I was a software tester at Intel when 3D cards first started to hit the market, testing display drivers for Windows 95. Many of my colleagues got to test the first ATI 3D card; my project was the forgotten S3 Virge. I spent way too many hours playing the game Monster Truck Madness as a way to test the driver, and also the "Buddy Holly" video clip that was included with Windows 95 OSR 2. This was back with Direct X 1. A year or two later I came back (I was a contractor) to help test out display drivers for ATI. It was pretty cool to be there at the very beginning. I even was testing the very first release of USB and AGP. Good times. I know that there was a group in a secret lab testing out the first Unreal game. By 2000 I was an Intel employee, and I ended up in a group testing BIOS software for desktop systems. Some of my colleagues were helping Microsoft in testing the BIOS for the OG Xbox. Good times.
Scott Smith I remember the S3 Virge. I had an S3 card (1999 - 2000?) I think in my self-built gaming rig. I had an S3 Virge paired with an Intel Pentium 3 CPU, and then replaced it with an NVidia Geforce 2 or something like that.
Excellent post - wish we had more of this sort of this for this channel. That said, the comments section being mostly meme's is better than the fanboy wars of years past, so I will take that and the occasional excellent post ANY day.
I remember how fast things changed, from the Playstation wowing everyone in the mid-90s to then looking like crap by 1999 because the PC had gone miles ahead. Think of Doom in 1993 to Quake in 1996 and then Unreal in 1998. Five years, just nuts.
Yeah that's the fascinating thing, towards the end of the 90s the PS1 was in last place graphically compared to PC and even N64, but it stimulated ingenious innovation - 1996-1999 on the PS1 is one of the most seminal runs in gaming history. The first Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Medal of Honor and Silent Hill all came in those years. And there were tons of awesome groundbreaking original games on top of that, those are just the ones that became big franchises. And Dual Shock! The twin analog sticks/vibrating controller was also an innovation of that period, and it's been the standard for over twenty years now and doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon.
Yeah, talk about it: from playing 2D NES games in the early 90s; to the improved jump in the visual quality of 2D SNES games in 1992, along with its proto 3D games; to full 3D games on PS1 by 1996, which they themselves weren't even up the visual quality and performance of 3D games you could then find on the Arcades; all the way to playing Unreal on PC by 1999; and then, to top it all, PS2 graphics quality by 2001!! A really massive change in visual quality, performance, and gaming experience in just the span of a decade for me!! I was blown away by what I was seeing and playing, with new game genres popping out from all directions due to the new graphical capabilities... and if there ever was just one thing that carried me into video games, then all those fast changes in computer graphics technology of that decade are the sole reason.
One of the biggest "WOW!" moments I had was upgrading to a 3Dfx Voodoo. To prepare myself, I first ran a game in software mode and then switched to Glide. I was blown away at the difference! Higher-res, better graphics and super smooth frame-rate! Too bad 3Dfx stopped innovating, but I will forever remember them cuz of that moment.
they never stopped, they implemented blur, aa, and some other stuff, but got behind on speed, resolution, bit depth, and compatibility. By the time V4 came, they were lagging so much that costed them everything. Thats the problem when someone is overconfident, they get surpassed by the competition.
They did kept on innovating, they just bad at doing business. The T-Buffer technology they were working on basically provide the foundational for many graphic features many years later, the ones we are using today
Yeah, it's unfortunate but they basically kept pumping steroids into that first voodoo design and hoping it wouldn't roll over and die. Once everyone else caught up, especially Nvidia, 3dFX just rolled over and died.
Voodoo3 lacked 32-bit colors and dual texture units like voodoo2 had. That´s what killed 3DFx. Also they used alot of money on advertising instead of developing better hardware...
@@JohnOmniviz The major reason Nvidia becomes the major player in the field today is because Jen Hsun Huang had the extraordinary vision and money to acquire 3dfx's core assets. No one else could do that back then.
yes, and before the PS1, the 3DO and Saturn was showing what was coming. DF has done a good history review here, but i'd like to see it fleshed out more: not just pre quake but also how the leader 3dfx was pushed out the market. Sadly this channel lacks organisation, so much content just all thrown into a mixed bag.
