The 3DFX Voodoo4 4500 

I remember the anandtech review of this card. when I saw that every other card was beating this I knew it was all over for 3dfx. Even the Voodoo5 5500 couldn't stop the Geforce or even the Radeon. Really sad since I was a huge Voodoo fan. I wish their dumb CEO had not spent almost 140 million buying STB and burning the company down

Say ... what material you're using as thermal pad between cpu and the cooler?

3DFX was known for SLI

There is actually a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP 4x Edition, hard to find but it can be found with some patience and deep pockets!

glide looks way better and smoother

I remember I had dreams about the Voodoo 5 6000 when I was a kid.. walking into a toystore, and seeing boxes of voodoo 5 6000's stacked on top of eachother... but it never happend.. Voodoo FTW!

It would have made more sense for this review to compare the V4 4500 to its main rival the GF 2 MX, with some benchamrks.

Phil´s Computer Lab new episode, Friday and 3DFX...what else can we ask for?

I waited to see the early reviews of the Voodoo4 cards, but was disappointed in the performance, so I splashed out and bought a Guillemot 3D Prophet II GTS 64MB card instead. At the time it was actually cheaper and had better performance. The Voodoo cards were priced at a premium level, and the GF2 had been out for a few months already, so I managed to pick up mine on a discount. At the time when I upgraded the video card, I was running a celery 400, which definitely didn't keep up! Pretty much straight away I upgraded to a PIII 1000EB, which I also got on sale since it had been out for a few months by then as well. Coupling the GF2 with a 19" Trinitron, my friends were practically drooling over that rig at LAN parties! We usually played at my mate's place, and he lived on the top floor of his apartment building, so they definitely weren't jealous of me having to carry up that big heavy monitor up all those flights of stairs!

3dfx should have released overclocked versions of the V4 4500 and 5500 with 183 mhz and name them 4600 and 5600 or even with 200 mhz. Sadly they never did, even if that would have been very easy to do and would have helped 3dfx to better compete with the GF 2 MX and GTS.

Damn I feel old. I remember waiting in line with my dad at a computer store for the midnight release of Windows 95!

Hi Phil. I throughly enjoy your videos and have been a subscriber for a few years. I never comment on any videos but I was wondering if you had tried the Glide FPS counter posted by thp at vogons. I've used it a couple of times and it worked beautifully: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62723 Keep up the good work, you're one of my favourite RU-vid hosts. Cheers.

An interesting fact about 3DFX is that they were originally going to make the graphics for the Sega Dreamcast. I do wonder what GPU would it of been based on and how it would of affected the performance of the Dreamcast. Shame the deal fell through, would of been interesting for sure :)

at laaaast, video of top kind! the best of your channel Phil, thanks for content worth attention, you know we love 3Dfx

You need to do a Pentium 3 Slot 1 vs Socket 370 video. 440BX vs i815 or something lol

The 90s: “Lets call our new line of 3D-cards: VOODOO!” The 20X0s: ”How does the RX 480 sound? Didn’t Nvidia kinda name one of their cards that before, tho? Who cares...”

👍👍👍 I have an old Diamond Monster Voodoo2 8 Mb, I ❤️ the 3DFX cards! Nice video!

Yes my son.. That was how a "GPU" looked like back in the day when daddy was young. It could do basically the same thing as the 2 kg tripple-fan monster spaceheater you have in your PC. Just a lot slower and less powerfull. Graphics innovation from 1980 to 2000: WUAU - Nice !! Graphics innovation from 2000 to 2020: So many settings - Let me see... I switch that on and it slows down the FPS (can't really see the difference) But I wan't that setting on. I need More POWER!! :)

No benchmarks against the GF 2 MX ?

So, let's test a 500$ video card today...

I use this card with a Pentium 3 Tualatin 900mhz, 512 mb RAM and a Turtle Beach Montego II. Killer machine for Retro PC gaming !

I seem to recall reading that the VSA-100 was actually supposed to be the succesor to the hardware in the Voodoo 2 but development fell way behind so 3DFX kinda did a hurry job on the Voodoo 3 hardware in as basically it was a Banshee with an extra TMU and higher clock speeds

Too bad 3dfx never released 183 mhz or 200 mhz Voodoo 4500 & 5500 to better compete against the GF 2 MX & GTS. 3dfx could probably still be alive.

You should do review of Intel 740. Still amazed that noone did it. Intel graphics are coming (hopefully), so i think its about time to show people why i740 wasn't succesfull. Also can be compared to Riva128, which you tested already as these were on market at same time. Ofc Voodoo 1 can be option too.

