Help me remember all pre-Voodoo PC 3D accelerators.

I have 2 Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (ViRGE 325) cards with 4 MB EDO. Oh and a Number Nine Reality 332 (Virge 325). For Voodoo Graphics I have a Orchid Righteous 3D 4 MB EDO. (click click!!)

As I recall the texture filtering was somewhat "noisy" on the Virge, but it was quite sharp and nice. The Voodoo, on the other hand, was just a washed out blurry mess in comparison. The textures were blurred very badly and the overall picture was too bright which messed up contrast. It was so much faster but it looked really quite bad in comparison. I don't recall noticing a big resolution difference, just that the Voodoo looked bad.

I don't think anything was wrong with my setup. As I recall, Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 were always scorned for their washed out look.
 
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Guys, you forgot Cirrus Logic cards and S3 Savage3D with 8MB of VRAM.

Btw, from which MechWarrior 2 edition are those pictures? Coz i've never seen this Galuzza Forrest world and i have a MechWarrior 2 Pentum Edition.
Are these pics from MW2 Mercenaries?

Eitherway i still prefer good old software renderer in this game. It just gives some special feeling that just isn't there with all the stuff mipmapped and filtered.
 
Ah memories... yep all bad...

D3D game...

If not for dreamcast, I'd still use PowerVR as a swear word (fast but *!&*$*£ *!%$) and how i rememeber 3DFX updating there D3D driver, the week before mastering and completely hosing there texture system. So I had reverse engineer there driver, to find out they had managed to forget there own memory restrictions and then re-implement our loader to load stuff in such a way to work...Or NVIDIA Riva128 'feature' of using software emulation if you had a ARGB4444 texture with iterated alpha at the same time...

S3 got working but it was faster using the software renderer...

Its was a time, when if you mentioned your were doing it under D3D, the response from all the IHVs was "hahahha yer but seriously use our custom library"... still shipped the damn thing...
 
Software faster than S3 Metal ? Not in this lifetime. I was playing UT99 at 1024x768, everything to High and with high resolution S3TC textures enabled. Not exactly supper smooth because i had just 64MB of SDR RAM but it was playable and looked damn nice. Voodoo guys could just dream of such textures :p Deus Ex years later was also running wicked fast on quiet old S3 Savage3D (also S3 Metal). So i have S3 Metal in good memory as propertiary graphic library.
It was certanly miles ahead any performance that D3D or OGL could deliver on S3 cards.
 
I think that DeanoC talked about Virge. Not Savage 3D. But I have some screenshots from Undying including Savage 3D (>0,5MB):

S3 Savage 3D 32bit


3Dfx Banshee 16bit


Savage had good image quality, but horrible drivers :cry:
 
IIRC Savage3D was the same generation as Voodoo 2, Banshee and RivaTNT. Savage4 was the same generation as Voodoo 3 and TNT2.
 
Yeah, pretty much. Savage3D was faster than Voodoo2 but only with a decent board - most of the cheap SDRAM boards it shipped in were quite a bit slower.

I claim a smidge of responsibility for the Metal port, although someone else did most of Metal itself and the UT stuff. Was quite funny getting the original Unreal driver working, there were three of us working different time zones doing 24-hour development on it...

But it did OK with Quake and Quake 2 as well. OK, the miniGL was just a thin layer over Metal, but it eventually got most of the same performance out of a real GL.
 
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Dio you said you did a driiver for argonaught b-render do you know what cards supported b-render i would really like to try i-war with one. I know the matrox mystique claimed to do it did anyone play - i-war on a mystique ?
 
RejZoR said:
Software faster than S3 Metal ? Not in this lifetime. I was playing UT99 at 1024x768, everything to High and with high resolution S3TC textures enabled. Not exactly supper smooth because i had just 64MB of SDR RAM but it was playable and looked damn nice. Voodoo guys could just dream of such textures :p Deus Ex years later was also running wicked fast on quiet old S3 Savage3D (also S3 Metal). So i have S3 Metal in good memory as propertiary graphic library.
It was certanly miles ahead any performance that D3D or OGL could deliver on S3 cards.
Click to expand...
S3 Virge not Savage. Savage would come a few years later IIRC and apart from some buggy palette handling in the D3D driver, I have fairly good memories of it...