For a Nvidia-sponsored video, it's 3DFX that stole the spotlight, but we all know Nvidia bought them in the end. Maybe it's time to bring the Voodoo brand back: Nvidia Voodoo 3000 series. (3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 was my first GFX card) =P And yes,John, please talk for hours about this. I loved seeing all these games running on different cards.
''Before we enter the future, join us to celebrate the biggest breakthroughs in PC gaming since 1999'' I think they want the contrast and wriggled a little further back.
When I first saw ads in magazines for the 3dfx cards around 1996, I genuinely thought it was snake oil. Games at 640x480 with *that* much higher framerates and looking *that* smooth? Yeah right, that's not possible. Of course I was wrong, and boy did 3D accelerators change the face of PC gaming. Still it took me until 1999 to finally get my first Voodoo2 graphics card, simply because games started requiring them.
"Play your favourite games, like Wipeout 2097, at double the resolution and frame-rate, only on PC with 3DFX!" I remember being incredulous at those magazine adverts back in the day. Surely technology doesn't move that fast? How could a general purpose machine like a PC be so much better than my dedicated games console? Ah, to be young and naive again...
I love how in those early 3d-accelerator magazine ads (eg 3dblaster, Voodoo1) most of things in the ads were prerendered CGI models. (eg CGI of Turok protagonist, CGI of a sportscar, CGI of an apache copter). Seems consumers smartened up by the Voodoo2 and the ads started showing alot more screenshots of actual ingame models, not cgi models.
I remember seeing the ads and then reading the reviews of these cards. I thought it was possible, I guess I was just more openminded, but I wasn't a big fan of how fragmented development might get.
It took a lot of persuasion to get my father to buy a 3dfx voodoo1 card (I think he bought the only model that had 6mb of vram too), but damn was it worth it, even he was impressed by the difference! I can't remember what card I got after it, but I didn't buy another 3dfx card, it may well have lasted until getting the first geforce card from Nvidia.
Matthias B I still remember running NFS3 on a Pentium Pro 200 MHz with a Chips & Technologies integrated video card... couldn’t get it anywhere near playable :) Needless to say my mind was blown when I played it a while later on a Riva TNT
The tail lights on NFS on the Matrox card just brought back so many memories of playing games on my parents' computer, then being absolutely shocked when I got a PC of my own with a massive 8MB Rage card and it supported things like transparency properly. Headlights in Monster Truck Madness 2 were no longer opaque cones.
Monster Truck Mandess 2 was my first online gaming experience as a kid. Dialing in to the MSN Gaming Zone on the family computer that my dad outfitted with a 3dfx voodoo2 card. Good times.
@@RogerJL It only accelerated windows really, as windows had I think GDI driver standard, and most video cards at that time accelerated windows GUI. Matrox Millenium had a very fast 64 bit bus, and very fast WRAM, so it was marginally faster in higher resolution 2d games due to faster transfers. It did have several awesome features such as 4mb of ram for high resolutions, fast ramdac for higher refresh rates, crisp output, and a few proprietary driver features. Millenium + Voodoo1 was the ultimate combo in 1996, and in 98-99 it was G400Maxx + SLI Voodoo2
Great video, but what is left out is that no one but the richest of the rich kids had Intel processors are the time. With AMD and Cyrix making their own 4x86, 5x86 and 6x86 processors at much lower prices, the Intel Pentiums were for rich kids and businesses. I remember having Quake on a Cyrix 586 and it ran like a turd - maybe in the mid-teens at 320x240, that was with an ATI 3D Rage (the first one, which sucked). Then I went to the store one day and they had the new Voodoo card that I had heard about in the magazines, so I pulled out my credit card and bought one. WOW, same computer, same everything and Quake ran flawlessly. It was amazing. Then, even more impressive, was loading up Unreal - a game that on a CRT still looks fantastic even today. The generational leap the Voodoo card brought to market can not be overstated, it was huge.
I was one of those lucky kids. Always had intel chips. We were not rich, but my father certainly had a good job (he was a service engineer for sun microsystems) and it helped him form contacts in the trade. Effectively he contracted with friends who had pc companies as their hardware guy and got components at vat free discounted prices (couldn't do it that way these days!!). Meant I missed the whole console and Amiga thing (though my brother did get a snes and later a Saturn). So yes, they were expensive CPUs, but fun times!
3D decelerators are still made to this day for people who enjoy suffering lol. MX250, GT 1030, RX 520, RX 530 etc. are probably slower than modern iGPUs.
