Matrox! They were good for a bit then **** the bed after G400 Max which was a superb card I had for free and the annoying Matrox PR people kept demanding it back. It was the best card out there for about 6 months.
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For the people who remember 3DFX
- Thread starter jinxpad
- Start date
Yeah Hercules and Diamond were very decent for a while. Tech companies came and went in 1-3/4 years or shorter as it was the Wild West Re:GPUs and gaming.
Soldato
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And me. You might have had the same Intel 810 Crapset as I had, paired mine with a 12mb Voodoo 2 and the difference was incredible.Very similar to me, it was some type of ati rage integrated graphics chip with i think 4mb of ram. Upgraded to a voodoo 3 2000 pci and it was a massive difference. Just a shame the company was sunk by their management wanting stopgap products taking resources away from the rampage project constantly.
Soldato
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My Voodoo 2 was a Diamond and it was a solid product.
Soldato
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That's the one. Great card.
Soldato
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Voodoo 3 3000 agp was the first graphics card I ever bought. I had no idea about anything, it was recommended by my friend who had a voodoo 2. I didn't even know if I had an AGP slot (or what one was). Luckily it did fit in my PC (p2 300, 6.4gb HDD, can't remember how much RAM it had, I want to say 32mb)? Playing Quake 3 with it was glorious.
Associate
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had a Voodoo2 8MB with a Matrox G200 (?) card.
Had a Pentium P133 with a 2Mb (may have been 1Mb) Diamond card which I ended up pairing to a generic Voodoo 1. Full screen Quake running at 640*480 with lighting effects was a thing of beauty! Wasn’t till I upgraded my PC that I got a Matrox G200 which quickly got upgraded for an unremembered reason to a Nvidia TNT. The advancement in 3D graphics over those five short years was incredible.
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Man this thread triggered some memories... "Matrox millenium MGA" sprang up into consciousness, so I googled it. Here's some nostalgia! 
Especially the "competition" paragraph!
The VRAM-based Diamond Stealth64 Video 3240XL with its S3 Vision968 (86C968) chipset was at or near the top of most benchmark tests, though the Millennium outperformed it to get the #1 position. DRAM-based cards like the Diamond Stealth64 Video 2201XL (S3 Trio64V+ chip) and the STB Powergraph 64 Video still provided some very respectable performance numbers in WinBench and Winstone 96.
The ATI 3D Xpression+ also provided MPEG playback and was considered on par with a Millennium without its optional Media XL MPEG daughtercard. With this daughtercard, the Millennium was significantly faster at MPEG playback. However, in DOS the ATI 3D Xpression+ far surpassed the Millennium in gaming frames per second.
At the more budget-oriented end of the competition were cards based on the Tseng Labs ET6000 which also launched in 1995, and had no 3D capability. Unsurprisingly, the Millennium gave better 2D and 3D performance and sharper output than ET6000-based cards. Other graphics chipsets in this category included the Alliance ProMotion 6422, S3 Trio64V+, and Trident 9680-based cards - all of these used DRAM but managed to outperform a lot of their 64-bit VRAM-based competitors in digital video playback and scaling performance.
Especially the "competition" paragraph!
The VRAM-based Diamond Stealth64 Video 3240XL with its S3 Vision968 (86C968) chipset was at or near the top of most benchmark tests, though the Millennium outperformed it to get the #1 position. DRAM-based cards like the Diamond Stealth64 Video 2201XL (S3 Trio64V+ chip) and the STB Powergraph 64 Video still provided some very respectable performance numbers in WinBench and Winstone 96.
The ATI 3D Xpression+ also provided MPEG playback and was considered on par with a Millennium without its optional Media XL MPEG daughtercard. With this daughtercard, the Millennium was significantly faster at MPEG playback. However, in DOS the ATI 3D Xpression+ far surpassed the Millennium in gaming frames per second.
At the more budget-oriented end of the competition were cards based on the Tseng Labs ET6000 which also launched in 1995, and had no 3D capability. Unsurprisingly, the Millennium gave better 2D and 3D performance and sharper output than ET6000-based cards. Other graphics chipsets in this category included the Alliance ProMotion 6422, S3 Trio64V+, and Trident 9680-based cards - all of these used DRAM but managed to outperform a lot of their 64-bit VRAM-based competitors in digital video playback and scaling performance.
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Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D was my first. It was a Voodoo 1 based card on a brown PCB with 4MB memory (2MB frame buffer, 2MB texture memory).
My parents took me to London on holiday from South Africa and I bought it from some little corner shop in Camden Market. I'd saved up for ages for the holiday and spent every penny I had on day 1
I dropped it into my Pentium 100 (o/c'd to 120MHz), Need for Speed II SE launched not long after and my mind was blown.
My parents took me to London on holiday from South Africa and I bought it from some little corner shop in Camden Market. I'd saved up for ages for the holiday and spent every penny I had on day 1
I dropped it into my Pentium 100 (o/c'd to 120MHz), Need for Speed II SE launched not long after and my mind was blown.
First saw 3dfx on my friends pc. Blew me away and the very next day I sold a bunch of my PlayStation games to a swap shop in town, jumped the train and bought an Orchid righteous voodoo card at pc World. Couldn't wait for computer fair to get cheaper. I just had to have it. Got back to the train station, opened the box and no card inside. Ran to pc World and luckily they took my word for it and swapped it out.
Loved the click when the card kicked in. A little reminder of the new power inside my pc
Loved the click when the card kicked in. A little reminder of the new power inside my pc
First saw 3dfx on my friends pc. Blew me away and the very next day I sold a bunch of my PlayStation games to a swap shop in town, jumped the train and bought an Orchid righteous voodoo card at pc World. Couldn't wait for computer fair to get cheaper. I just had to have it. Got back to the train station, opened the box and no card inside. Ran to pc World and luckily they took my word for it and swapped it out.
Loved the click when the card kicked in. A little reminder of the new power inside my pc
"3D So Real it must be Righteous" - haha I love it.