If you were playing Incoming and worrying about whether or not you were playing in 16- or 32-bit color, you weren't playing Incoming very well. I played it on a V3 for years and years and never worried about that; if it looked better on the GF2 GTS I had later, I never noticed. The whole "32-bit" thing was a red herring anyway. By the time we had CPUs that could handle that, all of these cards were obsolete. Running a V4 on an AMD K8 from years later is not realistic when considering its performance in 2000. The stronger CPU makes 32-bit operation academic, and hides the chip's weakness relative to the GeForce--its lack of hardware transform and lighting. The problem with the Voodoo4 is that at the time it came out, it simply wasn't competitive. Some of the reviews of the card in its own day are still up. A single VSA-100 couldn't match the performance of the competition, although it had great image quality, as you noted. Very few V4 4500 cards were ever made. If you wanted 3dfx, you either got a dual-chip V5 5500 or you got an older V3. I actually owned a 5500, but sold it and ran a retro gaming rig with an overclocked V3 3500 and a K6-III+ 550 on a VA-503+ well into the 2010s. You're right that the V4 is a perfect card for running 1998-2002 games on out-of-era hardware in 2020, because of its feature set and AGP support, but in its own time it wasn't a very compelling purchase.

I'll still be sticking with my viper V550 (or hybrid TNT2 Vanta/M64) and SLI Voodoo2. The screen I run my 98 machine with is only 1024x768 anyway (though the screen is native 85Hz).

Glide produces more detailed graphics, more life like colors and smooth performance of voodoo card

Got this card in 2001 when 3Dfx was already dead. Play games with this card from 2001 and 2002 was painful. My cousin had GeForce2 MX which was much more faster. But I still have this card, and it is very nice as alternative for Voodoo 2, or Banshee. It has different render in Tomb Raider 1996, more like PowerVR. Later I found out that Banshee and Voodoo 3 have tha same render, when Voodoo 2 have render which looks like Voodoo graphics

So thankful I was lucky to find a Voodoo 2 just laying around inside an old basement PC. The 3dfx cards are getting so pricey.

Now there's a card I'll never own. :) You know I love your videos about graphics cards, and this is no exception!

My first pc upgrade was a Voodoo 3 back in "99. I played Quake 2 with my friend over dial-up. I remembered how amazed I was when I first fired up the game after the install. Good old days.

3dfx is great indeed, but I actual prefer my i865gv thin client in win98se... the intel igp has excellent retro-gaming features. though it cannot render glide, but it supports S3TC as well. With a 2Ghz P4 it's capable of 32bit in 800x600 with decent frame-rates.

Why the hype for Voodood 4+5? Voodoo 4+5 was a dead stock. They were the downfall for 3DFX. Too slow too bad. The Voodoo 3 was hardly competitive. The Voodoo 4 was slower than the cheapest Geforce 2 version. The Voodoo 5 was slower than the GeForce 2 GTS, and that wasn't even the fastest GeForce 2 back then. It was just sad to see 3DFx go down. I had the Voodoo 1, 2 and 3, but nobody bought the Voodoo 4+5 back then, just a few fanboys. The Voodoo 5 6000... ok it's something special. 4 GPU did not exist before and never did again. By the way, the picture of the Voodoo 6000 in the video is wrong, the layout was different.

0:57 Hah, you got horizontal shadow lines that goes from top to down , you see it ? I got that same problem with my radeon 9600 pro from Gigabyte, in 2003 , even complained and returned and brought 9600xt , from same Gigabyte , after some testing I realized that it has also, but much less noticeable, but there was, really annoying if you are perfectionist .

Very informative video, as always! The Voodoo 4 4500 AGP works in my AMD Athlon Slot A T-Bird 1 GHz machine. :)

All I can see is why 3dfx went bankrupt: and Amd xp1800 with a gef2 Pro gets 7400 marks ;) i only use v1,v2. A v5 in an xp3000+ because i have it, but the v3 and v4 are just bad performance cards and stay in the collection

Windows 2000 was WAY better. It's was more IT and less consumer. Ran faster and better than 98 or xp with less BS bloatware. If your going to build a system to play old games always go with windows 2000.

I never saw the voodoo 4 . Friends had the the voodoo 3 and later the 5 but they were pricey even at the computer shows I frequented at the time compared to the TNT 2 and early GeForce family.

i bought the 3dfx voodoo 3 2000 pci back in 99 for $99 at walmart, it was one heck of an upgrade over the S3 Virge DX that was in my system at the time.

Can somebody give at this guy a 3dfx vodoo5 9000 to play crysis 3?

