S3 ViRGE: When Hype Meets Disappointment 

S3 Virge is THE video card of my 1996 retro tower. It really delivers on the DOS era 2D performance. And the stigma about it is STILL keeping the price low.

A moment of silence for all the early adopters of 3D accelerators. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.

The 2D of this card was pretty amazing at least.

You know where hype never meets disappointment? Phil's Computer Lab

2:12 Ah, Matrox. They hold a special place in my heart even though I've never used any of their cards. See, they're based in my hometown of Montreal. They had been making commercial and industrial video cards since the late 1970s, and so, as their consumer products were consistently outdone by Nvidia, ATI and even 3dfx in the mid to late 1990s, they just shifted their focus back to commercial and industrial cards, and so they're actually still alive and kicking to this day. Matrox's founder and owner has been quite the philanthropist, donating tens of millions of dollars to local Universities' sciences departments even in the last couple of years.

I don't think people realise just how great a job 3dfx done in making their chipset. It was like a bulldozer

1996... I was still playing Amiga 500 games at home while I saw Duke3D, Quake and Tomb Raider at my buddies' places. I wasn't really jealous, I still liked the Amiga, I enjoyed all the games I could get on that little machine and I enjoyed my time at my buddies too.

I had an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 in my first decent PC build - a K6-2 300. It was a really good combo, the Virge was a very fast 2D card and compatible with everything in DOS and Windows that the Voodoo couldn't play, had all of the features of the Trio64V+ and a whopping 4MB RAM.

Reminds me of the incredible disappointment I had with my ATI 3D Expression+PC2TV card (Mach64 GT-B chipset). It was a PCI card, installed in my Pentium 120. Toggling "acceleration" would mostly make the game slightly better looking, but wouldn't really improve the framerate. I was so confused at the time that I called ATI and spoke to tech support, thinking my card was broken! At least the S-VIDEO TV out was excellent (I even used it to make a commercial DVD). (It is possible the 60 MHz front-side bus speed of my Pentium 120 might have made things worse, as the card was probably only tested on a 66 MHz FSB of a Pentium 100 or 133, but still, I was expecting actual acceleration.)

my jaw dropped when I saw Unreal on a voodoo 2, the moment when you leave the ship and step outside ... awesome

The voodoo was really fantastic when it came out. Blew all the competition away. I tried a voodoo in a 486 and could get 25 fps in tomb raider in 640x480!

My first PC was in October 1998 as a gift from my father for entering by exam into Politehnica University Electronics Division. It had a AMD K-6 II 300mhz and an S3 Virge GX/DX(that's how it was seen by Windows GX/DX and not just GX). My first games on this PC were Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2 I think, Age of Empires.

this brings back memories. My first PC had a Pentium 200 MMX, 32 megs of ram, a 4 MB virge and very soon a voodoo 1 .... I had the same blow away vibe when I launched Unreal and Tomb Raider 2. Great times :)

1996 was a great year. My family got our first PC in '96. It had a Pentium 200 and an S3 ViRGE / DIamond Stealth 3D 2000.

I had one but honestly never even bought it with any 3D Acceleration in mind, in 1996 these things were immediately cheap and available from the usual vaguely branded Taiwanese manufacturers with the crazy box art, they were popular cards just because of the price and acceptable 2D performance with 2/4MB of VRAM for 1024x768+ displays. I don't even remember mine coming with any ViRGE versions of games etc, I don't recall anyone having one and being disappointed by the 3D performance because very few even tried that 'capability'. Also in 1996 we had the release of the Rendition Verité and of course the Voodoo which was basically all the enthusiast magazines talked about, if you were building your own PC's and buying components you likely had one or the other.

I had a Number Nine card that used Virge. I recall the disappointment. But back in 1996 a lot of us played with glacial FPS because it's what we had. There was a lot of making do at the time. With new games usually coming on CDs, making copies of games on floppies at computer shows, or behind the counter at a computer store if you knew the right person, died down. Played a lot of demos, too. The magazine CD-Rom Today had a disc which was always reliable for something shareware to pass the time. Single digit FPS and demos. That's the mid 90s.

