JUST I HAD TO USE NVIDIA OR VOODOO'$ OPENGL ON THE MATROXG400MAX SO IT WOULD BE SO MUCH FASTER..

[@xanelgames]

what do you think of the ATI Rage 128 close to these?

[@3DfxAslinger]

The Rage 128 Pro should come close to this.

[@FatalityOCC]

Coppermine 700 / 733 or Athlon 700 were available

[@3DfxAslinger]

thx! I have informed me more and corrected it in the video description.

[@JohnAmanar]

Great video! ^_^

[@angrygamer69]

Wow now i dont want to buy a riva TNT 2 ultra and just get a 3500 instead.

[@dmtd2388]

Voodoo3 and actually all 3dfx was not even close in front of nvidia or when TnT2 Ultra came out no comparison and cant even do 32bit and some other features all those 3 back then including some more vgas 3dfx was just bit faster some times cause it was only 16bit render and picture quality was so bad blurry front of nvidia

[@si4632]

@@dmtd2388 voodoo 3 shits all over them 16 bit colour 32 bit colour you couldn't tell the bloody difference

[@dmtd2388]

you could tell a lot of difference specially when i had an $1000 22inch trinitron CRT monitor

[@si4632]

@@dmtd2388 bull

[@PabloB888]

@@dmtd2388 I had TNT2 and performance in 32 bit color mode was a little bit too slow, so I had to run 16 bit colors anyway. I remember running ut99 just to see how great it looked in 32 bit mode, but game was simply unplayable. Geforce 2 GTS 64 MB DDR was the first card where running games in 32 bit colors started to make sense. Below people can see how picture looks on voodoo card without dithering (normal 16 bit color) i.ibb.co/TH5LZtb/Voodoo2-SSTV2-VIDEO-FILTER-DISABLE.png Here's how it looks voodoo with dithering filter (22 bit) i.ibb.co/vX9RMrs/Voodoo3.png And here's how picture looks on modern PC in 32 bit mode and I'm using updated OpenGL renderer which is has even better contrast than in 3DFX glide mode (contrast in old OpenGL and D3D renderers looked much worse compared to 3DFX glide renderer not to mention new OpenGL renderer) i.ibb.co/bz9QcS6/Open-GL-32-bit.png Of course 32 bit mode on modern card looks the best but picture on Voodoo 3 still looks good compared to that because you cant see gradients and dots like in 16 bit mode, so IMO 3DFX decision to use 16 bit color dithered to 22 bit was very good, picture quality was good, and performance was the best.

[@liamiangaming7931]

Voodoo 3 won for performance and having glide, while Tnt2 Ultra won with image quality, and idk what G400 MAX was better at.

[@GoodOlKuro]

I remember Matrox had the best 2D image over dsub.

[@liamiangaming7931]

@@GoodOlKuro oh yeah, I remember hearing that, I also heard Matrox had really good performance in D3D.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Actually the V3 had the best 16-bit image because of the 22-bit filter. You can see the difference in Unreal and Quake 2 engine games in on dark textures. The 22-bit image of the V3 is by far the best and it has practically zero performance loss. The TNT2 looses 30-50% performance when switching from 16-bit to 32-bit.

[@GoodOlKuro]

@@3dfxvoodoocards6 that's cool

[@jkostans]

@@3dfxvoodoocards6 it’s too bad iD made Quake 3 look so terrible on the V3. That’s the only title I remember where the 22-bit filter didn’t cut it. Most other titles showed some minor banding here and there, but otherwise compared pretty well with 32-bit rendering. The TNT2 looked pretty bad in 16-bit, lots of dithering from what I remember. Seems like the voodoo3 struck the best balance of speed and image quality at the time. The GeForce 256 DDR basically ruined any chance 3dxf had at making another return to the top.

[@tamas_k]

yesterday i put a voodoo3 3000 in my voodoo1 pc. for some reason i can't set the desktop (voodoo3) resolution bigger than 640x480. i think these two cards mess each other somehow.

[@3DfxAslinger]

Driver conflicts. It's better, to use one Voodoo card. I would build another Retro PC with the V3 3000. 🙂

[@tamas_k]

it was just a test, but i put back geforce mx. it's pretty good for old games. i will sell the voodoo3 and i'll buy a voodoo2 instead.

[@NightSprinter]

Odd, even though this is the German language selection for Drakan, they still had one line in English.

[@liamiangaming7931]

You can't deny that the voodoo 3 has the best colors.

