The Legendary 3dfx Voodoo Graphics Accelerator

[@pc-sound-legacy]

You perfectly describe the 3DFX-effect. People can hardly feel it if they have not experienced it, regarding we came from. The step from 20fps 320x240 software rendering in games as Quake, Tomb Raider or Need for Speed 2 to 30+fps 640x480 sharp and silky smooth, dithered texures excitement was just incredible and awesome! The Voodoo was nothing less than a revolution and always will keep a place at my heart.

[@HoistusMaximus]

Totally. People have an annoying habit now of pairing a Voodoo with a 2.4GHz CPU and concluding that they "prefer the look of software" at 1600 x 1200 and 60 fps as though that was even close to being on the table back then

[@micb3rd]

The 3Dfx Voodoo 1 truly the biggest jump in gaming technology and experience. My brother and I were lucky to pre order a Realvision Deltron Flash 3D one of the first 3Dfx cards that came into the UK. We got it from a company called Silicon Village and there was less than 10 Games and demos compatible at the time. Gaming gold.

[@034G63EVO]

I think we are around the same age. With my first job I also purchased the Canopus Pure 3D. I was rockin a P233 MMX that I hijacked from work lol ( I asked if I could barrow it ). Man, Those were some good times.

[@viciious1234]

Your 3dfx story is so relatable! I was also obsessed with Quake and Quake 2 in 1997-1998 and my first GPU card was also a Canopus Pure 3D! My dad secretly bought that card as a surprise while I was staying at my grandparents' house. Seeing Quake2 with GL drivers for the first time blew me away when I got back home! Sadly these cards sell for ridiculous prices when they pop up on ebay :(

[@RltchieI]

P200 MMX, 32MB of EDO RAM, Matrox Mystique 2MB upgraded to 4MB, Diamond Monster 3D Accelerator card & a 2.5gb Seagate Medalist Pro HDD. Ahh those were the days.

[@PixelPipes]

I love videos like these talking about the early days of 3D. Everything was new and exciting! And you absolutely do NOT have to be the first to make a video about a subject. We all enjoy watching different takes of our favorite subject matter. :)

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks Nathan! And thanks again for organizing GPUJune2 this year. So much great content to watch 👍

[@DarrenRockwell]

Your story about your first time witnessing a 3D accelerator specifically the voodoo 2 is so similar to mine! The first game I saw was quake 1 in GL_Quake (Of course). I also got a job just to build my own computer in my room so that I wouldn't have to use my parents family computer. I worked at Carl's Jr for one summer, 3 months exactly and it was just enough money to have everything I needed for my first computer. I think I had just enough money for three or four games after I built the computer. Damn those were great times. Anyway this is a cool video I like hearing your unique story and everything keep them coming!

[@sithyarael6807]

@@DarrenRockwell I grew up in the 80's and worked at Hell/Dell late 90's so I remember all these cards. And no wonder Nvidea bought then out before ATI could. Nvidia had the money ATI didn't. It would be a different story for video cards if AIT had the money at the time.

[@DSOImager]

Total game changer.. although I only had one for a few months. I sold it to a buddy and picked up a voodoo2.. which I still have :)

[@CooChewGames]

Loved MDK... the first card I got was the Voodoo 2. Wasn't convinced that a separate card was needed at first but when I got the Voodoo 2, it just blew me away.

[@RTLEngineering]

Great retrospective, loved seeing the demo details. I can't believe that the software side of the racing demo was with bi-linear filtering / mipmapping disabled. I would say that's an unfair comparison, but it actually puts the Voodoo at a disadvantage since the "software rendering" is much better than it really should be. Btw, the 50ns EDO was the row / page access speed. The speed within a page was ~10ns, which would have been 100 MHz.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! Totally agree about the racing demo. Interesting about the EDO access times as well. I've been learning more about this topic in the last few days. I'll be doing a repair on a Voodoo 2 soon and have been reading datasheets trying to find suitable replacement DRAM ICs.

[@RaptorZX3]

Also, i think Quake 2 might be the only game, AFAIK, that have 3D modeled-and-animated explosions, instead of 2D animated textures.

[@vswitchzero]

I still remember being amazed the first time I saw the explosion effects in Quake 2. Very unique, that’s for sure!

[@ClassicTrialsChannel]

My first 3d card was the Orchid Righteous 3dfx card. It was mind blowing running those first games patched to use the 3DFx. It was an amazing time in pc gaming

[@alexanderwhite8320]

After watching this video going to eBay to buy Voodoo1 for Pentium MMX 133 system I purchased few years brand new from university warehouse reserves.

