Very interesting

[Gregster]

Man how you guys remember all these cards/cpu's...I have owned a computer since the spectrum 48K days and always tried to keep up to date with everything. I just can't remember all the inbetweenie bits.
Good on ya though cos it's great seeing a post and clicking back into the depths of my memory thinking "I remember that card" hehe
I need to lay off smarties...think my brain is mashed

 

[Pottsey]

You just lost a lot of credibility

So what if I lost credibility for speaking the truth. If you stop looking back at 3DFX with rose tinted nostalgia then you can see the cards themselves where most of the time in many ways behind everyone else in technology. 3DFX where less efficient and relayed on brute force, supported less features.

In my view 3DFX often hold back the market by being so far behind in technology like 16-bit colour when everyone else moved to 24bit/32bit. Only support 256x256textures when everyone else moved past that. The list goes on. 3DFX did a lot of good early on but also a massive amount of harm later on. From a technology point of view 3DFX was always pretty poor.

 

[Pottsey]

Laughing my bottom off.

despite what you think of them personally pottsey, i really don't believe you actually think that your statement above is actually true. now 3dfx may have made mistakes at the end and they paid for it by being bought out but to say they never had good technology I'm sorry your talking billy round dangley things.

I do believe my statement is true. Take the Voodoo 1 & 2 the reason I never had a Voodoo 1 or 2 is because I thought it was a downgrade with worse graphics. Why would I want to downgrade to 16bit colour? Downgrade to 16-bit Z-Buffer, downgrade to 256x256 textures? Have a washed out view from the bypass cable. Forced to lower resolution , lose out on light volumes, real time shadows, true logarithmic colored fog, Translucency, Smooth shading and all the other missing features for Voodoo. EDIT: (Voodoo was 640x480 max resolution at 16bit colour if I recall correctly and I was used to 800x600 with 24bit colour) So I stand by what I said. 3DFX technology was not good. It was fast but not good.

EDIT: I remember playing Quake on Voodoo and my first thought was. Wow this is so much worse, all the advance graphic features are missing due to lack of support in the card and the max resolution is lower. Same for Ultimate Race from Kalisto again I tried it but Voodoo had to turn off the advance features and the max resolution is lower for 3DFX. EDIT2: Unreal was another game I tried with Voodoo and again it lacked all the advanced features and just looked far worse.

EDIT3: To clarify and futher explain my point of view, one area 3DFX was best at was game support. That to me is why they did so well but that game support wasn't due to good technology. The support was due to good marketing and good dev relations making special code for their cards. There was way more games that supported Glide over SGL as 3DFX devs did a much better job at going to game devs and giving support. But almost all games that supported both Glide & SGL ran faster, looked better and supported more advanced features in the SGL version. That is why I say 3DFX had the worse technology but better marketing, drivers and better dev relations.