In this video I test one of the first 3d "accelerators" from the mid 1990's - the S3 ViRGE to find out if it lives up to its reputation as one of the worst 3d accelerators of all time..
The S3 Virge was a great 2D card for DOS compatibility with its Trio64V+ core and especially with Build engine games (Duke Nukem 3D,Shadow Warrior,Blood,Redneck Rampage etc) it was perhaps the best card for the highest frame rates with the s3vbe318 VESA TSR 3K Utility enabled for that card with those games that were very popular at the time. Duke Nukem 3D was a huge hit title back in 1996 and 1997. I was shocked at how fluid the game play was with either a 325 Virge or a Virge DX card and that utility enabled. It was even better than the 128 bit Tseng Labs ET6000 cards Yes the S3 Virge was poor as a early 3D accelerator but paired with a 3Dfx 3D accelerator card it was very nice and they make a nice matching pair.
The point here, was , why you would want to pay EXTRA for s3 virge, over s3 Trio64 v2. Maybe for VRAM? But there was already Trio64 versions with 4 MB VRAM. The point is, 150$ extra wasnt worth it to pay over S3 Trio64. Samo argument for voodoo... who would pay extra $, over Trio64, to pair it with Voodoo, when you need 2D card only to voodoo. It was not worth. The only reason to pay for Virge would be, if differance from S3 Trio64 would be very little in price, like $20, and number of supported games would be actually higher, or Direct3D driver better.
@@warrax111 If you already had a S3 Trio 64V+ upgrading to a Virge 325 (or any Virge ) knowing that you would pair it with a Voodoo would not have much advantages. If you were planning on building a PC at the time you would need a 2D card anyway and any of those S3 cards would do fine. The DX or GX models can do a very limited selection of early 3D games by themselves (without the Voodoo) but the 325 is quite limited. The Virge 325 did look good with the game Terminal Velocity. Back in that era many PC's already had S3 chips integrated on their motherboards if they didn't use discrete graphic cards.
@@m9078jk3 I don't see any point going Virge over S3 Trio64, except, when you cannot find 4 MB Trio64 version, and you want 4 MB video RAM 2d card. Second reason could be Virge GX2, when you had AGP slot. Trio64 wasn't for AGP. Besides this, I don't see any reason going S3 Virge as 2D card with voodoo.
@@warrax111 There are a very limited number of PC games with 3D enhancements for the S3 Virge basically that's the only advantage over the Trio64 . Like I originally stated there are lots of advantages of using a S3 Virge 325,dx or gx card along with a 3Dfx Voodoo 1 3D accelerator card or a S3 Trio64 as the 2D card if you wish. Additionally they because very common in PC's and many were integrated on motherboards of Vendor PC's like Packard Bell's as an example in late 1996 and through the year 1997. The main reason is great DOS game compatibility and the best performance for build engine games. I'd prefer a Voodoo in a PCI slot card easily as a 3D accelerator over a Virge GX2 as that is a waste for using in an AGP slot. If it was a later PC (like a Pentium II) it would be better off with a nVidia RIVA 128 ZX AGP 2D/3D card or a TNT or TNT 2 2D/3D card. in a AGP slot.
I remember my first desktop P166mmx with a S3 Virge card. Can confirm 3D performance was worse than software. Then I bought a 3dfx Voodoo card, wow what a difference!
Not sure how you saw 3d performance worse than software. You must have had it incorrectly set up. I played lots of 3d games at 640x480 with the S3 ViRGE (and at slightly lower resolutions), and later paired it with 3dfx cards....
