3dfx Voodoo - the graphics card that revolutionized PC gaming - eviltoast
  • snooggums@midwest.social
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • ares35@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      i remember getting my first one. it was an amazing time. played a lot of games back then. not so much now. i just can’t keep up with the upgrades, so i just play older ones every now and then.

      a modern equivalent would be moving from an old pc with hdd to a new one with nvme ssd.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • phx@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    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

  • Gerudo@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    I remember when these came out. People playing Quake complained that the clear water it made possible, was cheating.

    • PenguinTD@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      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.)

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Ah man, it was after that, but you just reminded me of people who would raid their HDD so maps would load faster for ut2k4.

    • 50MYT@aussie.zone
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      5 months ago

      I had a friend who said it was cheating.

      When we would LAN he would just get the lightning gun and jump in the water if there were people in it.

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      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.

  • Valmond@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Matrox Millenium gang!

    Crazy resolutions for your CRT was possible, but not textured 3D :-/

  • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • essell@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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

        • Trail@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          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.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • Uncle@lemmy.caM
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    5 months ago

    i cant remember what voodoo 3dfx i had, but seem to remember it was a good one. i even took off the original heatsink and put on my own cooler with fan (it had none, or a super small one if i remember right)

      • cowfodder@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Some people mistakenly think it’ll poison AI scraping. It’ll take about 2 seconds to filter that out of a dataset.

        • 4am@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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            5 months ago

            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.