What does /vr/ think of this company?
What games did they make?
I used to have a Voodoo 3 3000
I loved my Voodoo 2. Great company, wish they were still around.
had a Diamond Monster. That thing was a game changer, literally
>>3331547
Wonder what would've happened if the deal with Sega didn't fall through.
UltraHLE was THE SHIT
>>3331549
Bundled games included:
Hyperblade
Jedi Knight
Heavy Gear
Mechwarrior 2
Shadow Warrior
Whiplash
EF-2000
Incoming
Motocross Madness
Sega Rally
You could use 2 different brands of voodoo2 cards together in SLI, (and even an 8 meg card and a 12 megger), leaving you free to make use of the opportunity of 2 different game bundles.
>>3332665
>Sega Rally
Pretty sure that's by Sega
>>3332897
3dfx didn't make any of the other games either. Bundling them with their cards though brought these games to people, and that had an impact
>>3332897
No shit. But it is in there among the bundles of games that came with these cards. Strangely.
Maybe more strange that Microsoft contributed a piece of software to a company scoffing at their D3D standard.
>>3332928
>Maybe more strange that Microsoft contributed a piece of software to a company scoffing at their D3D standard.
doesn't matter, had sex. Or in this case, a game running on Windows. It's all about the mindshare, getting the foot into the door. Moving these devs from Glide to D3D was the longterm goal, but first they had to see the Windows light, that good looking gaming is indeed viable with all that nasty nasty overhead of the OS
Best grafex cards ever.
>>3333369
>P4
Probably won't work with an ISA sound card brutha. What you really want is a P3.
>>3333379
Leave that for a dos rig. I rather have an aureal vortex 2 in my machine for A3D.
>>3333379
My Sound Blaster works fine in my P4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnzpiMfihZw
This guy has a crap ton of captures from 3dfx cards.
>>3333404
>6000 AGP
damn
>>3331549
None. Underage.
>>3333407
I like how hes actually using it instead of keeping it as a trophy.
>>3333404
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAlEmIL7q6s
look at this fucking spider! Look at it!
That channel is memory lane, I love it.
If anybody knows where to find a recording of POD's sewer level in Glide, that level contains one of the few early 3D accelerated instances of reflections, near the starting line
>>3333420
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZgWSOss3y4
kids these days don't even know the brilliance of PODs track design. This was one of the best. Really feels like you're navigating an abandoned city, instead of following a track
>>3333418
true that. Was there any glide game that would bring this card to its knees?
>>3333435
100% of the subjects of this board happened before 2000. If you can't be arsed to care about that time, you might just be in the wrong place.
>>3333440
Congrats on being so observant, its one of the first 3D games optimized for Voodoo 1 in 97.
>>3333457
I'll never forget the haunting sky over Beltane, first time I fired up the game (accelerated, of course). That racer will always have a special place in my video gaming memories
>>3333465
also one of the few games where the (fairly basic) story got integrated quite nicely. The track style got more and more surreal as you progressed, like you were really running away from ... it, and it was still catching up. The excitement on the last track, with the shuttle in sight, that game had a lasting impact.
>>3333435
>Before I was born
>2000
>>3333483
like 90% of /v/
feeling old gramps?
>>3333440
Fucking youngfag.
Of course your iphone has better graphics, it's a pocket sized multi-core computer with loads of RAM that came out at least a decade after the Voodoo cards.
That's like saying my 3DS has better graphics than a N64. Even though the N64 was pretty powerful for it's time, the 3DS has the advantage of over a decade of technological progress.
I've got a couple Voodoo3 3500's I picked up for a retro Pentium 3 build. And I also decided to pick up some Voodoo 2's So i could SLI them at some point if I ever wanted to.
3DFx was great, loved their shit. My first computer had a Voodoo Banshee, and playing games like Cyber Strike 2, Unreal Tournament, and FF7 was great on that card. Everything looked great.
>>3333559
remember the 3dfx logo splash? It had a distinctly different resolution and refresh rate than the OS right before. It was like the computer telling you "game mode enabled" and then shit got awesome
>>3333435
Really shitty bait. Try again dumb fuck
>>3333559
>Everything looked great.