Playing Unreal for the first time with my Voodoo Rush, thinking the software renderer was hardware acceleration, I was impressed, even though the frame rate was poor. It wasn't until I got it working on a Voodoo 2 that I realized what I'd been missing.
@@rastas_4221 I think technological stagnation is a bad argument in favor of charging nearly 1500 for a new GPU. If it's so little of an improvement then why charge so much?
@@superregera799 You really dont have to buy a 1400$ card, even a 600 card nowadays will last you 4-6 years, a 600$ card 15+ years ago, was pretty much unusable in less than 2 years.
@@fran117 Again, I don't really think that the fact that new cards are so little of an improvement nowadays over their predecessors is a good argument for charging so much for the new stuff.
Yeah I remember being able to buy a solid card back then for around £130, I don't think you had to go much higher than that to play most games as intended, today prices are crazy high for high-end cards and that's why most games don't take advantage of them, it's also the reason why I don't bother with higher end cards because it's mostly a vanity card and unless games take advantage of them which they don't because most can't afford them, they are just a waste of money. For me, all that's really needed is console like visuals, maybe with a few extra bells and whistles, double the frame rates, so 60fps and whatever resolution you want to play at, anything else, I couldn't care less about and the good news is, you can do the above quite cheap.
@@superregera799 Well thats what we get when theres no competition on the market. They are a corporation after all. You really dont have to get the best on the market nowadays unlike before, the only reason to get them is if you have 4k and high refresh monitor. A 200$ card will still do wonders on 1080p. Back in the day even THE best card wont get you 60 frames with latest games on a middling resolution, its ALOT different now lol.
Ah the Unreal engine was so cool with that close-up noise detail, I remember bashing my face into and out of walls just to see the detail layer come in and out, and also being amazed at seeing my character in reflections. That engine still holds up pretty nice, there's a cool Clive Barker horror game from 2001 called Undying that uses it. Has some cool haunted mansion levels, and some cool 'portal to hell' type levels set in a swirling abyss of chaos and darkness. And you have weapons and magic. Plus the writing is just a bit better than what you usually get in a game.
The software renderer in particular was insane - great visual quality and decent performance (especially with transparencies compared to the likes of Half-Life). You could disable the dithered alpha and get near 3D-accelerated visual quality, provided your CPU was fairly good!
S3 and Matrox were the first with 3D Accelerators. 3DFX were the first with a 3D Accelerator that was actually good. Revolutionary Features rarely came from nVidia at all. On the contrary. 32bit Rendering was best on Matrox. Heck even the G200 could close the Gap to the TNT, despite the 64bit Memory interface. TnL was something from the Professional Market, that was used there years before the Desktop Market...
Love this older retro stuff. Early 3D stuff was so interesting. There were so many players on the field at the time. Who would have guessed that Nvidia and AMD/ATI were the ones left standing. To think that 3Dfx could have been standing where Nvidia is right now.
@@Moi-tf6nn matrox kinda just added 3d as an afterthought. Their primary market was always those who wanted the best 2d and multiple monitors were their specialty at the time and still is today. A voodoo 1 with a matrox card was a pretty awesome combination of best of both.
Man, following PC gaming in the 90s was absolutely magical. It's absurd just how much progress happened in the span of a decade. It was like every year brought giant new leaps forward.
Oh man ... so much memories. I still remember to this day, me standing in the store with my dad and we had to choose between the Voodoo card and the Riva 128. And we choose the Voodoo, despite it being an additional card instead of an all-in-one. Great purchase at that time. Good old times, where GPUs came without cooling 😅
Great vid - at 13:25 I have some tips to get Unreal looking proper and running somewhat decently on that Rage Pro. You need to go into advanced options > Rendering > Direct3D and disable multitexturing, mipmapping and detail textures. This should fix the visuals after a restart, but to get better performance I recommend dropping the texture quality to medium and setting the resolution to 512x384. After you do this it is somewhat fast but not as good as the Voodoo.
Ah remember the endless hours of trial and error to get things running right and downloading drivers and games overnight... Diamond Monster 3DFX Voodoo owner
^^ my voodoo 1 card hat a small "bug". I had to start the PC and than shut it down and start it again. Than it worked. Well at least it still works, but my vintage P3 system is to fast for a 3dfx voodoo ^^. Actually I'm suprised that the P3 500 could manage to run the V1 card. I thought they had a problem if the PC is faster than 450 MHz. But maybe John forgot to press to "turbo" button like many people I knew at that time ^^.
