How the 3dfx Voodoo 2 changed my life - Retro GPU on a Modern PC 

For everyone wondering about Windows 98/KVM: kvm98-3dfx is up on Github. PART 2 IS NOW LIVE: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MfnZRTz5rJ4.html github.com/gearseekers/kvm98-3dfx

This is like one of those scenes in a movie where the hero(s) find random old scrap and somehow builds a device to save them

Awesome project 😊🎉

Also thanks RU-vid for actively trying to kill our channel by burying all of our videos. We appreciate you

Unreal Tournament - this game brings back so many fond memories!

I still remember when I finally got a Voodoo2, and put it behind my Riva TNT, I thought I was almost king of the world. Huge step up from my original Matrox M3D.

That’s awesome, I still own mine since the day it came out. I found it like 5 days ago in my storage bin. It’s in mint condition

I remember how my 2 MB Matrox Mystique (couldn't afford the 4 MB version) was SAVED by the Orchid Righteous 3Dfx Voodoo accelerator card, the original one that still went click-clickety-click whenever it switched between the pure pass-through video and the 3Dfx accelerated video for games. I had the choice back then to get that Voodoo card or a streamer. You know, basically a drive that writes computer data onto VHS tapes. Remember VHS tapes? What an awesome time to have been alive.

Believe it or not, I've still got a pair of Voodoo2s new in the box and sealed. Legendary card.

You are a real one for letting Foregone Destruction rock. Thank you!

The Voodoo 2 was my first 3D accelerator, love seeing one getting some love in the modern age.

Love this kinda content, proper flashback to my early days of building PC's...all your typical games spring to mind, Quake, Unreal Touranment, Wolfenstein...but for me it just brings back memories of playing Kingpin, loved that game. More of this stuff please Nick and Klaire 🙏

Love this - I started to build PCs in the era of ATi Rage MAXX, 3dfx Voodoo, Matrox and Power VR. I opted for a PowerVR card back in the day, coupled with an iiyama trinitron flat fronted CRT monitor - it was awesome. Every card took some configuration to get it working well in the games of the day too - thanks for the trip back along memory lane 😊

I use to run a UT server back in the day. This made me have tons of nostalgic flashbacks. Thank you so much.

Banger of a video fams, keep up the hard work. Was a great watch

This was dope, definitely continue making more vids like this!

Awesome video fams. Nothing like a trip down memory lane to start the day.

this video is going to help someone with a really specific project in the future

Awesome video Nick!!! Full of memories😁

Voodoo 2 was an absolute beast at the time

I love this. I still have my voodoo 2. It was my first 3D card ever. I also had a Pentium 200mmx, 32mb ram and a S3 Virge with the Creative labs Voodoo 2 12mb. 800x600 was max resolution for 1 card. If you had SLI you could get 1024x768, I upgraded to a voodoo 3 2000 AGP card after that. Interesting thing to note about this is at this stage of gaming graphics you could get a card every 6 months that would double the performance of the previous card. There was no nonsense of running a modern game on a 10 year old GPU. You have to take into account that the voodoo 2 came out in mid 1998. In end of 1999 the geforce 256 launch. That card was 4 times more powerful. It was insane. Looking back I remember every 6 months to a year I had to buy a completely new computer. People still rocking Geforce Gtx 1070 today and being able to play games is crazy to me. If you bought a voodoo 2 in 1998 there was no way you'd be playing any games released in 2006. You had 12mb VRAM max compared to card launching that year that came with 256 - 512mb. That was the year the Geforce 7000 series and Radeon x1000 series Launched. I remember those days fondly and building a new once to twice a year was amazing to me.

Looking at this all set up is incredible.

I loved the video. First tine on your channel. Looking forward to other obscure hardware.

I was running two of these in SLI back in 2000! My PC died. Friends dad invited me over and gave me an old server they used to use for CAD rendering. I was able to get Win98SE running on the server hardware and enjoyed several years of UT, Quake, and many more games. I miss Voodoo.

This kind of content is the reason I watch youtube more than anything else and pay for premium. Great video!

Still spewing I sold off my voodoo 5500. Wing commander on it was glorious. I had a monster 3D, a voodoo 3- 2000 then the 5500.

Love this channel, polished *and* intelligent content. Absolutely deserves more love. Will always remember this channel for the PowerMac G5 video that dispelled the misinformation on FX 4500 revisions.