Direct3D drivers were ok for the games that were released about the same time (thus, 1996). The issue is that people today mostly run games and benchmarks much newer and then they are disappointed that the visual quality and speed are so poor. Virge VX is actually slightly slower than the original Virge (325). It does not have any performance enhancements of cheaper DX/GX (even though it was also released at the end of 1996). However, this chip was designed as a replacement for previous S3 Vision 9xx hi-end 2D cards. The increased cost was related to dual-ported VRAMs, which decreased the performance hit of the RAMDAC accessing memory in high resolutions. The chip also allows to connect external RAMDACs to get even higher resolutions and refresh rates. As a result, it is not fair to compare it with standard consumer 3D accelerators. This was intended for 2D CAD and any other 2D workload requiring hi-end hi-resolution CRTs at flicker-free refresh rates. Quake1 - strange. It worked on my card. I used the same VX board (with just 2MB) and GLQuake worked well with DX5 S3 OpenGL wrapper, once the resolution was lowered (this is done using command line parameters on the executable file). Btw the screen glitches could be caused by the drivers. The Diamond card was not a generic layout+BIOS. It worked well on my system with just one particular driver (unlike my other virge cards). - Given the fact that VX is not better than the original Virge (325), what you see, is what you could get in ~April 1996, when Direct3D was released (they postponed the original Virge to this date because of Microsoft; the hardware was ready at the end of 1995 though). At that time, there was ATI Rage I, which was even worse (no Z-Buffer, worse picture quality, less features, similar performance) and a few strange non-D3D cards like the Creative 3D blaster (VL-Bus only), NVIDIA NV1 (slower than Virge, no texture filtering, no perspective correction...) and Paradise Tasmania 3D (just lol...). Matrox had only the original Millennium 1 (MGA 2064W), which could accelerate just polygons without textures / transparency. It was relatively fast, but useless for games. With this perspective, S3 Virge was not bad, when it was released. The market was just moving too fast, so the cards released at the end of 1996 were mostly much better (Mystique, Verite 1000, Voodoo1, Permedia 1...).
Btw we made a benchmark to test early 3D accelerators. It is mostly about UNIX workstations and professional OpenGL cards, but there are also several Virge and other consumer boards. You can see the fillrate performance and how they are affected by different features (texturing hi/low-res, filtering, transparency, z-buffer...) swarm.cz/gpubench/_GPUbench-results.htm
@@RandomlyDrumming Well actually the release date is irrelevant. What counts is when the product got the market share, which for Voodoo started in 1997. The Virge cards were bought full 2 years earlier in 1995. So.... :)
@@SlavomirG You certainly got a point there, but still - s3 Virge launched in 1995, Voodoo Graphics in Q3 of 1996. so technically *technically* they're both from the mid-90's. xD
I had this card in my Pentium 200MMX, I only used it as a 2D card while running DOS or Linux. It was just a standard SVGA card to me. Paired it with a Voodoo2 12MB later on.
The point is, you could just buy cheaper S3 Trio64 and save a lot of money for Virge. If you never used 3d capabilities of Virge, it's basicaly S3 Trio 2D card. Many people were selling S3 Trio64 for cheap in those time, when they were moving to 3d accelerators, so it could be obtained very cheap and easy, and you could save like 70-100$, for Virge, that did nothing.
@@warrax111 Even if you used Virge's 3D - assuming you weren't using its dedicated API (which most games weren't), it was almost as slow as software mode...
@@cheaterman49 Yes, but there were also exceptions, some games were speeded up nicely. Also, S3 Virge had quite a headroom with tweaking&overclocking, here you can see, you could get 30-45% performance by upgrading memory modules to 4 MB and overlocking the card. www.vintage3d.org/virge.php VX version overclocked, was more than 50% faster from software mode in general, of course when software mode was 10 fps, you still had only 15 which is unplayable, but many titles actualy got from 20 to almost 30 fps, which was very nice addition and noticable.
Thanks! Yeah I think thats kinda the sad thing in a way, its almost to the point of being an okay 3d card.. its just too slow to actually give a decent playable performance in anything but one or two games..
The title of "3D Decelerator" was exclusive to the Intel 740 graphic cards. They were expensive for what you got, almost no VRAM and extremely underpowered, and also had a lot of compatibility problems. This card flopped so hard, that less than 2 years after it's launch, Intel killed the whole graphics division.
My brother had one, and i could not call it decelerator. My s3trio3d was.. it seemed it has no 3d at all, i discovered later that it had some and even could run glquake after some fuckery..
@@Samopal.VanoZz Yeah, the Trio3D sucked even harder, but it was never marketed as an Ati/nVidia/3DFx competitor, while the i740 was, and also it was dirt cheap.
I remember Terminal Velocity working well on my S3, in fact I think it was the only game that ran well on my S3 - for a given amount of 'running well'.
