I used to play games like Starsiege (the mech game) on dialup. With our 250ms pings, your brain just learned to compensate for the delay and click that much earlier to shoot.
But yeah, those lucky people with their DSL modems and 60ms pings would wipe the floor with us.
I loved playing starsiege back in 2000. I had a wired college campus connection, but shared with so many students, my pings would go anywhere from 50 to 500 depending on time of day. Near-timeouts showed the client side prediction code in action, with mechs sliding around and then freezing in place.
The torque engine (at least tribes 2) was wild what it was capable of on dial up. 32 or 64 players was okay compared to 8 on quake 2 depending on your latency and connection speed.
I played in Tribes 1 tournaments ... I never had a computer powerful enough for Tribes 2 – it had a very bumpy launch, remember? A lot of C++ exceptions, etc.
But Tribes 1 was incredible in how smoothly it handled "larger" servers. It would be so chaotic.
When qtest was released, I was there in the IRC channel and one of the first to play.
I remember connecting to someone's machine and just destroying everyone. Afterward I got a message from someone congratulating me, but being incredulous about my ping time being 26ms.
I happened to be on the first floor in the first dorm on campus to get wired internet access, and they had an OC3 dedicated to it. Two months earlier there were 16 of us splitting that line, with public IP addresses. (Going back to dial-up after leaving the dorm was.. difficult).
So I told him, yeah I kinda have a ridiculous internet connection here at school. He was like, "no, you don't understand - it is my machine. I am playing on the server and your ping time is lower than mine!"
There was also a perverse effect on some games. With a graphics card, your gameplay could be altered and you had to unlearn all the reflexes you built on CPU rendering alone. Moto Racer (1997) was like that. The gameplay with a graphics card was completely different, even trajectories (I assume lag made the cpu accept a little bit more rounding errors).
If I remember correctly to get transparent water the level also had to be re processed through the "vis" program with a transparent water flag set.
vis did a precalculation for where a level segment(the partition in binary space partition) could be seen from any other level segment. the end effect was that while glquake did have a option for transparent water, the geometry would not draw on the far side. making the effect useless without a bit of extra work. But I have to admit I have no idea if entities(other players) would draw or not.
Adding: the server and client had to both be running vis patched maps to be able to see other players in the water due to the way entity visibility was calculated server-side.
The downside to running vis patched maps on a server is it used slightly more CPU than unpatched maps IIRC. Perhaps someone that ran more servers than I did (I ran two nodes on an Intergraph InterServe with dual P6-200s) could weigh in on what the impact was at scale.
> I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER.
Searching for "2Fort4" in YouTube yielded some interesting videos for people curious what the original Quake Mod version of the map looked like:
As someone who still spends at least 3 hours a week playing 2Fort on the current Team Fortress 2, it's fascinating to see how the core of the map is still basically the same after 20 years.
EDIT: Another video which goes into more detail about the history of each 2fort version, going back to its original inspiration from a Doom 2 level:
On a very different scale, but I recall playing bzflag decades ago and discovering that I simply could not jump my tank to the second level. My graphics card was so slow that something wasn't working correctly, and no matter how many times I tried from different distances I would almost make it, but not quite.
Even having a solid dial-up connection with a ~180-185ms ping was a ridiculous advantage when most HPBs were ~350ms, particularly in clan invitationals for Q1CTF. We were playing as LPBs in the dorm at ~45-60ms and 180ms wasn't that much of a concern, aside from sliding around corners more than expected, but at 350ms you were basically shooting predictively at where you assumed they'd be next, not where they 'were'.
Subspace/Continuum also used lag in its gameplay, with players warping to recently exploded spaceships so they could continue to invade. It was an established technique and had to be defended against.
My first gpu ever was a voodoo 2 8mb. I remember starting up the original unreal and getting it working. Shortly after we got a cable modem. 12 year old me was having a total blast. ;)
I remember my first like 5 paychecks when I was a teenager scooping ice cream went to a voodoo3 from compUSA. I don't even think it had a fan, and I remember being shocked how small the pci was as id been accustomed to mostly ISA "daughter boards"
I'm consistently amazed at how massive video cards are today... it really feels like it's often excessive for the sake of being excessive over any real need. I was actually happy to see the depth shrink of the Meshify C case, now I'm disappointed I'm probably going to have to swap the case for a new GPU... it's too hard to find options that fit beyond mid-range, and even then.
Those old cards were way under 50 Watts. Even a "low-end" card now like an Intel B580 (list price $250, inflation adjusted equivalent to about $125 in the late 90s.) is 225 W. Cooling and power circuitry are much more critical now.
Even then... There's no way an RTX 5070 needs the same cooler as a 5080/5090 by any stretch, but many of these cards on the lower-mid range are using the same coolers as on the high end. I doubt they're really needed in terms of that big. I could understand a slightly heavier 2-fan model, which would fit in more cases. Even for overclocking, they don't add much.
Then again, I also have a solid case without windows. But there are plenty of SFF builders that would like a more reasonably sized upper mid-range card. I'm not suggesting that single slot is enough... but a 2-slot dual fan design should be suitable/sufficient for a stock-clocked 5070 Ti.
Have we crossed the threshold where more "Graphics Processing Units" are sold for ML than for graphics processing?