Ah my first 3d card. I would have had a nice AGP card but when my father and I tried to put said AGP card in we wondered why it didn't fit in the PCI slot! So I ended up with an S3 ViRGE. My clearest memories of it are trying to run games but everything being white because no textures load 😆.

Moto Racer was also a great benchmark for these early 3D accelerator cards. Witnessing 60fps arcade-like graphics in motion was a sight to behold coming from DOS.

Hi Phil I remember building a lot of PCs with these back in the day when I had a computer shop in the UK. Probably because they were offering a lot of these to us cheap at the time. We got sent a sample voodoo 2 and once I saw that running Tomb Raider it was something we offered as an option in all our PCs. The sample went into my own PC 😅

Every new PCL video fills my heart with retro joy!

As a poor teen I relied on S3 to see me through, and I have no regrets. I stuck with my 200MMX machine right up to the end of 1999 when I splurged and built an 800mhz machine with a Geforce 256...that was outdated within a year lol. What a hobby.

Back in the day I had both the original Virge 325 and the Virge DX 375 (still have the 375). Recently, I borrowed a 325 from a friend and tried my old wrappers that allowed me to try Quake and other games in OpenGL. There's a video on my channel with that 325 card inside a Cyrix M2 based computer. If there is any demand, I would record some more tests with the 375 that was actually faster in the circumstances where a D3D to OpenGL or S3D to OpenGL wrapper is useful (related to the cost of bilinear filtering) and also corrects some of the hardware bugs.

I remember what I had in 1996. I had a Pentium 100 MHz with 16MB of RAM, a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 with 1MB of RAM, a 1.4GB hard drive, Sound Blaster AWE32, with Windows 95. It was a pretty stable machine. DOS games ran well and Windows worked decently enough. I did supplement it later in 96 with a Diamond Monster 3D, and this was also the first system I got a Subwoofer for. One of those Labtec sit by the monitor jobs, the LCS-2420 which was way more powerful than the cheap little speakers I had from the local computer shop. I played so many different games on that machine. But the one I remember most vividly was Lands of Lore Guardians of Destiny.

The S3 Trio was my first graphics card, which I paid 300Euro for in 1997. You might think that was expensive, and an odd time to purchase it, but it was for my Amiga 4000, allowing me to run the crazy resolution of 1024*768 in 24bit colour, combined with the fantastic Amiga OS. And.... Then Diablo was released on the PC in the same year, and suddenly the IBM PC platform was better than the Amiga at something, also the same card cost 10% as much on the PCI bus.

My first PC being a Pentium 166 from Siemens, back in the day. I remember it had an onboard, 1MB Tseng ET4000, which was good enough for Dos, but lacked performance or support of the oncoming 3D stuff. For "upgrade" i bought a Mystique (and additionaly the 2 MB RAM upgrade), but it wasn't that of a thing then anyway. At last i got a Voodoo which made me happy for a while. But the systems were outdated so fast back then, and one had to move on. For some unknown reason i kept the Matrox and the Voodoo card back then, and after over 20 years in storage, i got them working again in a retro system i build a few months ago :-)

Great inexpensive cards, had a very good Linux support early on which was a lifesaver in the late 90's (when we still had to input the timings of the monitor in the X config file...) ; certainly not the best by any stretch, but decent paired with a 3DFX accelerator.

I remember all my Voodoo cards (still have them). They were so much of an improvement over what came before. Now we are only getting feature improvements with maybe a tiny bit of performance uplift in todays cards.

My first ever 3D GPU, I got it to replace a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5422. I bought it from a computer fair in Gateshead. It later found a home in my Amiga when the Mediator PCI came out, until it too was replaced by a Voodoo 3. Nostalgia...

Back in the time I was a poor teenager, and this videocard was all I could afford lol. It was actually slower with hw 3d acceleration in some applications I remember. But remember this card (atleast in my country) was so much cheaper than the competition, so in terms of money it was a great buy :)

I remember our market here is South Africa was flooded with those S3 PCI cards and the people who bought computers with those cards where expecting Voodoo quality performance and then ended up being disappointed and regret not shelling out the extra bucks for a proper Voodoo card. Beer drinkers with a taste for campaign I guess. Ahh, sometimes I miss those days. 🤔 The S3's were amazing cards in the Windows 3.1 era and their VLB cards were great.

