That scene where the lights turn off, combined with an SB Live! with EAX enabled *shivers*... That was a scary scene back then, and I'm sure it would still have the same effect to this day. I played Unreal on an 8MB Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, so it ran quite a bit smoother then on the Voodoo 1, and it was the first game to really convince me that 3D accelerators were worth the price.
Oh yes... my era ! i mean.. it was my dad computer but i played with him unreal and he also had Sound Blaster Live sound card with a 5.1 Cambridge Soundworks ... good sound quality and dayum... also Nvidia TnT Riva 2 while me had a Ati Rage 2 =P Also was in 1998 exactly same P2 400mhz as on the video XD
I was one of the only people I know who had an aureal A3D card and, I promise you, it was way ahead of EAX back then. Insanely good. Playing counter strike with headphones was like cheating.
I don't think younger people can appreciate just how much this game blew us all away.. It was UNREAL... I still have my voodoo rush that I first played this with but alas it is just hanging on a wall.
My 8MB stingray voodoo rush with TV out is what i played unreal on my 27" TV at the time, using my home theater system for sound, literally would blow people away, card is in a box somewhere around here too.
I’ll never forget the moment I popped this and UT in with a Voodoo 2. My god… I wish they would remaster this. I would be head over heels. This game has a special place in my heart 💯
Back in the days, i used a PII 233 with 32MB RAM and a Diamond Monster Voodoo2 8MB. Unreal was such an impressive game at this time. Together with my Creative Soundblaster Live! and the Creative FPS 1000 sound System, i had a EAX enabled 4.1 system. So awesome! I gave away the PC, but i still have the voodoo2 card here :)
Those voodoo card's are few rare ones, that have positive price change over the times.. If you sell it when you are 100y old, buyer need's extra oxygen from bottle just by seeing it.
i have the 12mb version in my compaq, its a beast of a card even if it bottleneck my 180 overdrive mmx a little, still have the box and everything that came with it
3dMark 2001 usee some parts of that demo in their test program and many other ones. I remember how intense fighting were going Assembly summer @ Fin. Ati Rad 8500 was fastest card at the time (in single gpu, in homePC). They must run it with some P4 because it could handle big clocks and internal bandwith. They even dropped cpus multiplyer and put more Hz to line that talks with cpus lanes -> NB -> Memory. Back then some better memory maybe had some effect's, todays those 'gaming rgb mem's are just sad :p My old 64 Gb all 6 stick's sitting in case without any led's. Ram activity led that memory card controls itself would be nice, but not whole bank flicking overall. Just some up corner one red or blue blinking when heavy reading and writing goes on. It could be done "easily"
Still my favorite game, still work with Unreal Engine, and still have my Voodoo 3 2000 hanging in a shadowbox on my wall alongside the Diamond Monster 3D II ❤
I remember my PC when I first bought this game. I had a 233mmx and a 4meg (non 3dfx) video card. The game was unplayable. I upgraded to a 3dfx Hercules Stingray with 8 meg of memory and the game was smooth as silk. I remember how amazing this game looked for the time and I really enjoyed the single player campaign.
Unreal was pretty darn awesome to see for the first time back in the day. I upgraded from a S3 Virge based video card (which was awesome for 2D games) to a Voodoo Banshee based one largely because of Unreal. I'm still playing a game by Digital Extremes daily these days, Warframe! Also, your results illustrate why the majority of Voodoo 1 cards were 4MB models even though there were some models that more than that available.
I love that kind of comments, when people visit a retro hardware channel and start arguing about the sense. Somehow some guys don't understand, that it is all about fun, experiments and learning. If we'd talk only about sense of doing something, we wouldn't make such channels... and music, and art, and s.o. Nice project!
Cyrix PR200 with 32Mb ram, running a Diamond Monster 3D back in the day. What most "modern" takes of this leave out is that a lot of us were running at 512x384 for better performance, not 640x480. On an LCD panel it looks terrible. On an old CRT it was very playable visually, plus you could hit 30 FPS in a lot of titles. Remember Doom and even DOS Quake in software mode all ran around 320x200 back then, so 512x384 was a step up.
