Office PC meets 3DFX Voodoo Banshee

[@pc-sound-legacy]

I can absolutely agree with you... This 3DFX moment was magical... If you've seen such a card at work the first time. It's like night and day. It was absolutely mind-blowing! The Banchee was my 2nd 3DFX card after the Voodoo1 as I was not able to pay the price for a Voodoo II before. I played Unreal and Half-life with so much fun on my budget build, there is a smile on my face with these memories even today:-) I think you can't imagine it if you have not been grown up with this stuff back in the end of the 90s.

[@KevinSills]

I bought my first computer in 1997, a month later I bought a Diamond Monster 3dfx Voodoo 1, the difference was magical. In 2024 I bought an older HP computer and upgraded it, then I added a Sound Blaster Live and a Diamond Monster Fusion (Voodoo Banshee) video card. The graphics are gorgeous, and it also has the best 2D graphics for the 90's games, so the desktop graphics are really great too. I have 42 games for this machine, many run on the 3dfx card...........and there are lots of the Banshee's on Ebay.

[@KevinSills]

I read alot of the posts here, and anyone who lived through the 90's and owned a PC that added a Voodoo 1, 2 or a Banshee had the same experience. The difference in 3D performance was amazing, and games running in 3dfx Glide absolutely would blow your mind! in 2024 I still own a 3dfx Voodoo 1; but, I bought a Diamond Monster Fusion, and there are specific driver's for this card on Vogons, and I have 42 games for this computer, many run in 3dfx Glide, and it takes me back to those days when 3dfx ruled supreme!

[@AllboroLCD]

Those speakers do take me back!! They were standard practically with all generic local shop built rigs back then!

[@TheNovum]

I remember my friend who got a voodoo1 and showed me Quake1. I was blown away.

[@CTimmerman]

I have those same speakers. :) Their cone size sounds great.

[@StevenSmyth]

Good as always. I suppose where you live Packard Bells were office PCs but here in the US, they were heavily marketed as home multimedia/SOHO (small office/home office) computers. You couldn’t get a Packard Bell via mail order like a Dell or a Gateway nor did PB have authorized outlet stores. Here in the US we bought them from department stores like Sears and Montgomery Wards, or consumer electronics stores like The Good Guys or Circuit City. Still a nice set of benchmarks.

[@abooogeek]

In France, Packard-Bells were about the same of what you describe. All-inclusive configurations sold in supermarkets and electronic stores, rivaling with Cibox, Continental-Edison and Fujitsu-Siemens for the cheap OEM brands. They were interesting for the financing options but not as competitive than just BYO through a "Taiwanese" or "Chinese" computer store (the downside was to pay cash or with a credit card). Gateways were less common, pricier and not sold in stores (you had to have a mail-in order for those).

[@Richard-bq3ni]

This brings back memories. I bought my voodoo 1 just to play quake. It also ran quake2 perfectly.

[@Androx74]

i had a voodoo banshee at the time and a voodoo rush before i was really happy with that card seeing that bilinear filtering for the first time was awesome :D

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah it often gets a bad rap but I still think it is a great card. If you can pick it up for a good price I would not hesitate. Got this one from inside an old pc for next to nothing.

[@cuttingedgeretro9164]

Your channel with 3Dfx videos like this is going definately the right way, thumb up

[@RetroSpector78]

Haha ... thx appreciate it. Would like to do something more indepth but need to find myself a voodoo3 pci first

[@upgrade1373]

I got myself a Banshee for my K6-2 machine and it has been awesome so far. I didn't have one back in the day so it is all new to me!

[@dagglock7615]

Today I just got myself a Banshee and this video has given me a heads up on what I need to do. Thanks :)

[@pvc988]

I remember game magazines distributing 3dfx patches for games to be a thing. Often with extra bonus in form of malware ;)

[@ukeyaoitrash2618]

Literal malware? What kind? Holy shit!

[@pvc988]

@@ukeyaoitrash2618 Nothing special, just whatever they happen to have on their computers at the time. Back then malware wasn't that big of a deal. The worst it could do, was borking your OS to the point you had to reinstall. Spyware, data collection and ransomware were not a thing yet (not enough people had Internet access). Not to mention crypto miners. Most viruses and trojans were just annoying little pranks, like making your mouse pointer go crazy or icons escaping from under the cursor. One of more annoying types of malware was so called "dialer". It could change your dial-up connection number to something very, very expensive (sometimes even 100x more expensive) without your knowledge. Though, if you memorized your modem's dialing tones (and believe me, after some time you did), you could tell something is not right immediately.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

I picked up a similar Packard Bell desktop. Had to replace everything though so only the case is original. I also had to put in a PCI card but I went for a cheaper FX5500 but am pretty happy with it now (it has a p3 800 inside now)

[@KARAOTI23]

For me the highlight of this video that blew my mind is how to get a framecounter on glide... Thanks man!