I remember the first game i try when i bought my Voodo Diamond was POD. After playing a month in software renderer mode was mind blowing, the definition and silking move, i have no idea about FPS at that time but i knew just like Phil said that i was stepping into a new era. Great video!

In 1996 I didn’t have a computer yet but I played FIFA 96 on the computer at moms work. Old cards are so small and bare. I recently got a ASUS 7970 Direct CII complete in box for my collection and it is so big and heavy. I love the old Direct CUII design. Feels so industrial with all metal and no plastic and no RGB like modern cards.

I remember it well. I did some research and bought the Voodoo 1 and never regretted it

I used to have an S3 Virge DX but the first real 3D GPU was the Power VR Kyro II. I remember playing a demo of Virtua Racing and it blew me away with its smoothness. Too bad PowerVR disappeared into the mobile space, although that was the right move for them.

I really love that your returned to make videos on old hardware. I follow you really interesting, cause I love old hardware too and I always love to test and benchmark these old videocards on old systems!

I really wish I had kept my Pentium 200 and Rage 128 Pro 16MB. I missed out on DOS/early 3D gaming, having only upgraded from 8088 in 1999 and getting completely hooked on StarCraft as soon as I saw it. I got a few classics, thankfully - the X-Wing Alliance 3.5-game collection (XvT was a demo), Star Trek: Armada and ST:VOY: Elite Force, Mechwarrior 3, and the Half-Life Orange box. I was always impressed with the game discs whose audio tracks work in a CD player. The X-Wing and TIE Fighter discs were great as a child, doing my household chores over the summer with loud Star Wars music playing. Good times :)

I remember people back in the day defending the S3 Virge only on the basis of its 2D capabilities. I think if it hadn't pretended to offer accelerated 3D, it would have had a far better reputation.

Love the claim at 4:27 that by Christmas there will be more Virge chips sold than 32-bit consoles 😂

Never was much of a gamer. Back then I had a Matrox Millennium PCI, which was very good for 2d acceleration. When I got interested in some gaming (Quake) I first got the Voodoo 2 2000, then later the Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, which card I still have today. To think 16Mb was once considered a lot of video ram. 😏

The first video card that I bought for myself was an S3 Trio64V+ because it was cheap, the second one I bought was a Virge, again because it was super cheap. I was still mostly playing DOS games since that's pretty much the limit for the card. It took me a while to actually upgrade, in fact all the way until the Voodoo2 came out. As a teenager without a job, I had to pick and choose what I could upgrade, and the CPU was next in line since the old one was a 133MHz AMD Am5x86-P75.

My first computer was a 233MMX 96 Mo ram, with a S3 64. Soon replaced with an Ati Expert Play, and I added a Voodoo 1 :) This 233 could run at 290 MHz, impressive.

I had a S3 Virge/DX in my i486 DX4/100 and AMD 5x86 back in the days and had no problems with it. All my DOS games was running just fine, because the vesa support was not that bad. Also there was a few game patches out there with S3 Virge support and with that, it looked better than software rendering - but the performance was bad. Fortunatly this was not a problem for me, because i always paired it with a 3Dfx voodoo graphics accelerator card. In my K6-II system i even had a AGP version which was paired with a voodoo 2.

I remember that time quite well.. I had considered replacing my Trio64v2 with a Virge, but after reading the benchmarks in PC Games, instead opted to add a Voodoo1 to my setup. I was quite satisfied with the resulting system. In '97, it got replaced by an Intel 740 and a Voodoo2, followed up by a Riva TNT (1, 2, 256..), and more or less every second Nvidia generation ever since then.