[@CSHracer]

I remember having the same experience! My dad had a decent PC, but it was made from left over parts from his little brother, my uncle, he was the real PC nerd. We were LANing, Quake IIRC, and he had his nee Canopus card and it blew everyone's minds.. just amazing.

[@KevinSills]

I got my first computer in 1997, it had a Pentium 166mhz processor, soon thereafter the Diamond Monster 3D. I had already bought NFS2se, and so when I got the Voodoo video addon card I was blown away by the difference, and so started my trip into PC gaming. In 2024 I have an old HP computer with a Nvidia MX400 paired with a Monster 3D card, and a SB Audigy for sound, and Bose Companion II series II speakers. It's a great rig for my 42 games, most run in 3dfx glide.

[@theforthdoctor7872]

Legendary is an over used term these days. If you were there in the day the improvement from what went before was truly jaw dropping. A real legend.

[@smallmoneysalvia]

Holy crap I had forgotten about MDK, what a game that was! I loved it when I was a kid.

[@smokingone]

3dfx was the pinnacle of gaming performance, you literally couldn't get anything better.

[@nalinux]

Montezuma's Return is quite funny, and beautiful in Glide too.

[@homelessEh]

in regards to MDK after the MDK series the MDK dna shows up in "2003's Armed and dangerous"

[@RetroTinkerer]

Love your video, all these early 3D games, so many games that launched without 3d support that got 3d patches. Damn it is so difficult to transmit to people that didn't go thru this transition. I was sold on the Rendition Verite but as soon as I started reading about the VooDoo I had to get one... that was one of the best system I ever had.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for the comment Alberto! Very true - there were tons of 3dfx patches for games that were originally unaccelerated. I think that's why games like Turok were interesting because they were designed to be 3D accelerated from the ground up in those early days. Interesting that you had a Rendition Verite back in the day. They were great cards too but didn't get the support that 3dfx did with glide. That said, vQuake was definitely a special piece of software. Looks even better than GLQuake (at least on a 3dfx glide card) in my opinion.

[@SaccoBelmonte]

MDK will be always in my heart.

[@direravendenial8947]

Was 16 at the time it came out was really impressive back then and it also showed what the potential future could be like for gaming too. I often find myself missing older games on such hardware because it had a quality about it that you just can not replicate with modern cards despite the advances they have made. Great Nostalgia.

[@nexxusty]

The first GPU was the Geforce 256. This is a "Graphics card" or a "3d Accelerator".

[@damderrick]

Brings back memories of my 3DFX Banshee and VooDoo 2

[@heckintech]

These all hit pretty good, I've played a bunch of them recently.. BUT WOW, MDK just floored me, that intro music just excavated MY ROOTS lol, I've not played it in well over 20 years! I was running it on a 120mhz beast. 🧡 some big feels there. 😁

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks Jesse! Loved MDK, was such a unique game at the time. I believe there is a sequel but I've never played it before.

[@PatrickvonMassow]

Thanks for the nostalgia! One thing I always wondered: What were the strengths of "good 2D cards" of that time, like the Matrox Mystique? I compared them in non-accelerated games like Duke 3D and measured no difference in frame rates, compared with a cheap card. I also saw no difference in image clarity, etc.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! Yes, you are correct. There really isn't much of a difference in non-3d accelerated performance between cards in that era (around 1997 or so). The big difference was really analog image quality. Some cards look blurry at higher resolutions. I had a low-quality brand S3 virge in my Pentium 200 back in the day and the image quality was very poor compared to a Matrox Millenium I got later on. The pass-through cable does degrade image quality a bit too, and I found that having a good source signal helped to reduce this to some degree. Matrox cards were always well known for good analog image quality and higher frequency DACs etc, but there were many other good cards out there for image clarity too. Thanks again!

[@fatcat7msk7ru]

It was break through to next level graphics at the day.

[@framebuffer.10]

Fantastic 😎 note how in 1997 no graphics engine was able to represent the explosions with transparency effects, although I'm not even sure if the Voodoo Graphics would have been capable to render it, have to check

[@RTLEngineering]

I can't speak to why the explosions didn't use full transparency, but the ones in the video did use alpha-cutout (that's still a form of transparency). The voodoo GPUs were capable of all Porter-Duff blend modes though (as far back as the Voodoo 1). Perhaps explosions didn't use partial transparency to save texture memory (e.g. more than 1-bit alpha), and to avoid issues with the sprite billboarding (you really need multiple particles overlapping to make an explosion look good, which would mean more triangles being drawn).