I remember thinking it was funny that gaming ultimately subsidized a lot of the major advances in ML for the last decade. We might be flipping to a point where ML subsidizes gaming.
The 'death' of PC computing has been rather exaggerated. Each year hundreds of millions of PCs are still sold, and that's exclusively referring to prepackaged stuff. There's then the increasingly large chunk of people that simply upgrade a frankenputer as necessary. As for gaming Steam has users in the hundreds of millions and continues to regularly grow. And while that is certainly going to encompass most people, I'm sure there are some oddballs out there that game but don't use Steam.
So GPUs sold primarily for ML probably still make up a tiny share of the overall market, but I expect they make up a huge chunk of the market for cards like A100. Gaming hasn't been bleeding edge (in terms of requirements) for a very long time and card prices drop quickly, so there's just no point in spending that sort of money on a card for gaming.
These are very different stats. He was referring to unit sales of GPUs, not $ sales. The A100 is a $8000+ video card and so cards like it are going to dominate in revenue, even if their sales numbers are relatively low. For contrast the most popular card, per the Steam hardware survey, is (inexplicably - probably because of prepackaged kits) the RTX 4060, which is a $300 card.
In 2024 256 million PCs were sold but only 40 million of those were desktops. Excluding the fact that some PCs (hard to say a number but I'd be surprised if it weren't over 40%) are office PCs with crappy GPUs, most laptops also have a bad, integrated GPU.
There's a chance that this year or the next one more GPUs will be sold for AI than for graphics.
Laptops are also desktops, for all pratical purposes other than being able to swap components.
There are plenty of games and graphics to play, all the way back to the Atari 2600, not everyone is playing the last version of Call of Duty, Cyberpunk, or whatever tops the AAA charts.
In fact, those integrated GPUs are good enough for WebGL 2.0, which I still haven't seen much that can top mobile games graphics in the last 10 years (done with OpenGL ES), other than demoscene reels on shader competitions.
I'm fairly sure OP was more concerned about modern GPUs being used as TPUs or whatever they're called, than about what graphics circuits the Atari 2600 was using.
Even mid range GPUs are proportionally much more expensive. I built a decent gaming PC with a GTX 760 10 years ago for about $900. These days you'd have to pay double for the same relative performance.
Again, there are plenty of games to chose from besides last generation AAA games.
I guess some folks might suffer from FOMO, but that doesn't change the fact there are more games to play than most folks can achieve to finish during their lifetime, that aren't last generation AAA.
This seems commonly believed but isn't really accurate at all. For instance here [1] is a build to play Cyberpunk 2077 for less than $450 (low, 1080p, 50+ FPS). And that game is clunky, and that build is valuing price > performance. Add a couple hundred more and it'll run that game (or any other) like a beast.
Also, especially in modern times, keep in mind how real inflation has been. That $900 PC from 10 years ago would be $1200+ today.
Specially funny to me is how on console orientend channels everyone is talking about the raise of PC gaming, it never went anywhere.
Using computers, not game consoles, for gaming was all over the place during the 8 and 16 bit home computing days, and the large majority eventually moved into Windows PC, as the other platforms died, that is why Valve has to translate Windows/DirectX if they want to have any games at all on their SteamDeck.
Consoles has been a niche market, at least here in Europe, mainly used by kids until they are old enough not to destroy the family's computer while playing games, given that many families only have one per household. And nowadays that roles has probably been taken over the tablets.
To the point that Playstation/XBox are now becoming publishing brands, as the exponential growth for selling consoles has plateaued.
When the reveal the information about SEGA the whole leadership team should have been on a plane to Japan the next day, all to apologize bow and scrape.
And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.
> And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.
ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?
The same article also has another photo of a Creative-branded card. Other card brands also definitely marketed cards with ATI chips. I remember I had a R200-based card from some third-party manufacturer. ATI and Nvidia also had reference cards but I don't know if those ended up being sold in the mass market or not.
The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch by having total control over the hardware (minus the CPU, obv). Essentially building customer-oriented x86 SGI machines, branching out of the gaming market and challenging workstation vendors. A 64 bits Opteron+Voodoo based Windows machine would have been something to behold. But the Sega thing probably torpedoed the funding that would have been required for them to become independent of graphic card vendors.
They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.
Yes, I remember toward the end it seemed like they were just releasing souped up versions of last year's product. I don't know if it was a resources issue or they just didn't expect the market to advance so fast.
I worked for an elevator manufacture that killed somebody, they fucked up the whole apologize in Japan thing too. Even if it wasn't actually their fault.
I loved playing No One Lives Forever 1&2 on my Voodoo 5 5500. That was the height of my PC building days. Now as a wizened old man, I'm stuck with these Apple Macbook Pros/Airs and they do well enough. But I do miss building my own machines...
How wizened? If you are close to retiring, maybe you can build a pc and play some games. Keep the brain running, and stay in touch with friends (if they’ll do multiplayer).
FWIW, you can build a fully functional desktop for ~$400 with integrated graphics (that can play most modern games on lower settings), or maybe $600 with a discreet GPU. Less if you go with used parts.
My first 3D card was a Righteous Orchid 3d. It had a mechanical relay in it to switch between 2d and 3d modes, so it made a distinctive click[0] when you loaded Quake3D.