I was looking for a new PCI graphics card right when the S3 virge came out, I was just about to get the S3 Trio64, but I opted for the new virge instead. I had no interest in 3D, nor was I even aware it was supposed to be a 3D card, and I extremely satisfied with it as a general purpose graphics card and 2D accelerator. A few years later when I wanted to get into accelerated 3D, I bought a 3dfx voodoo2 and used it in combination with the same S3 virge for a few more years, until I finally replaced them both for the geforce2mx in 2001. It was many years later, in the 2010s when I first learned from youtube that a lot of people were buying it as a 3D accelerator and were dissapointed by it, so the whole negativity for the virge was a surprise for me. I'm still using S3 virge cards for my retro PCs, I don't think I have a better PCI 2D card in my collection still.

I had one of these back in the day and I definitely remember them being referred to as a "decelerator", lol

The ViRGE was hobbled by a number of issues. One of its bigger problems was that they had to maintain voltage and form factor compatibility with the preceding S3 Trio chip it was a die shrunk improvement upon; they simply incorporated a basic 3D rasterizer into the space freed up by the die shrink. Another issue was that the ViRGE was intended to be an improvement for software-quality rendering over a low-end Pentium without a GPU. IIRC the ViRGE wasn’t even meant to handle z-buffering on chip, a limitation it shared with several other designs including Rendition’s V1000. Later updates to the ViRGE design made the most of a bad situation and 2D was quite good, but the ViRGE was flat out limited. It is pretty funny to see a Pentium II equipped with one struggle to manage GLQuake with a miniGL wrapper though.

A S3 ViRGE or Matrox board was often the pairing of choice with a Voodoo 2, at least with the friends I knew who could afford to run Voodoo 2s :P

Cool! PC Player was my go to magazine in the late 90th too here in Germany. I used a compbination of Diamond Stealth 64 with S3 968 and a 3dFX Voodoo additional graphics. I think it was also a Model from Diamond

i absolutely love the S3 Virge DX. I use it as a 2D Card paired with my Voodoo and Voodoo 2 machines. because of the Virges bad reputation its been incredibly cheap to pick them up even with the massive price hikes on retro hardware.

Anyone who had a computer back in the 90's was using a 3D Virge. I remember that card very well.

For Christmas 1996 I got a S3 Virge for my Pentium 90 running Windows 95. I was very disappointed. So only a few months later I had saved up enough to buy a Voodoo 1 to accompany it. Then the system was a blast.

I remember it and was just as fascinated as you were, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

I vividly remember those times, I also read PC Player every month and was really pumped for the S3 Virge when it was announced and PC Player joined the hype at first (they also had a full page ad each month for the Elsa Victory 3D). I made the mistake and didn't wait for the test and got myself said Elsa Victory 3D (where I had to replace the BIOS chip as it was so early that it came with VBE 1.2 so Elsa replaced it later with a VBE 2.0 BIOS). Still have the card. It was a good 2D performer and made 3D games "prettier" but never accelerated much, contrary to all the promises by S3 and companies, which is why I combined it with a Diamond Monster 3D later in 1997. I believe one of the few 3D games I played on it was Terminal Velocity that came with the card and was quite playable IIRC. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Never had the Virge back then... my first 3D Card was the Miro Crystal VRX (Rendition V1000)... already this one let my jaw drop back then with Motoracer and Quake. But then i got a Voodoo and had to use my S3 Trio64 as 2D unit and my jaws dropped again! I already knew back then that for 3D the Virge was a bad choice but as you said, DOS compatibility and 2D Windows performance was great. Even with only 2MB, i had a 15inch CRT only back then. Anyways, nice video again!

My first personal PC back in 1997 was a Pentium 60. It had a slow PCI graphics card with an Avance Logic chip and 1 MB. Many things ran very slowly or at low resolutions because the RAM was simply too small. Then I bought an S3 Virge with 4 MB with my pocket money. There wasn't enough for more. But many 2D titles like StarCraft ran much more pleasantly with it. In terms of 2D, the card was good. And it works in every PC with a PCI bus and is robust and won't break. 3D performance became more and more important, especially towards the end of the 90s, so I bought in 1998 a Voodoo Banshee with a new PC in the fall.

