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

Most of V1 boards don't work on modern systems. Depends on PCB design, CPU and motherboard. It's very hard to find V1, which works with AMD 3DNow! systems. Older (K6) systems don't have this problem.

 

Trident Blade 9750
I've still got mine in a box of 'old bits'. It had pretty shoddy hardware D3D support IIRC. Also remember having a Number Nine Vision 330, although I think that might have been 2D only? - slightly depressing to see that Number Nine's old website is now a sports betting site.
I still remember, and hence find it staggering how they've all disappeared, when there were seemingly loads of manufacturers - and yes I still mourn the demise of 3dfx (I'm one of 'those people'...even though I know they brought it upon themselves).

P69

 

For me it was Tomb Raider (demo) on my S3.. very slow but a cool sign of what was to come.

 

I also remember rumors of one of the first 3D accelerators was slower than some software rendering on high-end PCs... I have no idea if this was true, but the joke of a "3D decelerator" was quite funny!

 

Heh, I rebuilt a Win98 machine with 2 x Voodoo 2's in SLI. Fired up Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries 3DFX edition... was blown away by how crappy it looked. I guess that is what time does to your memories, and being spoiled by what all we have now. Gotta find my copy of Mech 2 and see how that looks (even worse than Mercs).

 

It most certainly is true. The infamous 3D Decelerator is the S3 Virge.

 

I think the S3 Virge was the one I had at first (it was S3 something), and it was incredibly slow, too slow to really play any games on it in hi-res... but I cannot recall the speed if you put it down into 320x240 to really compare it against software fairly. At any rate, it WAS very slow for what it was supposed to do.

 

A problem that effected Voodoo 1's was a big CPU hit because the triangle setup was done entirely in software using floats as well as other CPU overhead in the drivers and Windows. In some cases this hit could be larger than doing eveything including rasterizing in software using fixed point. Case in point, Quake. It was possible on low end systems (using Cyrix CPUs for example) for Quake to run slower with a Voodoo, than in software. Of course coupled with a Pentium Pro/II it was much faster.

 

I had a lowly Cyrix 133 MHz back then and it surely ran faster with Voodoo than in SW.

 

I agree. The software setup costs for chips like the Voodoo1 (&2?*) and PowerVR PCX1/2 were utterly insignificant compare the cost of filling the polygons in software**. For example, Tombraider 1 would run 1024x768 @ 30Hz on a 133 Pentium on PCX.


(* I don't know what was involved for these)
(** Unless you were rendering to, say, a 64x64 display )

 

Hmm. I was thinking 320x200 software in DOS vs 640x480 hw accelerated in Windows via GLQuake. A comparison with software at 640x480 would be a big win for the Voodoo. I could be totally mistaken, I've got no evidence for my comment. Personal experience from almost 10 years ago doesn't really count now does it.

*looks at floor at old crappy computer with Voodoo 1 in it and considers checking to see what the actual results but that would be too hard since the thing doesn't boot anymore*

 

Well at different resolutions it's not a valid comparison, is it?

 

That's what I was thinking, but for some reason everyone seems to naturally compare low-res software to hi-res hardware... and I'm not sure why. It was probably because most of the games defaulted into those higher resolutions, so we expected the performance in the given mode.

 

Defaulted into 640x480 or greater when using hardware accelerators I meant...

 

Well Rendition really touted their chip's hardware setup engine as an advantage over Voodoo. Lots of hardware reviewers said to go with Verite instead cuz of that, if you had a really slow CPU.

 

Voodoo2 had hardware triangle setup
that's why voodoo2 was faster than voodoo1 even when very CPU limited (such as, quake 1 on a P166. Or even my ppro 200 which was still very weak for a voodoo2)

that discussion makes me wonder how would run games such as mohaa, rtcw on a o/c ed voodoo1, in 512x384 on a modern PC ; and how about CS 1.5 .

 

Heh, just so happens I also have a Voodoo 1 in my lab, I might just take out those Voodoo 2's and see if that old puppy runs. I so, so wish I had never gotten rid of my first Orchid Righteous 3D... I kept the box, all the software, and manuals... but sold it to some guy so I could help pay for that new Voodoo 2 I had bought. So stupid of me! What a classic piece of hardware!!!

Anyway, I have a K6-III+ running at 550 MHz on a MVP-3 board, which should support the Voodoo 1 without a problem. Then I can actually run Archimedean Dynasty in 3dfx mode again!

 

I just stuck my ancient Voodoo 1 into my A64 system, and gosh I was able to get it to run. The latest NT drivers do not work for me under WindowsXP (32 bit obviously), but older driver versions ones do (??? yeah i know it makes not much sense).

OpenGL is totally broken, but were talking a voodoo 1 here, its not surprising. Depending on the version of the OpenGL drivers is what happens. Some really really ancient prerelease versions of the OpenGL driver work somewhat ok, newer ones die when trying to draw triangle fans becaues of a Glide problem (guessing CPU optimization is screwing up). If the latest Glide drivers worked, OpenGL would probably work better too, but *shrugs*.

 

Hey, my old 3dfx demo might run on your machine: http://xona.com/tbc/

I always kind of wished I had programmed it in direct3d just so it would have remained compatible on today's machines.

 

Yeah it works for me... under x64 even... using my new x64 voodoo driver from this thread: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?p=830979


I know, I'm a nut