I have an old Toshiba laptop with a 2Mb Virge MX in it and a K6-2 and I started playing with it knowing full well about the hype surrounding it. My experience with it hasn't necessarily been great (no textures in half-life) and it is also technically underclocked, but between the smearing/smoothing effect of the dual scan display and the great performance of the K6, it actually hasn't been as bad as I feared. Like you, I have been pleasantly surprised by its performance.
I didn’t even know S3 had their own API. Years ago I played with both a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Virge DX 2MB card and a no name Virge DX 4MB card, and with DirectX drivers in win98SE on a AMD K6-2 machine, it actually was decently useable on old DirectX 3 era games like Motoracer and MDK. The 4MB version was vastly superior since it had some room for textures at 640x480 and wouldn’t mega bog to swap textures across the PCI bus. I’ve actually tested them in a fast overclocked slotketed Celeron system and actually managed to run Test Drive 6 in 320x240 resolution...the bottleneck was mostly video ram... They were decent chips with later drivers in later windows on early DirectX games and also made great 2D fill ins for a Voodoo/Voodoo2...but yeah, the early early 3D days with proprietary APIs on win95 were troublesome times all around. You should look into i740 cards...most notably Real3D stealth pci cards. They were basically an AGP card and a dedicated bank of AGP texture RAM all on a PCI card. They also weren’t nearly as fast as 3DFX, but could handle 1024x1024 texture resolution versus max 256x256 on the 3DFX chips, so the image quality was substantially better than much of the competition, and likely a big part of why they were so much slower.
I and everyone I knew had a Virge as the 2D card in a 3DFX setup. The only game I tried in native S3 mode was Descent, and that wasn't pleasant. It was the card everyone loved to hate, but we all had them anyway. It makes me sad that Commodore never managed to create their Hombre chipset. They wanted to use OpenGL exclusively right from the start, and I can only imagine how differently the industry would have been if that API had become commonplace instead of the mess of proprietary APIs from each manufacturer. I recall there were quite a few graphics cards that had less than a dozen games available, and there was a Matrox card that only had ONE game written for it (and it still ran poorly).
I had both a S3 Virge/GX and the more expensive Matrox Mystique. The Mystique was *much* faster than the Virge, but had terrible 3D visuals and compatibility. When the Voodoo Rush came around, it was the Mystique that I replaced. The Virge lived on a while along side a PowerVR and later Voodoo 2 until a motherboard upgrade to AGP... and a VirgeGX/2.
I still have quite a fondness of this card, as it was the first 3-D accelerator my family had back in 1996 with our Packard Bell with I believe a Pentium under 100 MHz. I was six years old at the time, and I specifically used it with Descent II. Since I wasn’t used to high frame rates at the time, I was perfectly pleased with the standard Virge we had. It wasn’t until I got my own computer, an HP Pavilion with a Celeron 433 in 1999, that I found even on board Intel graphics could outperform the S3. Next year my dad would buy me a 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, and the S3 became nothing but a memory until I started collecting vintage PC hardware around the end of the 2000s. Great video! You got a new subscriber!
thanks so much for the kind words! It is funny how our standards change with time - I also was perfectly happy with the frame rates I got on vintage computers at the time, but today they wouldnt even be considered "playable"! A slow pentium 1 with a virge would be a pretty tough combo though - these cards love a fast CPU!
I seem to recall it performing better than that in POD and Terminal Velocity. But... well it was a long long time ago, rose tinted specs etc. What I do remember very clearly is my jaw hitting the floor when I got my 3dfx VooDoo card.
The p133 I had back in 95/96 came with an s3d Virge dx card. I had that exact same demo CD and can definitely attest to terminal velocity running perfectly fine with it.
My first IBM compatible was a p100. I loved that computer. Many many years later I bought a used p133 chip and popped that in. Old style board so you had to adjust jumpers to recognize the "speed increase ". I still have that computer. It has a integrated s3 Trio 64+.
In general, aside from atrocious drivers and other incompatibilities, Virge didn't have enough memory bandwidth to successfully pull off a lot of 3D features without loosing a lot of performance. For some time, in the mid-90's, I had a Virge DX paired with Voodoo 1 and I used to experiment and compare the performance. I remember one time that I ran Tomb Raider 2 on the Virge and, of course, it ran really bad. But, some function keys could toggle 3D effects (like texture filtering, fog, etc.) on the fly, and I remember that disabling texture filtering really visibly increased frame rate on the Virge (Voodoo didn't even feel it, as it had enough memory channels and bandwidth).