[@RetroSpector78]

No worries .... Doesn’t work well on all games. But still a nice way to get a FPS counter on some.

[@HabadzaKalfa]

As a kid I was happy if a flight simulator game was able to run with 10+ fps on our computer (below that it usually got tricky to land a plane without crashing). Today many people seem to deem a game as "completely unplayable" if fps drops below 60.

[@FOIL_FRESH]

that frame counter hack is great

[@RetroSpector78]

Yes. It is hard to find good fps counters thst works well with a lot of games.

[@TheDc1984dc]

I had a custom build with an AGP Voodoo 3500 16mb. The CPU was an AMD K2 550. And it was amazing back in the day.

[@MrLurchsThings]

Maybe this is a regional thing, but in the late 90s when I was going to plenty of LAN parties, no one had a 3DFX card. Everyone had nVidia cards of some description. Be it a TNT or an early Geforce. So I find all the videos on Voodoo cards like they’re from another world. It’s a weird world.

[@MrLurchsThings]

@Samurai Jack Maybe so, I was just saying that at least within *my* experience here in Australia; it was all nVidia.

[@KneelB4Bacon]

The Quake 2 demo was the first "real" game I saw running with 3D acceleration on my Voodoo Banshee. Before this, almost all 3D accelerated programs were tech demos. You knew at this point that hardware acceleration was here to stay.

[@CTimmerman]

15:12 I think my 200 MHz Pentium with S3 Virge GPU played Carmageddon pretty well.

[@UpLateGeek]

Yeah, I almost forgot how much of an improvement the 3dfx cards were over the old S3 chipsets. I remember being blown away by the improved graphical quality, and I do remember noticing improved performance, but I don't remember it being this stark of a difference. I think in 1998 I was running a Pentium pro 180 overclocked to 200, but I was a pretty poor kid so I wouldn't have been playing the latest games. I do remember saving up for ages to buy Quake II, then I saved up for even longer to buy a Voodoo2, and the improvement in graphics blew me away! Anyway, I've always liked the idea of a stealth gaming PC like this. Looks like a boring beige office PC on the outside, but lots of awesome games on the inside! Although it is a bit disappointing to be limited by the non-AGP chipset and K6-2 CPU. I kind-of wish they bought a celeron or early PII or something instead. At least then you could upgrade it to a later CPU with more grunt.

[@diegocipriani]

please try Incoming from Rage Software, it was THE tech "demo" back in the day to show 3dfx capabilities!! great work as ever, I really appreaciate your channel, carry on! :)

[@HuntersMoon78]

Yeah I remember that game, also Wargasm on Voodoo II hardware ran great.

[@eddiehimself]

So after watching your last video, I decided to get a Creative 3D blaster Banshee, as well as a Pentium II PC to go with it and my AWE 64 lol.

[@crazyivan030983]

Aaaaahhhhh... Need For Speed 3. Remember my high school time. Nostalgia and memories. Greetings from Poland :)

[@cyberp0et]

I have it on a CD and I will install it n my Windows 98 machine :)

[@Tech-NO-City]

My 2 favorite 3DFX games Camageddon 2 and EVO 4x4

[@Passenger-nj7in]

If it only wasn‘t so expensive. Great card.

[@СергейПузырев-к9н]

Hi! Interesting tests, but I absolutely impressed with you monitor. It's perfect design for 199x, named Vintage and, possibly, one of the first LCD displays for PC. Have you any videos about it?

[@RetroSpector78]

No I don’t ... I actually didn’t care all that much for lcds. At some I traded in about a dozen lcd’s for crt minitors. But most of them were more modern. I also feel it is easthetically pleasing.

[@СергейПузырев-к9н]

@@RetroSpector78 Oh, yes! It looks very authentical. I like such oldschool design. I've just misread the logo - it's Vibrant, not Vintage. The whole appearance of the monitor made me think of Vintage :) So, it's great choice for KZbin!

[@RetroSpector78]

@@СергейПузырев-к9н unfortunately the OSD is locked. Need to find a way how to reset that.