Wow, thanks for reminding me how much fun I had playing these games.

Love it, nice video! I have a Voodoo 3 2000 I picked up recently and its been a joy to play with on my Pentium III rig.

The CEO/COO of 3dfx would be proud of you

yea the only revolution that ever happend in 3d graphics

oh man... the memories are flooding back... "HEADSHOT!" hahahaha. thank you so much for the trip down memory lane Nick. they say everyone remembers their "first"... I remember my first was an 8mb Voodoo .

Awesome video, can't beat the vibe of someone just being super excited about what they are doing. Like I know you love building PC's for all your regular vids but this was just such a passion project it really shone through. My first experience of 3d gaming I reckon would have been Stunts in the early 90's and in my memory I was great at it but I was also like 4 years old so chances are that I was actually rubbish haha It was probably another decade after that before I would have taken any interest in the hardware side of things so no idea what was even in the rig that powered my introduction to gaming but it ruined my life quite effectively 😅

I spent no time clicking the bell icon to make Gear Seekers play on my modern PC.

To be pedantic, the only thing in common between 3dfx SLI and Nvidia SLI are the idea of combining the power of multiple cards and the acronym... 3dfx SLI was scan line interleave with each card responsible for alternating lines of the render, while Nvidia SLI stands for scalable link interface and each card renders either a separate frame or a contiguous part of a frame. BTW, nice video 😀 I never had 3dfx myself - with the first PC I purchased for myself I chose the Nvidia Riva 128 (a Diamond Viper V330 to be precise), and upgraded it to a Riva TNT when that was released soon after, largely thanks to the store that built the PC giving me an unintentionally great trade in price on the V330.

My first PC had a GeForce 6800 (no suffix, PCIe & 256MB). I'm from '93 and my first experience with 3D gaming was allegedly A2 Racer (1997) on what was at the time my family's sole computer. In 2005 my mom got her own computer and in 2006 my parents got me one as well, a Dell Dimension 5000 with a hyper-threaded Pentium 4 3GHz and the aforementioned GF 6800. Loved that system, but after I moved out and asked my parents to hold onto it for me, it had vanished by the time I went to pick it up from them :( I have acquired an identical replacement of it since though :)

now i will have the ut music in my ear for the rest of the day. face was always fun. nice project. i love it

I'm glad the algorithm recommended this to me. Discovering an intersting channel from this video.

Awesome video .. I think my first 3d accelerator was the 3dfx Voodoo Banshee..

Unreal Tournament, those sounds took me 25Y in the past and instantly refreshed memories 😂 thx for that Nick 😊 we are geting old

This is amazing! I bought a Voodoo 2 new for my Celeron 400mhz system back in the day.

Awesome vid. I used to play the original UT on a Powermac G3. Had the ATI Rage 128 Pro - 16mb GPU. I eventually upgraded to the Radeon 7000 Pro - 32mb GPU. Good work on getting this working with more modern hardware. Silly part is that the onboard graphics on the CPU would probably do a better job. But definitely a fun experiment.

I keep my media cases in storage and use sleeve case books for the media itself. Makes it easier to access, without all the bulk of the cases

Nice! ... I wish I had a Voodoo back in the day ... My first 3D card was a PowerVR Kyro II (Hercules), It was a weird card, but fast enough for the games I was playing at that time.

Nice to see new motherboards that still have PCI slots !

The fact that you let the full UT 99 intro play... a true man of culture!

Awesome video, I had to show it to my son what I was playing on :)

I never realised that the Voodoo 2 could be connected to any Video Card. My original gaming PC was a Voodoo Banshee + 2 x Voodoo 2 in SLI. It did me right through in my main PC until the release of the Geforce2 MX400 which I needed to play Black & White

The Voodoo2 12mb version was my first 3D GPU. Before that it was 2D card gaming only, and that was fine, until I finally got one back in 98. It was a leap. A giant leap in performance. Playing Tombraider 3, Unreal 1 at the time it was insane. You cannot really compare the level of the leap with current hardware. Now you get a better GPU, but it's still somewhat the same as the previous one. Going from a 2D card to 3D card was just... something else. Something many people who missed it will never experience.

I used this to play everquest on launch! Good shit

I remember getting one of these around the time Quake3Arena released, fun times!!!