This brings back so many memories. I played a lot of these games on a Pentium 133mhz with an old Voodoo 1 I bought from a friend. Helped me to play Quake 2 and even Half Life (don't ask how it ran, but at least I had fun with it). The Voodoo was such a great upgrade for my old machine. Due to the light effects, I still refer to that era as the "green light" era, as every light source seems to have a green shimmer in it. Good retro video as always, would love to see more DF Retro on hardware themes.
My father and I built our first home made computer in 1999. It had a Voodoo3 3000, paired with a Celeron 333 running Windows 98. I have a lot of fond memories gaming on that machine, playing Quake 2, Grim Fandango, Thief, and Unreal/Unreal Tournament 99 (which was my online game of choice for many many years, and still like to play sometimes even today).
@@Leon-lg7zm I think it's better to hold off judgement till thier release. Rdna2 looks to be very efficient from what I've seen in the XSX. While Ampere seems to run very hot with reports of 350w+ on the top-end, and the leaked 3-slot design for the founders edition 3090. Overall, things look very different this year. But it's still too early to say.
@@musam992 That doesn't really matter tho, efficiency is a plus but is leagues behind power for basically everyone. The price is gonna be the deciding factor.
I’d like to see more PC Retro in early-mid 2000’s hardware, when Pentium 4 was transitioning into Core 2 Duo and games like Half Life 2 and Left 4 Dead showed huge performance gains with dual core CPU’s. Also some Unreal Tournament 2004 Retro would be awesome too, loved that game.
I remember that time, what 3D cards really did was allow much higher resolutions because most games were at low resolution before that of like 320x240 or something like that, 3D cards allowed resolutions much higher like 800x600 or higher whiles having much smoother frame rate and better visuals. The PS1 got the ball rolling but once things heating up in the PC space, it went crazy from around 96-97 onwards and it most of less took until the PS3 and Xbox 360 for consoles to start matching PC on resolutions, frame rates, visuals and all that because before that, consoles were a really low resolution. Best of all was the cost of the gpu's, I remember getting a River TNT with my brother and it only cost £130 lol, if that was today, it would cost at least £500 lol. As for me, there are 3 cards I remember owning, the Matrox Millennium, the PowerVR and RivarTNT, after that, I kinda lost track of what cards I've had lol.
The NES display resolution is 256×240p While the PS1 resolution is 256x224p and N64 is 320x240p You can see how 5th gen consoles in terms of resolution is the same as 3th gen consoles
My first 3D card vas TnT2pro in 1999, still have that card. First time i boot Quake 2 with that card it was amazing, blown away endless fragging, Q2DM1- The Edge But my jaw dropped when i first time boot Unreal with TnT2 castle intro, looped several times until i picked up my jaw and started playing. And arrival of UT 99 and running for flag on CTF - Facing Worlds, amazing times.
John, you didn't mention whether the Riva you used was the first gen or the refresh known as the Riva 128ZX. That second iteration had much better performance and was available in 1998. Also wish you had included the Intel i740 in this video. Those cards are even more rare, I suppose. Also, Shogo:MAD was released in 1998 with an engine built from the ground up for Direct3D. That and Jedi Knight, which all the magazines used back in the day, would be great candidates for any potential future videos about the 90s GPU wars.
i remember that Intel i740 card, i've only seen one and was in a junk pile. at the time i just didn't care enough to snag it (i just went meh intel video card = junk).
ATI 3D Xpression was my first GPU. Showing my age. Had old school SLI with 2 3DFX cards. Remember having cards for 2d and 3d installed. Remember waiting for new patches or drivers from the latest PC gaming magazines before I got a modem. Getting your choice of GPU running would be hit or miss for a while. 3DFX was the equivalent of gaming porn at the time.
I usually skip sponsored videos, but I have had enough experience with Digital Foundry to know that even the videos that say that they are sponsored are high quality like the rest and don't shill. Thank you Digital Foundry, for the great content, and for Nvidia for sponsoring this.
most people would agree with that now, but you have to keep in context of the time when bilinear filtering was a very desired feature because low res pixelated textures were less "realistic" than smoothed ones
In some ways yeah, but the other advantages like simple things we take for granted made it special. Having colored lighting in GLQuake2 was a HUGE deal!