In the 1990's I was running Linux, and back then X needed to be configured manually. The XFree86.config file needed all kinds of technical info, including something called dot clocks. I worked all this out on my S3 card in 1993, and rather than work all that out again, I just stuck with S3 cards through the 1990's. The S3 Virge might have been considered trash, but it just worked brilliantly when displaying X on my Linux box. It was a good card that did all I asked of it.
Yeah I think it has a worse reputation than it deserves honestly. Yes the 3d wasnt great, but nobody could do good 3d on the PC at that time, and the Virge was actually better than or at least as good as most of its competitors. It was only the Rendition Verite and Voodoo which came a bit later that changed that. Plus, like most S3 cards it had good compatibility and image quality so it wasnt bad in that respect. Just that $300 price tag though.. Thanks for watching!
Actually an S3 card saved my ass when I moved into Linux in 2005. By then it was very outdated, but did let me have X. Used it for a couple of years, and then moved into a TNT 128 someone threw into the rubbish.
I had a Virge GX2 (Diamond Stealth 3D 4000). It was horrible with XFree86. I had rebuild X several times to debug the Virge driver. Xdaliclock and moire2 xscreensaver would lock up my computer right. It ran ok in 95.
My first 'real' graphics card was a Virge DX-based card (not sure if it was Diamond's card - this was way back in 1996/1997), and it was just as bad a 3D card as every reviewer has said. It had great 2D support in DOS, but its reputation as a 3D 'graphics decelerator' is well deserved.
I built my own graphics card(only 2d) in 87 for a university project. The artifacts on this video look just like the ones I experienced when I decided the vram couldn't possibly require all those decoupling capacitors. It may be there are some dry or cracked joints on the solder or if they are using really bad cap they may have dropped out but should be using ceramic.
I remember when I told my dad I was spending my hard earned paper route/lawn mowing money on an expensive 3dfx voodoo card, he asked why, because the S3 had 3d on it already. Waste of money he said.. but he wasn't the gamer. So I bought the voodoo, plugged it in, and just wow. He ate his words on that one haha!
I almost bought a S3 ViRGE card back in 1996, but scanning computer magazines made me instead decide on a Riva 128 based card. Quite likely on of the better decisions in my history of computers with the Nvidia card lasting for quite a few years.
I'm using this card (ViRGE/GX, which comes with 4MB) for every pure DOS retro gaming box I build, the latest being driven by an AMD K6-2 CPU (550MHz). I don't buy these cards for 3D - I buy these cards because of being legendary for smoking nearly everything else in 2D at the time, especially with the S3VBE TSR loaded up. Out of all the video cards on Ebay, it's the ViRGE/GX that I've loaded up on for all my future DOS box builds. I'm probably the reason they now cost $50 instead of $15.
The ViRGE doesn't have much actual 3D-specific hardware. The math to describe the textured triangles (starting edges, deltas X/Y, Z/Y, U/X, V/X, etc) is done in software by the S3 driver or library. The GPU is just some DDA accumulators that step along the edges and rows of each pixel of a triangle. The CPU has to calculate 27 parameters by itself each textured triangle, so unless the triangle is very large, all this overhead of calculation and transfer is what bottoms out performance. To actually be of benefit, the ViRGE needed to do more math onboard instead of in the software driver/library. This is what I think most reviewers are missing, that the ViRGE is just a texel fetcher and interpolator. The vertex and start value/delta calculations are entirely CPU software.
I conceded from that era. I don't think people was all that disappointed (except magazines). S3 was awesome for most DOS and 3D games. Running a 3D game at the time was usually done in software mode, so no slowdown. Of course I am talking about when they started including that card bundled with most computers. A Vodoo? It was a nice bedtime story, but despite saying "It allows you to play all games at maximum settings", the highlight usually was "It costs like a car!". So I never knew anyone who used a Vodoo.... Think we relied in our parents to buy those, and usually parents where anti games and never played themselves... not to count that imagine, 1995, you blew up 3,000 pounds on a computer(5,800 with inflation). You can understand why you won't spend the same amount on a better machine just after a year, or spend nearly as much on a "card to play stupid games"
People asking for a cheap pc in 1996 got the S3 card inside. People asking a pc for games got a Matrox. People using the Pc professionally, or people standing all day in front of the monitor, got an ATI card. It had the best font for Word, and was the fastest and with best contrast with CAD software. S3 was at bottom of the heap, but it was cheap and stocked from all hardware distributors.
