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[LordOfChaos]

Seminal 3D graphics accelerator company 3dfx went under on this day, 24 years ago. Notice of the end came by way of a final 3dfx press release, apologizing to customers and fans for the drastic action it had been forced to take. Facing bankruptcy near the end of the year 2000, 3dfx's shareholders agreed to sell off its brands and assets to nVidia to get "the best possible result" for creditors, investors, and employees. Though the company is now long gone, many a seasoned PC tech aficionado still carries a torch for the company that was, and we still see enthusiasm for retro 3dfx hardware and projects.

The trio of 3dfx founders would surely never have expected their company's fortunes to shine so brightly, yet so short. 3dfx's maiden product, the Voodoo Graphics 3D chip reached manufacturing in November 1995 but didn't get introduced to consumers on a PCI add-in-card until after COMDEX in October of the following year.


Owners of the Voodoo Graphics PCI card enjoyed unprecedented 3D visual thrills that only this 500nm chip running at 50 MHz could deliver to consumers – backed by a mahoosive 4MB of EDO RAM. This dedicated 3D card – it had to be paired with a 2D accelerator in your PC – made a huge difference to the breakthrough 3D game titles of the era like Doom and Quake. Games had to adopt the Glide API to make use of the power of Voodoo, but the graphics quality and performance uplift were unprecedented.

The original Voodoo was a rip-roaring success, driver by the new breed of PC gamers. It became an object of desire for every 3D gaming enthusiast, and 3dfx tried to keep up the momentum with the Voodoo Rush in 1997, and Voodoo2 in 1998. However, 3dfx's lead gradually eroded as eager competitors such as Matrox, Nvidia, and ATI introduced new accelerators coinciding with when 3dfx's Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo3 combined 2D/3D accelerators hit the market.

At around the same time – the last few months of the 1990s – a series of unfortunate events reached a critical mass. 3dfx's buyout of graphics card maker STB didn't go as expected, it wasted money on the purchase of chip maker Gigapixel, rivals benefitted from the rise of the Microsoft Direct3D API, a courtroom battle with nVidia over patents loomed, there were delayed Voodoo product releases, and general internal strife was ongoing. All this meant that 3dfx decided the best thing was to fold.

When it went under, prized 3dfx patents went to nVidia and lots of 3dfx engineers found a new home in the Green Team. Over recent years we have seen some tantalizing teases regarding the return of 3dfx, and though we knew it couldn't be real, it is still disappointing when nothing actually happens.

Today is 3D graphics pioneer 3dfx's 24th death anniversary – platform still inspires gamers, enthusiasts, and makers long after Nvidia acquired the assets

No one does Voodoo like you do.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Kyo]

"made a huge difference to [...] Doom"

Uh, no, it didn't.

 

[BigLee74]

Voodoo banshee was my first gfx card. What a difference it made! Good old days!

 

[RoboFu]

Glide bitches!

 

[Sephimoth]

Now thats a name ive not heard in a long time

 

[Grildon Tundy]

Ah, the era of graphics cards from a time I didn't know what graphics card were. I was busy playing Ski Free and Chip's Challenge.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

Man that was a time to be alive in PC gaming. I remember playing Quake 2 on my Voodoo chipset and wow just wow.

 

[LordOfChaos]

Ah, the era of graphics cards from a time I didn't know what graphics card were. I was busy playing Ski Free and Chip's Challenge.

This might unlock some core memories for some people

 

[willothedog]

Had an Orchid Righteous 3DFX paired with a Matrox Mystique for 2D, game-changing visuals on the PC for the day.

 

[Hookshot]

34 years of having to mess around with Sound blaster sound cards.

 

[YCoCg]

Still the best GPU boxes around!

 

[SF Kosmo]

I had the original Voodoo (as well as the follow up Banshee) before switching over to nVidia when the first GeForce arrived.

