The 3DFX Voodoo was not the first dedicated 3D graphics chipset by any means, but it became the favourite for gamers among the early mass-market GPUs. It would be found on a 3D-processing-only PCI …
  • leave_it_blank@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    My first game I played with the Diamond Monster 3D (Voodoo 1 4 MB) was Tomb Raider 1. I could not believe what was happening. It looked soooo much better, and the frame rates were so fucking high! That really was voodoo magic. I can’t remember something other that magical in all my gaming history.

    • dan1101@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      Same. Another similar breakthrough memory I had was the Gravis Ultrasound and hearing actual sampled instruments in the Ultima music. Before that game music was much more bleeps and bloops.

    • keimevo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      I had the same feeling, but with a TNT2 card. I first played Half-Life with software rendering, 320x240 in my fishbowl 14" monitor. Then a few months later I bought the TNT2 (M64, the cheap version), and began my 2nd playthrough at a glorious 640x480 with much better FPS. It was awesome.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      3 months

      Same.

      Next I upgraded to 2×12MB Voodoo 2 (SLI with an IDE cable). I could play at 1024×768!

      Best of times.

  • HornedMeatBeast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    I miss my Voodoo 3 2000 AGP card.

    Some games ran worse when I finally replaced it with a GeForce 2 MX400.

    I noticed a large FPS drop in Diablo 2.

  • digitalFatteh@lemmy.caEnglish
    3 months

    Depending on whether you had a 3dfx or GeForce made playing Planetside a bit of a cheat. You could spot the cloaked infiltrators from anywhere as they would shimmer a nice ghostly white. Great times 😏

  • Björn@swg-empire.deEnglish
    3 months

    I had a Voodoo 2. I was salty at my parents that they got the 8 MB version instead of 12 MB. But I couldn’t formulate my frustration because I didn’t quite get the difference between system and graphics memory yet.

    Still it was amazing how fast everything was. I spent hours just switching weapons in Jedi Knight. And Unreal was just drop dead gorgeous in Glide. No comparison to Direct3D or OpenGL.

    And it included a demo of a rotating donut with bump mapping which would be toutet as this amazing new graphics feature decades later.

  • Triumph@fedia.io
    3 months

    “They’re worth a bit now” partly because they were used in coin-op arcade games, and people who refurb those will buy them as spares.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      Probably quake 2. Quake 3 likely wouldn’t have run the best on a 3dfx card but I think it would have run.

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3 months

          Without a graphics card? Of course not. Without 3d acceleration? Definitely not. Quake 3 was by far the most taxing game I was aware of when I came out. I barely saw any computers that could run it with maxed out settings until probably a year after it came out.

  • Quicky@piefed.socialEnglish
    3 months

    I had a Voodoo 5, which I bought about a month before 3dfx went tits up. Impeccable timing.

        • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.clubEnglish
          3 months

          Yeah, I wanted to have it my collection since it came out, but it’s not happening anytime soon, at least not until us millennials don’t have anything better to live for.

  • aburrito@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3 months

    I had no idea you could emulate old hardware like this on an FPGA, that’s so cool