Cards had such neat names back then too.
Voodoo Banshee Rage 3D Pro Ensoniq Soundscape (soundcard)
I’m kinda glad it didn’t get to the point of “throbbing purple speedster” or whatever, shit’s kinda boring now
Box art was also awesome. Now they can just shit on the box and people will still pay $2k for a new gpu.
I mean, I don’t buy a GPU for the box…
You also don’t buy a painting for the frame, but it sure helps.
Fire GL 1000, Monster 3D, Matrox Millennium
The Voodoo and Descent was a match made in Heaven.
We need to go back to the 6DF games. So much more fun to be mined there.
Try No Man’s Sky in VR - it’s mind bending!
I started looking into that. Descent 1&2, Feespace 1&2, Forsaken, it’s a big empty world now. I did find Forsaken Remastered. It updated some of the graphic abilities, but it’s still 20 year old triangles.
Freespace 3 needs to be a thing.
I remember Forsaken on N64. I worked at Blockbuster, and that was the one and only game I’d recommend to people at the time. It changed what I knew a video game to be (not long after Super Mario 64 did the same). +
I was slightly too young to get one, but I remember them coming out. I didn’t get my first GPU until AGP became a thing, when I was able to get a Voodoo Banshee (which was the 3rd? Generation) from these guys.
I loved the banshee.
Everyone mocked me for the idea of having one graphics card that can do both the 2D and 3D at once. Clearly an idea that’d never catch on
i think i had a banshee at one time too, omfg im old
Also had a Banshee and it was the greatest thing ever at the time. Previously I had an S3 Virge with 2Mb or 4Mb memory for 2D only. You can imagine the improvement.
Matrox Millenium gang!
Crazy resolutions for your CRT was possible, but not textured 3D :-/
Heyoo!
There must have been dozens of us.
I remember when these came out. People playing Quake complained that the clear water it made possible, was cheating.
It took me so long to bake all the maps and future map updates from Mods(threewave mostly) and publish on our dorm FTP. People that still play on CPU is at disadvantage for sure.
But after a while anyone that plays 3d game already have one. It basically trickle down to other players. (ie my voodoo1 was sold cheap to one of my friends back then when I got the voodoo2.)
The great first video card, remember it well.
It came with a kick-ass poster for its time as well.
Did you mean to link to a creative commons license?
Some people mistakenly think it’ll poison AI scraping. It’ll take about 2 seconds to filter that out of a dataset.
I don’t think they believe it will poison it, I think they believe they’ll be able to collectively sue when it’s discovered their content has been used.
Not sure if that’ll turn out to be a pipe dream as well, but it’s got a better shot than poisoning.
At least in the US, copyright doesn’t cover every single thing you write down, and comments on a website probably are one of the many things you can’t actually copyright. But it’s vague enough that it would have to be argued in court to actually know for sure.
Not only PC gaming, but coin-op gaming, too.
I had one of these back in the day, held on to it for way too long. Eventually was doing some cleanup, and included it in a craigslist post for $10, along with a handful of other things that someone might still be able to use. I got a hit on it almost immediately, from someone with an email address at midway.com. Apparently, these were used in some number of coin-op games, and they’re like gold.
So - if you have one in a drawer somewhere, it’s probably worth some money today to the right person.
Holy shit I think I threw it away
I still have mine. What an amazing card that was when it came out.
I was there, 3000 years ago, the smooth textures in Quake & NFS, and the lighting effects in Unreal and Quake 2.
Tomb Raider had Glide too. So perfectly pointy.I have the fondest memories of those days & 3Dfx as a brand. I still have my Voodoo 2s (2×12MB) connected in SLI, I should get them a better display (case?) actually.
I remember having Glide powered screensavers.
Unreal… That was my jam. Voodoo Banshee 16mb and that game was beautiful.
you forget the amount of time needed to bake Quake translucent water patch.
I didn’t know about batching at the time so would wake up every few hours to start the next level converting, so I could get it completed during midterm :)
End product was amazing! I still have the converted levels to this day.
For those that weren’t around at the time, this was like the jump from prop planes to jets. Such a large leap from what had come before.
Reading the resolution and FPS numbers it doesn’t seem that impressive, but doubling both FPS and pixels and adding a bunch of new things like reflections and water at the same time was just incredible.
it was an amazing time.
a modern equivalent would be moving from an old pc with hdd to a new one with nvme ssd.
That is an excellent comparison!
I think I might still have some of these laying around somewhere. Good times.
I only had software rendering until after Half-Life came out and it required a dedicated graphics card. I completely missed the 3DFX era but always wished I had one.
HL supported software mode, it used the same render from quake for it. It was however very slow. For more modern CPUs it would be fine but for common CPUs at the time 15fps would be a good experience.
3dfx was good but the cards started to struggle with the likes of HL and UT. Both were playable, but not super smooth.
