PC Videocards - how times have changed....

[roddypoddy]

Orchid Righteous Voodoo 2,what a card,blew me away playing Unreal,and GPL with this in my pc(266 p2),i marvelled at what i was seeing,in fact both games seemed "unreal".

 

[Ch3m1c4L]

i found unreal 2 gave me the most WoW factor, but i think that was more the first time i had a decent 3d card and not just some dodgy one that came with the pc.

 

[queamin]

I still remember adding a 3dfx voodoo 1 4mb into my machine and firing up GL Quake. NOTHING has ever impressed me so much since. The difference going from blocky crappy, 320x240 10fps or someting, to smooth, filtered, 640x480 30fps oh man, couldn't beleive it.

Same for me Q2 was great and Q1 looked a lot better aswell

 

[queamin]

3DFX lived off the same core architecture for years and just kept repackaging it in a newer faster version, then adding dual GPU boards, then adding sli just to keep up with nVidia.........strangly a marketing tool that nVidia seem very familiar with

If I remember correctly, 3DFX itself wasn't bought by nVidia, instead it was a lot of the IP and a lot of the staff then followed.

What really killed off 3DFX was their failure to integrate transform & lighting (t&l) into their boards and failure to introduce 32bit colour (something even the TNT2 had).

What I find strange with nVidia nowadays is their desire to integrate proprietory API's into their gfx solutions - originally with the TNT they marketed as the company that had no API, but lauded the use of DX.

Not having 32 bit hurt 3DFX a lot as all the site loved it

 

[bhavv]

I thought 3dfx died because the Voodoo 5 couldnt compete with the Geforce 2 due to having no T+L.

My first 3D card as the ATI Rage Fury. I didnt know anything back and my dad was getting me my second PC after my Pentium 100 with 8 Meg ram, 1 Gb HD and 1 meg ATI Mach 64 died. So I looked through the spec lists and picked an AMD K6II 450 and 32 Meg Rage Fury because I thought 32 meg was better than a 16 Meg Voodoo 3 or TNT2 . It was ok, but nowhere near as good as a PII 600 with a TNT2 would have been which was the best spec at the time.

Then the next time I went from that to an Athlon 1400 with a Geforce 3. That thing was just OMGWTFROASTBBQ awesome, and was the last PC my parents got me after I completed my GCSEs. Then I started self upgrading and building and went totally crazy insane and got hooked

 

[iv-tecman]

Might have been a few reasons as to why 3Dfx died, still a shame though. As for the picture of the Voodoo 2 - wow. How small were 3D cards back then..?? lol I mean, today top of the line 3D cards are huge..!!

Seems to me they are getting quicker, and higher res, but the size and the fans needed are certainly not getting any smaller....

Oh and didn't 3Dfx not want to use D3D, whereas Nvidia did? Seem to remember Glide games being released for a short while, but then MS released Direct X for windows 95, and 3Dfx didn't want to write or suupport the API, whereas Nvidia did...

I remember my TNT 2, can't remember the full name, just remember it was my first Nvidia product. 32MB I think.!!

 

[Amakuma]

I remember my old TNT2 I thought it was bad ass when I bought it, I also remember buying a 5900 huge mistake and playing Morrowind for the first time and seeing reflective shimmery water I was blown away.

 

[iv-tecman]

I remember my TNT 2 now…. Lol It was a Creative Labs Nvidia Riva TNT2 32MB Ultra. It was rapid, upgraded from a Videologic 2D card and a Voodoo 2 and was simply blown away with it…. About the time Wipe0ut 2097 appeared for the PC..

Also about the time when console ports were starting to make there way to PC. Bad times in some ways……

I still think the best all round card I’ve ever purchased has to be an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. Even though the drivers (at first) sucked, the card was very powerful.