[@Mini-z1994]

@@RetroSpector78 Man 3dfx cards has really taken off in price, it's about as expensive too get a voodoo 3 3000 pci as my gtx 1660 super heh. The ati radeon 9250 pci 128 mb might be a interesting card too try out on this pc even if the cpu is quite slow. On youtube with a pentium III 866 mhz it gets about 4000 points in 3dmark 2000 so certainly a power house for something like quake II at 1280x1024 i'd imagine if not 1600x1200 running fine. There should be a version of the 9550 as well out there with pci bus but that might be hard too find.

[@SantaClaw]

Well, the Voodoo2 is actually a lot faster than the later Banshee, that's the main reason it wasn't as popular, having two 12mb voodoo2's in SLI is MUCH (nearly 2x) faster than a banshee. This is because multitexturing in games really took off, and the Banshee has no chance vs even a single voodoo2 with multi texturing enabled. The Banshee is terrible at multitexturing, while the Voodoo2 is a beast in that area.

[@RetroSpector78]

Have 2 voodoo2 cards but don’t think I hve the sli cable. Will need to look. Might make for a good comparison. Would also love to get my hands on a voodoo3 pci.

[@SantaClaw]

@@RetroSpector78 www.ebay.com/itm/174421113457 - There are several on ebay

[@thesillyhatday]

I had that exact PC tower. Pentium 3 800Mhz.

[@Tangobaldy]

I had a packard bell like that and it cost me a fortune. I added a 3dfx card and played half life diay chained to 3 of my mates computers nearly every night. No wonder I am single now. But hey I am loving it and have a pc and a life thats stress free now. I dont miss the trouble of trying to get games ot work on a computer. Nwo we buy on steam if it dont owrk, get a refund. ABck then it was no returns. Wish I had kept my old pc equipment as I could sell it all now and buy a HTC vive

[@Lilithe]

I remember the Banshee being pretty bad for late 90s gaming over PCI. Unreal Tournament against someone with a real Voodoo 3 was a slideshow sometimes.

[@Breakfast_of_Champions]

The memories... the hardware evolved so fast back then. On the other side it took them many years of evolution to finally make an FPS as good as Tarkov.

[@jimmothy79]

This was my first 3D gpu (Creative 3D Blaster Banshee PCI), wish I could get one now but can never find them

[@chuck2501]

I was unlucky / lucky. My Voodoo 2 died and I sent it off to creative, it was repaired and lost in the post. They sent another one after a few weeks and they both turned up the next week! SLI was so cool, sli only seemed to work at 1024x768 though.. so that was awesome. I'd alreadt played HL in software 400x300 went back in 1024 and played again. so amazing.

[@HuntersMoon78]

Wonder what crazy fps would acheived with Quake on modern hardware.

[@erichkohl9317]

Ah yes. I bought a Monster 3DFX back in 1998. Still have it -- I put it in a Windows 98 PC that my coworker gave me. :)

[@RetroSpector78]

Iconic card !

[@andheeid]

0:54 there some cut out on the bracket plate of the card, do you know what is the function of those?

[@RetroSpector78]

Think I showed it on my pentium 200 mmx video. I got the card from an old computer where it was sitting bracket-less. So had to find a videocard that had a matching bracket. And so I did :)

[@krz8888888]

My first accelerator card!

[@piecaruso97]

you should also install an isa sound card to have that sweet dos compatibility for games

[@pascalmariany]

Cool video series! I have a Pentium II 333MHz and its beats the AMD K6-2 easily. Also the same combination with a Voodoo Banshee. Back in the day I also had the K6-2 though 😄 I’m from 1983. I have a VPN at home and I’m from the Netherlands. Would you like to play some games with me? Maybe Quake 1 in coop? Check out the KillerPack for Quake. It’s a great mod.

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

Hey Retrospactor, what happened ? When we can expect new great quality videos from your unique youtube channel?

[@spidermcgavenport8767]

Thank you Sir, this is greatly appreciated!

[@spidermcgavenport8767]

Sir, would you be willing to, if and when you have time, try a Laptop of that era with a PCMCIA to pci express adaptor with an external graphics card on the speculation of a performance increase?

[@Trev0r98]

You should put that Voodoo Banshee card on the top PCI slot, closest to the CPU. The most performance-sensitive PCI cards should be given the shortest "critical path" to the CPU.

[@tOSdude]

Did you try "have disk" in Device Manager to see if you could force Windows to take the reference driver?

[@ShrineOfLife]

mate, I know its some years ago you made that video, but I do have the exact same problem now with my socket 7 machine, it just keeps the banshee as a standard vga adapter - could you please hint me to the installer, that made it finally work for you?? maybe its a thing with the pci version, i dont know. I can get the banshee running, but I have no options menu in the display properties and I think its kind of missing out on " the real thing ". thank you in advance and ty for the video!!