Or, too many times, it didn't, and I had to try again.
I have more memories of my 3dfx Voodoo cards than of any other old hardware. The OpenGL implementation was so buttery smooth that there is simply nothing to compare it to. Quake 2 at 120fps on a 90Hz CRT was just something else entirely. It felt like there was no input latency at all and even with a higher ping of 80-100 in RocketArena it felt smoother than modern shooters on a 144hz panel.
It was truly jaw dropping firing up quake 1 for the first time on 3dfx voodoo1. Double the resolution of software and super smooth framerate, and much better quality texture mapping too. I recall tweaking some setting (gl_flashblend?) so that I could see pretty glowing orbs around my rockets (and strategically, also everybody else's rockets).
I was the unfortunate owner of an S3 ViRGE card at the time - the (in)famous "3D decelerator". I managed to get Quake running on it, and it looked nice, but was slower than with software rendering...
I had an S3 ViRGE too. It really was a decelerator, and the number of games that actually supported it was minuscule. I managed to run GLQuake, but without any textures - just shades of gray - and even that ran at most a couple of frames per second.
But there was another game - Terminal Velocity - that actually looked a lot better with hardware rendering, although it was still slower than software rendering. So, I would run it with hardware rendering to enjoy flying and then restart the game with software rendering to actually fight the enemies. :)
It's hard to convey just how revolutionary the original voodoo cards were. There aren't many times in my life where there was a clear line of before and after, but this was one of those times.
They also had the most recognizable unified box art style from all HW makers[1]. When you saw those eyes staring into your soul off the shelves, you knew it was a 3dfx GPU. They also had the best ads. [2] HW vendors today don't have the balls anymore to use designs like that, it's all flat sterile corporate nonsense.
Unless I'm mistaken, those cards were all produced by 3dfx after their acquisition of STB. Regardless, that box art blew my 14 year old mind back in the day.
I wiped my drive a few times before realizing dropbox didn't back my wallet up. I shrugged it off losing 30 bitcoins worth maybe at best 3 cents each at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.
I think mine went into a computer that we donated to a school, or something. Around 2002 or 2003, my dad and I put together a bunch of working systems out of spare parts and donated them.
Mine was the PCI version of the card. Crazy looking on Ebay how much even the bare card goes for now, let alone when someone has the full boxed set.
Still blows my mind that it was just a flash in the pan. At the time it felt that 3dfx was certainly going to be a dominant force in computing for years. And although they lingered a bit, the whole event was barely over 2 years.
I remember reading a historical piece where the voodoos success was partially luck. At the time the first generation cards were being developed edo ram was super expensive so most competitive designs were hamstrung trying to do things with very little ram. By luck edo ram prices crashed right as they released making them far more affordable to manufacture than 3dfx could have reasonably expected. That gave them an early and massive lead with their initial design.
I think everyone understood that having it be 3D-only (and requiring a separate graphics card to do normal 2D desktop graphics) was a half-solution, and 3DFX's long term success would depend on their ability to provide a full 2D/3D solution before existing competitors like NVIDIA, ATI, and Matrox could catch up with their own 3D accelerators.
That took a lot longer really as well... I remember seeing SATA SSDs around 2009, paying a massive amount for my 64gb Intel drive (that ate itself just over a year later)... I hated moving/symlinking so much... but, fortunately by the time it died, I could go to 256gb or 512gb (don't quite remember which) for not too much more.
Even then, I was still seeing most Desktops sold with spinning rust for several years later.
Debatable. I always preferred the crisp look of the software renderer to the washed out GLQuake. Same with Quake 2. I think it because textures back then were too low resolution so filtering just makes them look muddy.
Even today I think a lot of Doom clones look better (or more nostalgic) with software rendering and texture mapping rather than OpenGL. There's an intensity of saturation to the colors that's lost. Fireblu is never quite so eye burning as when it's in software.
It’s also because the VGA signal quality from the 3dfx Voodoo wasn’t very good.
It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so it needed another graphics card for rendering the desktop (any non-accelerated apps really), and this was connected to the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. There was a noticeable image quality loss from this arrangement.
A Matrox card would give you crisp VGA with nice saturation, but the 3D acceleration was nearly worthless. Choices…
I really disagree. There were some nice Matrox cards. They weren't as good at 3d as 3DFX but for the time they really improved gaming. I developed Battlezone on G200. In those days we tried to have everyone have a different graphics card because the companies would just give them to us and we wanted to work with every card.
Matrox had great hardware, but the software drivers took too long to catch up. I was on the OpenGL team and my life's mission was to get Quake running as fast as the G200 and G400 was capable of. We finally caught up and got parity with Nvidia's TNT2, and then bam, they released the GeForce 256 series, and it was curtains for Matrox because their next gen hardware wasn't ready yet.
You can 'fix' the texture filtering to nearest neighbour in hl by adding the following to userconfig.cfg (should be in a directory called 'valve' in the game's root directory):
gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR
gl_ansio "0"
gl_round_down "0"
Or just entering those lines in the consoe, preceded by 'set'
I agree that the washed-out textures haven’t aged well.
But at the time, not having pixelated textures was the first thing people looked at when judging graphics quality. I remember that being a HUGE selling point of the N64 and something that made the console look almost a generation ahead of the PlayStation and Sega Saturn to kids back then.