1996. Big DESCENT 2 fan. Bought the DIamond Monster (=3dfx Voodoo). And my jaw drapped. It was revolutionary. 60fps nearly all time where software was at about 20-30fps, and looking at the aliasing was just so beautiful. Game changer. I saw Virge on a LAN session before with Descent 2 and it was horrible as you stated. I think it however also supported 3D glasses and that was -while also a slide show- really interesting to look Descent 2 at.

I feel truly blessed to have on hand this exact Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro 2MB+ cards kitted out with 4MB total. Great DOS performer.

The Matrox Mystique (first edition, 2MB) was my very first graphics card. I still have it around, great card at its time. With the specific patches, 3D acceleration was quite fast, for example in Tomb Raider, Schleichfahrt (Archimedian Dynasty) and I think Moto Racer later. But it was lacking any bilinear filtering, so there was no eye candy but only faster gameplay.

Matrox, those were some incredible cards for the day. They even kept up with the voodoo on occasion, and the image quality was incredible.

I appreciate taking a historical look at situation when the card came out, While not making the video overly long. I'm getting bad memories of when I got my FX5500 thinking it "supported DX9"

Sweet Memories. I had an Elsa S3 Virge Card back in the days. I've tried to play Jedi Knight in 3d. It was slow and choppy. But other then that it was a good Video Card. Well done and it could deliver a crisp Picture. And I also had a Spea Media fx. But I paired it with an AWE32 so it only did what it could do quite good: General MIDI (and eat up a LOT of Space in the Tower Case).

Around the time the 3Dfx came out I still had a Trio64V+ with 2Mb combined with a P100. A friend of mine litterly jumped on the 3Dfx when he could get his hands on it because he loved his FPS games and such. I myself was already greatly addicted to RTS games which had no need for any 3D acceleration. I did however upgraded to a Matrox G200 card with 4Mb which was good enough for the type of games I mostly played. Did ended up with my friends 1st Voodoo 1 card after he upgraded to Voodoo 2 with 12Mb just in case I needed a bit 3D acceleration 😉

In 1996 I was still rockin' the 486DX4 100 with a Diamond Stealth VLB and an AWE32. Most of my money went to buying Atari Jaguar games out of the discount bin.

To the question if 10 fps is playable or not: I remember my hunger to be amazed by the new games back in those days. I could not afford a good 3D card, but my curiosity was way higher than that. And I remember how I enjoyed playing the first time these 3D games even if it was like a comic book. When we evaluate something from the past, we need to consider the circumstances of the time which is of course very difficult when looking at today's standards.

In '96 I still had my VLB 486 DX2/66 system with Tseng Labs ET4000 I believe and later (I think around '98) replaced it with a Pentium 166 MMX with an Ati Rage II+ and added a Monster 3D Voodoo².

In my area they were just used as basic display adapters for clone pc builders. Cheap as chips

I remember getting an S3 Virge just to play Descent with HW acceleration. It ran slower, like 10-15 fps.

Ah yes. S3 Virge and Pinball. Nostalgic. I have two S3 Virge and a Trio64 V+ which got completely destroyed by playing FF7 PC (a lot). Then one of my friends has this OEM machine from his client and not gonna use it anymore. He gave this graphics card to me which is a Matrox G200. This card up until now holds a great place in my heart. And Matrox has the most stable drivers out there.

Great look back. It’s funny as just the other day I found a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 in a box of random stuff. It’s a Virge 3D card and even has the RAM upgrade so it’s sporting 4mb. I set it aside to look at it further and your video explained it all. I do recall people calling it a 3D in accelerator back in the day LOL! 😅

This was my first graphics card purchase, which came along with a bare bones system I got in 1997. Back then, I didn't know any better, but I also didn't play a lot of 3D games, so it didn't matter much at the time.

I always enjoy the personal anecdotes and story time :)

Man, in 1996, I would've still been using my A1200. Fair enough, by then I was using an accelerator card with a 25mHz 68030, 68882 FPU, 8MB fast RAM, PCMCIA CD drive and 1gb hard disk, but that was all to keep within my budget as a 13 year old, bought one bit at a time by mowing lawns around my estate for £10 a time. It's amazing what a difference a few years made, by the time I hit college in '99, I'd got a Pentium 3 500mHz that was so good in software rendering(for its day, anyways) that I didn't need a 3D accelerator card. It's also a massive difference again from that to today. Back then I would find anything running 15fps or higher to be playable, even if I had to go down to 320x240 to achieve it. Compare it to now where I never set my screen resolution to anything lower than 1920c1080, then start complaining if I can't hit 90fps and find anything below 60fps as completely unacceptable.