Daily reminder Voodoo 1 and 2 (including Rush and Banshee) literally use the exact same fucking 'vaseline smear' screen dither filtering method as N64 which people supposedly hate so much.
>>3333597
At way way higher resolutions with much larger texture cache
>>3333569
Yeah, that was always great.
Also, having recently booted up FF7 on my Retro Build, it's quite funny how good it looks. It looks nearly as good as the upscaled version they released a few years ago.
>>3333597
Except PCs used nice and sharp CRTs with VGA, so it wasn't so bad. While N64 got even blurrier on consumer sets with composite. Not to mention voodoo also gave you higher resolution compared to 240p on N64.
>>3333605
High res games like Battle for Naboo on N64 look pretty much identical to what the original Voodoo 1 would produce IMO. Since that game was released on PC as well I'm actually pretty curious if you could run it on a Voodoo 1.
I don't think the original Voodoo has a texture cache actually. Pretty sure it just pulls textures directly from VRAM. From memory the Voodoo 2 (and Banshee) did have a texture cache though.
>>3333609
The initial voodoo team were all former members of SGI, who made the N64 chip. I think the voodoo did very well in trying to hit the sweet spot between performence/price, while the N64 was gimped too much.
>>3333623
I may be a senseless nostalgiatard, but to this day I do not see the use of anti-aliasing. I know what it does, and I know how it's supposed to improve the picture, the technical background is crystal clear to me, I just don't consider it "worth it". That was true for me for the old 640x480 Voodoos, as well as modern 4k displays. For the latter probably even more so.
>>3333627
I think I remember a few games supporting AA back then, it was always optional though. The Voodoo 1/2 can only do Edge AntiAliasing: this means that aliasing-effects, that are not situated at the border of a polygon, are left untouched. Since Voodoo2 stores its rendered pixels immediately in external Ram while the antialiasing is done when the whole image is already rendered, the hardware has to read several pixels out of the external memory, to use some sort of filtering on them and store them again in external ram. So AA involves read, modify and write operations. Because accessing to external memory reduces memory bandwidth and steals it to the other rendering actions a drop in the number of fps occurs. Remember that less fill rate is less fps.
>>3333639
>aliasing-effects, that are not situated at the border of a polygon
what would that be?
>Remember that less fill rate is less fps
You're telling that to someone that disables AA as the first thing if a game lacks performance. I'm well aware of the overhead. Hence my statement of "I just don't consider it 'not worth it' ". It's such an expensive effect, and I don't see the benefits. In motion I literally don't see them. I'm busy looking at the screen as a whole
>>3333623
>while the N64 was gimped too much
If you paired the N64's GPU with the same kind of RAM as the Voodoo, you'd basically have the best price/performance GPU of 1996/1997. It doesn't have as much fill rate as Voodoo, but it's cheaper and comes with hardware T&L. It would have been incredibly good value for people with old CPUs.
It was limited on N64 because it had to share a single channel of RDRAM with the CPU like an old Intel intergrated graphics solution.
I don't know what lead to their demise, but I do know that between 1998 and 2001, anything rendered in 3DFX almost always looked better than it did in OpenGL or D3D
>>3333676
bad mix of hubris and nvidia did
>>3333676
But Voodoo cards before 4/5 lacked 32 bit color so they couldn't have better image quality than TNT2 or GeForce 256.
>>3333702
Lets not forget how long it took the competition to catch up to 3dfx in performance. Don't forget nvidia's utter failure of their NV1 chip.
>>3333676
see >>3333702 ?
That's one aspect of what killed 3dfx. They were focusing on image quality, making a good API, special effects. nvidia focused on numbers. The visual difference between 16-bit 3dfx output and 32-bit nvidia output is minimal, the benefits of Glide much stronger. In the end though, nvidia has a 32 where 3dfx has a 16 in its specs. 32 is more, so it must be better. Reviewers love their numbers, they're seemingly objective, unlike mushy things like image quality. So, even though nvidia produced less pretty imagery at the time, they had the better numbers, and hence "won" in reviews. Consumers followed it up, and before you knew it 3dfx was dead in the water, half the achievements of Glide were gone, and it took a while to bring them back. To add insult to injury, in the end it was nvidia that bought the 3dfx corpse and rebranded and re-purposed some of the stuff they developed.
