3dfx Voodoo 3 retro review 

Voodoo 3 3000 PCI was my first accelerated graphics card. It was a huge step up from software rendering.

When the Voodoo 3 came out, its cost was around 3 minimum wages here in Brazil (around 430 usd). Only the rich could play computer games...a decent gaming computer build would cost as much as 3 thousand US dollars. I'm so glad technology evolved and now you can buy used parts and computers. Even a minimum wager can game, saving a few bucks for some months. Amazing video!

I remember going to my local computer store to snag a Voodoo 3 3000 on a great sale but they were sold out so I grabbed the 3500 instead and they gave it to me for the sale price of the 3000 as an apology for the 3000 being out of stock and damn was I impressed! My college roommate was all about his ATI Radeon card but I preferred the Voodoo card by a mile. The late 90s and early 2000s were a great time for upgrading a building PCs and I miss having late night gaming sessions playing Counter Strike and TFC2

Interesting to see people still have these! I’m happy there are people who still have retro setups. I have a spare Voodoo3 I think, would anyone want it? Cause it’s just collecting dust. 😂

Yup, that was my favorite card of all time. Thanks for the retro visit.

3:38 similar thing with Voodoo2 - they came out when Pentium IIs were around, 350-400 MHz if I'm not mistaken, and they didn't achieve their full power until Pentium III 1000 or even higher. Hell, I know people that used to have Pentium 166s paired with Voodoo2! Yet somehow back then we just enjoyed the ride, having orgasms every time we saw spinning 3dfx logo before the game started, instead of raving about bottlenecks. I hate this about today.

I got this in 1999 and bolted a fan on the heatsink for higher clocks. Major step up from the Diamond Monster 3D I had before.

I just bought a 3500 and the absolutely massive cable to go with it. The case mounting bracket caused it to bend up and out of the AGP slot when locked down, and the breakout cable has one side of the "DVI" screws broken, but once I got it all set in there, it works great still. It runs everything up to Y2K perfectly and now my Gateway GP7 is nearly perfect. It is such a national tragedy that the only potentially true challenger to Nvidia died in 2001. RIP 3dfx.

I remember this. Andrew Tao was my chip lead on this. It was called avenger internally. We wished we did this instead of banshee which was 1 tmu. 2d was very fast, vga was also very fast

I bought a 3000 PCI to replace my old voodoo 1 in my heavily modded Packard Bell. It was a good card. I still have a Voodoo 3, 2, 1, and Banshee

Yay! Another cool video! I still having a Voodo 4500 PCI, i use to play some old game on this card. And you are doing really well, because i always go back to my childhood when i watch your videos. Thanks.

My first graphics card, Voodoo 3 2000 PCI (all I could afford at the time). Bought it in Micro Center in Sunnyvale California, down the street from Intel and AMD HQ (where my parents worked in microprocessor fabrication). It was an amazing time to be into computers and computer gaming. My whole family worked in the tech industry so I was quickly introduced into games like the original Rainbow Six, Half Life, and Quake 1/2. Software to hardware mode with the Voodoo 3 was like night and day.

I love your channel Phill! It reminds me very good old times. I don´t have time for gaming any more. But always see your Channel. Cheers from Argentina

I still remember that day my brother owned me money and someone owed him money. I told him to never mind once he told me that the guy was giving him a computer to give to me instead of money. He insisted. This was in 1999/2000 He brings over a cardboard box of computer parts, not the computer I was expecting. This card with this large aluminum heatsink catches my attention. It's written 3Dfx on it. Meh, I set all the parts aside. A week or so later I decided to build up a computer using those parts. The CPU in the box? Pentium !!! 650MHz (SLOT1). A stick of 256MB of PC100 RAM, a SB 128 PCI, and this odd graphics card. Get it all installed. I think I had to look up the P/N and found the 3Dfx forum. The card? Voodoo3 3000 16MB AGP.