Yep, I actually owned a S3 Virge -- it was an OK card for my 2D usage -- but I never attempted 3D use with this card -- so I'm not aware of the 3D issues.
Pretty interesting! Been fiddling with an old Compaq Armada 7800 which uses an integrated S3 ViRGE/MX 4MB - with surprisingly decent results. As long as you play at a lower resolution (~400x300) and, if possible, disable bilinear filtering in-game, you can get decent performance. The lack of supported blend modes does hurt compatibility with many D3D games though, with graphical glitches as a result. That being said, the laptop's 266MHz Pentium II can run a lot of stuff faster in software than when using the ViRGE!
Yep, that was pretty much what I noticed as well - it looks much better in S3d mode, but you can get faster FPS in software mode.. hence the "3d Decelerator" name everyone gave it at the time.. Still fun to play with these old cards and see what they can (or cant) do..
Hi. I had one od those Virge in my computer shop in the late 90's. Never been able to run any 3d game on it neither direct3d nor Linux OpenGL, although the 2d part was great either for gaming or for windows office work. I remember seeing a nice demo in a computer fair in Paris, where I bought the game Hellbender. At 3:00 I bought one of this S3-968 PCI for a grand 2000 FF (around 400 euros), to keep it less than 2 years and eventually replaced by a Matrox Mystique. I should have spent less and wait for a Voodoo 1 instead. The 968 was really fast in 2d though, after the 864 VLB I had in my 486DX2-66 which was also very fast
Yeah I think the virge pretty much had to stick to its proprietary S3d to get any kind of 3d performance (and even then it was slow) Direct 3d and OpenGL were even worse by all accounts. The S3 cards always did seem to have good 2d performance though, so they are still great for that use case. The 968 is a really nice 2d card for sure!
@@_nom_ Sometimes it happens when wanting to keep up-to-date with the last products. I changed my way, I kept my previous i7 for seven years before buying a new one.
Thanks for your in depth video. Loved it! Is that a MAG DX1595 monitor? I had one of those and enjoyed every bit out of it! What a lovely monitor that was! Do you perhaps have a model number of that case at 2:54? I used to have it back in the days, but can’t find the model number anywhere!
It is indeed a DX1595, well spotted! Its a great monitor for sure. I also have a MAG xj530 and thats also really nice. I have moved over to the 17" Mercer monitor at the moment though just because its bigger (size matters!) The model number is PT50DC for the Acerpower 450dp case. I dont know if that is an Acer specific model number because I think quite a few different brands used a very similar case to this back in the day. I have seen Mecers with virtually the same case for example. Hope it helps you find it though!
Oh wow, this takes me back. My family finally bought our first new PC in summer 1998, after having used a hand-me-down PC-XT and a hand-me-down PC-AT (both very, VERY antiquated even at that time!!!) and I'm pretty sure that its original graphics card was a ViRGE. The only good thing I can say about it is that, for late-1990s games like Unreal Tournament and Battlezone 98, it was definitely better than software rendering, but otherwise really disappointing. 😅 I think the PC's original specs were a P2-class Celeron CPU at 300MHz, 32MB of RAM, 4GB of HDD storage, an Ensoniq AudioPCI soundcard, and a ViRGE graphics card with 4MB of VRAM. We would have scrapped the PC just 3 years later in summer/autumn of 2001, but not before upgrading it with a 16MB ATI All-in-Wonder graphics card, a secondary Maxtor HDD with 8GB of added storage, and a HP USB 4× CD-RW burner. Our next PC was a P3-700MHz with a DVD-ROM drive and ~30GB storage, but I'm pretty sure I carried over the ATI card, the 8GB extra HDD, and the HP USB CD burner. That P3 would have sat from maybe 2003 to 2012 as "mom and dad's get-stuff-done PC" while my brother and I built our own P4 PCs for gaming, and then moved on to multi-core, 64-bit builds. Both in retrospect and in living it in realtime, it's pretty crazy how rapidly technology was advancing and obsolescing until about 2005. Your "brand new" PC could be pretty painfully obsolete just 6-18 months after purchase, and absolutely antiquated after 2-3 years.