Mind you, it's not the only thing that killed 3Dfx, they were a bit too arrogant to think nobody could beat them, and their expenses were a bit out of control. It certainly contributed though. Also, with all the ways 3D accelerators changed and developed since then, it's questionable at best whether we lost something with 3Dfx or not. Their latest hurrah, the T-buffer, was a dead end. Similar effects are done very differently nowadays. I personally was happy to see them try though, to push for actually prettier graphics, not just bigger numbers.
>>3333702
Yes, but its performance boost in 16-bit meant that it could excel in other areas compared to the TNT series.
Voodoo was finished once Nvidia released their Geforce beast. Absolutely destructive in OpenGL performance.
>>3333874
I dunno, Voodoo was kind of finished when 3dfx bought STB.
>>3334136
Why exactly was this bad? What's the benefit of letting third parties sell cards?
>>3333597
Glide uses dithering to provide rather effective depth of field effects in a performance-friendly way. I don't think any cards have used that technique since. It was one of the things I missed most after 3Dfx went under. The nvidia cards produced an image that just seemed flat in comparison.
>>3334212
>dithering
>depth of field
wtf? You're gonna have to explain that one with images
>>3334212
I believe voodoo might have used dithering to make use of the 18 bit color that it generated images at internally and could only output in high-color mode.
>>3334224
It's a combination of temporal dithering and spatial/focal antialiasing via their t-buffer tech that provides a good sense of depth to the rendered image.
The effect doesn't come across as well on a modern LCD or through still images though. It's like trying to explain a vector display without showing someone a real one in person. Ideally you'd want to view something like Unreal played on a CRT through one of the cards.
You could try watching videos of glide games/demos on youtube and see if you can notice the effect.
Holy shit:
http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/voodoo-revived
>>3334280
>april 1
>>3333414
>underage
>for something that came out in 1996
You are the underage if his post offended you.
>>3334169
They were already established brands / brand-combos, so if some people got comfortable with the monster3d or pure3d product lines, they couldn't stick with that. And STB didn't have exceptional versions of the cards, and was said to have had issues filling all the production demand alone - I heard it delayed the launch.
Not to mention how they've afterwards gone back to the 3rd party system.
>>3334280
Too bad, it would have been awesome to see a much smaller bunch of such cores bolted onto a VIA nano or intel quark chip.
>>3334268
I understand enough of the theory. Bring it on and show a screenshot that has dithering used as a DoF equivalent. Don't wiggle your way out with the T-buffer, it's unrelated
>>3334268
Well maybe, but the primary reason was to reconstruct the 24 bit internal color depth (as best as possible) from the 16 bit color depth framebuffer saved in VRAM. Which is pretty much exactly the same reason N64 had its own very similar dither filter.
N64's GPU and Voodoo 1 are exceedingly similar technology, no doubt due to their identical mid-90s SGI pedigree, the latter just gave up hardware T&L for significantly higher fill rate because on PC you could theoretically supply high-end CPUs.
>>3334251
How does OpenGL handle colours and bit depth? Can you for example make something that is 0 B 50 G and 255 R in a program directly? What happens to this if the hardware isn't 24-bit?
>>3335864
You do know that voodoo didn't technically support OpenGL originally, but used the miniGL subset, right? (which I understand was tightly connected to Glide)
>>3337270
OpenGL is OpenGL, you can't just say it's mini.
>>3337402
But 3dfx did take a look at the set of OpenGL calls, and decided that only a limited number of them were clearly helpful for games, and so that's what they worked with when they hatched their drivers.
>>3337453
The point is that the games still communicate with the OpenGL API. What the driver can and does is up to anyone else. I just want to know how RGB and bit depths are handled between the games and drivers in general.
>>3333379
>>3333369
Not all P3s support ISA, but many P4s do not support Voodoo.
A P4 is overkill for Win 98 gaming anyway.
If I could choose, I would pick these four.
>Pentium MMX with sound blaster for DOS
>Pentium 3 with Voodoo 5 and Aureal for Win 98
>Athlon 64 with Geforce 7900 and X-Fi for Win XP
>Core 2 with Geforce 285 for Vista