Voodoo was mind blowing at the time. Support was limited to a pretty small number of games in the beginning like Tomb Raider and Quake but it really felt so bleeding edge, it was really the first time I remember feeling like games I was playing at home were technologically beyond the latest arcade games.

 

[RoboFu]

I had a voodoo 3 something. I remember playing MGS and FF7 ports on it.

 

[Lux77]

Voodoo2 was its peak, especially in SLI

 

[Herbspiceguy]

My first 3D card, going from grainy pixelated to smooth in Quake(World) was mind-blowing at the time.

 

[CliffBronger]

I started off on a 3dfx 1 and was blown away by it at the time.

updated to a 2 and eventually 3.

Those where the days when a top tier gfx card was £120

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

I remember when I finally convinced my dad to let me get a 3D card in the family computer - we got the Canopus Pure3D, and... the fucking Compaq Presario we had wouldn't work with it, so we had to return it.

A couple years later, we got a new computer and put 2 Monster 3D IIs in there, and my God. Playing Unreal and Shogo on that was absolutely life-changing.

 

[tamago84]

i remember having one of these cards...needed it for journeyman project turbo or something..game haunted my elementary school years

 

[Laptop1991]

Loved my Voodoo cards, 2 voodoo 3's and two Voodoo 2's, but the biggest buzz i ever had in my gaming history was hearing the click and seeing 3d graphics for the 1st time with my Voodoo 1, nothing has beat that buzz since for me, RIP 3DFX, the best graphic cards of the 90's.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

I had a Voodoo 2 and eventually Voodoo3 back in the day. Playing games like Quake 2, Half Life, and Unreal in 1024x768 was mind blowing back then, it made consoles seem like kids toys in comparison (especially playing N64 games with UltraHLE).

Hard to believe they went from dominating the industry to getting bought out in just a few years.

 

[64bitmodels]

thanks voodoo for introducing dedicated gpus to the masses!!

 

[nkarafo]

made a huge difference to the breakthrough 3D game titles of the era like Doom and Quake. Games had to adopt the Glide API to make use of the power of Voodoo, but the graphics quality and performance uplift were unprecedented

A few things about this:

DOOM was software only. Voodoo acceleration was not supported.

The graphics in Quake were not better with Voodoo acceleration, they were worse by default. The textures became blurry (kinda like how N64 blurs low res textures) making them lose a lot of detail. You also lose the real time dynamic lighting from the weapons. The only thing you gained from this was better performance, since you could now play the game at 640x480 at an even faster speed than the low resolution software mode.

I think you could fix those issues via the console but i'm not sure.

Truth is a lot of early Voodoo accelerated games looked worse than the software modes (Quake 2 also looked significantly worse).

3D acceleration didn't start looking better until the games were made specifically for it and absolutely required it.

 

[64bitmodels]

Truth is a lot of early Voodoo accelerated gems looked worse than the software modes. 3D acceleration didn't start looking better until the games were made specifically for it.

when do you think that was?

 

[nkarafo]

when do you think that was?

Truth is, i don't remember any examples of GL modes looking better than software. And shortly after 3D accelerators became the standard, games also stopped having software modes entirely so you can't really compare.

The issue with early accelerated games was that those games were low resolution and had very small, low res textures. So the bilinear filtering caused them to look very soft. And in the case of Quake 1/2, the so called "colored lighting" looked more like a glorified piss filter.

Personally i wasn't impressed with 3D acceleration on PCs, until Quake 3 was released.

 

[Drew1440]

It's a shame what happened to 3DFX, but some of the later cards were just ridiculous. Imaging sticking 4 GPU's onto one boards just to stay competitive with the cards from ATi and Nvidia, they became the Sega Saturn of video cards.

 

[Denton]

Voodoo banshee was my first gfx card. What a difference it made! Good old days!

Banshee was the first time I saw 3D acceleration with my own eyes as opposed to magazine screenshots, in a friend's PC, he had Pentium II 400 at a time when I had Pentium 100.