Ah, I remember hearing about the Voodoo 4 and 5, back when I was in college in 2000. I never actually got a 3DFX voodoo 4 4500, until back at 2012. I bought a used one that came with the box and original packaging for only $35, back then. I also bought a Voodoo 5 5500 shortly after, but only used it for about an hour until I changed it out. Unfortunately, I lost that card and many of my other belongings to a fire. When I put together my Pentium 3 600 MHz machine late last year, I slapped the Voodoo 4 in there, and I got performance similar to an overcharged Voodoo 3. In 3dMark 2000, I got an average score of 2900. But when I changed the processor to a Pentium 3 800 MHz, I got a score of 3200. I also had a Dell Dimension 4550 PC, with a Pentium 4 2.0GHz processor, and with the Voodoo 4, I had a 3DMark2000 score of around 3500. I heard the Voodoo 4 4500 is not as good for older games like the Voodoo 3, but my old games always ran great with my Voodoo 4 card. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a Voodoo 5 5500 and swapped my Voodoo 4 for the voodoo 5. The Voodoo 5 is an excellent card for older titles. It is much like the Voodoo 4, but significantly more powerful than the Voodoo 4 and can do 32 bit more better. In fact, with the Voodoo 5 5500, my PC benched from 3200 to 4200 on 3DMark 2000. I have found the Voodoo 4 to be a bit unusual, because the VSA-100 chipset the Voodoo 4 has was designed specifically to work in parallel with one or more of it's kind. I think 3DFX wanted to release a budget graphics card with their newest chipset on it. That would be my best guess as for the Voodoo 4's existence. The Voodoo 4 4500 is really just a slightly more powerful Voodoo 3, with official 32 bit color support and a few new features over the Voodoo 3. The Voodoo 4 card is not a bad card, and is great for old glide games, but that's about it.

32-bit was so overrated. The difference between 16-bit vs 32-bit was minimal or ZERO, but the performance drop was 30-40%. It was much better to use the 22-bit of the Voodoo with close to ZERO performance loss and excelent picture quality.

AA is overrated, in a fast paced game like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament you won't notice a difference.

Don't forget, VSA-100 also has 2048x2048 texture support over the Voodoo3's 256x256!

V2 vs Banshee vs TNT1, V4 4500 vs GF 2 MX and V5 5500 vs GF 256 DDR / GF 2 GTS would be really nice to see :)

I've seen a couple of modded 4500s pop up on ebay over the years where the vram has been upgraded then there was one card where the owner had added dvi port, upgraded the vram, and replaced the gpu with a slightly newer version that clocked higher for all in all was around 20-40% faster than a stock card.

The games you are testing are too old. Forsaken is a Voodoo2 game.

Great video, Phil! Currently playing through Descent 3 on my Voodoo5 5500 AGP, Glide API, and my Pentium III-S 1.4GHz system. Runs extremely smooth and looks fantastic.

I had an V4 exactly like this a few years ago, but the glide compatibility is not great for old dos games, so i sold it. Nowadays i have a Diamond Monster 3D (V1 4mb) and a Voodoo 3 PCI 16mb. The V3 is the best all arounder for early W98 and other dos glide games.

Phil why no V4 4500 vs GF 2 MX and V5 5500 vs GF 2 GTS video ? Those were the rivals from 2000.

How much does the V4 4500 overclock ?

7:23 my first ever jump scare on this channel! xD

A alternative universe where 3dfx are still alive and well would have been nice

I have the PCI version with 32Mb Vram

I had a Voodoo 4 4500 Mac Edition (PCI w/DVI interface, otherwise the same), Voodoo 2 1000 (x2), Voodoo 3 3500 TV, and Voodoo 5 5500 - complete in box. Sold them on ebay for ~$35 - $50 CAD each in 2004 - 2005 as I dumped old hardware because no one wanted slow outdated cards at the time. Even worse, my in box soundcards including a Gravis Ultrasound MAX and Aureal SQ2500 sold for almost nothing.

Dude my old voodoo 1 rush could run Tomb Raider 2 and Unreal and UT no problem.

man i still use the pci voodoo 4 in a very small sony vaio pc that has no agp slot.

Been hunting for one of these for years... but I can't bring myself to pay the prices for it on ebay. I haven't seen one outside of ebay... so I'm just sitting here hoping i'll come across an affordable Voodoo4 4500 someday. It's the only 3DFX graphics card that's not in my collection at the moment.

