remember when 3d accelerators were new?

anyone remember back in the day when 3d accelerators where new? i certianly do and i remember wanting a voodoo2 for so long. however it is but a fragment of the past now, even the company behind the voodoo cards is gone. i am sure many of you still have your voodoo I, II, banshe, III and other 3dfx cards.

for those younger viewers. 3d accelerators where a new thing at the time and most games did not require them until about 1999/2000. even popular games like quake, quake2, half-life and others didnt require their use, but they sure looked a hell of alot better with it.
early 3d accelerators where also different in a few ways. one was the fact AGP was no out, until 1997, so all cards used the PCI. the second way was it was not a stand alone video card, you had to link it to your exsisting video card with a VGA cable. also your could even link up rwo accelerators. like the voodoo II.

I have fond memmories of those cards, despite the fact i never owned one until after i got a TNT2 card. by that time i just used in in an older DOS system

All the people who spent a ton of money on Voodoo cards must have been pretty pissed off when they became pretty much obsolete.

Hm, i remember GTA Had a 3dfx mode, when was that? 1996?

My first video card was a Voodoo 3 3000. Boy was I so happy when I first got it. Then a couple months later I found they went out of business.

I worshipped 3Dfx back in the day, when I got my Voodoo 2 card. That was like...the Dodge Viper of accelerators. I could push ~60 FPS on Quake 2 at 800x600 with that thing. It just ruled.

Then my dad got a Riva TNT, and did the same thing, except at 1024x768 (a mode which my card didn't even support).

I was so happy when my system was finally able to play all of those 3dfx only games.

Actually many games had a 3dfx version besides the common Direct3D or OpenGL.

I must say that many of the 3dfx versions were much better looking than the simple Direct3D. This card jwas just perfect during its reign.

I used to have a 3Dfx1 and then switched to 3Dfx2 (3D monster2) which was a killer. It could run everything very good with P200...
This until Quake3 arrived, it was then down to a crawl :P

I remember when math coprocessors were the new rage and everyone threw out his SX.

Sephiroth said:

anyone remember back in the day when 3d accelerators where new?

Yeah, wasn't that like last year?

Sephiroth said:

anyone remember back in the day when 3d accelerators where new? i certianly do and i remember wanting a voodoo2 for so long.

Yeah me too, I remember waiting and waiting and waiting for a price drop from $299 for the Voodoo2 card alone. After well over half a year, nothing had happened so I caved in and bought it. When I went back to Best Buy a few weeks later, I saw the card, now packaged with 3 free games, for $249. I did manage to get out of the store without hurting anybody, but whoever was on the other end of the 3DFX customer support wasn't so lucky. They didn't reimburse me either. I've still got the card here. Even though I can't use it, I refuse to sell it and still keep it in perfect condition :P

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AgentSpork said:

My first video card was a Voodoo 3 3000.

sup voodoo 3 buddy...
PCI baby
Still got the bastard too...I should hang it on my wall because it kicked so much ass...in fact, i'm gonna do that

Yes, I remember. My brother built a computer, 233MHz Pentium MMX, 64MB RAM, Matrox Mystique 4MB, and a Diamond Monster 3D (Voodoo 1).

Hell, I still have fond memories of VGA and EGA modes.

hehe, I kept the CGA card that came with the old XT we had
Twas a 4.77 megahertz with a 20 megs MFM HDD, which was huge for this time when games were hardly bigger than 100 Kb. :P

I remember my first 3d accelerated video card: It was a Voodoo1 with either 6 or 8 megs of ram. Heh, memories. I used it to run Die By the Sword. :)

I put one of mine into an old DOS box, the other sits in a desk. yea i wanted it so bad i could taste it. back then i had never heard of Nvidia or ATI, but i loved 3dfx. that changed in 1999, that christmas i got a new system with a Nvidia TNT2 card. and in 2000 the geforce 2 was out, maybe 2001. also the voodoo 5 was out. I ended up buying the Geforce 2 over voodoo because it seemed so much better. now they are gone. the ones who started and pushed the industry, gone

A while back i think i posted a pic of a very old ATI card, EGA/CGA

My Voodoo 2 was the shit. That thing could run anything. Then it got fried.

When 3D the accelerator fashion started, 3DFx had barely any competition. It was just the only effective 3D card during these few years (besides some unaffordable professional stuff of course).

We had the Matrox Mystique : pretty good in 2D, was doing a lil bit of 3D but absolutely no texturing = sucks dick. Mystique + 3DFx was very good combo tho.

Ah, I remember three years ago...

My Matrox card was crappy.
The only game that ran well on it was Shadowman, and that's because the game was designed specifically for the card. Of course, that game was also crap, and any other game(including Half-Life) never ran better than 24fps.

Add to that my 56k and my super-crappy Cyrix chip, and I was a SAD, SAD, MONKEY.

my first after market video card was a Voodoo 5 back in like 1999. i bought it for 200 dollars from circuit city. 64 megs memory in that thing, and i didnt find out till a month later i think that 3dfx was out of business. it was an AWESOME card and ran pretty much everything good for like 3 years until it broke. love it. dont know where it is now, i think i left it at my friends house cuz it stopped rendering in 3d.

You make me feel bad!

I'm getting my firts video card ever next month!

My first card was a PowerVR PCX1, which I believe is developed before the Voodoo's release (1996).

It had funky crap bugs with DX6 games and later, such as additive blend not working. I soon knew I had to get a Voodoo2 imeediately after those anomalies.

Goat said:

i think i left it at my friends house cuz it stopped rendering in 3d.

All (and I do MEAN ALL) voodoo cards have VERY vulnerable drivers, so if you happen to get a freeze at times while playing or so, chances are the drivers are corrupt. Forcefully remove the currently installed Voodoo drivers and install them again when prompted.

i tried EVERY driver, and no matter what i tried that used 3d rendering, it IMMEDIATELY froze with the first frame. even dxdiag's 3d shit froze.

I don't remember because my Voodoo 3 TV is the only 3D card I've ever had.

"do you voodoo?" wasn't that an advertising slogan for the card? i will try to find a good page about these cards and post it here

I do remember vaguely, Voodoo 3 2000 16MB was my first video card. Now, it's a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB.

Why yes, I got a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP card. It was four years ago today, in fact. I still have it in my desktop PC. I don't use that computer for anything other than MIDI.

My voodoo 2 hangs from a hook on my ceiling, I thought about getting it framed.

I remember "local bus video", whatever that means. It had 500k of memory and wouldn't run DOOM95.The salesman said it would run CAD so it would run anything, liar.

You may be thinking of the old VESA cards, that used the VESA local BUS. was basicly ISA with an extension. I do recall that you could also use them for older ISA stuff.

i am glad PCI won out on that one, also a more uncommon standard was MCA (i think) had pins lined up like AGP, these where also large. have only seen them in a few systems, one was a unix server
has images of both
http://members.iweb.net.au/~pstorr/pcbook/images/isavesa.jpg