I had the 3500 TV and the first thing I did to it was take a fan from a parts bin and screwed it to the heat sink. The problem these had were the proprietary dongle you needed to hook up to your monitor, was so heavy that it eventually pulled down on the card causing the connection to fail. I used to copy movies from dvd to MPEG2 with amazing quality for the time using the standard Voodoo3 3500 TV suite. It had an MPEG2 recorder app. I just had to make sure to stop the record when the movie was over. It completely bypassed the DVD copy protection built into dvd players at the time so it wouldn't fade to blue screen like it would when you connected a VCR to the DVD. You could stuff a bunch of movies on 1 DVD-R or a couple on a CD-R. This card also came with a real CD copy of Unreal that was a blast to play. I would play it non-stop in multiplayer COOP with random people all night long. One time I took the level for The SunSpire, which was really cool dark/huge level and turned it into a death match level. It was super fun to play especially in the large and dark corridors.

Phil, every time when I watch these sorts of videos from your channel, it takes me back to my childhood. :)

When I first installed the voodoo card it felt like a quantum leap in gaming. like the quantum leap of going from 2d games to 3d games. You would be hard pressed to get the same leap today.

This video is awesome. I love your attention to retro hardware, especially 3dfx. My first 3d accelerator was a 16MB Voodoo Banshee PCI, which I paired with a Pentium 233 MMX. My current Win98 retro gaming rig is a P3 800 w/128mb of RAM, a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, and an Aureal Vortex 2-based sound card. Perfect for Jedi Knight, Unreal, UT, Wing Commander Prophecy, Freespace 1+2, Half-Life, Quake 3, NBA Live 99, etc...

I remember the image quality being a sticking point in reviews in gaming magazines. I distinctly remember one magazine reviewing the Voodoo 3 against the TnT2 and complaining of a grainy and washed-out image in the Voodoo 3. That might be down to the 16-bit support and reliance on box filtering.

Great video! It's like watching a video version of Tomshardware from back in 99. That is an awful lot of games to benchmark with that many cards. whew! I remember from that time too, people were very disappointed, to the point of quite angry, over 3DFX acquiring STB and limiting the supply of 3DFX components to only 1 company, their own. The lack of SLI in the Voodoo 3 cards was another big let down, and like you said, the performance wasn't much better than the Voodoo2SLI, which people had already invested in. Honestly, 3DFX did themselves in by purchasing STB when you look back at why the company folded and later got purchased by their main rival, nVidia. Sure was crazy times back then with everybody in Silicon Valley.

I bought a Voodoo 3 card for about 10 CAD long before they became collector's items (it was less than 10 years old when I first got it). I put together a retro system and had it working perfectly, but sadly I abandoned the system along with a bunch of other stuff due to some complications during a long distance move. I didn't realize how valuable the system probably already was to collectors at the time, but I would have liked to have had it just for myself regardless of what it was worth.

I had a Voodoo 3 3000 and a Voodoo 5 5500. Loved both of those cards but I took them out for some other one but I can not remember what I had in my 2000 PC that I built and sold after making a new one in 2004. So cool that you are showing these with older games. I don't even think new cards can make these games look good anymore. It makes it look fun to play in your videos. I think I never had good processor and Ram at the time so it never looked that good when I used them. :(

every time I watch one of your videos that include a 3Dfx card it makes me wish I could go back in time and give my younger self the money he was looking for to upgrade to the latest & greatest so I could bring those well-loved cards back to the future (no movie tie-in) and have them back in my possession once more... especially the Voodoo 5 5500 I loved so much but when all the game makers switched from Glide to OpenGL couldn't keep up, I think I sold that card just 9 months after buying it for a mere $50.... it's a shame

I was lucky to get a voodoo 3 3000 pci from my school, must have been a pack in card for an old pc, i paired it with the pc bpught the year i was born, with a p3 celeron at 667mhz and 512mb of ram, as well as the creative/ensoniq audiopci under ensoniq drivers for soundscape support, not sure if its a bad setup but it was free, and i love it for getting into retro pc's.

Very informative, thank you good sir.

My first 3d card ever! Worried all the way home about how much it cost and whether it would make any difference. Got it installed, loaded up Thief and spent a good 10 minutes walking around one room just stunned at the difference. Well worth the money.