Today, I think I prefer the PSX look, thoug. Maybe with Z-buffer correction to avoid the warped textures of the PlayStation.
Might have also been one of those things that looked better on the 14-15" CRTs of the time vs crisp high-res flat panels of today. They were blurry enough that 640x480 was "high resolution" (I remember not being able to easily see the pixels at 800x600 on a 14" CRT unless I came super close to the monitor).
I came here to comment similarly, the lower pixelated software rendered Quake seems to work well with the textures. They have a bumpmappy fuzzy feel that gets lost with the sharp corners everything is super flat texture mapped and filtered version that one got from the 3d accelerators of the time. I guess my brain just adds context to the low res images.
Before unreal, I had a s3-virge for 2d and a powerVR 3d accelerator pair, and I was always flipping between software, virge and powerVR depending on game. Which at the time were largely hexen/heretic. The powerVR was higher resolution and clean/sterile but never seemed like a lot better experience.
But then there was unreal, the first game I think was absolutely better on an accelerator (voodoo2 in my case). Its also pretty much the last of the serious software renderers and outside of the voodoo's definitely did a better job with software lighting /texture mapping/etc than any of the previous (affordable) accelerators. Which is why I ended up finally replacing the powerVR with the voodoo2. The results were 'unreal'. Some of that might just be bias, I played insane amounts of doom/etc but never really got into quake. Quake just seemed like doom rehashed to me, so I was off playing warcraft/diablo/hexen/etc.
And frankly, outside of FEAR, I stopped playing 1st person shooter games for 20 years, the graphics improvements were so incremental, I just kept seeing flat low polygon models everywhere. And I don't think that looks good. Even after all the tessellation/bump mapping/endless tricks I kept seeing frames where I could play "count how many polygons are onscreen right now" games. Its gotten better the past few years, particularly some of the lighting, at least the screenshots/cut scenes are no longer obviously not in game rendering. The UE5 demo is slowly becoming reality in actual games, so maybe its time to revisit a few of them.
Replaying Heretic 2 back in 1998 with my first Voodoo (banshee) was a borderline otherwordly experience, compared to my first playthrough of the game using software rendering. Nothing has blown my mind the same way since.
I have had three experiences like this in my life:
1. PC Speaker -> Sound Blaster: Most games that I had were instantly upgraded
2. Doom: my first "real" fluid 3D experience, with stairs, etc, compared to maze-like maps in Wolfenstein
3. Software Rendering -> 3dfx (Canopus Pure3D): Transparent water surfaces in Quake (if you re-vis'd the maps), smooth and fluid visuals, it was amazing.
The closest thing to this, in modern gaming, has been the boss fights in Elden Ring: https://i.imgur.com/gzLvsLw.mp4 -- visually, they are quite epic.
Always thought the original software renderer looked much better. It didn’t have the bilinear filtering, so the textures didn’t look all smooth and ‘washed out’, which suited the environment more imho
I'd be interested in a RTX-enhanced software renderer. Ie replace the baked lighting with the GI raytracing, but otherwise keep the rest of the software renderer. Have a feeling that could be an awesome blend.
Would be a bit challenging with the palette but should be doable.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. Like do a RT-only pass doing lighting (no textures), then do the software pass using the RT-lighting rather than baked lightmaps.
Latency would be slightly higher but I guess one could implement the important parts[1] of the software renderer on the GPU.
I can't speak for the original GLQuake on 3dfx hardware, but on OpenGL-compatible Quake engines (which include modern Quake source ports such as Quakespasm, Ironwail, and vkQuake), bilinear texture filtering is an option that can be turned off.
I play on vkQuake with nearest-neighbor texture filtering, square particles, and the "classic" water warping effect and lighting effects, alongside 8x MSAA, 16x anisotropic filtering, high-resolution widescreen, etc. This keeps the art style consistent with the look of the original Quake, while still allowing for the benefits of hardware 3D acceleration.
For what it's worth, the modern source port for Descent (DXX-Rebirth) makes bilinear filtering optional, too, while using OpenGL and allowing MSAA and stuff. I played through the first two games some time ago and I also found the bilinear filtered textures worse-looking than the blocky ones.
I dreamt about having the vodoo but i could not afford it. Went with a rendition verite based one. It was underpowered compared to the vodoo but I really consider it the first real GPU as it was a RISC processor.
Same here. I can still vividly remember the experience of loading in with a voodoo2 for the first time. It was night and day -- mind completely blown. The late `90s really established a new version of the gamer; consoles were fun, but computer gaming was a different world. It made me a junky for reading about hardware, overclocking and gaming.
For me it was Carmageddon. I bought it later on an ipad and it may have just been rose tinted glasses of being completely blown away back in the day but the ipad version never seems quite as crisp...
In terms of pixels, it was 4x the resolution. And for fun, one of the window textures (visible in the difficulty choice lobby IIRC) was implemented as a mirror in glquake - IIRC John Carmack said it was so easy to do in OpenGL he did it as a kind of test.
I remember how i was amazed when i got my first 3d card, a Voodoo 2. It was like having an arcade at home.
The 3dfx logo spining up when you launched a GLide game was something.