S3 did invent texture compression formats called S3TC that is still used today in all games with DirectX 12 and Vulkan but under different names (DXT or BCn). So it wasn't all bad.

Great video

The S3 was an affordable and half decent card for folk on a budget (PC gear was very expensive in the 90s)

I used to own S3 Virge DX in 97 paired with 3DFX Voodoo 1. That was a good combo back then. Especially with my AMD K6-III 300mhz ;)

My first pc had the Virge gpu,solid DOS card.I added Voodoo card next to it for 3D games in Win 95.

I had a top of the line Compaq at the time, it came with some sort of S3 chip built into the motherboard with Intel Indeo video capture a 233Mhz Pentium SDR ram like 32MBs and a zip drive and CD rom and a 6.5GB quantum hard drive (crazy large for the time lol) depending on the 3D game some ran OK and some games ran faster in software. I upgraded the cache RAM and later on I added a VooDoo 2. That Voodoo card was an amazing upgrade!!! I really loved that computer even with all the headaches, the zip drive got the click of death about a week or two before the hard drive failed... lost like 6 months of work I was doing on a file sharing program that would have been like a proto version of bit torrent. This caused me to stop programming all together. But playing games on that machine was a lot of fun :)

We depended on those old PC magazines for information back in the day. No internet, no forums, almost no adults that had more knowledge than we did. You had to help yourself, and it was often frustrating!

In 1996 I would have been very young still. I believe in this time I was still playing things like math blaster and the jazz jackrabbit shareware in DOS. By the time I got my hands on a Windows computer I'm pretty sure it was Windows 98 and integrated 3D accelerators were starting to be a thing. I remember playing games like quake 2, interstate 76, monster truck madness 2, and eventually quake 3. I don't remember ever thinking any of these games ran too slow on my computer. But I definitely didn't know about or have a discreet 3D accelerator yet at this point. I completely missed the 3DFX voodoo and didn't know that it existed until well into adulthood. By the time I learned about graphics cards it was ATI and nvidia, and all of the other players had been driven out of the market. I'm thinking around the time of half life 2

In 1996 I had a 100MHz DX4 with a VLB Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 2MB. It wasn't much, but it was honest work :)

My dad bought me a Diamond Edge 3D in February 1996. It was cool and all, but Voodoo made it obsolete in a matter of months. We still had a lot of fun with it, though. Countless hours were spent on Virtua Fighter Remix, Panzer Dragoon, and NASCAR Racing. Too bad there were only a handful of titles made for the card.

I had the S3 Virge in my PC back in the late 90s. It struggled to play the latest games at the time, but I played a lot of Quake and Starcraft decently well. I was more involved in the community side of gaming than the technology side, so I had everything I needed to play the games I want. It wasn't until I wanted to play Counter-Strike that I seriously wanted newer hardware.

I had an S3 ViRGE in the early 2000s when they were dirt cheap (just needed a PCI card) and I used it when flashing new BIOS-es on AGP cards. When it died I desoldered the chip with a hot air gun and made it into a pretty neat key chain. I imagine it would have been quite the disappointment when new.

In the 1990s I was a teenager in Poland. My go to magazine for computer hardware was CHIP. Yes, they had a Polish edition. For games I went with Gambler and Reset. Both went bancrupt in the early 2000s.

I used to have a 486 80Mhz with Cirrus Logic 1MB ISA video card. I remember when S3 Virge came out and I couldn't upgrade because I had no PCI slots. A year later I got a brand new Pentium II 333Mhz with an Ati Rage 3D 2MB if you remember those.