I want to quote this one too : i played it on s3 virge with 16MB RAM (maybe 7fps ?) Then on ATI Rage Pro with 48MB RAM, pretty playable. And when i received the 3DFX, it became completely smooth. What a game !
What a nice trip down 3D memory lane, thanks John. My personal stepping stones as an avid gamer and graphics enthusiast: Voodoo 2, Voodoo 3 3000, nVIDIA Geforce 256 DDR, Geforce4 Ti 4600, Radeon HD 4870, Geforce 970 GTX, Radeon RX 5700 XT (my current card). I remember the exact moment I "got hooked". It was at a LAN party with friends, where a friend brought over his dad's brand-new top-of-the-line laptop. With a voodoo 2 graphics card! We fired up Quake 2 for a bit of MP and as we walked by my friends tiny terrible TFT laptop screen, we all stopped in our tracks. What the hell was that!? Colored lights!? Smooth texures! It all looked so stunning, even on that terrible, terrible ghosted TFT screen. It was of course the OpenGL version of Quake 2 running on the 3DFX card with some sort of MiniGL driver installed. I got my first Voodoo 2 not long after, and I became addicted to following the graphics trends and benchmarks. I think my own stepping stones signify a certain level of competence in choosing my cards over the course of those years. A lot of cards looked promising, but lacked support or speed. For instance I long pondered the Matrox Millenium G400, but the performance was not up to par. That hardware bumpmapping though... Those were great times. Ah, yes, walking up to the cliff edge in Unreal after leaving that spaceship. I'm still looking for my jaw.
Most of the younger kids and teenagers today won't be able to understand or appreciate this. It's crazy to think that it's been a few decades and we've seen such *huge* leaps in technology as it pertains to PCs and GPUs.
_"Not of the S3 variety I assure you"_ pity that, they were the last competent 3rd party... releasing a decent midrange gpu in 2004... so shall it be till Intel eventually rocks up.
Great work. Awesome to see this topic in-depth. I remember trying to play 3D games without a graphics card in the mid-90s era. It...worked...kind of. But when I bought my first card in '98, wow, it really blew the top off of my PC gaming experience. I became a PC gamer and never looked back.
My first 3D "accelerator" was a PCI Trident 3d Image 9750 purchased to pair with the family Pentium 133MHz non-MMX. Let's just say I was ecstatic when I built my first PC in very late '99 with an slot-A Athlon 650MHz, 96MB of PC-100 SDRAM, a Creative Labs TNT2, a Yamaha Waveforce sound card, and...a trash PC-Chips motherboard based around the AMD 750 chipset. I suffered with the stability of that motherboard for two years until I was heading to college and was able to build a new system based around a Thunderbird-based Athlon 1.4GHz and GeForce 2 GTS. Still, the TNT2 and Athlon 650 allowed me to do what I set out to do with it: play tons and tons of Unreal and then Unreal Tournament. However, I did learn not to buy overly cheap, sub-standard motherboards, and went with an ASUS A7M266 board for the t-bird 1.4Ghz build. I've not bought any non-ASUS motherboard or graphics card since, and I even worked for them and then their manufacturing arm, Pegatron, when they split. Good times.
My first Graphics Card was a Voodo 2. Old school PCI bus, 12MB of VRAM, with the video pass through. The card had a pass through because the Voodoo 2 was not a VGA display. It only accelerated 3D games. If I was not playing games, the internal video chip would be processing the graphics. I still have my voodoo 2.
Yup first it was glide, then AGP, then it was hardware t&l, then it was some unsupported shader, then it was need a new motherboard cause AGP was out. Thats when i quit, just console game now, lots cheaper.
@@Zero11s you might be right but I just wanted to play the latest games without having to spend money on hardware all the time to keep the fidelity and the fps up. I don't regret getting out.
@@andriodman1 Hahaha. I feel your pain. I feel your pain. Us at ReadyStateLoop had boxes of discarded hardware during the "early days" of 3D PC gaming.