Unreal in particular was amazing, i remember as a kid just watching the lighting and the water.
At that time every light in a game had to be colored, just because it could be done. Small rooms with green, red and blue lights moving all over the place, so 90s.
I never had that "Wow" factor again, from there everything felt like incremental instead of revolutionary. How an absolute market leader disapeared in 2 years is incredible.
I think i only got the same wow factor the first time i tested a VR headset.
Crazy illustration of "nothing happens anymore." 3dfx seemed just as dominant in the 1990s as NVIDIA does today. But from founding to selling to asset sell-off, the company lasted just six years. Meanwhile NVIDIA has been king of the hill since the GeForce was released in 1999, which was 25 years ago.
AMD overtook Nvidia at times in the gaming space. I'd say that Nvidia has been king of the hill since the introduction of CUDA, since that's what really cemented their position in the tech sector.
Pre-AMD acquisition ATI also often had better hardware specs than NVIDIA, but their drivers were so often buggy and terrible. By the time they'd been fixed the reviews were long since done on the initial release versions.
AMD seems to run a better software shop, at least.
The 90s was an absolutely crazy period for PC hardware. So many flash in the pan companies making a novel devices and then dying entirely as their niche became obsolete. There used to be tons of display board manufacturers and very few of them survived the 3D acceleration introduction.
I have one question: wasn't the 3dfx a graphics postprocessor? I thought it didn't render the image in higher quality, but it did postprocessing only... Never had opportunity to have voodoo, but later, when got a decent NVIDIA, I played Need for Speed 2, which had demo videos "rendered in 3dfx" with snow etc, and my graphics was crispy and no-snowy. I tried to look up why my NVIDIA does not have those effects, and I learned that they were overlayed over the original image only by 3dfx voodoo...
No it’s definitely a 3D renderer. Glide was a competitor to OpenGL and Direct3D that was proprietary to 3dfx. Don’t remember why the quality was higher.
Yeah, the earliest models are literally 3D only as discussed in the article, they have separate pass through cable for your existing 2D graphics because even just making a flat 2D window isn't viable directly, Glide really wants to render only textured triangles which is fine for Quake but no good for Windows.
I had one of those 3D-only cards on my first computer. I didn't know about the passthrough and got pretty annoyed that my games sucked and never worked with the hardware 3D stack. I don't know if they didn't document it correctly, or if I just missed it. But when some support person finally told me, I was so pumped. I spent a while manually moving the cable to the 3D card when playing a game, until I finally got a passthrough cable.
The Voodoo was a 3D-only accelerator. It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so you needed another basic video card which plugged into the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. When an accelerated game was launched, the Voodoo took over and replaced the 2D card’s output completely.
That’s probably why you remember it being a post-processor. It didn’t apply effects to the 2D signal, but it needed it for all non-accelerated programs.
3dfx also supported more blending modes than most competing cards at the time. That could be why the snow effect didn’t work on your card.
I was playing around with building retro game VMs with qemu and pci passthrough awhile back and dusted off my old canopus pure 3d to try out with a pci to pcie adapter board. It was kind of amusing you'd have the windows desktop running in virt-manager and when you fired up unreal tournament the desktop would just freeze and only then would the card actually output anything.
In early 2000, I cobbled together a gaming PC from used parts that I bought or traded for. It had a K6-2, a Voodoo 2, and 192 MB of RAM. It was amazing and such an upgrade over my family’s Celeron. The big games were TFC, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, and StarCraft. We LAN’d every weekend. It was heaven.
I recall Unreal has an option to switch to use the 3dfx card, and if IIRC, it has some additional features like more colourful lights and such.
Unreal was such a beast back in the day that it completes beats Quake 2 and other contemporary FPS even on software rendering. TBH it still looks beautiful even by today's standards, if you ignore the low polygon counts.
I'm not a person who cares too much about graphics, even for FPS (I don't really enjoy most of the modern FPS except Wolfenstein, which has interesting gameplay), and I argue that too much graphics eye candies simply decrease the overall quality of the game, but 3dfx definitely was a huge bang back in the day.
the performance boost also made a significant difference in how well the game played: i remembered when the voodoo 1 came out i had a 100mhz pentium and running quake (in low resolution) was "fine" but ran at like 20-25fps. With a voodoo that game ran at a smooth 60fps which made it so much more fun for such a fast-paced game (while also running at a higher resolution with smooth textures and improved lighting effects). It made a huge difference on multiple axes.
The percentage change in resolution you ran the games at was also absolutely mind blowing too.
For the most part we went from running the game at 320x200 or 320x240 to 640x480 in that first round of acceleration. I think in terms of % change it is a bigger leap than anything we've really had since, or certainly after 1920x1080.
So you suddenly had super smooth graphics, much better looking translucency and effects, and the # of pixels quadupled or more and you could just see everything so much more clearly.
Yeah that's true. Software rendering at low resolution is not a good sight to look at.
I remember back in 1997, when Quake 2 was just out, I sit in a net bar (where you pay to use a computer) and played an hour of Quake 2 in software rendering. The game was interesting, but I felt a bit sick, half due to the resolution, half due to the almost infinite brownish colour. A girl behind me murmured, "This is not as half fun as Duke Nukem", and yeah I completely agreed with her.