[@ruxandy]

It seems that the Matrox and TNT2 cards are running at 32 bit color and (for games that support it) high resolution textures... Not a fair comparison with the Voodoo 3, IMO. I mean, I love the Voodoo cards and all, but truth being told... the image quality on cards like the TNT2 was just better. And before you say: "yeah, man, but framerate on 32 bit was horrible!" - from experience I can tell you that during that time almost nobody cared about framerate (and NOBODY wanted 60+ FPS like nowadays). To me and my friends, 20 FPS seemed very playable 2 decades ago, and 30 FPS would've been ULTRA playable. And the TNT2 was able to sustain 20+ FPS at 800 x 600 x 32 (which was a very decent resolution) in most games released before the year 2000, and it did so while also delivering GREAT image quality. There's a reason why 3dfx died - and it's not solely because of the STB acquisition, but mainly because they stopped innovating after Voodoo 2. They just recycled the same technology over and over again.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Read the description. All the benchmarks were done in 16-bit except Incoming where the G400 and TNT2 run in 32-bit and the V3 in 22-bit mode. The V3 was better than the TNT2, it was faster, had better compatibility and better 16-bit image (especially with the 22-bit filter turned on). 3dfx lost to nvidia in the year 2000 when they sold the V5 4500 at 179 $ even if it was slower than the GF 2 MX sold at 130-150 $. Also the V5 5500 was sold at the same price as the Geforce 2 GTS even if it was around 10% slower in most games. Thats the reson 3dfx went down. The V3 series actually sold very well. The V5 5500 and especially V4 4500 sold poorely.

[@kathleendelcourt8136]

The G400 Max really struggles with OpenGL.

[@rcarkk]

Only with Trilinear filtering. The card takes a big hit in performance. Direct3D doesn´t have that issue

[@betalabs]

In the game Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing the truck model in voodoo3 is not shiny !!

[@3DfxAslinger]

Yes, with the setting on, I get white trucks. I only have used the demo version of the game without the Voodoo 3 fix.

[@brostenen]

For some reason, I like the G400-Max better.

[@3DfxAslinger]

I also prefer the G400 MAX over a Riva TNT2 Ultra as main graphics card.

[@brostenen]

@@3DfxAslinger The good thing about the G400-Max is that pure signal strength. And paired up with Voodoo2 in SLI. Then I think a perfect 1998/2001 combo is born.

[@TheVanillatech]

@@brostenen Matrox always had amazing 2D quality and made very solid cards. I paired a Mystique with a VooDoo card, and later with VooDoo 2 SLI, for that same reason.

[@brostenen]

@@TheVanillatech Personally, I only have an orchid V1 left of all the voodoo cards that I have ever had. I think it was 2 or 3 years ago, that I sold off my V3-3500-Compaq version. Right before, I had sold off all my P2 and K6-3 motherboards. You know, SS7 and 440bx boards. I did keep my S370 intel motherboard and my GF2-GTS, GF3-ti200 and GF4-ti4200. The reason is that I was lacking space, never used the hardware, and I have a lot of 486 and Pentium1 hardware. Those run MS-Dos-6.22 and my P3-933 is running pure Win98se. And I have a good stash of Win98se compatible hardware that are way faster. True Voodoo era hardware are awesomme, yet with the prices today, and tons of faster Win98 hardware, then I do not see a reason to keep Voodoo era hardware. Especially when space is limited. I have to have space for my C64 and Amiga hardware as well.

[@TheVanillatech]

@@brostenen You clearly had too much. I understand how we all want these amazing things, as collectors and admirers of the vintage hardware, but then we become middle aged with lots of other commitments and there isn't any time anymore. Back when this hardware was new, we had all the time in the world, but couldn't get all the hardware. Orchid made amazing VooDoo cards, the Righteous 3D it was called in the UK. My friend had one and it's image quality was much clearer than my cheaper MaxiGamer model, which looked quite milky. You should hang on to that Orchid. Nice talking with you.

[@ytanonymity3585]

NVIDIA as a new comer player in this GPU competition is nothing compared to Voodoo and Matrox at the time lol

[@pabloXL]

results were inherently skewed cause voodoo3 only did 16bit color and that had a huge performance impact

[@3DfxAslinger]

See the video description or at min. 0:40, all runs in the same condition. Only incoming runs at 32 bit on the tnt 2 and g400 and 22 bit on the voodoo 3 for image differences. All others runs in 16 Bit. The postfilter (22 bit) on the V3 was also deactivated for a fair use.

[@pabloXL]

@@3DfxAslinger oh yeah that was the clip I noticed it in. Hey have you thought of doing a g400 max bump mapping comparison video? I remember when these cards came out, that was the g400 selling point

[@3DfxAslinger]

This channel is now focused on 3dfx, but it's bookmarked. :)

[@PabloB888]

I had TNT2 32MB in 1999, it was good card back then but Vodoo3 was better card overall simply because there were some exclusive Glide 3DFX games (gta1, tomb raider 1, NFS2, carmageddon 1 etc.) and on top of that GLIDE renderer in some games (Unreal 1, UT99, NFS 3/4 etc, carmageddon 2,) looked better (different colors, some additional effects) and run better at the same time (especially in unreal engine 1 games). Voodoo 3 was 16 bit colors only card, but because colors were dithered to 22 bit picture was still great (more comparable to 32 bit on TNT2 than on 16 bit), while one TNT2 I had to play in 16 bit colors anyway because of poor performance in 32 bit. If i could turn back time I would choose voodoo 3 instead of TNT2. www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/62/4 Here's interesting picture quality comparison

[@universoexpandido5216]

Glide was great in Half-Life, better than Directx.

[@evilqtip7098]

You made a mistake that's a voodoo 3000 .

[@liamiangaming7931]

No that's a 3500, it's a special Compaq edition, the voodoo 3 3000 is shorter.