[@IndellableHatesHandles]

@@RTLEngineering Don't discount that maintaining two different rendering modes for explosions depending on whether the user has a Voodoo card or not would be annoying, and most people probably didn't care enough at the time.

[@GrinPS14]

So the demos were on the monster 3d CD!? Nice to find out decades later. 😂

[@Caleb-fv5fp]

Thanks I’m always looking for more content on the voodoo 1

[@Lesydian]

At some point I was able to purchase a Quantum 3D Obsidian2 X-24 24MB of Voodoo2 on a single PCI slot... perfect solution for my IBM Aptiva S78 "Stealth" PC

[@gex581990]

These were the days man

[@cszolee7979]

... I bought an Elephant Voodoo card in 1997 from my first salary and played Quake and Rogue Squadron and... I can't remember what (NFS3?) with it. With a MMX 166 @ 250MHz, Gravis UltraSound and later an SB AWE32 PnP it was top tier :)

[@IndellableHatesHandles]

The caption system's interpretation of the dinosaur sounds in turok is hilarious. [Laughter] [Music] huh

[@druout1944]

Great video; very well briefed

[@BrassicGamer]

This was fun - tech demos are always interesting so thanks for including those! The best thing about games of this era is that nearly every single one was mind blowing in some way. It was such a big leap technologically. I've actually never played Turok but I might give it a look now. I finally played through Quake II a couple of years back (albeit via a source port) and actually really liked it.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks Andrew! So true - this was such an exciting time for 3D gaming. Turok is a fun game. Give it a chance when you start.. it takes a bit of getting used to. But the puzzles and secrets are fun.. and so are the cool weapons you find along the way. I still haven’t beaten Quake 2. I definitely need to give it a full play through one of these days 🙂

[@captmaverickable]

This was great!

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

I skipped 3dfx when I was younger and went straight to a Creative TNT2 Ultra but have learnt to appreciate voodoo cards recently. Good video mate!

[@lemagreengreen]

The 3dfx hype was real, it was the one big upgrade you could make at the time that would make things so much better. I only really remember the Rendition Verité as a possible competitor but I never saw one of those in the wild. I ran Voodoo1 and then Voodoo2 SLI until I got a TNT2U, from then on it was all Nvidia.

[@vswitchzero]

It sure was! I had a V1 but missed the V2s. SLI must have been awesome. I eventually got a V3 3000 and then a Geforce 3 Ti 200.

[@r4z4m4t4z]

nice video, well done!! fancy 3d stuff. i like the 2d/3d split screen comparison demo, faking the 2d side, so they are right, 3d does look sharper.

[@hawksights]

I remember throwing a monster 3D II into my PII 266 system and suddenly I could just run any game on the market.

[@supermario8416]

Excellent video.

[@charlorme9155]

it was the gold standard for 3D gaming it made playstation look crap back then !

[@TehJumpingJawa]

Regarding Forsaken, did anyone ever notice one of its multiplayer maps utilized Non-Euclidean geometry? (e.g. 'the tardis effect') You go through an opening, and it's bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Not sure if it was used in any of the single player levels (as back in the day I didn't have the skill to get particularly far into the campaign), but I definitely remember having my mind blown when I discovered it on a multiplayer map. This must've been one of the very earliest fully 3d games to demonstrate Non-Euclidean geometry in its rendering & map design. Something we didn't really see fully exploited as a gameplay mechanic until a decade later with the likes of Prey, Portal & Antichamber.

[@vswitchzero]

Very interesting! I never noticed this before, but have never played multiplayer Forsaken before. Definitely a game I'd like to put some more time into!

[@UncleMikeRetro]

As always, great stuff!