My first decent video card was a Voodoo3 3000 AGP, and the upgrade from a generic S3 Trio on an ISA bridge was enormous. The main reason I had seen a Voodoo card in my dreams was Need For Speed 2 (not the underground, I am talking about the 1997 version - yes I am a bit old) and some effects were only available on the 3dfx Glide API. Gaming has never been so thrilling

My parents bought a P3 500 with an ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB, which I decided to sell on ebay as a teenager when we still used 56k. With the money I got myself the Voodoo 3 2000 giving up on twice the size of memory, AGPx4 and 32bit just for 3dfx greatness in UT :D

Awesome choice of games to show!

Oh yeah, Prophecy. I used to go to bed with my head spinning. My Voodoo 3 turned it into a new game.

Oh how I miss my 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000.

I absolutely love the way you say "khaad."

Voodoo cards were my childhood dream. I got a Riva TNT2 instead though.

1st had a ATI @ Play with 4 mb memory piece of crap playing games. Replaced with a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP and wow my games were played so smoothly. It was tops late 90s early 2000s. Well Done Dude !

Awesome review

Nice video. I remember my V3 being OMG hot. So i attached a small 80486 fan on it. I was scared it would melt haha:D

Ohhh the memories! I came across my voodoo3 box a couple months ago and I know that damn thing is in the box. I remembered saving up to buy it then had no idea how to install it.... now I'm rocking a gtx 1080. How did we ever manage back then?!

There were also Velocity cards, which also rocked Voodoo3 chipset, with one locked TMU (easily unlocked via registry) and only 8MB of memory.

On my P2 233MHz I managed to kill the AGP port trying to overclock the S3 card the computer came with. So my solution was to buy a Voodoo 3 PCI (think it was a 2000, could not afford the 3000). But I was SOO happy with that Voodoo 3 card! It was a huge step up from the 4MB S3 card I previously had. And I remember being a bit disappointed later when I got a Geforce card, and some of the old games that supported Glide did not look as good (imho.) as it did on the Voodoo 3.

Ah, the memories... My first PC around 2001 was: Voodoo 3 2000, Celeron 450, 64MB of Ram, Sound Blaster 128, and Abit ZM6 motherboard (if I recall). I still remember how I was skeptical, saying 'this can never beat consoles!' Until my brother launched the first game - Rally Championship 2000... Jesus, the photo-realistic (at the time) graphics, real car sounds, 800x600 sharp resolution. This was one hell of a shock. And then we launched Aliens vs. Predator 1, and my jaw hit the floor (still looking for it to this day). Voodoo 3 was truly impressive. I know that now, 16-bit color limitation seems like a deal-breaker, but it wasn't. Back then, the usual configuration for a PC around here was: Riva TNT2 M64 32MB (which was a slow crap), and a 400-700 Mhz Celeron. Most people simply could not afford a PC that would allow them to run something at 32 bits with acceptable FPS (that didn't happen until GeForce 2 MX 200/400 hit the market). That's why 3dfx chose to go with 16bits + dithering - it was fast, and it looked really, really GOOD (MUCH better than Riva TNT's 16-bit mode)! Voodoo's compatibility was also top-notch - I played dozens of games - both Windos and DOS, and NEVER had any issues with it, while friends running Rivas were regularly struggling with compatibility. The image quality was also great... Don't get me wrong, I realize that the 'full' TNT2 and TNT2 ultra were faster in some games, but they needed a VERY expensive machine to show it's real power. And people who could afford that usually went for GeForce anyway. ... if only 3dfx didn't get so greedy in the end :(

During my teens days, I always wanted to buy Voodoo 3 3500 but I couldn't afford it even though I took part time job after school. I sacrifice my summer holidays to work full time and finally got myself one. And it was worth it, it totally change how Quake 2 and half-life looked and it lasted all the way to World of Warcraft vanilla days until I had build a new rig due PCI-E was all the rage.

the nice thing about the Voodoo3 is how affordable it is, especially in comparison to other 3dfx cards. while in terms of performance its really not much better than a V2 SLI setup , its also usually 1/4 the cost (if not less). its a great card for late Pentium IIs and early PIII based systems and the PCI variants are great 2D cards for older systems. also important to note that most games of the time didn't really get much from running in 32bit colour mode, and the performance hit often means youre running in 16 bit anyway.