Oh.. This bring back great memories. I had discovered Unreal on the same config 3DFX with a Sony Trinitron and SbLive on a stereo+subwoofer system.. That was a true blast.
The Unreal demo, what a memory. I remember my dad and uncle were benchmarking their cards to that demo back in the day to see which tweaks made a bigger difference.
Excellent video. With 8 MB it looks like the performance improves a lot more with slower CPUs and less with faster ones. With the P200 MMX the performance improves by 9.1%, with the P2 333 mhz by 3.8% and with the P3 500 mhz by just 2.0%. But considering that the fastest CPU in 1997 was the P2 300 mhz at a price of 2000 $, allmost all Voodoo 1 cards were used with Pentium 1's and maybe 233 and 266 mhz P2's anyway.
You are right, it improves more on old pc because of the slow transfer speed on the pci bus on old pc . I test my Voodoo 1 6mb with some game it can run some games that with the 4mb are not playable at all.
How much I love the gigantism of the late 90s shooters! Back when the conventions for a true 3D game were still not established and everybody just experimented...
Great mod and experiment. I was there when Unreal came and it was quite the nightmare to make it run without a Voodoo. My first proper 3D accelerator was a professional ELSA Gloria XXL, that was great for many things but definitely not for gaming. Things like that, I used to run it with the software render. I remember that I needed an overclocked Pentium II 350 to make it half decent. Some time later I got the first Geforce paired with a dual Pentium III 1Ghz and what a difference it made. Still, I remember that playing at 1600*900 with everything enabled was demanding even for the Geforce. Also, I rented the CD but it got all scratched when I crashed the car with all my friends inside and we rolled 7 times. The CD ended on the road and the car landed on top of it, but we still returned it the next day. Good times, lol.
Too bad 3dfx never released a Voodoo 1 with 60 mhz. That 20% extra power would have been really nice for the 1997-1998 games. As far as I know the fastest Voodoo 1 is the Diamond Monster that runs at 57.5 mhz.
I quess "no lights" is not about dynamic light in particular but about lightmaps. They require extra rendering step on 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics because it does not feature blending of multiple textures in a single pass like VooDoo 2 and later can do.
Unreal was one of the very first games I played on my Voodoo1 card, the other being ff7. I don't remember the framerates being as low as shown here, but it was a *long* time ago. I do remember the Voodoo being *much* faster than the software renderer on my P/MMX-200, in addition to looking *so* much better.
That's because the castle intro sequence is more demanding than the normal gameplay. When playing Unreal the FPS is a lot higher than in the castle intro sequence.
It also used to be that anything above 24-25 fps was considered pretty decent back in the days. I remember playing Quake II with the software renderer at 18 fps in my Pentium 120 and I was quite happy with it. Then i moved to a Pentium II 233 and frame rate at 800*600 was like 50 all the sudden, and I could no believe my eyes 😁 Unreal was no Quake though... much more demanding.
I don't know why those early accelerated games with their colored lighting and more vivid colors and beautiful sky boxes, why they are more fantastic and atmospheric than a lot of AAA games of today. Maybe nostalgia, but I see again the starting intro, the first feeling when you get out of the spaceship and you look at those cloudy skies with the blended planet and sun, and the first time you look down on the waterfall. It still gets me. It's why sometimes I'll find myself playing some of these old games instead of the more modern stuff. Also the music. Futuristic, from demoscene musicians. Music that today's gamers would call cringe, they prefer their orchestrated and hollywood like AAA music, or less memorable soundtracks, very boring just to cover the background.
I wonder how that 4MB card with the 66Mhz memory chips would go with an 66Mhz 8MB memory upgrade, it's amazing what "just" 4Mhz can do for performance.