Did you try removing the memory expansion and running Terminal Velocity with out it? It may have something to do with detecting if there are 4MB and using that vs just the games that were written to just use the stock 2MB and don't take advantage of the extra 2MB even if it is there. It looks like a memory issue to me. either addressing is off or something...oops I just see that you already tryied that...I wonder if it is problem with they oneboard 2MB or even even caps?
I remember getting this card for my IBM 5x86 computer. The Diamond card included interstate 76 game, and it ran pretty good. It was better than a lot of the onboard and generic cards mostly used at the time.
This was quite interesting to see. I mean they apparently succeeded somewhat in their marketing as I thought it would've been quite good card from some magazines. I remember wanting to have s3 virge at some point. Luckily they weren't available here and then in the end got Voodoo2 which I was really happy.
1:28 What? Windows 95 was one of the most revolutionising operative systems to grace personal and home computers. I bought it on day one and was absolutely blown away.
I remember the s3 virge mx in my moms tiny celeron notebook being able to run gta 3 on windows 98, but migrating to windows xp the direct x support wasn't enough to still support gta 3.
The S3 Trio64V+ soldered to the mobo of the Presario 5528 AIO had a similar 1MB RAM upgrade board (for a total of 2MB!), basically looked the same but shorter, think fewer chips.
Just picked up and outfitted a Toshiba Tetra from the late 90s with this graphics chipset onboard (S3 ViRGE 4mb, probably had an excess surplus of S3 chips no one wanted for some reason) for next to nothing at a thrift store; in the box with all its cords and 'sessories. Just missing the RAM and HDD, which I was gonna replace anyway. I'm finding that your best bet with the ViRGE is to pretend it isn't a 3D accelerator _at all._ Sticking with non-accelerated games, it's actually quite nice. But that's not what it was advertised for. Anything from the "3D acceleration" explosion of the mid 90s runs kinda iffy or not at all. And before they could get support it was already obsolete. Stuff like Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, The Sims (which is notoriously difficult to get running on modern systems, though doable without emulation), Sanitarium, Lemmings, and a bunch of non-accelerated 3D games all run great. I think the most "resource heavy" 3D game I've played on this machine so far has been Daggerfall and it runs great, even with the Eyes of Argonia patch installed- provided it's a patched full install running off an 8gb Compact Flash card instead of a spinning rust IDE hard drive, and it's using a Pentium MMX @266MHz and 192mb of RAM to do so. Pretty decent $10 laptop, honestly. All the point-and-click games - seriously, a *massive* library of adventure games, edutainment classics, pinball games, the rogue-likes and ASCII games, classic arcade ports, Sega's Genesis/MD ports for PC (I wasn't aware of these until LGR covered them in a vid), so many other great 2D games. All of these run phenomenally, and if that's what you want then this is a great card to start your DOS gaming PC adventure if you don't own a bunch of spare 3Dfx cards lying around but need to scratch that DOS gaming itch.
i have a NEC READY 9250,(bios circa 1992) it indeed has an on-board S3 Graphics chip. it has been upgraded to an ATI 3D Turbo Pro(mach64 based) 8MB Ram. cool video.
I believe I owned at some point a S3 Virge DX and had 3dfx Voodoo card as it's companion. I can't remember when I bought them and what cost, I rarely remember stuff like this.
I had a S3 Virge with a cyrix 120+ which was not great for windows games but later upgraded intel mmx 166 and voodoo card and I was happy for a couple years.
I had the ELSA Victory 3D 4 MB with the S3 Virge in 1996, and this card was my first experience with 3D acceleration. I remember playing the bundled game Terminal Velocity in S3D mode on a Pentium 90.
ah nice! I think that was based on the original ViRGE chip (not VX or DX or GX) so its performance would have been very similar to this card probably. Thanks for the view and, based on your channel name I'm sure you will enjoy the next video with the voodoo2 even more!
