Quake 2 with 3Dfx Voodoo and AMD 3DNow!
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- Опубликовано: 21 авг 2024
- Hi, I am following up on a previous video where I benchmarked Unreal and answered a questions if it would be better to upgrade the CPU or the Voodoo 1. Now it is time to answer the same question using Quake 2 - a game I was never able to get my hands on.
While I thought it will be a similar process like benchmarking Unreal, I was quite surprised how many more options and limitations appeared!
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Man, I remember well of this old times! I remember the excitement that was to play Quake 2 and the original Tomb Raider for the first time with the Voodoo 1, when I played these games before only with the CPU (the software mode). I also got later the Voodoo 2 to play the Quake Arena (the Voodoo 1 has not enough power to play these game at 640x480), and, a few weeks later, I bought a second Voodoo 2, to play the same Quake Arena at 800X600, because the higher resolution was so nice to see! The problem was that the two Voodoo 2 weren't enough to play as 1024x768 (the image quality was fabulous on a 13/14"CRT monitor), so I sold the two Voodoo 2 and I bought the top graphics card from a new graphics card manufacturer that I didn't like much, because I suspect that they like money too much, a so-called Nvidia...
Ahh, these were exciting times! Great video, quite the trip down nostalgia lane. Edit: I think I still have two Voodoo 2 cards somewhere in my basement, but I don't remember if I still have my AMD K6-3 CPU and motherboard. You've inspired me to go on a hunt!
I hope you'll find them! I am trying to get a second Voodoo 2, but they are more and more difficult to come by. I also want a second Diamond so I can use the original 3dfx drivers.
@@bitsundbolts Which one was the Diamond? Was that the original Voodoo? I think I've also got a Voodoo Rush around somewhere, that was the cut-down version.
3Dfx partnered with many companies to produce the Voodoo cards including Voodoo 2. From Voodoo 3, they cut those ties and manufactured the cards themselves. It is partly to blame for 3Dfx demise. Diamond was just another board partner that released boards like Creative and many others. To run two Voodoo 2 in SLI, they should be the same manufacturer and model (8 vs 12 MB versions). There are newer (community) drivers which allow you to match Voodoo 2 from different partners, but you can't use the original drivers from 3dfx or the board partner
@@bitsundbolts I'm gearing up for a house move, so after all that settles, I will revisit you with some information about Voodoo 2 cards. If they work, we can arrange for me to send them over to you for a video. That should be fun for your audience!
Thanks for the offer, but it may be difficult to send hardware to me. I am going on vacation to US for a couple of weeks now and after that I am back in UAE. Good luck with the move!
What a blast from the past. I loved my Voodoo2 SLI back in the day. It made Quake 2 run like butter.
I remember playing Quake 2 as a little tyke at my friend's house. It scared the pants off of me but it was such a rush. That sense of exploration combined with fear of getting killed in the game. I think we played it on a Pentium 1 of some sorts, probably 166 MMX and a 1MB or 2MB S3 graphics card. It was just about the time that I really started getting interested in computers. Our own computer at home was still a 486 running DOS so 3D games in Windows was really something special because up until then we only had Wolfenstein 3D. Doom was a game for devil worshipers and Duke Nukem 3D had strippers and also devil things so they we're both off limits for the longest time.
Wow 3DNow! results were VERY impressive! (with Voodoo2) Thanks for sharing!
Hey PixelPipes - Nice to see you here! I watch your Channel!
I was surprised as well to see that much of a gain using 3DNow! I remember that this technology was laughed at back then.
A shame that there weren't more games that were as well optimized for 3DNow! as Quake II is.
Very interesting results. I didn't know 3dnow had so much potential that I probably never experienced back in the day! Just bought a couple of K6-2 CPUs + motherboards so I look forward to seeing my own results.
I was surprised as well. Let me know how it works out for you!
@@bitsundbolts Will do. Thinking about making my first serious videos on those boards/CPUs, and a few other videos on retro goodies I've picked up recently. Don't want to become a youtuber, but might be useful for the overall community. Cheers!
Just do it. I am doing the same. Not here to become famous, just sharing what I am doing and having fun with it!
yeah 3Dnow! worked wonders for 3Dfx cards well in to the Athlon days since it could basically provide near Hardware TnL speeds to the cards in software for games that used it. but not many really did not many even used MMX for that mater either till much later. mid 90's where fun time to be in the hobby so much you get off the shelf now we had to hand make :D
Can test "Trespasser" ?