[@pierrehorak2167]

i think you forgot UNREAL my 23 year gaming house priced expense that got me into this hobby

[@Lurch-Bot1]

I have a Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 5. I think I may also have one of those Ensoniq budget Voodoo 1 cards that was probably released in 1998. The Voodoo 2 is a Diamond Monster 3D II. I have never actually played GLQuake so I'll have to give it a try whenever I get my Pentium MMX built. Putting it on a Super 7 board so I have plenty of clock speed options. The Voodoo 2 was the first SLI GPU and the 5 was the first to do it on the same board. Glide was pretty impressive and it also ran 3dfx into the ground. They pulled a Betamax. They also never properly ensured backwards compatibility from one generation to the next. To play GLQuake on my Voodoo 2 will take some tweaking. Trying to run it on a Voodoo 5 would be a nightmare most likely. I am pretty sure it was not compatible at launch but when 3dfx went under, the community took the ball and ran with it and made some improvements. But I still think if you get a Voodoo 1 game running on a Voodoo 5 it is probably running a lot of the functions in emulation rather than natively with the hardware.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! Thankfully GLQuake works great on all 3dfx cards I've tried (including the Voodoo 3 and 5). It's a Windows game so as long as the appropriate glide drivers are installed, it should be okay. There is a MiniGL update (just replace a .dll file in the Quake directory) to fix some display bugs and improve performance as well. Definitely give it a shot - it's a great game. In my experience, the worst compatibility problems were with DOS based games (like Tomb Raider etc). The DOS games accessed the Voodoo card's hardware directly without the use of drivers, so they didn't like newer cards. The Voodoo Rush and Voodoo 2 often required game patches to work properly even though they supported glide.

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

always got time for more Voodoo content!

[@hartsickdisciple]

Back in those days 3dfx was the only game in town if you wanted the best visuals and best performance. If you didn't have a Voodoo card, you didn't have shit. I didn't get into the game until 1998, so I missed the prime of the Voodoo 1. Voodoo 2 was on the market by then. My family had a Compaq Presario with a Pentium 233 MMX and 32MB of RAM. I ended up buying a Voodoo Banshee and turning that machine into a gaming PC. The games that sold me on 3dfx and 3d acceleration in general were Rogue Squadron 3d and Wing Commander Prophecy. I knew I had to get a Voodoo card after I saw them running in Glide.

[@amdintelxsniperx]

overclocking only damages when the voltage is increased otherwise it is fine ive overclocked tons of vintage cards

[@johnwiesen4440]

I had the same setup back in the day with my Voodoo 2 card with my ATI or my Matrox Card then I got a Voodoo 5500 AGP. Now I use a bit of software Nglide. If you use it make a donation if you want too.

[@bruceevans1133]

Yes I had the orchid back in it's day was awesome my mate was blown away with it! I was about 36 then now I'm 61 (will never grow up) I am a tracking systems engineer and alot of customers comment on my age working with computers but from back then that's probably why, I lived though it all from the start i.e. Sinclair ZX 81, Spectrum, BBC computers, Dragon 32 / 64 all the way to the modern P.C.'s I am fluent with all 250 commands of BASIC (DOS) these young gamers don't know ther'e born... can even program in Cecil NOW that is as old landwige.

[@davevan9150]

Ah forsaken, I had forgotten about that one. I just tried getting my p133/voodoo machine running but wouldn't boot

[@jaybird57]

In 97' my Matrox Mystique was pretty hot..

[@homelessEh]

i got my diomond monster with a lexmark printer for some absurd discount during a staples grand opening back when staples was cool.. and new paired it with my s3 virge 8mb .. when nvidia bought gutted and burned 3dfx i decided then to boycot nvidia id buy camping equipment if nvidia was my only choice.

[@JackNCoke2008]

Can this card play Cyberpunk 2077 at low settings?

[@KrzysztofC-1]

No "Unreal" with it's epic intro castle flyby?

[@vswitchzero]

That intro was very epic! Unreal came out a bit later on in 1998 so I didn't include it in this one, but you can see it in my Voodoo 2 retrospective :) kzbin.info/www/bejne/n4qZiYWahdSarJo

[@richardbarrera6584]

Hello. Do you know why my Voodoo1 card shows me a blue and white vertical line when Quake1 GL starts? in Windows 95. I installed directx 6.1 and driver for w95 but nothing

[@robr640]

Kids nowadays will never understand the huge leap between software & hardware rendering. Those first few 3D capable cards had to render in the snow, uphill , both ways... 😂

[@vswitchzero]

LOL so true!

[@vjun007]

I have this exaxt Diamond 3dfx card here, which revision you have here, though?... I have a pretty late one, tho. (Rev E, i think) PS. This same card, is featured on Wikipedia here, so it says...

[@vswitchzero]

I believe mine is a Rev.E as well. I'm not sure what the differences are in the early vs late revisions. I'll have to dig it up again to double check.

