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Anyone miss 3DFX ?

Aekeron said:
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that that wasn't the case - normally you end up having to use a glide wrapper.
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Most likely it was a Glide Wrapper that emulated Glide in Software.

The biggest problem for 3dfx was that they did not have T&L, they thougth 16bit was good enough and that they wanted to make all cards themselves causing huge delays so by the time the V5 5500 was released it was slower than the competition (and more expensive)
 
I certainly don't miss 3dfx. The voodoo 1/2 (and to a certain extent the Banshee as well, although by that time the first TNT was available) began making the need for 3D acceleratiion mandatory in the PC gaming world and for that they earn cudos and thanks but they then lost it big time, they seemed to think they were 3D on PC's and their way was the only way, while they were living in their own self congratulatory world Nvidia, ATI and even Matrox came and stole all the thunder and the lions share of the market with a better scalable tech path. So in my book they were fools, they had everything but refused to see what the industry wanted and the direction it was going in. Also some of their tech is allegedly responsible for the [sarcasm] 'groundbreaking' [/sarcasm] Nvidia 5xxx FX series of cards, that's nothing to be proud of :o

So in summary, for me, They did an important job to start the ball rolling but times changed they didn't move with them so get consigned to dustbin with the other also rans.
 
Probably my joint finest computing moment came from installing my 3DFX 4mb voodoo 1 addon card alongside my Diamond Stealth 1mb 2d card purring alongside my Cyrix 133mhz CPU and 16mb RAM. I remember installing the Wipeout 2097 demo that came with the card and just litrally being blown away by the graphical difference. Playing Counterstrike for the first time on a cable connection after 2 years of 56k is the other moment. Cant seperate the two!
 
Aekeron said:
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that that wasn't the case - normally you end up having to use a glide wrapper.
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Depended on the card/game. I used to run Tomb Raider1 on a Ti4400 with no wrapper just the pure Glide version. Think TR2 as well ran the same as did a few others (Nuclear Strike did so did Wing Commander Prophecy). The glide wrappers were more for ATI + Matrox cards or later NV cards which did not support Glide native.
 
The GF4ti4200 certainly didn't support glide natively - I had one of those cards for a *long* time and definitely ended up using wrappers for various things :)
 
AWPC said:
Depended on the card/game. I used to run Tomb Raider1 on a Ti4400 with no wrapper just the pure Glide version. Think TR2 as well ran the same as did a few others (Nuclear Strike did so did Wing Commander Prophecy). The glide wrappers were more for ATI + Matrox cards or later NV cards which did not support Glide native.
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The early Nvidia cards didn't support glide either, Creative Labs however released a glide wrapper with their drivers. Though I think the main reason for doing this was to let all their happy TnT2 Ultra (IRC) customers play the UT demo/beta as that was glide only :)
 
PaulyJay said:
The early Nvidia cards didn't support glide either, Creative Labs however released a glide wrapper with their drivers. Though I think the main reason for doing this was to let all their happy TnT2 Ultra (IRC) customers play the UT demo/beta as that was glide only :)
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You beat me to it, I was just about to write almost exactly that. The wrapper was called Unified.
 
davecarter said:
Remember my first voodoo 2 , was astounded by the visual upgrade compared to sofware mode in the likes of quake 2 romb raider 2 and forsaken.

I even bought another a few months later, probably one of the best upgrades I ever purchased.
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Forsaken!!! :D Loved that game! Quake 2 in open gl also rocked!
 
Aekeron said:
The GF4ti4200 certainly didn't support glide natively - I had one of those cards for a *long* time and definitely ended up using wrappers for various things :)
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Sorry but your soooooooooo wrong!!

http://www.smokeypoint.com/flash.htm This gives you some details of a batch file you could have used with a GF3 or GF4.

http://www.smokeypoint.com/gf3glide2x.zip
This file above contains the files I used to run several Glide games natively on W98 with a GF4 and also later a 6800GT.

Have not tried it on my 8800GTX but suspect it may even work sometimes all you needed to do was copy the following files into your windows\system folder and some games were version dependent so you may need to use the one your game was provided with as there were several different ones:

glide2x.dll
glide2x.ovl
glide3x.dll
 
I never owned a Vodoo card, always had one of the underdog cards from ATI of matrox. I still have my Matrox G400 dual head *snigger*. 3D FX obviously did a lot of good, but as someone else said they ultimately came unstuck through because they thought they were only 3d card player - and all this glide only nonsense really peed me off. Glad things are a bit more 'fair' these days in that regard.
 
Still have a Voodoo3 3000 under the bed actually. The PCI version though. I had an AGP version in one computer, and a PCI version in another. The AGP version just suddenly died on me one day. One minute working fine, needed to reboot so I restarted.... gone forever :(

Fun times.
 
I owned and used the following 3DFX cards myself...

voodoo1 4MB
voodoo2 8MB (or was it the 12MB,can't remember)
Voodoo3 3000 16MB
Voodoo5 5500 AGP 32MB
 
I had

Voodoo 1
Voodoo 2 Banshee

Then went onto Geforce 2 GTS (was close to getting Voodoo 3 but the new GF2 was a bit quicker/newer tech) :D
 
pugheaven said:
The Orchid Righteous Voodoo1 card paired with my Matrix Mystique card, man, that's a memory I love... and bought it 1 weeks before official release, man, first and only time I porbably had the best PC in the country rofl... with a Cyrix 200+ processor in it... and a wopping 16mb of ram I think it was at the time and a "huge" 1.7gb HD rofl... man... how times change...

If it wasn't for 3dfx, we'd be 3-4 years behind where we are now I reckon!

Cheers Pug
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YES
I had the same, loved my mystique until i got my voodoo 1, still remember playing q2 (the lighting effects)with voodoo, for me one of the biggest steps from software to hardware (what ever it was called) and it even made quake 1 look better.
 
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