Yes, the original and first Virge Chip, one year later in 1997, the 4 MB Voodoo Graphics came into this system and this changed all in 3D acceleration!
The same year people were amazed by the Nintendo 64, which also very often ran games as slow as 15 fps and in just 320x240 resolution. I dont' remember which video cards I had back then. I know I had the first 3dfx add on and Voodoo 2. I'm pretty sure I had an S3 variant as well at some point.
On the contrary, I didn't experience the situation you had with Terminal Velocity on my S3 Virge DX card running s3d, instead it performed rather nice, and this was the only game that I actually experienced s3d......
I'd like to try out a DX and GX one fay just to see if they work better without these issues. I have a feeling its to do with the VX version I used. Thanks for watching!
@@ohsoretro5612 So what's the difference between DX, VX and GX versions? All I remember was that GX utilized SGRAM, but I don't think there's any difference in performance since the main chip was still Virge series.
@@ching-chenhuang8119 I think you are correct in that they used different RAM types, but I think that did make a slight performance difference. I think the DX and GX were also clocked higher so that would improve things slightly as well. I am planning on doing a follow-up to this video in the future where I look at the actual performance differences between the different variants of the Virge.
Some additional games and tests that show the S3 Virge was capable enough to accelerate some games: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-llYTUPUEPBE.html The push for SVGA was what made the card show so poorly. Using it at 512x384 or 400x300 sometimes without bilinear filter WOULD accelerate games, especially on mid-low end CPUs of the time.
S3 was always good at 2D, and there were so many generic cards out there. It could be obtained for cheap & was often bundled with prebuilt systems. It was fine as a display adapter, since most of the games were software rendered 3D, or they looked better/performed better in software mode. The main advantage of 3D accelerators was that higher resolutions were often available in 3D modes. Games would get noticeably slower, as the resolution got higher, while hardware rendered 3D was often faster at higher resolution, like 1024 x 768. S3 also paired well with 3DFX cards. They seemed to me, to be faster than the generic Trident cards. The Verite was absolutely worth it, though, and had unbeatable/noticeably better 2D performance and decent 3D performance. Not everything supported it, though. For most 3D cards in those days, 3D performance came at the cost at 2D performance. It wasn't worth it, if you didn't play hardware accelerated 3D games, because 3D cards would often make software rendered games run slower. I forgot that Decent 2 had hardware rendering support built-in. There was a 3DFX version, but it didn't support 3D in cockpit mode.
now those nvidia mx440 was lacing some stuff too. carmageddon 1 2 can be played nfs 1 2 3 4 5. fps can be limited to 300x200 in those games. even doom e into the futer can run 300x200. so a low end gpu can run wery low.
The s3 verge is better than you think it is depending on the model. I had one back in the day that I upgraded the memory on by socketing more memory in and it ran tomb raider at 640x480 and a solid frame rate. I think one of the problems with the verge was there were so many different models that used different memory and had completely different build quality. Not that it was going to replace a voodoo 3 but back in the day I paid I think 30 or $40 for the card and the memory upgrade.
That card was terrible. The only games it "accelerated" were a couple demo games that came with it, and even that was not impressive. I've never seen a Direct 3D game that actually worked with it
I've ran _Moto Racer_ with Direct 3D mode. It only ran in 320x240, wasn't really faster than software mode, but it did apply a bilinear filter to the textures, although that filter looked inferior to the 3DFX.
My first new computer had this card, Tiny P133 :D I think it was supposed to come with an ATI rage card, not sure how I ended up with the Virge, I marginally upgraded it with my cousin's Matrox 3d add on card.
I was 16 at the time and I remember that all the companies rushed their "3D" models back in those days. I had a Matrox Millenium myself that was cool but not 3D at all besides for a few things 😊. Anyway, nobody I know was fooled into thinking that the Virge was a real 3D card at all. It was cool on its own way though: cheap, with 4Mb of memory and very compatible. Very nice if you were into Linux and a good alternative to pair with a Voodoo.
All S3 cards were terrible, but I don't remember them being anywhere near those prices. They were ok for a cheap PC and often the go to for a basic setup at the time. Intel released a card as well that was cheap and that was far better. The trade on one of those was about 20 quid or less. Nothing beat a Voodoo and Matrox Millenium combo though, but that was a big chunk of cash to spend even then.