[@vjun007]

@@vswitchzero Cool. Sad that i killed the S3 Virge card here, it was a supposed companion card, for that diamond "monster" here. Hope I'll replace the rom chip, with its original vga bios here, tho. I doesn't caught up the early days of 3D graphics here, (im from 1992) but im surely catched some if its early "spirit" here, and even was played on original Rave Racer arcade cabinet, in early 2000s, tho. Game itself pure 90s, so i thought it would be okay to mention it here, along, i think some SEGA Model 3 machines, of that time here, that i was chance to play on, tho. Sorry, if it's a spam-like "offtopic" here, just my childhood memories are flowing trough me here, tho. *blush*

[@nicks4597]

I had all of these :)

[@mentalplayground]

VooDoo back in day :))

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

The best video

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much 😁

[@stevesmusic1862]

MDK -Mothers Day Kisses!

[@ReaperX7]

Funny how Glide, a low level API, was heavily dismissed as a good graphics API after OpenGL and DirectX took off. Even 3dfx's OpenGL implementation used Glide. Fast forward today, we have Vulkan (originally Mantle) and other implementations like Mesa3D which uses Zink, an OpenGL on Vulkan API, similar to 3dfx OpenGL and MiniGL, as well as DXVK which uses DirectX 9, 10, 11, and 12 over Vulkan. 3dfx was thinking so far ahead nobody could or would accept it. Ironic.

[@ozzyp97]

Glide was specifically designed to match Voodoo hardware functions 1-to-1, it didn't really have much of a future even if 3DFX hadn't died so quickly. It's also more or less a subset of OpenGL (hence easy translation with MiniGL), since that's how the Voodoo came to be: Take SGIs API, strip out everything not absolutely necessary for gaming and create an efficient fixed function hardware to implement the rest. OpenGL only really became a high level API once the industry gave up on fixed function accelerators and started embracing what Rendition started with true general purpose GPUs. So in way hardware moved away from the APIs, including Glide, not the other way around.

[@GeoffDavis1974]

I drove 2 seperate monitors simultaneously with mine...

[@vswitchzero]

Definitely a good move to avoid the quality loss due to the passthrough cable! I remember being disappointed by the analog signal quality degredation on my Canopus Pure 3D paired with my S3 ViRGE. It was quite noticable, but the 2D signal quality of my ViRGE wasn't great to begin with, which probably didn't help :)

[@GeoffDavis1974]

@@vswitchzero it was super cool when glquake popped up on the 2nd display and you could still see the desktop. Unfortunately the keyboard and mouse were grabbed... 😄

[@supermario8416]

The Voodoo 1 could run with high fps even the most demanding games from 1998-1999, if the resolution 512x384 was used.640x480 in games like Unreal, Quake 2, Sin, Half-Life etc could be a little too much for the Voodoo 1.

[@vswitchzero]

Good point! I noticed 512x384 was the default in Unreal when using the Voodoo. Even then it was pretty choppy, unfortunately. Quake 2 seems to do decently at 640x480 most of the time. I tried the SiN demo recently and it was very choppy. I wonder how much of that comes down to a CPU bottleneck in my system though🤔

[@supermario8416]

@@vswitchzero the Voodoo 1 could benefit a lot from a faster CPU, especially in 512x384. Sin is more CPU intensive than Quake 2, even if it is built on the same engine.

[@vswitchzero]

@@supermario8416 Interesting. I've never really used a voodoo card with a system much faster than a P200 before. I've heard they can be a problem with fast systems, but I'll have to give it a try with a Pentium 2 or an early celeron to try it out. I believe Unreal takes advantage of MMX extensions as well, which my P200 classic is lacking.

[@supermario8416]

@@vswitchzero with a Pentium 2 or Celeron Mendocino, the Voodoo 1 should be 35-40% faster in 512x384 than in 640x480. It would be nice to see a video with the Voodoo 1 and a P2 or Celeron :)

[@vswitchzero]

@@supermario8416 Cool! Definitely a good idea for a future video 👍

[@homelessEh]

can only imagine where 3dfx would be now if nvidia didnt greedily gobble them up..

[@kuraitsuno4004]

Con eso jugué RESIDENT EVIL 3.

[@deforged]

14:36 w...what?

[@vswitchzero]

Just a video cut to remove the boring part and to keep the clip more interesting :)

[@AnonymousPhucker]

laggy video on quake gameplay

[@C4nn15]

Turoks draw distance is terrible

[@CaudaMiller]

ive just spent small fortune and this crap comes out for just 250ish. it was better but dithering drove me mad. dithering is for weaklings like amiga