I think I still agree with her somewhat. Quake 2 is a great game, but Duke3d is a fun one.
Where Quake2 really shined was in multiplayer, especially mods like q2ctf.
Quake2 was released at just the right moment to take advantage of both 3D acceleration and broadband Internet access. Playing a game of q2ctf, in 3D-accelerated 800x600 mode, with 60 ms ping was just fucking amazing.
Unreal had a small menu where you could switch between different renderer backends precisely because of things like different cards having different... Driver quality let's say.
I still remember these massive performance jumps you could get around the turn of the millennium. First it was Pentium 166 MMX (SIMD FP math), then it was 3dfx Voodoo, then it was GeForce 256 (hardware T&L) and AMD Athlon Thunderbird (just blasting past anything Intel could offer).
MMX wasn’t actually that useful. The vectors were only 64 bits wide, you had no float support and the supported operations were kind of uneven... SSE and especially SSE2 were a much bigger leap.
what gave the pentium mmx the big speed boost (I also remember it being quite significant) was probably the bigger 16kb cache (pentium classic had only 8kb) rather than mmx itself.
Quake2 with a K6-2 and Voodoo2 was a kickass combo. At some point iD software released the 3DNow! patch for Quake2 which yielded yet another 10 FPS....good times.
My memory is that during late 90s, whenever a game supports glide, 3dfx card will always render smoother and with noticeably better texture than NVIDIA and ATI cards, even benchmark will give you similar numbers. So we constantly envy the roommates with a voodoo card.
I still am a bit of a 3dfx fanboy. Ended up emailing 3dfx at one stage and got sent a load of posters and case stickers (remember those?).
I had a Voodoo Banshee which was a fairly decent card (not quite as good as a Voodoo 2, but better than a Voodoo Rush as a combined 2D/3D card). Paired to a Pentium P133 - very overkill on the GPU. Ended up using the same card on a AMD K6-2 500 in the end which was a bit more evenly matched.
Then ended up buying a cheap Voodoo 5 5500 after they went under (only paid £50 for it).
Sadly both of them went in a dumpster a long time ago. Wish I'd kept them both. I ended up moving to nVidia cards for a while, then had an ATi Radeon. Nowadays I just run a Macbook Air for my personal machine - life got in the way of much gaming!
>> This tale brings up many “what ifs.” What if 3dfx had gotten the SEGA Dreamcast contract? Would both companies have been better off? What if 3dfx had continued simply doing chips and not gotten into the board business? Would 3dfx then have brought its products to market more quickly?
What if Atari had continued with its rasterizer chip from 1983s I,Robot? They also had their "mathbox" for geometry transformations since the late 1970's. They were well equipped technically to enter the broader 3D graphics market in some way but that never happened.
Sometime in the late late 00s, i put my voodoo card on Craigslist. I got pinged immediately, told me he’d pay double if i reserved it for him. The cards were precious for keeping some arcade game cabinets running, and with the company no more, my used card was a lifeline. I wanna say it was a golf game like golden tee? I was delighted to make the sale and happy to charge him the original (not double) price
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcmKy-72_2U
I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER.
Sniper's paradise!
But yeah, those lucky people with their DSL modems and 60ms pings would wipe the floor with us.
Nowadays, everyone has a < 10ms ping.
Plus all the weird behavior with packet loss. You could see each player's ping and PL numbers in the server player list. Those were the days.
But Tribes 1 was incredible in how smoothly it handled "larger" servers. It would be so chaotic.
I remember connecting to someone's machine and just destroying everyone. Afterward I got a message from someone congratulating me, but being incredulous about my ping time being 26ms.
I happened to be on the first floor in the first dorm on campus to get wired internet access, and they had an OC3 dedicated to it. Two months earlier there were 16 of us splitting that line, with public IP addresses. (Going back to dial-up after leaving the dorm was.. difficult).
So I told him, yeah I kinda have a ridiculous internet connection here at school. He was like, "no, you don't understand - it is my machine. I am playing on the server and your ping time is lower than mine!"
vis did a precalculation for where a level segment(the partition in binary space partition) could be seen from any other level segment. the end effect was that while glquake did have a option for transparent water, the geometry would not draw on the far side. making the effect useless without a bit of extra work. But I have to admit I have no idea if entities(other players) would draw or not.
update: found this https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-help/general-help/4754-visp...
Apparently there is a no_vis option to run without the visible set optimizations.
The downside to running vis patched maps on a server is it used slightly more CPU than unpatched maps IIRC. Perhaps someone that ran more servers than I did (I ran two nodes on an Intergraph InterServe with dual P6-200s) could weigh in on what the impact was at scale.
Searching for "2Fort4" in YouTube yielded some interesting videos for people curious what the original Quake Mod version of the map looked like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJh36LuKwVQ&pp=ygUGMkZvcnQ0
As someone who still spends at least 3 hours a week playing 2Fort on the current Team Fortress 2, it's fascinating to see how the core of the map is still basically the same after 20 years.
EDIT: Another video which goes into more detail about the history of each 2fort version, going back to its original inspiration from a Doom 2 level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid9QwAOlng&t=375s
The video also misses that there was a pretty popular 2fort for half life 1.
Edit: typo
Shout out to any EG players!