The video starts with Quake, Tomb Raider and Need for Speed. I absolutely played those games with my Voodoo 2 back in 1998, after having settled for software rendering in 1997. Awesome time to recall. Great memories. It was like getting an early leap to the Dreamcast, from the Saturn / Playstation era. An early generation leap for PC gamers.
i owned a video game shop in this period, people were blown away by the playstation, then we set up a PC playing Unreal, and it made people stop, stare and ask 'erm, wtf?'
Aaaa, I remember the sheer excitement I felt when I got my first "decent" GPU, ATI Radeon 7500, I could finally run Morrowind. Those are some of the best video game memories I have, the absolute wonder I felt when playing that game. Also, I'm starting to see some parallels between 3d acceleration and DLSS. Better picture AND better performance, that's crazy! But it has happened once already. Pretty cool.
This is such an awesome blast from the past for me. I hadn't even heard of a 3D graphics card when Quake 1 came out, and to play it I had gotten the pentium overdrive to update my 486. Quake still blew me away at the time but it was a wild ride from that to getting a new computer with an ATI Rage Pro and eventually a Riva TNT with 16mb. That span of time is one of my favorites in all of gaming and why I'm now writing my own software renderer and game engine. Don't worry, it'll eventually support graphics APIs! Thanks John for the trip down memory lane.
• 0:30 - …Paradise, Tseng, Cirrsus Logic, Diamond, Oak… - Before standardization and APIs, game development was hell. 😕 - It's a shame that all the video card manufacturers died or were acquired leading to an oligopoly. :-| It's even worse with audio; AdLib, Gravis, and Turtle Beach are gone, and while Creative is still around, nobody cares since integrated audio is sufficient. • 1:06 - My favorite GPU is my oldest one: a monochrome ATI from an old file-server. • I remember 1997 being a huge year in gaming; _Quake_ was out and a huge move forward (I still recall people saying "it's REAL 3D!"), and _Unreal_ was coming soon with revolutionary graphics. It was such a great time for games.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I'm one of those that owned a 3DFx Voodoo 1 card back in the day. Tomb raider was my first 3D accelerated game I played, and I was blown away by the 'quality'. Also Quake and Unreal were the games that really pulled me in and made me the gamer I still am today. At present, whenever I hear people complaining about 'bad graphics', I often think back to those days and think 'you should've seen were we came from'. Anyway, enough rambling, I just felt like a kid for a second again.
Loved the 90's, my first 3D card was a Voodoo Graphics PCI expansion card with 4 MB of EDO RAM combined with a Pentium 166 MMX & 32 MB memory. Carmageddon looks awesome back then, mindblowing graphics
I had pretty much the same set up. Used to play a lot of Quake 2, it was like a slide show until I saved up for a voodoo card. I'll never forget firing it up for the 1st time with the card installed.
My first PC GPU was an ISA Trident 256kb VGA card followed by 1MB S3 Trio. Then it was Ati Xpert@Work in 1997 (8MB Rage Pro chip), TNT2 M64, original Gforce 256 SDR, Radeon 9200SE, Geforce FX5700LE (awful card) and then probably Ati X1950Pro, Radeon 5850... I have quite a few Windows 98SE retro machines with Rage pro, Radeon Mobility 7500, awful SiS integrated chipset and others. I think the 90s were the best time in PC gaming (and gaming in genaral). I find it hard to get excited about new hardware any more. The returns on investment look much more marginal than the giant leaps we had from software rendering to DX6, 7, then programmable vertex/pixel shaders of DX8.1... I remember staring at the Nature benchmark of 3Dmark2001 ( I think). Good old days!
That's a Taiwanese company called Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and yes, they're still around. They made some discrete video cards but also made a lot of motherboard chipsets.
I remember being on a mission to replace a SIS 630 card with a TNT2 back in the day, for some game I can't remember. I was in school and saved for quite a while
@@bdwilcox Ah. I see. Interesting. I remember the card didn't perform that great. I was getting like 3FPS on the original Hitman by the time that came out. Lol. The saddest part was I actually beat the entire game that way, at 3 frames per second. 😅
Yeah, me neither- it was S3 Trio 1MB in 1998. After adding +1MB RAM to it for higher resolution support- it lasted me till late 1999. Then I purchased TNT Vanta 16MB, as Quake2 multiplayer was brutal in software, ~18fps 320x240.
