Exploring the features of the Voodoo Graphics Chipset 

I would definitely love to see more 3dfx related content especially a Glide programming video. Great stuff.

I love Voodoo gfx. Something just magical about them.

My first 3D card. I couldn't believe when I played GL Quake with this.

Found your channel while searching through some Compaq 386 videos & now found this Voodoo feature set video just what I was looking for! I started computing after 2010 so I missed out on these exiting time of computer innovations & discoveries but channels like yours are godsend to me to learn the history & relive a past that I never had. Thankyou for sharing your knowledge & keep up the good work.

I think it would be fun to see the programming too! I found an old Glide dev kit years ago and I can compile their sample code in VC++ 6 - and it works - but it's really simple examples like initialize card, clear screen, fill with specified color. I'd love to see the code for something a bit more interesting!

Now this is retro tech...i owned this back in the day. When graphics memory was in MB

I'd love to see your take on some arcade hardware of that era. What Sega was doing with their model 2 and 3 was amazing!

i love that old box for tomb raider 3box. long time noo see it was for me. memories

Keep in mind Tomb Raider engine as used in the first 4 games has origins on the Saturn and the Playstation, and needed to keep targeting the Playstation for all these games. Neither of these systems has a Z-buffer. The game levels in this engine are designed on a grid of square tiles, and it's simply selecting tiles for rendering starting from the furthest away ones that do not exceed fog distance and this way in a back to front order, flood fill like. In case there's several entities in a tile besides level geometry, these are simply sorted among each other. Each tile's walls and ceiling/floor form a convex shape, so you just draw them in arbitrary order before drawing the entities in the tile. Complex entities are designed as a collection of convex chunks, ie. you only need to sort the convex chunks, and it doesn't matter which order you draw the individual polygons in within that chunk, all you need to correctly draw a convex object is back face culling (rejecting polygons based on surface normal or winding order), so the whole sorting effort doesn't become a big overhead and it's really a handful of comparisons here and there. The sorting algorithm isn't very smart so sometimes things pop through each other without Z buffer, but game designers mostly avoided things which are long and horizontal, so it doesn't break too badly. There is no individual triangle sorting at all. People always think too complicated don't they. But simple hardware invites simple solutions. Best the Playstation hardware design can do to help you is you can represent a render queue as a set of buckets, which can help radix sort, but well it's faster if you don't actually have to sort much, much less several thousand of something. Oh also thanks to the grid they didn't have to actually playtest the game, it was always obvious to the level designer what sort of jump you can make and how. It's a low budget British game OK.

If no one mentioned this previously, the texture mapping unit is pronounced "T-Rex" (like Tyrannosaurus Rex) rather than "trex". Other than this minor thing, great video! 🍺

WIth depth buffering off, the game is trying to sort the triangles in software, but isn't going to get per-pixel correct results, so you'll see popping like the triangle you saw above the door. And absolutely do some programming on this. The Glide API is one I've not experienced myself!

I'm a simple guy, I see classic Tomb Raider, I click!

How could you not do any programming with this card? This is the meat of your channel and why I'm here.

Did I hear Tseng Labs ET 6000 2D card? I had this one with Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 for a while. 2:58 Yepp, I did hear it right :)

Yeah, i would like to see some glide coding, even just a few triangles in 3D.

My first GPU.😘 I've experienced 3 'wow' moments in my gaming life time; moments where you find yourself inexplicably smiling as you witness something breathtakingly new and excitedly think of where it will lead. 1) Playing X-Wing on my 1st PC (DX2/66). Going from my Amiga's predominantly 2D/isometric games to Gouraud shaded 3D polygons was mind blowing to teen-age me. 2) Getting my Voodoo 1, and experiencing smooth FPS gaming at VGA resolutions! 3) Playing my first VR games on my Oculus Rift (First Contact, and Robo Recall) I wonder what the next will be? AGI? AR? BCI?

There were 386 likes on this video and it is such a nice number. But then, I remembered that 387 is also a nice number that is quite relevant, so I clicked like wholeheartedly. Since 487 is not a thing, I wonder who will be the one breaking the 486 barrier.

Thank you very much

I don't know is somebody already said it. But if you still curious, what happen when z-buffer disabled, here am I to help. Z-buffer is actually per pixel depth buffer, which can be used for sorting pixels by depth. But you still can sort depth per objects and per triangles . So when z-buffer disabled, game starts to sort triangles by depth, rather than pixels. So occlusions still works, but not always. Originally lot of 3d games sorts depth by triangles, especially for hardware which doesn't have z-buffer, like Sony Playstation 1.