Used to love the voodoo cards just for the cool box it came in

Awesome video Phil! :)

Great work!

Hi I bought a gaming windows 98 gaming pc it have the voodoo 3 , my problem is when I play wolf3d and touch the wall or tables the game get slow any idea what cause these ? Is there a way to fix these ? Other games I tried works fine doom , quake , but some not desert strike is slow

I always wondered why the PC gaming mags in the late 90s had loads of dots all over the screenshots and now I know it was due to the 16bit limitation lol.

We had STB Voodoo 3 2000 16Mb, it really was a dream after ATI Rage Pro 8Mb :)

I had a Matrox video card for my main and Voodoo gpu as add on, the combo seemed to work great at the time.

I have had a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP softmodded with a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP Bios. Time usind was the release day in 1999 until 2001, than a geforce 2 mx comes into the system and the T&L Unit gives more life to the PIII 500 Katmai CPU. Today I'm using a V3 3000 PCI in my retro System, also with a PIII 500 Katmai. :) I also have a 2000 AGP, 3000 AGP and 3500 AGP (the original one, not the compaq).

I used to have a Voodoo 3 on my 1998 PowerMac G3 back in the days. Incredibly powerful and a massive upgrade compared to the built in VRAM. Sadly they never released drivers for Mac OS X so i had to get a Radeon card in 2001 and a year later i retiered the old work horse for good.

Elsa Erazor? Was that the one with the 3d glasses?

First card I bought was a Voodoo3 2000 PCI. It ran TFC and CS Beta nicely. Paired with my AMD K6-2 500Mhz CPU.

hello is V3 2000 agp ok for DOS glide games? GTA1, Tomb Raider, MDK ... i mean pure DOS 6.22? I have V2 12MB and cant run any 3dfx game under dos dont know why. 😢

How did you capture your footage? I just installed a Voodoo 3 on my dad's old P3 so I can play Rogue Squadron, Battle For Naboo the way it was meant to be played. I just want to capture and discus my set and how to go about setting up THE BEST GAME EVER!!!!!! Happy Holidays and thanks for the awesome info.

it was great at that time. i still have 3dfx Voodoo 3 it still works great

One of the first cards i bought :D

I don't have lens flares in Incoming, using Windows 98SE and a Voodoo 3 1000 with 1.07 driver. Somebody know how to fix this? And I figured out how to change the resolution (add -screenmode on the shortcut) but can't you select the renderer?

Is the Voodoo 3 capable of using SLI, like the Voodoo 2?

Had the Voodoo 3 AGP card and loved it with games like Castrol Honda Racing RC45, Need For Speed 111 Hot Pursuit, Half Life, Mission Studios combat flight sim, there were many games written in Glide & Open GL this chipset was mandatory if you had these games. Now looking to get Alienware for flight sims. Perhaps you can direct me. BTW it replaced a ATI @ Play 4 mb memory card. Well Done Presentation 👍

Great video Phil! I'm thinking about buying a V3 2K but my motherboard has a PCI 2.2 porta, would V3 work in that standard?

I just purchased one of these from amibay. Fantastic card, everything with a Glide API runs smooth as sync. Could you do some more in depth videos about the settings (I've just watched your alpha blending one)

Super late to the party but I still want to thank you. I am about to get myself a retro system ( Pentium 3 800mhz with a ati rage card) but I want to modify the rig with another card and according to my research the vodoo 3 would be decent choice. Thanks a lot for sharing more information about the card.

For those that don't know... Not all voodoo 3500's are built the same. Look at the ram chips. If they say TC-6, you basically have a voodoo 3000 with TV out because those only run at 166mhz. Overclocking to 183 will be rarely achievable. If they say TC-55 you have 5.5ns ram. You'll have a card that is factory clicked at 183mhz solid. Can maybe OC to 200 but not much more. If you have a card that says TC-5, this is a unicorn and will likely run 200+ all day. Factory clicked at 183. The only limit being the GPU frequency stability. The ram itself is fast.