I was able to o\c my first card, a Diamond Stealth II from 40 Mhz to 72 Mhz with added heat sinks on the ram and a fan for the GPU. That's an 80% o\c. Done by editing an array in a text file. It was a beast! With 4 MB!
Let's not forget that only very few could afford a Pentium2 rig combined with a Voodoo 3D accelerator card and a Soundblaster card from Creative Labs. PC's were not a device for almost everyone as they are today. I'm still keeping the CPU, the Soundblaster Live and the Voodoo2 12Mb from those times...
I guess that in newer games with higher system requirements the performance improvements would be even bigger. For example in newer games that use the Unreal engine, like Unreal Tournament, Rune or Undying.
This behavior might have something to do with the FSB. When a GPU runs out of memory it has to use system RAM in order to compensate. The Pentium 200MMX and PII 333Mhz have a slower 66Mhz bus which should impact performance in scenarios where the graphics card needs to access system RAM. It is possible that the 100Mhz bus of the PIIIs makes this operation almost painless.
Just increasing the TMU memory would have the same result except no 800x600 support. FBI memory only allows for higher resolutions. TMU memory upgrades allows for more resident textures, providing a potential speed improvement due to less texture loading. Newer games like Quake 3 will probably see more improvement because they were made for cards with more than 2 mb of texture ram.
I will test other games in the future - we shall see if newer games benefit more from extra video memory. I am just afraid that the Voodoo won't have enough power to drive those games.
Seeing the intro demo for the first time on my friends 'massive' 17" monitor, 3dfx Voodoo with AWE32 and big Creative speakers with a subwoofer was jaw dropping. ~£2500 PC in 1998 At this time I had a standard PC - 14" montor, 2mb onboard graphics, Soundblaster 16 and £10 Trust desktop speakers. A year or 2 later I saved up and got a Voodoo 2
great video! a demo of tomb raider playing on a 3dfx voodoo at a computer show blew me away. i bought a matrox mystique 220 for 2d and a voodoo for 3d on the spot. went home and had a blast with the game. so when unreal came out i was ready. i also had a SB card and frankly playing that game in the dark was nerve wracking. what a great time we had, those of us who got to experience the rise of 3d games. of course we were amazed as each generation of game improved on the last, but nothing was as great as the beginning of hardware 3d. my voodoo was retired for a TnT2, then a 9600 Pro (i was always jealous of the 9700 Pro, the magazines talked about that card like it was the holy grail, couldnt afford it though). Now im older i make do with a 1050 since i mostly game on xbox but man those were the days.
I remeber the unintended horror of my childhood where we upgraded the graphics card to a Vodoo 3500 but Unreal froze every time in the menu screen after the upgrade. You flew around for a bit and then it freezes every time. Of course we had no clue back then about computers and eventually with a new motherboard it became playable (though I never played the campaign because I was too afraid as a kid :D ).
I was chasing for great 3d accelerators at the time, all voodoos, all Verite 1k/2k, all nVidia Rivas, I tried them all. But those are quite long obsolete today. The only thing remains unparalleled in Unreal till today is its software renderer, the only one on earth that can easily confuse you at higher resolutions with hardware rendering. Unreal's software renderer is undoubtedly the GOAT.
And it's all down to one simple trick: dithering. A 2*2 ordered dither on the texture coordinates is an incredibly effective way of faking bilinear filtering.
i have a diamond monster 2 in my 1993 socket 5 pc with a 180mhz overdrive mmx cpu, runs this game very fine, its incredible what those gpus can do to an old pc
It might be possible to utilize the increased amount of VRAM, I suppose, if you write your own program or modify the existing program. It would seem those games don't, which isn't so surprising if this configuration didn't actually exist. The little improvement there is, might just be a few memory calls that can be skipped, possibly due to the difference between the 4MB and 6MB variants, and with a faster platform, the cost of accessing the memory is lessened.
I wonder what the results would be when running Unreal 2.26 (Gold) with its detailed textures.. However, Voodoo only supported textures of low resolution, up to 256x256, so perhaps the results would have been the same.