Awesome idea/video! Please also try the VM-variant you talked about. It sounds really interesting, since I would imagine there are a lot of problems with this configuration and Windows 98. That said there might be also a couple of really cool upsides. For example if one would use an older motherboard with more than one PCI-Slot, this could be used for a Multiplayer-Game over the virtual switch and everything runs on one machine.

I remember having an Nvidia TNT2 Riva with like 32mb of RAM. I had about 384mb or system RAM too. Mannnnnnn

Great. Now i need to buy that motherboard to tet out my voodoos!

this was my first 3d card and wow it blew me away in quake 2 when i enabled 3dfx option in game,good times😊

My first graphic card was a Voodoo 3 2000 16MB PCI, it was a true GPU (no VGA pass through) and worked perfectly as a way to get video out on any PC once I didn't use it for gaming. I had it nearby as a backup testing card up until 2013, I think. It was insane to have a single GPU that could work on PCI, AGP, and PCI-E era systems. It's also a great reason I don't buy CPU that don't have iGPU nowadays.

My first 3dfx card was a first generation Voodoo, Canopus Pure 3D and then went on to a Canopus Pure 3D II. I still remember getting excited every time I would see in game menus, extra options enabled, for particle effects, trail effects, etc that no other card would render. Such great times. Shame how things ended for 3dfx but mistakes were made.

Quick tip, to access the recovery menu quicker you can hold shift and click restart in the start menu.

This brings back memories. My system was 1gb p-3, Creative Labs dvd decoder card. SB awe, ati all in wonder pro, 2 voodoo 2 in sli. I had more pass through cables sticking out of my system. But worlds biggest pain. When it worked it was amazing. But it was a nightmare setup everything. lol

Looks like Gigabyte released a B760 version, the B760M D3H, and it even has DDR5 support. There's also the Asus Pro B550M-C/CSM, though it has no VGA. My first 3D attempt was with a S3 ViRGE, which was more of a decelerator. I remember trying out Mechwarior with it, at around 3 frames/sec. My first real attempt was Voodoo 2 in SLI. I still have the Voodoo 2 cards, but I have no idea if they work. I also have a V5-5500 AGP and two V5-5500 PCI cards. I'm now tempted to try the V5-5500 PCI cards in some older hardware (Core 2 era) just to see if they work.

I had this card also. I also eventually got the next model with SLI either before or after Nvidia bought them out.

I had Voodoo1, voodoo3 3000 and 3500tv, I loved 3dfx. 90s were absolutely amazing.

Note that pluggin the VGA-in isn't mandatory on 3DFx (it's not genlocking like some MPEG-2 accelerator boards). It was merely a convenience back in the days because very few people used multi-monitor setups - this helped people getting both the 2D image from their main graphics card and the 3D on their (unique) monitors. Nowadays with cheap LCDs everywhere it's possible to leave each card to its own display output (like done when capturing the output in this video).

Never did i think i would see Windows 10 interacting with a real Voodoo 2 card, much less see the Voodoo 2 render something with the card running on Windows 10! Insane to see that Windows 10 still somehow has support for the card as long as you disable driver enforcement.

There are a few new motherboards that have PCI slots. I got 2 AM4 boards with PCI slots. Even finding boards with ISA slots can be found.

Awesome 👍 I think my first Voodoo card was the 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 which did both the 2D & 3D in a single card (I think), and Unreal Tournament was one of the games I spent most time playing along with StarCraft & C&C 😁

I still have a pair of Voodoo2s in a drawer waiting for the right rig, and some minor repair (some "pins" along the edge of the chips are bent together) I last used them in a socket 775 rig along with a 9600gt and an ati rage 128 aiw card in an agp slot. It was the ASRock 4coredual-vsta motherboard

I love shit like this, man. Vintage computing is my jam. I'd love to see the Win98 VM video. My first ever GPU was technically whatever was in my mom's Digital HiNote laptop from 1997-98 (very hard to find info on that thing). The first desktop GPU I ever had was the Riva TNT2, 16MB model, in our family Compaq Presario around 2000. Still have that card!

I still have a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP I purchased new back in June of 2000. Sadly no one seems to make a reliable AGP to PCI-E adapter for it, and pretty much most of my old gear is gone.