Seeing Half Life, NFS3, Unreal on it, on 19" CRT...pretty damn magical. It is funny how in my memories that monitor was so huge, and yet the 55" TV I am typing this post on feels "normal".

 

[semiconscious]

I had the original Voodoo (as well as the follow up Banshee) before switching over to nVidia when the first GeForce arrived.

Voodoo was mind blowing at the time. Support was limited to a pretty small number of games in the beginning like Tomb Raider and Quake but it really felt so bleeding edge, it was really the first time I remember feeling like games I was playing at home were technologically beyond the latest arcade games.

3dfx + tomb raider = eye-candy ecstasy!...

 

[BigLee74]

Truth is, i don't remember any examples of GL modes looking better than software. And shortly after 3D accelerators became the standard, games also stopped having software modes entirely so you can't really compare.

The issue with early accelerated games was that those games were low resolution and had very small, low res textures. So the bilinear filtering caused them to look very soft. And in the case of Quake 1/2, the so called "colored lighting" looked more like a glorified piss filter.

Personally i wasn't impressed with 3D acceleration on PCs, until Quake 3 was released.

Eh? Didn’t look better than software mode?

Yes, the image looked soft, but it was better than the low res pixelated mess of software mode. Not to mention smooth.

Your take is definitely not what I remember!

 

[I Love Rock 'n' Roll]

Voodoo 2 was fantastic!

 

[nkarafo]

Eh? Didn’t look better than software mode?

Yes, the image looked soft, but it was better than the low res pixelated mess of software mode. Not to mention smooth.

Your take is definitely not what I remember!

We remember things wrong:

Just look at the texture detail loss, especially on the weapons. The Super Shotgun looks almost flat shaded in GL!

Now i understand, you probably wouldn't be able to play with the better quality software mode at decent frame rates. But you can't look at those pictures and tell me the graphics are better in GL.

 

[poppabk]

Man that was a time to be alive in PC gaming. I remember playing Quake 2 on my Voodoo chipset and wow just wow.

Yep playing Quake 2 and going from shitty software rendering at 512x384 to hardware rendering at 1024x768 was the biggest graphical upgrade I have ever seen.

 

[diffusionx]

A few things about this:

DOOM was software only. Voodoo acceleration was not supported.

The graphics in Quake were not better with Voodoo acceleration, they were worse by default. The textures became blurry (kinda like how N64 blurs low res textures) making them lose a lot of detail. You also lose the real time dynamic lighting from the weapons. The only thing you gained from this was better performance, since you could now play the game at 640x480 at an even faster speed than the low resolution software mode.

I think you could fix those issues via the console but i'm not sure.

Truth is a lot of early Voodoo accelerated games looked worse than the software modes (Quake 2 also looked significantly worse).

3D acceleration didn't start looking better until the games were made specifically for it and absolutely required it.

this is applying a modern lens to the older games, where people like that retro, chunky, pixel look. Back then the filtering and smoothing was much appreciated and thought of as a major improvement. There is a reason why these cards blew up and the Quake engine games were selling them as fast as 3Dfx can make them.

 

[BigLee74]

We remember things wrong:

Just look at the texture detail loss, especially on the weapons. The Super Shotgun looks almost flat shaded in GL!

Now i understand, you probably wouldn't be able to play with the better quality software mode at decent frame rates. But you can't look at those pictures and tell me the graphics are better in GL.

I fully understand your point about the blur that was generally applied, and some of those stills are quite damning.

But in motion, it was night and day. Those pixels didn’t look great jumping about on low res screens at 10-20 fps (which was the norm for software mode on your average PC back then).

3D cards made an incredible difference. The leap was staggering.

 

[SF Kosmo]

The graphics in Quake were not better with Voodoo acceleration, they were worse by default. The textures became blurry (kinda like how N64 blurs low res textures) making them lose a lot of detail. You also lose the real time dynamic lighting from the weapons. The only thing you gained from this was better performance, since you could now play the game at 640x480 at an even faster speed than the low resolution software mode.