I really wish unreal would get a modern update the way quake and quake 2 have. Unreal was fantastic and I'll always remember playing it on my 3dfx card way back when computer gaming was just really getting exciting.
11:15 I would suggest checking through an IDE - M.2 SATA adapter, or using an A2 V30 SD card like the Kingston Canvas Go Plus. IOPS values should improve.
amazing video, is like is tailored for me , the game before i played unreal was duke nukem 3d, so you can imagine how pretty i thought this game was lol
I remember when this game first came out. I was all set with a Monster 3DFX card, and although it wasn't the greatest thing ever, the game--Unreal v1--was BREATHTAKING. :) It's difficult to believe just how spoiled the most recent generations of people are regarding games and graphics. I literally witnessed games change from the 80's all the way up to when "Deus Ex" hit the scene. After that, almost nothing surprised me as graphics, frame rates, creativity, and immersion continued to improve. "Jedi Outcast"--launched in like 2003 I think--was brilliant. "No One Lives Forever 2"--on the Unity engine--was also absolutely stellar. :) Wow. #MEMORIES
I would do it, but I already created the memory boards. When removing the chips, I may end up with non-fitting boards. I got some broken Voodoos which will be perfect for a memory swap - provided they are fixable.
The reason you aren't getting much for having the extra video ram is either that you can load everything needed in a level into less than 4 already or the bottleneck is the processor it's self so extra ram isn't going to help much. The real performance gains for voodoo cards was with SLI anyway. I remember going from one to two voodoo 2 in my system and it was a MASSIVE gain. I out performed the voodoo 3 when it launched, though me and my friends tuned the computer forever. Pretty sure that was the first time I overclocked a card. we ended up rigging cpu cooling fans from a Pentium II to the main chips and powering them from a chassis fan header set to run full speed at all times because obviously temp sensing wasn't going to be available. Unreal is a bit over what a voodoo 1 is capable of really. To me unreal fits more in the voodoo 2 era. They launched within months of each other. This seems like trying to run cyberpunk 2077 on a nvidia GTX 1080. There was never a time when 20fps was considered acceptable gaming.
at this time, i bought a computer especialy to run unreal AND half life, it was a very big hardware with a p2-333 @350 + an video card ati all in wonder 128. i saw a visual revolution in game into this both title.
Pentium Ii 333mhz using two Voodoo2 cards in SLI mode, Unreal ran 60fps at 1024x768 perfectly with all graphic options set to max, and this was when PlayStation 1 was the No.1 console at the time ha!
that maxed out Dispersion Pistol at that encounter makes my brain hurt. i suspect thats not possible, but can not remember where first of the upgrades is - maybe it is somwhere on Vortex Rikers and i just forgotten, definitively would not have all 4 however.
Are these system scaling limitations possibly due to higher system memory performance on the newer test rigs? It seems to me that texture swapping for a game like this would be more dependent on system memory performance.
After getting great fps with Quake2 using a single 12mb Voodoo2, I couldn't deal with the framerate drop with Unreal. Had to get a second Voodoo2 for SLI before I was happy.
no dynamics light would be perfect for pro multiplayer games, unfortunately its not possible to use it online. only in single player (unreal tournament99)...we called it milky look..thats how all pro quake3 players played q3. yesterday i started new Unreal game, on unreal difficulty,its challenging even for me as former pro player..so cool
i remmember getting home from school and me and my bro and my dad firing unreal up for the first time and all 3 of us just kept watching this opening scene minds blown good memmorys "JEWBIDAR" :)
Looking into the tool-assisted speed run (TAS) software might be helpful. I'm sure PC software is available that would make it possible for creating perfectly repeatable runs for any game to use in benchmarks. This software simply records the inputs being made and replays them with frame-perfect timing.
Either the 3dfx gpu is not optimized for more than 4MB or maybe drivers were not optimized. I have a voodoo2 with 8mb, i think there is a driver option to disable half of the memory, can test the opposite. Half life may be a better game to test this.