1990s Glide = 2020s Vulcan

I am proud owner of couple of 3DFX cards. I keep them nice, clean, dry :)

Back in the day, used to have the Voodoo 5 5500. It was a really beautiful card and made every other viddy card look crummy in comparison. Got full use of that card, and then sold it for a song after Xp and better hardware became available. But it sure did look sweet in games. The card needs to be retired to the Smithsonian, unless you still have a bunch of Win 98 games and build a retro rig. I recently built a Win 98 machine using a Nvidia 8X AGP for almost no cost for playing Doom/others. But Win 98 is such a disaster OS, even with the latest unofficial service pack, although it did help out a lot. Thanks Phil . . .

Good card but I promised eternal fidelity to 3500. I have registered issues with 4500 and (old) games of Glide and DOS in my book. V3 has a better compatibility without 32 bits. Did you check it? Thanks

I have two vooddo 3, a 3000 and 2000, back from the day, they did run out of money and nvidia just screwed us without drivers, that's probably the reason why I never bought a nvidia card

I have collected most of the 3dfx graphics cards that were made. Not from every brand, but mostly one variation of every GPU; from the Voodoo 1, all the way to the Voodoo5. I once saw a Voodoo 5 6000 go on sale on ebay. This was in 2002. It was selling for almost $1,000 bucks... even back then. I was very surprised to see how much Voodoo cards are going for these days. I collected all my cards just because I really missed 3dfx. I had no idea they would be gaining value like this! I am surprised, to say the least. I do need to collect a Voodoo 4 4500 though. That's the one I dont have. I think I need to get the Voodoo3 1000 as well. Any of you guys have the Voodoo Velocity cards??

So thankful I was lucky to find a Voodoo 2 just laying around inside an old basement PC. The 3dfx cards are getting so pricey.

I still got a bunch of 3dfx cards, I was thinking of making a retro machine out of the voodoo 4 4500 I have. I would use my voodoo 5 5500 but the agp port wont fit on the mother board cause its made for older agp slots and it wont fit unlike the voodoo 4 with its 3 sections split out will fit any agp slot.If anyone is unaware they made quantum 3d aalchemy systems with either 8 all the way up to 64 vsa-100 chips

The Voodoo 4 4500 is even less common a card then a 5500. I sold one of my spares awhile ago and people bid it up to twice what the 5500 was going for since i had the only one for sale on ebay in over 6 months lol

11:58 yeah they are decent in opengl, with my voodoo 3 3000 build, it was 1 frame slower than 3dfx opengl.

Random question from a fan... what would be a decent OS for an Athlon XP 2100+ (even linux distros...)? Thanks in advance! Love from Italy

Pentium II is perfect for Voodoo 4

I got a 4500 pci for sale offers?

Back when cards had cool names.

Last time I saw a Voodoo card was when my friend was showing me Grim Fandango in the 90s.

I still have a VooDoo 5 5500 in the box. I used a sweet Voodoo 2 & 3 back in the day and loved them.

... V3 3000 vs V4 4500?

A Phil video about a Voodoo!? It's just like the good old days!

I had a voodoo 3 2000 pci loved this vga!

Think I have almost all the parts for my retro PC, just got "Albatron PX865PE7 Pro" Not sure what config will be final, but will test several configs "Pentium® 4 530J" (1 core 3GHz HT) + "Voodoo3 2000 PCI" or "Leadtek Geforce 4 Ti-4200" (with Win98) Or (if CPU is supported by this m/b) "Pentium® D 930" (2 cores 3GHz no-HT) + "Albatron FX5700LELP 128Mb" (WinXP)

Just sold my voodoo5 5500 and my voodoo1 to buy a yamaha synthesizer (mx49) - gotta set priorities - (I only kept my voodoo3)

I don't know why you are spending 5-10 minutes on some review videos showing old configuration troubleshooting and BIOS settings. Topic of this video should be is Voodoo 4 4500. You can create separate video of the vintage PC configs and reference them here, but lately your video are too long because you always show too much stuff which should not be important.

I run my modern 5700xt Ryzen 5 3600 system like a time machine a lot of the time lol. Doom 2, just finished the first FEAR, Quake 1&2, Morrowind etc. Doom 2 on Vulkan runs great. Gotta love low-level APIs lol. Ive never been a "it has to look like blurry crap like it did when i was a kid" type person.

