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the card that changed everything

I would say Voodoo one, even though I never had one as at the time I opted for the Matrox Mystique/PowerVR combo, but did go onto a 8 meg Voodoo2 after that.
 
Can't imagine this being anything but the 3DFX (it was all caps back then!) Voodoo Graphics, unless we wanna look at 2d accelerators. Still got mine in a box somewhere, maybe I should rig it up alongside my GTX280 lol :)

There were other 3d accelerators around back then too of course (Rendition Verite, Nvidia RIVA128, 3dlabs permedia, PowerVR, Matrox M3D etc) but it was the Voodoo which really grabbed people's attention thanks to it's performance and good support for the glide API. Funnily enough the 'killer app' for 3d acceleration, GL Quake, ran under opengl and 3dfx didn't even have a full ogl ICD, but they were able to get round this by using a 'minigl' driver to convery ogl calls into glide.

I remember playing the demo of Forsaken on my V1 and thinking crikey, I've gotta show my console chums what a PC can do. To be fair when you look at it now, it was all a bit over the top (much like Incoming released at the same time) - psychodelic coloured lighting washing over the whole level, lens flare, coronas etc, but back then when you weren't used to any kind of proper bling it was very impressive.

Nowadays there's a big focus on 'realism' in graphics, you know with bump-mapped textures, a grainy feel with understated lighting. Sometimes I wish we could see more oldschool OTT graphics :)

In the world of 3d acceleration, the Geforce DDR and Radeon 9700pro were pretty groundbreaking too, but essentially were just an evolution that we expected, not a seismic shock like 3dfx gave us.
 
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I would probably say the 16MB Voodoo Banshee, as you didn't need to use it as a slave to a 2D accelerator.

Closely followed by the CLAP (Creative Labs Annihalator PRO) Geforce 256.
 
Apart from the 3dfx Voodoo cards I wouldn't say any single card has had that big an effect on the computer games scene, but incredible cards would be:

Voodoo 1/2
Geforce 256
Radeon 9700 pro
Geforce 8800 GTX
 
layte said:
Anyone who does not say the Voodoo 1 must be too young to remember the impact it had. Going from software rendering to something that put the PS1 and N64 to shame was staggering.
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This... It was by far the biggest leap. As stated above you really had to be there feeling the amazement to understand it :)
 
Noto said:
Geforce 2MX The huge leap in 3D performance was unheard of?

or 16mb Voodoo as above mentions
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I disagree; the gf2mx is actually slower than the Geforce DDR (due to the SDR memory) and the Voodoo Banshee is slower than the Voodoo 2 (due to only having 1 TMU).
 
Hutch said:
This... It was by far the biggest leap. As stated above you really had to be there feeling the amazement to understand it :)
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Yep, I still remember how excited I was aged 16, ordering the card from our hardware supplier the moment they had it available, getting impatient waiting for it to be delivered, and then seeing the jaw dropping beauty of Quake and Mechwarrior 2 running smoothly in Open GL.

God I sound like such a geek! :p
 
For me, the ATi 9800, but as far as history goes, the Voodoo tbh.

Voodoo 2 SLI was also pretty revolutionary, but the change from software graphics to hardware has to be the single biggest change.

Mate had a voodoo 2 when I still had onboard and he could run half life with see through water :eek: while I had to either run software or have solid blue water :(

And the Banshee was flawed to say the least, there were all kinds of "patches" to make things work with it that were fine with the voodoo 1 and 2. Though I never had one so can't really speak from experience.


Why are people saying anything in the past 10 years ? All they do new is run more recent DirectX effects and run faster :s
 
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Mr Paul said:
Easy, the 3DFX Voodoo 1
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I got one of these. The trouble with it was on my Pentium 133, in 320x200 running under software, things looked all pixellated but ran smoothly - under hardware, you could use 640x480 and get the texture antialiasing but the card wasn't quite powerful enough to run it so the frame rate would drop significantly. Even with the card I'd often play games unaccelerated. Ignoring the frame-rate drop though, things looked *incredible*. I got one a few days after I bought Quake 2 and the difference was jaw-dropping. Smooth textures! Coloured lighting! :D
 
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Marf said:
Yep, I still remember how excited I was aged 16, ordering the card from our hardware supplier the moment they had it available, getting impatient waiting for it to be delivered, and then seeing the jaw dropping beauty of Quake and Mechwarrior 2 running smoothly in Open GL.

God I sound like such a geek! :p
Click to expand...

I put my student overdraft to good use for mine. £160 for one of the first Diamond Monster cards to enter Europe, and all I got was the card and passthrough cable in a jiffy bag. I had to download the drivers and S3 968 tsr utility off my own back.

On another note, why are people mentioning the 9800pro when it was just a go faster version of the ground breaking 9700pro?
 
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