I had the Voodoo 3 2000 :D But i also had rigs with TNT 2's as well :D

They stayed the same with the PCI masquerading as AGP right the way up to the end, with 5500. In the long term this has been a plus for me personally as it means I don't loose the performance on my VIA mini ITX system with its single PCI slot and my bios flashed Mac PCI Voodoo 5

That being said I just scored a voodoo 3 3500 and played a game on it for the first time. DOS Compatibility is going to really help when trying to play buzz aldrin's race into space.

What game is that with the apache?

Did you test V3 on WIN 2000?

very good card .play all old games especially if this support 3dfx glide api.

Are Windows 95B, 98SE и ME identical in terms of 3dfx drivers support? If, for example, I have a weak old machine with Win95 on it, can I use latest drivers for the Voodoo1/2/3?

Voodoo3 55000 AGB, i rember this card, good old days.

I played Alien VS Predator 2 silk smooth with a 3dfx VooDoo card with 4mb of vram :)

I've got a new Diamond Viper V770 Ultra sitting in my drawer. Need to scrape together parts to build a retro gaming PC.

I remember going by performance back then and bought Voodoo 3 instead of TNT2, the card gave monster FPS with 3DFX support in FPS gaming. Nowadays i'd probably go for image quality and TNT2 instead. But luckily nowadays i can afford to buy RTX 2080S and i can get both :D

My first computer was a HP Pavilion 8570c. Pentium 3, 450mhz and 96mb of ram with a 20GB Hard Drive. I added the Voodoo 3 3000 3DFX has better marketing and I choose them ova the other makers. After only playing Quake II in software mode, adding the V3 and playing in Open GL blew my fucking mind. Quake II Quake III Half Life Command and Conquer Counter Strike Unreal Unreal Tournament Unreal Strikeforce Janes USAF Falcon 4.0 Team Apache Soldier of Fortune. So many other games. Best computer gaming years ever. Eventually I replaced it with the Geforce MX400. I saw considerable improvement in graphics. 3DFX went under not much later. Now I stick with Nvidia Geforce Titans on my Core i9.

Question: Would a 3ddx Voodoo2 PCI card enhance SVGA if another card, like an S3 Virge VX, doesn't have SVGA support? Or does it not do that? This one game I have, Gateway II: Homeworld has SVGA capability, but unfortunately, the S3 card doesn't support SVGA (MS-DOS detects the card if it's VGA or SVGA). Right now, I'm using an nVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 PCI video card as my video card, but I only use the card in Windows XP, but I'm just running straight up MS-DOS.

given the fct that Voodoo 3 did not take advantage of the agp port and struggled under 32bit color mode, what would you recommend, a voodoo 3 or a pair of voodoo 2 cards in SLI?

i still have it,and it was awesome,especially with the unofficial drivers

I had the 3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 with a P3 500. I had a 3dfx Voodoo 1 Canopus Pure 3d with a Pentium 133 before that. I eventually upgraded the Vooodoo 3 3500 to an ELSA GLADIAC GeForce 2 GTS, with the same PIII 500, I think.

4:40 - what game is that? (nvm, there was a flash of the title, it is Turrican, I recognized it but it didn't look like I remembered lol)

I almost wonder if they hadn't acquired STB, if they would have stayed on track. Good relationships with their board partners would be much more important, but they wouldn't be actively driving them into nVidia's arms. The money they spent on that might have been spent on bringing the VSA-100 cards to market earlier. I don't know if we'd still have a 3dfx today, but it'd certainly be interesting to think about.

There are actually very rare versions of the Voodoo 3, I don't know how much exactly, but one is the EvilKing voodoo 3 3000, it has an orange PCB, it also actually has a fan so it should run cool.

Recently acquired a Socket A setup and have a Voodoo 3 on the way to. Worried that I have messed up with this combo (3.3V AGP mobo, Athlon XP 1900+, 1.5GB RAM, Win2k) in terms of being "period correct" and having sane performance scaling for the Voodoo 3 ? I could not afford to go Slot 1 as prices for that platform are nuts on eBay.