 

[FocusST57]

I remember getting my first Voodoo1 to go along side my Matrox Millenium. First game i had was Hexen 2. Was stunned by it, remember thinking 'wow, its so realistic' .. kinda funny looking at it now and comparing it to Crysis

I also remember enjoying a breif spell of having an advantage in quake as the few people that could run GLquake could see through the water

 

[JTrickle]

Its almost like buying a GPU is like buying the heart of a gaming machine, and how times have changed….

No, its exactly the same as it was then.

Most glide games would run on a Pentium 75 acceptably. You didnt need a 200mhz processor. Some later games that would still run at low res on a voodoo1, such as the 1999?/2000? DeusX would need a faster processor. Also to play some online competitive shooters such as quake2 you'd need more processing umph.

No different than now. Look at Bad Company 2.

 

[Random-Rabbit]

I remember when I upgraded my old 386 to a 486 DX2 with 1mb diamond video card, added a ... drum roll CD-ROM! and played 7th guest non stop.

I opended up the box the other day for a laugh and I couldn't recognise anything inside it ... too much dust

 

[TheMrWibble]

I can remember swapping from SLI V2's to TNT2 ultra just becuase i liked the way the q2 chaingun spray on walls looked on the nvidia card
Loved the sli V2s at the time thou pure beasts of cards.
233mmx @ 266 ,32 mb RAM and mystique and the sli v2's and a hooge soundblaster AWE32
I dont miss the phone bills thou

 

[Random-Rabbit]

haha those where the days .. counterstrike on a 56K modem

 

[Guest2]

I don't think there has been that many advances really. I remember my very first PC I got in 1996 had a 1mb video card. I'm quite sure that direct X came out around this time and is still a technology being used/advanced now. My first 3d card was a matrox mystique 220 4mb that supported direct 3d. Ultimate race pro was a big jump. Moving on I had a voodoo rush 3DFX card. Moving to 3dfx was a massive step up. Seeing all the effects of Unreal was amazing

Since then cards have generally increased in memory size, core speed, memory speed and physical size but there have been no massive jumps like 3DFX tech did.

 

[Emlyn_Dewar]

GL Carmageddon did it for me on the Voodoo 1, was awesome!
There's a joke about card sizes in the story... I seem to remember my Voodoo 2 being a reasonable sized card? Is it broken memories or was that the case?

 

[James J]

I remember my TNT 2 now…. Lol It was a Creative Labs Nvidia Riva TNT2 32MB Ultra. It was rapid, upgraded from a Videologic 2D card and a Voodoo 2 and was simply blown away with it…. About the time Wipe0ut 2097 appeared for the PC..

Also about the time when console ports were starting to make there way to PC. Bad times in some ways……

I still think the best all round card I’ve ever purchased has to be an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. Even though the drivers (at first) sucked, the card was very powerful.

Same here actually and it was the first ATI card I ever owned lol. I had been nvidia for a few years before getting it and had a geforce 2 ti 64mb when died so I then spent £300 on a new geforce 4 ti 4600 128mb or whatever it was called from leadtek with a massive HSF. The 9700 pro came out at a similar time and was the first dx 9 card and although it kinda sucked at dx9 (lol) it destroyed all the dx8 games and stuff before it. Use to play quake 3 on it with AA and AF and loved it lol

I remember trying to play HL1 on a celeron 500mhz with 64mb RAM and a riva tnt 2 16mb gcard and although I could play in 32bit (!) I had to turn off dynamic lightning otherwise it was a slideshow

 

[James J]

GL Carmageddon did it for me on the Voodoo 1, was awesome!
There's a joke about card sizes in the story... I seem to remember my Voodoo 2 being a reasonable sized card? Is it broken memories or was that the case?

One of the voodoo cards was enormous but I can't remember which lol. Far too long ago now

 

[TheMrWibble]

V2s were pretty large cards at the time compared to most others.

 

[Biffa]

One of the voodoo cards was enormous but I can't remember which lol. Far too long ago now

v5 6000

 

[Disjunto]

could they not find any biggers fans?