I also had a 200mmx and voodoo cards back in the day, last version was the voodoo 3500 i think

Cool, I still have a voodoo 1. Would this work with a PCI sound blaster and game port to use old controllers? I don't suppose you have a Logitech Cyberman?

I found an 8MB voodoo 2 (diamond) in a box recently in my stash of PC parts. Still works. Although I got it going in XP, not 98. This is why I'm not selling my LCD monitors with VGA :)

Still have somewhere my 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000. Was epic!

3dfx is the father of gpus.. Very interesting and Gold content right here.

I had a pentium 2 with 2 voodoo 2 banshee cards in sli with a tnt nvidia card and well to play quake 2 and half life in 1998 with an 8 gb hard drive! The cards cost a total of £450 at the time! Had to upgrade the cards to an invidia 280 gt and operating system to play home world.

My first experience was Voodoo 1 native dos glide EF2000 - Blew me away especially after visiting an Air Show with something similar! They were probably running Quantum3D AAlchemy setup for their EF2000 Simulator. Essentially the same VSA-100 chips, just more of them. Very Scalable.

Jazz Multimedia Adrenaline Rush was my first, from Sunnyvale Computer super store that fizzled out in early 2000.

I ran my Voodoo2 fed by my Matrox Millennium (G200 8MB I think it was) at 1024x768, which was the highest resolution my 14" monitor supported, using the OpenGL driver. It was an awesome card to run up until I got a new 19" monitor and my GeForce 256 DDR a couple years later. Played a boatload of UT and Quake 2. Woooo, nostalgia.

This was my first card as well. I remember playing Goldeneye for N64 with an emulator and using Glide. There was some sort of fog effect that was present that I've never seen since with the other graphics APIs.

I got a 6600GT that I have in storage that I'm probably going to use with a VM passthrough setup for Windows 98 and XP games. It's neat seeing people try this. I had some luck passing through a 6900XT and getting basic video (no GPU acceleration, low color accuracy) with a Windows 98 and XP VM on Linux. I should probably also get a period accurate Sound Blaster card to accompany it.

Anyone over a certain age remembers spending every cent they had at the time for a Voodoo 2....sweet memories :)

Yup, still have my Voodoo 2, still works, brings back memories, had to use Scumm Qemm to manage memory, what was it, 584k, 640k, limits, had to be manipulated in DOS to get some of the old non windows titles to run! Was a good part of the fun just getting some of the old stuff to run! Was so cool when I upgraded from 300 baud to my Hayes 1200 ultramodem! then came good old USRobotics modems! LOL, now I'm on multigig fiber....

I remember that NFS Porsche Unleashed worked well with Voodo cars. I played it on Pentium 2 233, that was amazing.

Have you thought about trying a VGA to displayport adaptor?

12 m 21 s UT99 ! Still play it this day!! From release on the 1st 3 years I put easily 1k hours into it ! More of this, please !

My first Voodoo was a Voodoo 2 12 Mb and then a Voodoo 5500 AGP.

Given that UT was officially released on linux, could you use this card with it?

I remember using the voodoo graphics in my family’s Gateway Select Edit: I looked and it’s a Voodoo 3 Velocity

This was my first video card. Came in my Pentium III. I think it was a Gateway I got in 1999 with Windows ME

Windows 98 virtualization with GPU passthrough would be really cool to see!

My first 3d experience was on 3DFX, but on the Voodoo3 16MB with an AMD K6-2 500 and playing Black & White

why not use the old signing tool from the windows 7 sdk to test sign the driver? would fix the issue you have

Yeah, I remember playing unreal tournament a lot right out of college. Good times. My young wife was almost a widow right out the gate. 🙂

Thanks for yet another reminder that I’m old as shit.

this is cool

Please please please document your journey doing passthrough to a win98 vm. I play around with this stuff all the time and I definitely want to see the results

My 1st 3d accelerator was a Matrox Mystique 220

I had an ati rage pro 4mb i do believe when i had access to my first pc p200 mmx. I got the card 2nd had from a friend who got a vodoo card. I needed it to play the first star wars rogue squadron game which i feel in love with. One of my other friends got the sega saturn pc 3d card during that time and we used to play 2 player games on his 14" crt

I still have a Voodoo 2 and one or two of Voodoo 3 somewhere ... 😃

where the hell did you find the driver for that thing?!? I'm struggling to find any working driver for a Radeon X1600 pro!!!