At the time of launch 1024x768 was a pretty high resolution for gaming and we considered the minimum playable frame rate to be 30 FPS. Context for the benchmarks...

I bought (Voodoo 3 3000) one of these at a computer trade show for $225 when they were around $400. The one I picked up with that price tag on it was next to the ones that had the $499 price tag on it. I handed it to the person and said how much is this. They looked at the price tag and sold it for $225. I think the person working the booth at the time did not know anything about the cards and was just manning the booth at the time. It was an awesome GPU for the time.

yesterday i put a voodoo 3 3000 and a voodoo 1 in the same pc and for some reason i can't set the resolution above 640x480... i think the system uses the voodoo 1 resolution instead of voodoo 3, dunno why. update: i found the solution - just need to set the monitor to generic lcd or whatever, that simple.

I think I still have some old Vesa Local Bus Slot graphics cards from the 1980's. Can you do a video on these cards?...

AMD K6 II 350 + Voodoo3 2000 + Unreal 1.......:)

I am still loving this graphic card.

lol I like the teddy bear.

This is the place and time where I actually went over to Nvidia from 3dfx the 32-bit color was very visible back in the day when playing Kingpin that just came out you could really tell a difference I'm telling ya. 😀

In games based on Quake 2 & 3 what API should be used by Voodoo 3 owners 3dfx opengl or default opengl ? I read that 3dfx opengl should be used only by Voodoo 1 & 2 owners but I saw some videos that showed that the Voodoo 3 is 25% faster when using 3dfx opengl. But in the same time I remember that back in those days my Voodoo 3 card was faster using default opengl in both Quake 2&3 engine games. Phil can you please give an answer to this issue ? Thanks !

I just got a working (posts anyhow) PII 266/512K on intel mobo, 30 pin ram with a Voodoo3 2000 PCI card in it, no hard drive... I'm not sure what to do with it. Thanks for the video and comparison with the TnT2 as that was one option to keep the Voodoo card and install in one of my PIII's or lower end P4 with Win98.

+PhilsComputerLab 1) You're music sounds like Goosebumps... what is it? 2) What is the difference between graphics cards and accelerator cards?

Man, I loved the voodoo chipsets , 3dfx was always one of my top picks for graphics cards, but I was also a loyalist to creative labs , almost every thing had to be creative labs 😁. I was quite disappointed when 3dfx lost out on the graphics card wars

Does the 5500 support 8-bit paletted texture and fog?

Testing 3dfx voodoo cards without talking about glide?? That was another level compared with tnt's 2 direct 3d. Ex owner of voodoo banshee 16mb, p2 300mhz 64mb ram........and athlon 900, voodoo5 5500 64mb, 256mb ram,SB live 5.1....now I m going to see your voodoo5 built ;) hope you did it well there.

I also overclocked my voodoo 3 3500 to 210mhz and it was really fast! There was no image artifacts forme though, might e because I have the original v3 3500 Instead of Compaq.

does the V3 support the SST batch? I own the glide version of Mechwarrior 2 which where shipped with the voodoo Righteous 3D Orchid. It was confirmed to work with voodoo 2 through the batch method but don't see anything on the voodoo 3. Also made a nice discovery with a last ditch attempt on a Ensoniq 3D Banshee with SGram "EliteMT". Finding compatible drivers where near impossible, only the first and second referance drivers worked but not all games where stable. So with research and knowing creative bought Ensoniq around the time of the Banshee I looked into the 3D blaster banshee and found they where pretty much the same, soooo I took the blaster bios and flashed it on the Ensoniq. Major Success! Stable and runs every game a throw at it except 1 " Jane's F-15E " ( It will lock up after so many minutes ) and running on creatives latest banshee driver as well. other games I have run with no problems are Rogue Squadron 3D, Quake II, Starseige, G-Police, Future COP LAPD, Expendable, JANE's WWII Fighters, Jane's Longbow, F-22 Lightning 3, F-16 MRF, Mig-29 and Starlancer.