Was a nice intro with the PC Player Magazine. Was also my favorite mag at the time. But apparently I didnt follow along well enough. I got into 3D games only a few years later being impressed probably after seeing a Diamond Monster in action in Jedi Knight. So ofc I also had to have such a card and bought a Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro... and then thought it was defective...in the end I bought a Voodoo 2 on top of that. It also shows quite a bit how deceptive names were back then. Tons of cards had names which have absolutely nothing to do with the chips they use.

Hi Phil, as a long time fan and subscriber of your channel I was always intrigued by the fact you included the PC Player Benchmark in your Testsuite. I guess your personal history of living in Austria finally cleared this up for me. Great video as always and keep up delivering that awesome retro content which always relates really close to my own computing history. BTW my last DOS Graphics card was a SPEA V7 Mirage VLB and my first 3D card was an ATi 3D Rage Pro Xpert@Play AGP which was always a gamble to find out if those flaky Win98 drivers would support the newest Game. Regards, und Liebe Grüße aus Deutschland. 😊

My friend has the S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 with a Celeron 300 OCed to 450Mhz. It was hilarious to see Quake 2 running slower in S3 Virge mode than in software. And with the Voodoo 2, well you know.

I remember buying an S3 Virge back in Fall 1997 (to upgrade my S3Trio64V+), I was able to score one (random Taiwanese vendor) that was in my budget (for 100 DM) and I felt disappointed that it was not giving an extra juice to my Pentium 120. Sure, now DirectX would display Direct3D features but that was it. Thank you for testing it because you really show evidence that the nickname "3D deccelerator" is appropriate, and also chasing a Virge for building a Pentium computer is not a must, and any S3 Trio will be better and cheaper option to populate.

I remember reading the negative articles about those new-fangled 3D accelerators. I didn't see the need for one in my Pentium machine at the time. It was only when games like Quake II and NFS II came out, I started wondering about an accelerator. I got a Voodoo I for Christmas in 1997. I was completely blown away by it.

Ah, that's pretty nostalgic. My first computer had a S3D Verge. I'm not complaining since I couldn't afford a computer at the time and I literally fished that computer out of a dumpster. I remember playing a lot of Moto Racer at 320x240 and NOT feeling disappointed in it since I was coming from the N64 which was also 320x240.

I did buy the s3 virge card back in the day solely for it's decent 2d performance and the fact it had been heavily discounted. I paired it with a voodoo 2 card

Phil, you ought to test the enhanced version of Terminal Velocity that utilised the S3 ViRGE's 3D capability.

Back in the day I think I had, first, a Trio 64 (later it got paired with a 3DFX VooDoo). Then the Voodoo got paired with a Savage 3D. S3 got it together near the end but it was too late. The Savage 3D not only looked better but performed better than the Voodoo on Unreal Tournament. Severence: Blade of Darkness too.

I had a S3 Trio64V+ . Great 2D card, used it all the way until I replaced it with an S3 Savage 3D. Still, in the voxel game Outcast, the S3 Trio was the fastest card among all the ones I had after that...

We had the 2nd Aldi/Medion/Lifetec PC. P2 with s3 virge. This card was the reason I bought a Diamond Monster 3D II

Funny card, hehe. Luckily I never had one! In 1996 I was too busy for playing games and only had a borrowed office-PC from work - a Dell Optiplex-something with a P120. It wasn't until 1999 I bought myself a gaming PC again, when the Coppermines were released. Have a beefy P3-700 Dell Dimension that still runs beautifully. I forget what GPU it had initially but I think it was one of the #9 cards. Love that machine anyway, and spent way too many hours grinding Starcraft on it - one of my all-time favorites and the main reason I bought the machine. Speaking of #9, whatever happened to them? They were huge for awhile and then just seemed to disappear off the map.

I got some inheritance money and spent it all on a Am486 DX4-100, mobo, 8mb ram and a Virge DX. Coming from a 386 SX-33 the upgrade was INSANE. I was 16 at the time. My world was simpler. My last modern upgrade was a i5 6600k/8Gb/GTX970 to a Am5600k/32Gb/6800X and the change in performance felt unremarkable. Nothing compared to the golden years. Hell, the most exciting part was the case.

We had a similar experience with one in our pentium 2 family pc, back in the day. It couldn’t play 3D games at all😅