Wow what a trip down memory lane
Then again, I also have a solid case without windows. But there are plenty of SFF builders that would like a more reasonably sized upper mid-range card. I'm not suggesting that single slot is enough... but a 2-slot dual fan design should be suitable/sufficient for a stock-clocked 5070 Ti.
Also no Internet because I hadn't gotten that far.
I ran back and forth to Steven's house and searched Altavista for the answers.
Good times.
of course i had to dual-boot windows so i could still program in vb6 and be a general shit on AOL
I remember thinking it was funny that gaming ultimately subsidized a lot of the major advances in ML for the last decade. We might be flipping to a point where ML subsidizes gaming.
So GPUs sold primarily for ML probably still make up a tiny share of the overall market, but I expect they make up a huge chunk of the market for cards like A100. Gaming hasn't been bleeding edge (in terms of requirements) for a very long time and card prices drop quickly, so there's just no point in spending that sort of money on a card for gaming.
I have a 3090 for AI and gaming and I haven't seen a reason to "upgrade" yet. In fact, I might try and get a 3090ti instead.
There's a chance that this year or the next one more GPUs will be sold for AI than for graphics.
There are plenty of games and graphics to play, all the way back to the Atari 2600, not everyone is playing the last version of Call of Duty, Cyberpunk, or whatever tops the AAA charts.
In fact, those integrated GPUs are good enough for WebGL 2.0, which I still haven't seen much that can top mobile games graphics in the last 10 years (done with OpenGL ES), other than demoscene reels on shader competitions.
Not everyone is hunting GPUs for AI, other than hyperscalers.
Additionally, maybe Linux users would be left out, everyone else is already migrating to NPUs, GPUs for AI is fighting the last war.
I guess some folks might suffer from FOMO, but that doesn't change the fact there are more games to play than most folks can achieve to finish during their lifetime, that aren't last generation AAA.
Also, especially in modern times, keep in mind how real inflation has been. That $900 PC from 10 years ago would be $1200+ today.
[1] - https://www.xda-developers.com/cheapest-pc-to-play-cyberpunk...
Using computers, not game consoles, for gaming was all over the place during the 8 and 16 bit home computing days, and the large majority eventually moved into Windows PC, as the other platforms died, that is why Valve has to translate Windows/DirectX if they want to have any games at all on their SteamDeck.
Consoles has been a niche market, at least here in Europe, mainly used by kids until they are old enough not to destroy the family's computer while playing games, given that many families only have one per household. And nowadays that roles has probably been taken over the tablets.
To the point that Playstation/XBox are now becoming publishing brands, as the exponential growth for selling consoles has plateaued.
PC gaming is going nowhere.
And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.
ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?
If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many of these providers jumped ship.
Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful, and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.
They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.
They simply didn't focus enough on the next generation chip.
http://nolfrevival.tk/
Or, too many times, it didn't, and I had to try again.
[0] https://riksrandomretro.com/2021/06/07/the-righteous-click
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-shootout-projec...
When I got a real job next summer, bought an AGP Matrox Millenium G200 and after that the NVIDIA GeForce2, and never strayed from NVDA since!
But there was another game - Terminal Velocity - that actually looked a lot better with hardware rendering, although it was still slower than software rendering. So, I would run it with hardware rendering to enjoy flying and then restart the game with software rendering to actually fight the enemies. :)
[1] https://www.ixbt.com/img/r30/00/02/08/90/boxes.jpg
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/41r1wj/3dfx_w...
Bruh. That's like selling your bitcoins in 2009 for two pizzas.
Mine was the PCI version of the card. Crazy looking on Ebay how much even the bare card goes for now, let alone when someone has the full boxed set.
Not all of them...
https://www.techpowerup.com/333599/yeston-launches-radeon-rx...
https://minixpc.com/products/maxsun-graphics-cards-geforce-r...
The latter two were 2d+3d in one and well before any real competition.
Even then, I was still seeing most Desktops sold with spinning rust for several years later.
Debatable. I always preferred the crisp look of the software renderer to the washed out GLQuake. Same with Quake 2. I think it because textures back then were too low resolution so filtering just makes them look muddy.
It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so it needed another graphics card for rendering the desktop (any non-accelerated apps really), and this was connected to the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. There was a noticeable image quality loss from this arrangement.
A Matrox card would give you crisp VGA with nice saturation, but the 3D acceleration was nearly worthless. Choices…
gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR
gl_ansio "0"
gl_round_down "0"
Or just entering those lines in the consoe, preceded by 'set'
Overall it looked better, but a lot of Quake 2 players weren't aware of a lot of the small details that were put into the textures.
But at the time, not having pixelated textures was the first thing people looked at when judging graphics quality. I remember that being a HUGE selling point of the N64 and something that made the console look almost a generation ahead of the PlayStation and Sega Saturn to kids back then.
Today, I think I prefer the PSX look, thoug. Maybe with Z-buffer correction to avoid the warped textures of the PlayStation.
Before unreal, I had a s3-virge for 2d and a powerVR 3d accelerator pair, and I was always flipping between software, virge and powerVR depending on game. Which at the time were largely hexen/heretic. The powerVR was higher resolution and clean/sterile but never seemed like a lot better experience.
