Who remembers this when playing PC games with 3D support..!!

I had the Orchid Technologies Righteous 3D card too, paired with my diamond Viper 2D card, remember being able to to run my fisrt 3D game at 800/600 and thinking, wow, that pool of blood looks great ;)

Then upgraded to the Banshee (rubbish card) then a voodoo 2 8mb, then 12mb, then the voodoo 3 2000, then 3000, then 3500 and finally the 5500, before being forced to the Dark side of NV with a Ti500 GF3 ....

Ah those were the days, I loved playing Operation Flashpoint on my 5500 in Glide, looked and ran so much better than in DX mode!
 
Le_Petit_Lapin said:
I love looking back at old games and wondering how the hell we found the graphics jaw droppingly relistic at the time. :D
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Yeah it's hilarious to think that when real good looking 3D games first game about back then, they were just so blocky and pixelated. Ahh the good old days of 320x240 and 640x480 resolution games.

And to think, the graphics that we have today might as well be hilarious to the future generation.

There's also looking back at the pricing of hardware back in the days too.
 
I love a memories thread. I remember getting my first 3dfx board (a 4mb Voodoo 1) fitted in a shop in Plymouth because back then I didn't know how to do it myself. Took it home and...wow, Quake looked so sharp, Descent 2 looked amazing. Brilliant stuff. And the little pass through cable as well. Ah, memories.
 
Wow. Don't think I've seen 'pop-up' for a good while now. My first 3d card was a TNT2 Ultra in about 1999, but my friend had the 3dfx add on card in the mid nineties, and we'd hammer Quake and Tomb Raider on i think a P133 or a P166 iirc.
 
whitecrook said:
Wow. Don't think I've seen 'pop-up' for a good while now. My first 3d card was a TNT2 Ultra in about 1999, but my friend had the 3dfx add on card in the mid nineties, and we'd hammer Quake and Tomb Raider on i think a P133 or a P166 iirc.
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Very true

Pop-up dissapeared quickly actually! By the voodoo3 came out i don't think i remember any games with pop-up
 
This takes me back to my matrox mystique 220 days and my power VR card. oh the memories!
 
Started with the 4mb Voodoo card and then dropped a sizeable chunk for 2 12mb Righteous 3D II's, a Matrox Millennium and a new motherboard and PII 450. I've still got them somewhere.

Went from 640x480 in 3d games to 1024x768. :D Pant wettingly exciting.

Still have my Voodoo 5500 too.
 
Gimpymoo said:
Do you think we are any worse off for having DirectX now instead of Glide?
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At the time I would have said yes (3dfx fanboi), but not any more.
Glide was good because it was very fast however the fact it was only 16bit (or "22bit" if you believe the marketing hype) and only supported 3dfx hardware.
In the 90s this didn't matter because 3dfx had good hardware and generally speaking 32bit had a fairly hefty performance hit so running in 16bit mode made sense anyway.

Ultimately you want game developers to concentrate on building games, not worrying about how to support different driver APIs. DirectX has given them that platform, I remember a time when games used to have different executables to run them under Glide (Screamer Rally, Carmageddon etc).
 
The only old card I still have is a 2MB Matrox card, can't remember the type though.
I kept that as a backup in case my main card would die or when I sold my old card waiting for a new one.
 
Can’t remember what happened to my 3Dfx cards. I only ever owned two of them, I remember the Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 more fondly only as I would look for the 3Dfx logo on the back of PC game boxes etc…..

I remember Resident Evil with a 3Dfx and how the Power VR community were up in arms about the game not having power VR support…

I used to run my Voodoo 2 along side a Nvidia TNT 2 Ultra with 32MB of memory and remember the 3Dfx still being the quicker of the two cards with most games but finally when I upgraded to a ATI 9700 pro the Voodoo 2 card was put aside and I can’t remember what happened to it… I think I might have binned it.

I never got to own any of the other variants.. Only reason I ended up with the TNT 2 Ultra was because I was rather friendly with the manager of the local PC store and he gave me a TNT 2 Ultra to try it out… When I went to give him the card back a few weeks later he said just keep it.. so I did.!!

I’ll be honest, the only Nvidia based product I’ve ever purchased out of my own money was a Geforce 8800 GTX 512MB….

That got replaced with an ATI 5870 some months back. I’ve not actually owned that many cards, I tend to get them and use them for a good few years before I change…

Oh and the reason I believe or so I’ve read that Sega went with Power VR over 3Dfx for its up and coming Dreamcast was down to NEC being a good supplier for Nintendo and its N64 console and also NEC was a Japanese company, among other factors….. Shame, as 3Dfx really did need to get into the OEM market. This is where ATI and Nvidia got it so right… Supplied affordable OEM chipset for companies such as HP and Dell…

You’ve only got to look at ATI, the Rage 3D was a total pile of rubbish, but it was installed to thousands of PC’s over the world due to OEM agreements, and now look… ATI have pretty much the fastest GPU line up on the market…
 
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