[@xephorce]

my s3 savage 4 died on me yesterday :( idk what wrong with it. its giving no display now but the last time it did work the display was all messed up it was half split vertically on the screen. like the whole imaged was shifted and i noticed many incorrect characters on the boot screen. I am hoping it's just bad caps but i really doubt that. so sad when old tech dies. sometime in the future i plan on trying to fix it if it can be. any suggestions on what to try to restore it?

[@6581punk]

Probably electrolytic caps failing, the ones in the 90s are pretty bad. But also worth checking solder joints as well, expansion and contraction due to heat/cooling cycles can make solder joints go bad.

[@xephorce]

@@6581punk ya my first step will be the caps only a few on the card. Just waiting for them. I just really hope the cards ok. I know its nothing crazy awesome being a s3. But it's crazy compatible with old dos games and it's a 32mb version so can do some basic 3d games lol.

[@RetroSpector78]

Was also searching for an s3 savage 4 but very difficult to find. Thought performance of these was pretty good.

[@RetroSpector78]

Had an old laptop once that started showing weird characters and lines. Turned out to be the ram. Had to reflow the ram chips and the thing started working again.

[@analog303]

@@RetroSpector78 Actually I have a spare one if you're interested in fixing it in a video 8) ? It's a Creative 3D Blaster Savage4 Pro, I did a bios update on it and after that it died..or to be precise the bios forgets it's contents,because I could get it working if I put the bios flashing tool into the autoexec.bat :D and run it every time if I wanted to use that card...so not the loveliest solution but worked :)) so let me know if you're interested ;) and I'll send it to you. Keep up with these great videos mate ;) loving them!

[@framebuffer.10]

My God that matt black 3dfx voodoo 1 is fantastic, is there any chance you want to trade it (+ some difference) for a "normal" voodoo 1? :-)

[@pianokeyjoe]

I have this card! A friend sent me some cards and other parts and the Creative 3D blaster is one of them but I did not know if this card was any good for my retro Linux computing projects so the card has sat collecting dust, until NOW, thanks to your video! So Creative 3D blaster IS 3DFX voodoo Banshee with GLIDE? So I can use the 3D accelerated Xserver drivers included with most older Linux distros during installation!

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah I do believe there are Linux drivers for it. Might also make for a fun video. I remember trying to glquake up and running back in the day with my voodoo 1 :)

[@Geomanb]

Are you using different microphones? because your voice seems to change somehow during scenes...

[@dykodesigns]

Installing graphics card drivers under windows 98, it always seems russian roulette. Sometimes it works, sometimes it crashes windows if it doesn't like the driver.

[@danekeating5224]

Are you Willie from the TV show ALF? Good that you had a hobby to fall back on. Did you eventually kill Alf?

[@aaaalex1994]

Last time I tried to run Screamer 2 with my Voodoo2 it didn't work for some reason, it trow me an error saying that it couldn't find the card...

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah ... back then it was all about video drivers, game patches and windows updates.

[@Madness832]

So, you turbo-charged your Packard Hell?

[@JamesPotts]

I had endless driver problems with that card, when it was new. I swore to never buy another Creative graphics card.

[@RetroSpector78]

In a previous video where I used the card I cannot remember having this much trouble. Perhaps it was a windows SE thing. Will need to check.

[@JamesPotts]

@@RetroSpector78 I mainly had stability issues. Lots of crashes under windows. I eventually replaced it with a TNT card.

[@nickwallette6201]

It could be heat. That Banshee gets HOT, and since PCI cards were brilliantly designed to have the components on the bottom side, there’s not much that dinky heat sink can do without a fan - except hold heat to bake the poor thing. Back when I was looking for one of these online, I kept noticing that the PCB was discolored behind the GPU on many of them. Yikes! Having some airflow past this card and out a perforated slot cover is pretty much essential IMO.

[@RetroSpector78]

@@nickwallette6201 very true. On one occasion I wanted to swap it out real quick for another card and accidentally touched the heatsink. Not pleasant :)

[@zarkeh3013]

The Banshee isokay, but if I remeber right a signle voodoo2 was same or faster? I think the Voodoo2 would be a good match for this computer. Using onboard Video for 2D it might have great DOS gaming capability, although 3dfx also has great 2d. I'd like to see a voodoo2 or even dual voodoo2's in this! make it run Carmageddon better, lol!