But then there was unreal, the first game I think was absolutely better on an accelerator (voodoo2 in my case). Its also pretty much the last of the serious software renderers and outside of the voodoo's definitely did a better job with software lighting /texture mapping/etc than any of the previous (affordable) accelerators. Which is why I ended up finally replacing the powerVR with the voodoo2. The results were 'unreal'. Some of that might just be bias, I played insane amounts of doom/etc but never really got into quake. Quake just seemed like doom rehashed to me, so I was off playing warcraft/diablo/hexen/etc.
And frankly, outside of FEAR, I stopped playing 1st person shooter games for 20 years, the graphics improvements were so incremental, I just kept seeing flat low polygon models everywhere. And I don't think that looks good. Even after all the tessellation/bump mapping/endless tricks I kept seeing frames where I could play "count how many polygons are onscreen right now" games. Its gotten better the past few years, particularly some of the lighting, at least the screenshots/cut scenes are no longer obviously not in game rendering. The UE5 demo is slowly becoming reality in actual games, so maybe its time to revisit a few of them.
1. Sprite-based -> 3D sandbox world (in my case: Stunts, F29 Retaliator, Gunship 2000, Wolfenstein 3D)
2. Hardware 3D rendering (I had the NVidia RIVA 128ZX)
3. Fast-paced real-time multiplayer (Delta Force: Black Hawk Down)
The 4th might be the usage of LLMs or similar technology for (mostly-)unattended content generation: NPC dialogue etc.
The software renderer has this gritty feel that is integral to the art I feel.
That said, the 3dfx was impressive at the time, and I was very jealous of my buddy who got one.
Would be a bit challenging with the palette but should be doable.
Latency would be slightly higher but I guess one could implement the important parts[1] of the software renderer on the GPU.
[1]: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_renderer.p...
I play on vkQuake with nearest-neighbor texture filtering, square particles, and the "classic" water warping effect and lighting effects, alongside 8x MSAA, 16x anisotropic filtering, high-resolution widescreen, etc. This keeps the art style consistent with the look of the original Quake, while still allowing for the benefits of hardware 3D acceleration.
I had a similar experience seeing Quake2 running with the Glide renderer (on a Voodoo2) for the first time It was amazing.
The 3dfx logo spining up when you launched a GLide game was something.
Unreal in particular was amazing, i remember as a kid just watching the lighting and the water.
At that time every light in a game had to be colored, just because it could be done. Small rooms with green, red and blue lights moving all over the place, so 90s.
I never had that "Wow" factor again, from there everything felt like incremental instead of revolutionary. How an absolute market leader disapeared in 2 years is incredible.
I think i only got the same wow factor the first time i tested a VR headset.
AMD seems to run a better software shop, at least.
That’s probably why you remember it being a post-processor. It didn’t apply effects to the 2D signal, but it needed it for all non-accelerated programs.
3dfx also supported more blending modes than most competing cards at the time. That could be why the snow effect didn’t work on your card.
Unreal was such a beast back in the day that it completes beats Quake 2 and other contemporary FPS even on software rendering. TBH it still looks beautiful even by today's standards, if you ignore the low polygon counts.
I'm not a person who cares too much about graphics, even for FPS (I don't really enjoy most of the modern FPS except Wolfenstein, which has interesting gameplay), and I argue that too much graphics eye candies simply decrease the overall quality of the game, but 3dfx definitely was a huge bang back in the day.
For the most part we went from running the game at 320x200 or 320x240 to 640x480 in that first round of acceleration. I think in terms of % change it is a bigger leap than anything we've really had since, or certainly after 1920x1080.
So you suddenly had super smooth graphics, much better looking translucency and effects, and the # of pixels quadupled or more and you could just see everything so much more clearly.
I remember back in 1997, when Quake 2 was just out, I sit in a net bar (where you pay to use a computer) and played an hour of Quake 2 in software rendering. The game was interesting, but I felt a bit sick, half due to the resolution, half due to the almost infinite brownish colour. A girl behind me murmured, "This is not as half fun as Duke Nukem", and yeah I completely agreed with her.
I think I still agree with her somewhat. Quake 2 is a great game, but Duke3d is a fun one.
Quake2 was released at just the right moment to take advantage of both 3D acceleration and broadband Internet access. Playing a game of q2ctf, in 3D-accelerated 800x600 mode, with 60 ms ping was just fucking amazing.
Which Wolfenstein?
I've been thinking it was due to MMX for almost 30 years!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I
I had a Voodoo Banshee which was a fairly decent card (not quite as good as a Voodoo 2, but better than a Voodoo Rush as a combined 2D/3D card). Paired to a Pentium P133 - very overkill on the GPU. Ended up using the same card on a AMD K6-2 500 in the end which was a bit more evenly matched.
Then ended up buying a cheap Voodoo 5 5500 after they went under (only paid £50 for it).
Sadly both of them went in a dumpster a long time ago. Wish I'd kept them both. I ended up moving to nVidia cards for a while, then had an ATi Radeon. Nowadays I just run a Macbook Air for my personal machine - life got in the way of much gaming!
What if Atari had continued with its rasterizer chip from 1983s I,Robot? They also had their "mathbox" for geometry transformations since the late 1970's. They were well equipped technically to enter the broader 3D graphics market in some way but that never happened.