I have Voodoo3 3000 AGP, and Voodoo 3 2000 AGP and PCI, but seen strange bug. I couldn't play Quake2 at 1600x1200, but when I put 2 videocards at same time (AGP and PCI) it worked somehow

I worked at PC World in the UK from late 1999 to late 2000. Used to get lots of customer returns and damaged boxes in the crate bin at the back of the warehouse. Usually they went back to base but sometimes the managers would let the employees buy items, especially if they were lacking accessories or the boxes were totally ripped. I bought a LOT of graphics cards back then, usually to sell on to my friends or to build PC's with which I'd then advertise in the local classifieds. I still have a few VooDoo 4's, only a single VooDoo 3 and a pair of VooDoo 2's which I actually use in an SLI Pentium III rig. I remember when VooDoo cards started to get owned by other chipsets and we ended up having a difficult time selling 3Dfx cards after that. Many got sent back to base. I had the opportunity to buy a lot of them, wish I had! Ah well.

Best retro hardware channel

9:13 i dont like that idea when using a CRT ! It can be dangerous. Many years (at least 13) ago i used Kanotix Live CD with my 19" CRT, and that crazy Linux Distribution nearly grilled my CRT, because it send wrong stuff (who know's what) to my CRT. I was using 1024x768 with 60hz, but for some reason my CRT started to smell like if something was burning and i saw a little bit smoke, i immediately shut the monitor down, and never ever used Kanotix again. I used that Monitor until 2014 without any Problems and some other Linux Distros.

I used an Nvidia Geforce 2 GTS and a glide wrapper in those times. The Voodoo 1,2,3 were good cards, but by the time Geforce 2 came out, it was over for 3DFX.

It's crazy how these cards were so high-end and then just a couple years later some super cheap card would blow it out of the water. The '90s are such a terrible time to invest in PC parts.

Hey , your view on utilizing old radeon card for Boinc / F@H ? Card like 4870/5870/6970/7970 have very strong Fp64 capability , and pretty cheap too

The good old 3dfx cards. Truth be told i still have my voodoo banshee from anubis which i bought new when it was just released, the card was actually shipped with bad vram causing pink screen artifacts unless you underclocked the vram. Didn´t impact the performance much and the card served me well for quite some time, first in my main rig and later in my 2nd rig (mainly for diablo2) after i upgraded to a tnt2 ultra in my main. Its a bid sad the company sort of died as more competition nowadays would be really good.

Never had the pleasure of owning a 3dfx card, but I've always been fascinated by how smooth gameplay looks on optimized games.

For my Comparison Win98SE machines I've settled on a Geforce 256 SDR with a PIII 500mhz, a G400 Max with a K63+450@550Mhz and a Voodoo 1, and a Hercules 4000XT 32MB Kyro with a PIII 800e. and a PCX2 PowerVR. For audio they have Soundblaster Live! Value, AWE 64 and AWE 64 Gold respectively. I drop the K63+ to 300mhz and install a Celeron 300A (or drop the 800e to 533mhz) in the later two machines while using the Voodoo 1 or PowerVR PCX2. These three systems play everything I throw at them up to and including Battlefield 1942 with the PIII units. The 32-Bit color advantage of the G400MAX and Kyro is very noticeable in comparison to Nvidia and Ati cards, and the Banshee and Voodoo 3 3000 I have just don't give me any added benefit in comparison. I keep those two, along with Riva TNT, TNT2, TNT2 PRO, TNT2 Ultra, Matrox Mystique, Geforce 2 MX and others simply because I don't feel like testing them before attempting to flip them, and I might want to go back and retest them some day.

i'm jelly now ;-) - crazy prices :(

Hey Phil... you really like those thermal pads? I have heard they aren't that good and almost trap some heat as opposed to the pastes. Just asking.

The prices for Voodoo cards going higher and higher, that's sad for us retro enthusiasts :-( As the later Glide games also supporting direct 3d or openGL, I recommend GeForce 2 mx or 4mx cards. The performance is great and the power consumption is low. And they are widely available for small money.

I love your videos! It's so nice to just crack open a cold one, kick back in my chair, and watch you geek out for 20 mins!

FYI the drivers have 'Force 32bit colour' in Glide, and it works 100% for every game. I took screenshots in Unreal with the option on/off and it 100% works. Careful with 'tweaked' drivers, as they break this option. Also - the 3dfx Windows 2000 drivers are excellent!

How about a video V4 4500 versus it’s main competitor- the standard Geforce 2 MX 175/166 mhz ? :)

Holy cow! I used that Sempron processor from 2003 to 2012. IIRC I also used a Kyro II GPU that was very good.

Phil, whats the make/model of that SATA optical you have that DOES have analogue audio connector PLEASE ;-)

I have a 6200 geforce pci my compaq deskpro en has no agp and it do the job nicely for windows 98 retropc this voodoo is too expansive