The Glide version of Quake has some issues, but the improvements to resolution, color depth (software mode only had 256 colors) and performance were massive, and texture filtering was generally considered a W at the time as well, even if it's subjective and modern gamers might prefer the nostalgic pixel look.

You could definitely argue that the Voodoo version was weaker than the other 3D accelerated versions of Quake, but it wasn't better than the software renderer.

 

[diffusionx]

The Glide version of Quake has some issues, but the improvements to resolution, color depth (software mode only had 256 colors) and performance were massive, and texture filtering was generally considered a W at the time as well, even if it's subjective and modern gamers might prefer the nostalgic pixel look.

You could definitely argue that the Voodoo version was weaker than the other 3D accelerated versions of Quake, but it wasn't better than the software renderer.

and when we talk about performance, it's not like today, going from like 53fps to 60fps like we see today. It is like... we went from 15fps at 320x240 to 60fps at 640x480. It was totally transformative in a way that just doesn't exist in any form these days. Even if you hated the texture filtering - which, again, nobody did in the 1990s - it was well well well worth the trade off.

 

[nkarafo]

this is applying a modern lens to the older games, where people like that retro, chunky, pixel look. Back then the filtering and smoothing was much appreciated and thought of as a major improvement. There is a reason why these cards blew up and the Quake engine games were selling them as fast as 3Dfx can make them.

Allow me to disagree. People thought they loved the softer, lower quality textures because nobody really showed them the difference side by side the same way i just did. The higher screen resolution and frame rate was enough to not care but this isn't just a "modern take". Just look at the textures, even if you prefer the piss filter art style of the GL images you can't deny the texture detail hit. The N64 was also criticized for this, even back in the day. It's not a modern take at all.

Personally, when i played Quake 1 back in 1998, on my first computer, i was wondering why the dynamic lighting is missing. I did remember playing the game in software mode before that and that was the one thing that impressed me the most. But the GL version disables that by default.

Now i'm not saying hardware acceleration isn't inherently better. But by default, the graphics looked worse. You had to edit the game cfg yourself to make it look better, like disabling bilinear filtering, enabling dynamic lights back and, IMO, disabling the colored lighting (AKA, piss filter). This way you would retain the software look for the most part and still enjoy the higher resolution and frame rate. This is basically what the remasters do.

There is a reason why these cards blew up and the Quake engine games were selling them as fast as 3Dfx can make them.

Yes, frame rate was very important.

I fully understand your point about the blur that was generally applied, and some of those stills are quite damning.

But in motion, it was night and day. Those pixels didn’t look great jumping about on low res screens at 10-20 fps (which was the norm for software mode on your average PC back then).

3D cards made an incredible difference. The leap was staggering.

I agree, the performance was surely an amazing leap. I'm just arguing about the graphics quality hit.

Which was even fixable (to a point). With the console commands you could fix some of those issues but nobody really did, which was always a weird thing to me. I remember playing Quake 2 using a custom autoexec file that had a bunch of console commands that disabled and changed a lot of stuff.

You could definitely argue that the Voodoo version was weaker than the other 3D accelerated versions of Quake, but it wasn't better than the software renderer.

I'm arguing that, by default, the graphics look better in software mode. You can see the pictures i posted and decide yourself ofc.

If i play Quake 1/2 today i will 100% try to replicate the software look. I will even play Quake 1 in software mode entirely, since any modern computer can run it at high resolution and frame rate without acceleration.

 

[poppabk]

We remember things wrong:

Just look at the texture detail loss, especially on the weapons. The Super Shotgun looks almost flat shaded in GL!

Now i understand, you probably wouldn't be able to play with the better quality software mode at decent frame rates. But you can't look at those pictures and tell me the graphics are better in GL.

I did not know anyone who could run Quake 2 at even close to that resolution at the time. You were struggling to get a playable framerate at 512x384.
Edit: And by playable, I mean the bare minimum to play the game - not modern 'drops to 45fps in intense battles - game is unplayable'.