Back when 3Dfx were King. I still remember using my Orchid Righteous 3D on my IBM Aptiva PC. The glorious sound of the click when 3D mode kicked in. I miss these, more simpler days. :(
I got a 3DFX Voodoo for Christmas 97. Voodoo Cards were sold out everywhere. I searched every PC store in town just to finally getting my hands on a Orchid Righteous 3D (that name). I loved klick of the mechanical relais when 3D acceleration kicked in. Just so satisfying. I still keep it in a display cabinet at my parent's house and marvel at this wonder whenever I visit. It extended the life of my PC well into 1999, a serving me on sweet 10BASE2 LAN parties. Good times.
I'm pretty disappointed that you basically have written the PowerVR out of history. You had one too so you know full well it was highly compatible and just as powerful as the Voodoo 1. I had one right at the beginning of the 3D card craze and i was able to run Quake at the same frame rates and at higher resolutions than the Voodoo 1. The Voodoo card was stuck at 640x480 when PowerVR was running Demos at 1024x768 at 30fps. The games has a problem with tiling because of the way it worked but for me this was a minor issue. And it ran anything with the Unreal engine as smooth as butter with no artifacts as well.
Yeah I had a power VR card and it was awesome and then I had a Dreamcast and it took gaming to another level on console and made the Dreamcast seem much more powerful than it had any right to be with powervr. The tile based rendering seemed to smooth the frame rates brilliantly. Then onto the Apple iphone and ipads where it really delivered amazing portable experiences. It may not have been a commercial success but the Vita also delivered kick ass graphics too. PowerVR is great technology but you can't take anything away from the pioneering work of 3DFX.
ATI Rage 128 was my first discrete graphics card. I remember it running pretty great for NFS 3, maybe only having to turn down car reflections. Before getting this card, I played through Quake 2 in software mode. The difference between that and playing it through on OpenGL mode is stunning.
I remember seeing Unreal for the first time. Had bought a Voodoo 3, my first 3D accelerator card, and paired it with my Pentium II. Jaw hit the floor pretty hard when I first saw it. Up to this point I was mostly familiar with games like Quake in software mode at 320x240.
I've had a 3DFX Voodoo 5 card. With 2 fans. It was amazing. Was playing Star Wars: Jedi Outcast, and Jedi Academy. It can run Unreal 2 as well. And oh… X-Wing: Alliance, Rogue Squadron, Need for Speed 3: Hot pursuit… wow… And I've still got that Pentium II computer! :D
@@CyroTheSpider Yeah, I guess so. The computer is from 1999, and it had 8 MB of RAM or such before we put a 128 MB. It feels weird to write « 128 "MB" of RAM ». Memories…
Ah the sweet clicking sound of the Orchid Righteous 3D. I still get goosebumps thinking about it. Simpler times...Thanks for the memories, great Video as always!!
Never had a dedicated card but do fondly remember NFS and Quake. People would haul their beefed up computers to the community center, connect them up and play together. I'd go there to watch, in total awe.
I have a PCI-E X1 physx card lying around here. Now y'all have got me wondering if the City of Villains physx functionality works on City of Heroes private servers...
It was actually a good idea until nVidia bought them. Offloading complex physics calculation to discreet hardware could have led to some great things if they kept at it. Ahh well, this generation the cloud will start handling some of that stuff eventually. Its been proven it can work now it just needs to be implemented into something good.
Awesome job John! This is a tough era to cover in video form, with having to juggle with driver, hardware, and game compatibility problems on a constant basis. No small feat!
I remember getting a Diamond Monster 3D (Voodoo 1) it was a game changer for my PC. I had been playing the PC version of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy 7 in software mode before that. What a difference! In fact, there is a puzzle that is completely broken in Resident Evil PC because it couldn't run a transparent red light on the screen - the screen simply turned complete red. Since the internet wasn't as robust as it is today, it wasn't as if I could just look up a walkthrough online. Unreal blew my mind - and it was well beyond what any console to do at the time! Good times. Thanks for this trip down memory lane.