[@BenoitAdam2]

Pandemonium 2 my man !

[@GigAHerZ64]

Don't you have your speakers wrong way around?

[@kyllasaakuvata]

Carmageddon 2 needs FAST cpu. P2 450 with V2 its running great

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah ... the amd k6-2 might be a tad slow, but the banshee is also not powerfull enough I think. Will try with a voodoo2 and voodoo2 sli (if I can find the cable) to see what kind of difference it makes.

[@analog303]

@@RetroSpector78 as far as I remember an 800Mhz AMD Duron or P3 could run it just well with the Banshee,I had this configuration around 2001 and the Banshee was a really great card for a long time but going with K6-2 or K6-3 and Banshee was not a good combination for these more demanding games. We played Half Life,Carmageddon 2 and Quake 3 in multiplayer with the guys in high resolutions and the Banshee could keep up with that,but you had to put a better CPU next to it than K6-2.

[@DxDeksor]

Your voice sounds different at some points. Did you get sick or something ?

[@RetroSpector78]

Haha ... no .... had to do some parts very early in the morning into my first cup of coffee :) we had plans for lunch so wanted to get this finished asap.

[@cyberp0et]

Windows 98 SE is my favorite Windows.

[@erminc1891]

The CPU is the bottleneck in this configuration, PII 300 MHz is the better pick

Nice!

[@XDymeStarX]

a Packard Hell !

[@exileddoom]

truth be told iv had far better luck with windows me vs windows 98

[@pierrejeanf.dupuis4150]

Windows consumer version rule still holds; skip every other version. 95 skip, 95b good, 98 skip, 98SE good, WinME skip, WinXP good, Vista skip, Win7 good, Win8 skip, Win 10 good. WITH a huge load of ifs and buts. I'll skip over DOS with Windows 3.11 and up and proceed to noting that both NT4 and Windows 2000 were never natively intended for consumers, even if you ended up with 2K in the ME period. If you did, you may (like me) have (mostly) skipped XP which had various issues during various times. Some may argue that Win8.1 was the next OS after Win8 and Win10 is bad too. Personally I may agree that 2K and 7 are the best, and things are otherwise fairly muddled since the 9x period. But I wouldn't like to do online banking on either nowadays. As to the best Voodoo card, the 3000 was excellent. Had a 3500 myself, the one with the tuner. Don't know what it did, but watching my VHS tapes trough that on my PC (22" Iiyama Trinitron screen hooked up in '99) didn't make a huge amount of difference from playing back DVDs directly from my DVD-ROM drive. So video D-A conversion was phenomenal for the time. It was my first AGP card, so I figured an omniclear desktop was normal. Later I got an MX400 (same period) and was amazed at how bad that was in comparison. Later ATI cards did a better job, but I don't think that even a modern high-end card with an OLED screen can compare to the Voodoo 3500 with an Iiyama Vision Master Pro (510) CRT. But perhaps...nostalgia...

[@bryandrobny7690]

Jaton GeForce 6200 512MB PCI Graphics Card- Video-348PCI-LP

[@CesarDRK]

Something is very wrong with your results. It seems like your video driver is not installed correctly! I can play Carmageddon II with decent framerates on my Monster 3D 1 4mb (voodoo 1).

[@IkarusKommt]

What the dark ages it was, with a ton of incompatible hardware.

[@alaricjeard269]

This sould perform waaaayyyyy beter in 3d mark 99... You might have drivers issues...

[@RetroSpector78]

Will try a clean win98se install and also have another k2-500 system to compare against.

[@only257]

📼😌😊sweet

[@RetroAmateur1989]

It's 1998. You bought a state of the art pentium II running at stunning 450mhz, with a whoping 128mb of ram. But that isn't the best part. You drop nearly 1k on two beefy Voodoo2s(because you want to experience that mindblowing 1024x768 resolution), and a third card for that 2D. Just a few months later 3dfx releases the banshee. No need for 2 cards for that resolution and no third card needed, and the cost is less than half of what you paid. And you're left like 🤬

[@maniatore2006]

I totaly ignored the 3DFX Series. My first 3D Card was a S3 Virge, later a Matrox, and the best at this time was later the Diamond Viper V550 The most Games Support Direct 3D even NFS III

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah also have fond memories of the riva, riva tnt and tnt2. But don’t have them in PCI unfortunately.

Ops, Nice beige hehehe

[@MrApaHotel]

Throw that junk awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy

[@BEXYSPC]

gl_flashblend 0 in quakes console to restore the “realistic” lighting.