Contrary to popular opinion, Voodoo did have texture compression, as did PowerVR... But rarely used and custom to each card, so rarely got used... Course non of it as good as DXTC/S3TC which has proved to be the current gold standard in texture compression...
 
Davros said:
Dio you said you did a driiver for argonaught b-render do you know what cards supported b-render i would really like to try i-war with one. I know the matrox mystique claimed to do it did anyone play - i-war on a mystique ?
Click to expand...
In general the only one that got significant use was the 3dfx driver. FX Fighter supported the S3 and ATI drivers as well, I don't know if the Mystique driver was ready by the time it shipped.

So I reckon your best chance would be a 3dfx card - I'd guess the driver should work for any card with DOS Glide support. But if the application didn't ship with the BRender driver compiled in then I doubt you can bolt on additional drivers.
 
DeanoC said:
, Voodoo did have texture compression, as did PowerVR...
Click to expand...
For the Voodoo, I guess you are referring to their narrow channel format - essentially 8bpp "YUV" with a programmable matrix to map back to RGB. I get the feeling (and I stress this is only a guess) that this was put in early versions instead of a palette since the latter was fairly expensive. IIRC it was used in the Tomb Raider port since TR had quite a lot of textures per level. I know I had to write texture management code for the PowerVR port for it to work with 4MB of texture memory.

PowerVR didn't have texture compression until series 2 (ARC, Dreamcast and Neon), i.e. VQ 2bpp plus 1bpp on clx.

Series 1 had a few 16bpp formats and a simple 8bpp, but the latter was just RGB332.
 
Simon F said:
I know I had to write texture management code for the PowerVR port for it to work with 4MB of texture memory.
Click to expand...
Yep, same here. And correcting myself earlier, it looks like I locked TR to 16-bit operation as well for the same reason.
 
man, I soooooo wanted first-gen PowerVR to do well. it was the only consumer-gamer PC 3D accelerator that could stand upto Voodoo Graphics. if only those Namco games had come out, (Rave Racer, Tekken, Air Combat) sparked sales, and then sparked wider development / acceptance. would've been neat to see Sega Model2 games translated to PowerVR1 (besides Virtual On) for the SGL API. games like VF2, Sega Rally and Daytona.

IIRC, PowerVR PCX1 came out a little later than Voodoo, in early '97 if not very late '96, it was too late sadly, Voodoo was cleaning up.

it's kinda funny though, PowerVR is still alive & independant to this day, within Imagination Technologies, while 3Dfx is not.
 
Dio said:
Yep, same here. And correcting myself earlier, it looks like I locked TR to 16-bit operation as well for the same reason.
Click to expand...
I must admit that I had the added joy of creating translucent and non-translucent versions of the textures since CORE packed lots of different images into 256x256 pages. For speed reasons I needed to know which sub-textures were genuinely translucent and which were guaranteed opaque. This increased the tex-memory usage quite a bit.
 
swaaye said:
ViRGE has substantially better image quality than Voodoo Graphics. I built a retro rig a year ago to mess with both and ran the Tomb Raider patches for both. The ViRGE has ok speed (yup!) and the color/shadowing contrast in the game is far better. Much sharper filtering than Voodoo too.

I'm pretty sure tho that ViRGE would be very bad in D3D. Games that use the S3 API run ok. I also tried Descent 2 and Terminal Velocity, both are S3D games.
Click to expand...

I had the Descent 2 and Terminal Velocity shareware versions with my S3 Virge 2MB, it looked and ran better than software. First high-res (640x480), filtered 3D experience :).
really, too bad that the card was useless in D3D (except with you like slideshows with missing alpha blending). Another thing that annoyed me is those two games wouldn't work with a Virge DX 4MB. Even though I had a voodoo1 with that new Virge I was annoyed not being able to play those two good and nice looking games . ..
 
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