Thanks for this content Mr Linneman! The mid 90s were really a time of wonder for PC gaming, especially when 3D accelerator cards were something most people did not know about. I was pretty happy with my old 2MB S3 Virge at that time, though its 3D capabilities were always suspect. The game that convinced me to get a proper 3D accelerator was Quake II, as software mode just wouldn't cut it. I got a Creative Graphics Blaster Exxtreme (3D Labs Permedia 2 chipset) at a relatively cheap price, and it kept me happy for a while, at least for a year or so. It was ok for Need For Speed III or Forsaken, but as time went on, I realized how inadequate it was for games like Unreal Tournament or Resident Evil 2. I then bought a 12MB Voodoo2 card off a friend, and man was it a revelatory experience! Watching this video reminded me of those good times.
phew, this really brought back some memories, especially seeing how broken the ATI 3d Rage 2 was on a lot of games - that is indeed exactly how it was back in the day! Getting an Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo 1 card was revelatory... Something I think is kind of interesting is how unusual the PC was in this regard. Pretty much all platforms, except some of the very cheap home micros (e.g. Spectrum, Amstrad CPC), had some form of graphics acceleration - hardware scrolling, hardware sprites, hardware tile-maps, hardware blitting... All consoles did, most arcade hardware did, and certainly a good number of home computers did too. The PC with its basic frame-buffer and practically nothing else, if anything, was the odd one out.
Yes the Sega Model 2 arcade board could push 350,000 textured, lit polygons at 60fps which was stupidly powerful for late 1993. The model 3 board that came in 1996 with Virtua Fighter 3 was equally as ridiculous as it could push 1.5 million polygons at 60fps with every effect enabled!
Sponsors are fine but this one... Feels dirty. It's one thing when a publisher sponsors a video about a game but for nVidia to sponsor the history of GPU's... Why didn't you talk about those years where nVidia cheated benchmarks by overclocking themselves and making their performance look better than ati's when in reality ati was either on par or ahead. What about how after that fiasco gameworks was born with policies setup to hurt performance on ati/amd hardware or how even the devs couldn't see the code which means they couldn't optimize it and the fact that they would have to put nVidia ads in there game (witcher 3 for the former, project cars 1-3 for the latter).. there's plenty more that's been left of "the history" of the GPU. Bad show digital foundry bad show. Trust minus 10 points. That currently leaves you at about a 75/100 and most of the points have been lost in the last year and a half.
What was not true in the video? The video was not about the whole history of GPUs. And AMD have presented cherry picked misleading results in recent history.
Now this is a real og DF vid. Much appreciated! Not at all like the over-praising, glorified, 20+ min, _not-really-sponsored-wink-wink_ commercial of a live service SCAM listed as an "tech analysis" while telling the viewers "oH iTs CoMpLiCaTeD" to excuse low content/investment, broken messes riddled with microtransactions. This gen's live service trend can't end soon enough.
It's good that DF are upfront about their sponsored content but there is still something icky about this, especially since it ties in with what Nvidia are doing with their own countdown to Ampere hype page. Digital Foundry's recent "future-proofing your PC" video was also sponsored by Nvidia and while I don't question DF's integrity, or honesty, this still feels somewhat distasteful. edited 31/08/20 Didn't this used to say sponsored by Nvidia or am I losing my mind.
In my lifetime, I have owned the following cards: -S3 ViRGE - Ati Rage Pro 64 8MB - Geforce 256 32MB - Geforce 2 64MB - Geforce 3 ti 64MB - Geforce 4 MX 128MB - Geforce 5700 256MB - Ati Radeon Pro 9800 256MB - Geforce 6800 512MB - ATi Radeon x1600 512MB- - GeForce 8600 GT 1GB - AMD Radeon HD 4850 2GB - Geforce GTX 660 ti 3GB - Geforce GTX 1060 4GB - AMD Radeon 5700 8GB Going from a Ati Rage Pro 64 to a GeForce 256 was a huge leap for me. Especially playing UT99, Half-Life 1, Mech Warrior 3, and a few others. One of my favorites, out of all the cards I have owned.
That was a nice trip down memory lane. My dad worked as an electrician and would bring back old Pentium 1 200 computers that were getting tossed by whatever business. We soon had gathered enough parts for 3 P1 200MMX computers with a mix of a Matrox Mysique, Riva 128 and in the center of the table, a voodoo 2. Hooked up to a 10BaseT "high speed" hub. LAN games were glorious.
PC gaming then was progressing really fast but because of so many different cards being on the market that were hugely different it was like playing the same game on two completely different consoles in comparison as certain games were optimised for specific cards.
![DF Retro Hardware: The Origins of the 3D Graphics Card [Sponsored]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