I did think those prices were insane when doing the research for the video, so maybe those were launch prices? But yeah, the prices seem to have dropped very quickly - do you remember what year you were selling them for 20 quid?
I used to play Descent via Kali95 and KaliDos. I got the Virge3d since they included a Shareware version of descent for Virge. What a disappointment. Software rendering had higher FPS, and there was no option to run it at anything other than 640x480. I would have happily run it at 320x240 if I could have gotten a steady 30 FPS or higher. There would never be a Descent II exe either. I did get a Voodoo, but it would be years before any kind of Descent port to Glide (Descent 3)
You have to take into consideration that they were only a handful of real 3-D cards in the 90s in early 2000s. Three labs is basically The best card you can get in those cards run anywhere from $650 on up to $1200 and that would be the wildcat card. The mini GL cards like 3-D FX were fantastic cards but they did not include a complete 3-D API
I don't think S3 was the biggest graphics chip manufacturer in mid 90s. On the mass market, they also had Trident to contend with, extremely widespread, probably more so. But this wasn't to stay long like that, by late 90s Trident fizzled out but S3 was going strong. I heard Trident was working on 3D tech of their own but it wasn't ready, but arguably, it's not like S3's tech was particularly ready either now was it? But i think jumping the gun and releasing it even as a paper bullet point helped S3 stay relevant and sell units, which is how they managed to stay around for a while longer, though ultimately they may have paid for relative success by losing all reputation. S3's Windows GDI desktop acceleration is hardly award winning but fast enough. ATi, Matrox, Tseng all did it better. When Riva 128 came out, it took the new GDI Windows acceleration performance crown and also was leading in 3D performance and had decent Direct3D and OpenGL compatibility, no mean feat for a new company. The fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy worked surprisingly well for ATi. Between S3's slow-ish and half-baked 3D, and ATI's fast-ish and completely and utterly broken 3D, S3 would be my choice. ATI had no officially supported games at all that i can think of, and just the carnage from horrible drivers was rampant. I played the S3D version of Terminal Velocity back in the day, but i don't remember which card on, i don't think i ever had the VX, it's an odd one. DX i had for sure but maybe GX2 too. It worked fine and looked good! No lines. I did not know Screamer had a 3D accelerated mode. I would have loved it! One problem seems to be just insane Direct3D overhead. Other is that 3D modes in many games are confined to 640x480 or more, while in software rendered mode, 320x200/320x240 and some of 400x300 and 512x384 are available, which help A LOT. It would have only been fair to run such 3D hardware with insufficient fillrate also at less than 640x480. Image quality of software render was highly compromised to begin with. NV1? NV1 is a rumour which does not exist. It's not a Direct3D or OpenGL GPU at all, but it does have a nice little library of games ported from the Saturn!
S3 Virge was also used for these two gfx cards for Amiga. bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=463 bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=464
indeed, and worked quite well. remember playing quite a lot of games on my mac emulators on the amiga 4000 20 years ago, still have two CV3D cards in my possession..
The VIRGE DX had better software support and was more popular than the VX. I remember many games taking new life on my DX back in 96/97. By the time it was pretty amazing in terms of performance /value.
Obviously the biggest problem was the lack of software support. I personally owned a ViRGE -based card back in the day (because I got it for cheap). I remember it running certain game titles pretty smoothly (especially Screamer and Terminal Velocity), but of course the biggest problem was the severely lacking software support. The card itself wasn't bad for the price I paid for it.
Thats very surprising! I remember trying to play Diablo on my Dx4 100 and the game wouldnt even load - kept complaining it needed at least a Pentium. Eventually found a patch somewhere that would override that I think, but the game didnt run at all well.. that Diamond mach64 you had must've been quite a fast card!
Teminal Velocity!! I remember finding it thinking it was a sequel or something for Escape Velocity. It was the disappointment of my childhood. Then Escape Velocity: Override came out and it was k.
The biggest problem with the ViRGE was it's poor texturing performance, especially with bilinear filtering applied. In some games with very granular texture settings (admittedly not very many), you could get massive performance gains by turning off textures where possible (though massive gains in this context is still pretty mediocre performance).