Id love to see some 3dfx programming. Some great memories from the 90s include playing the tomb raider series. Believe Tomb raider 2 and 3 allowed accelerator use and I had a voodoo 2 banshee card at the time after replacing the a crappy trident 3dimage’ accelerator (believe the trident worked with tomb raider 2 idr). Later upgraded to the 3.

Thank you Fritzchens Fritz! :) Haha!!!

It is weird about the video passthrough. You would think that is horribly complex. It must have something like a genlock, a ADC, a standard re encoding DAC. Also it has to somehow adjust from time to time the 3d window as the source video. OH just thinking if it always ran full screen it would be a lot simpler, it would just switch to its output maybe that was more like what was going on.

I had one. I wish I kept it.

One possible reason why turning Z buffering off didn't make that much difference is because the software is doing depth sorting anyway. This sorts the polygons (here triangles) from nearest to furthest, and uses that to avoid drawing polygons at all if they're completely hidden by other polygons, which can make a big difference to performance. The problem with depth-sorting is that one polygon covers a range of depths, and therefore neither polygon is unambiguously deepest. This is obviously a problem when the two polygons cut through each other, so both are nearest for certain pixels, but also affects polygons that don't cut through each other because the way a single numeric depth is assigned to each polygon (I don't know what they did, but let's say e.g. using the mid-point of each triangle) turns out to be a bad choice. Z buffering is kind-of a back-up occlusion method that works per-pixel rather than per-whole-polygon, and fixes (some of) the details that depth-sorting got wrong. If depth sorting happens to do a perfect job, Z buffering is left with nothing to do. Of course Z buffering can also do the whole job, especially if some arrangement has been made to minimise overdraw even without depth sorting - things like using binary space partitioning on the level map so that overdraw only really occurs where there's transparency or movable objects anyway. I wouldn't like to guess whether depth-sorting is done only when Z buffering is disabled, or only done at object-level precision for movable objects such as characters being placed in the scene or whatever. Often in programming you use one algorithm at a time to solve one problem - using two different algorithms to solve the same problem at the same time is generally just unnecessary complexity that slows things down. 3D graphics is complex enough to make that guideline just plain wrong. In addition to the use of spatial data structures, depth-sorting and Z-buffering there's also backface-culling (not trying to draw polygons that face away from you), and probably more that I don't know about, all targeting the problem of only drawing what's visible.

To me the performance looks worse when you turn zbuffer off. Probably because it is now done in software?

I have that same pc case

You can turn off Z-buffer in TR3 and run the game in 800x600 on a voodoo1 card

16-bit argb 8-3-3-2. Now that's a weird format. Wonder if that was ever used in real games.

Voodoo1 can play UNREAL and QUAKE2/HEXEN2 etc. but you have to use 512x384 and tweak the autoexec.bat.

Tomb Raider 1-5 are capet at 30FPS. also first 3 titles are not realy demanding and run good on anything faster than 133mhz CPU and most 3D card with at least 4mb of ram so Voodoo1 i actually overkill for first three titles. TR4 and TR5 are a bit more demanding on 3D especially if you want to run 1024+ resolutions so V3 or TNT2 are recomanded.

What the hell does SST stands for.

18:25 2 FBI and 6 TREX in Voodoo? Ultimate Voodoo 1?

Dude, I haven't seen that for years... Hahahahaha. (I was working on the tmu hardware). The 4 but RGB color mapping was taken out at the next revision. It was not really worth it for the space.

21:23 >Be PS1 >Exist >Don't have Z-Buffer >PC Retrotech wondering how can 3D rendering work without Z buffer >Still have 3D graphics This might be a shocker to you, but you don't need Z buffering. In fact, turning it off will boost performance if you're bandwidth or even memory limited. Alternatively you can use it for moving objects only and render the background without a Z buffer. On the N64, for example, turning off Z Buffering can boost performance significantly. The guy behind Portal 64 made a megatexture like engine on the N64 and it runs at non slideshow framerates even in 640x480 mode while having textures on par with the PS2. It doesn't use Z buffering. The reason you're not seeing any performance difference in Tomb Raider is because of a CPU bottleneck. When the GPU is bandwidth and fillrate constrained, that's when you see the difference in performance with Z buffering and without Z buffering. Likewise, some Factor 5 and Boss Game Studios games on the N64 also don't use Z buffering and can achieve higher quality graphics than is usually possible. World Driver Championship looks like an early PS2 or Dreamcast game and it can run in high res mode without the expansion pack due to not using Z Buffering. What's the catch? You need to sort everything manually and might run into a lot of overdraw. But it works. Indeed, the PS1 has 3D graphics without a Z buffer. IIRC the same goes for the Sega Saturn.

He shouldn't be making videos on this without doing research or at least googling how older systems worked without a z buffer...