Man, you would have been a BALLER playing this at 1024x768 back in the day with that setup lol
i had a K6-2 400Mhz PC with Voodoo2 + i740 for 2D back in the day! it was the first PC i built for my self. with 3Dnow! and 12MB Voodoo2 you could run at 1024x768 at near 60fps in Quake 2 which was insane at the time. 3Dnow! Quake 2 works with the Voodoo3 and 5 as well.
the K6-2 overclocked pretty well too you could get to 500Mhz pretty reliably but need good cooling. this with a Voodoo2 and i740 + Sound Blaster Live! Value and 16MB of ram made for amazing budget gaming PC for its time.
Results with a stock Voodoo 1 are far different than with a few tweaks.
Enabling options like Fast PCI Read and others can improve performance a lot !
I don't remember for Quake 2, but I managed to get about 40 fps with a Voodoo 1 and a 233 MMX.
And Unreal was totally playable.
As far as I know, the FPU of Intel was superior to AMD K6 family. That may have contributed to better results on an Intel platform. Be assured that I will revisit this topic using a Pentium 233 MMX
@@bitsundbolts In fact, I first bought a K6 233.
It got so hot I changed it for a Pentium 15 days later, because of reboots when the temperature was a bit warm .... The MMX was coolest, but the performance was also better.
But it was the first K6, not the K6-2, this may make a difference.
Fun fact, the 233 accepted to run at 290 MHz, but made a fun computer :)
Unreal worked well even on a Cyrix 6x68 P150+ with a Voodoo1, although iirc you had to run a commandline tool to tell programs that you had a Pentium, otherwise the CPU would be identified as a 486 by most (due to having a different identification string which was unknown to older programs).
Slight overclock on the CPU to a P166+ also helped. Note, this was the non-MMX version of the CPU, which had a very weak FPU compared to intel - which was also its achilles heel in later games.
Nice benchmarks! Always fun to see this. I remember that AMD K6-2 could even compete with early Pentium 3’s.
We'll see this soon! I am curious about it as well!
It cannot, in 3D it's Pentium MMX level clock for clock.
Back in 1997 i had my first PC after Amiga. Pentium 166 MMX, Voodoo 2 and Soudblaster AWE64, miss those days, playing and games were much more fun than nowadays
I benchmarked Q2 countless times on my K62 and Voodoo 2. I remember averaging around 60fps at 800x600, matching my friend's Intel rig with the same 3D accelerator. 3DNow! did a lot of heavy lifting for this game.
Ah, the good days of PC gaming when it was actually affordable and progress was made year on year........ I remember playing unreal on my Voodoo2 and looking at the intro for the first time, jaw on the floor. I am still waiting to be as impressed with the graphics I I was then some 25 years later.
The first time I played a hardware accelerated game, my jaw dropped to the floor. I’ll never forget that.
I still remember it like yesterday. It was near the end of the year in 1998 and I happened to see part of an episode of CNET and they showed the Voodoo 2 card and how different the games looked on it. We got one for out Pentium 200MMX and also doubled the RAM to 64mb and Quake 2 looked so good. We played GL Quake for a while but went back to software Quake because the blood and gibs looked better at the lower rez but Quake 2 looked so good with the Voodoo 2 and GL. That Pentium 200MMX had a long hard life and I wore out two CRT monitors with it and Win95 became so bloated and glitchy. I was unable to finish Diablo 2 on it because it kept freezing up on Act 4.
Gibs driven engine selection)) a friend of mine chose to play q1 instead of q2 just because of gibs.
@@Samopal.VanoZz Quake 1 does have better gibs and blood, especially on pure software mode, GL Quake makes the blood particles too small and it looks less of a bloodbath.
IIRC, 3Dfx only offered a "Mini-GL" and eventually offered a full OpenGL ICD for the lineup of Voodoo 2 and up. NVIDIA was somewhat famous for offering a full OpenGL ICD well before 3Dfx did.
I have not done my research yet, but I think for the Voodoo 2 the best you could get was the Mini-GL (but that may have been just for Quake II). Maybe I'll find out during future research.
If only this information was this easy to search back in 1997 lol
Even though it was a lot, its exactly what i was looking for with such great brief explanations. Thanks bruv
I played Quake 2 on a AMD k6 3Dfx 500mhz with a Voodoo 1. It was fast, and smooth, and very enjoyable experience.
QUAKE 2 will never die! We are still alive and kicking boyzzz! :))
Amusingly, 3DNow! Professional was supported all the way up to the "Construction" family of CPUs. It ws dropped in Ryzen, although I read that while the CPUs report that they don't support it, supposedly they will still work...?!
The K6-2 400 was a PC that I used for several years and I played Quake II a lot
Pls Ive been looking for this for a long time and finally I found u!! You're literally a life saver. It kinda took a while to download but it still worked.
Thanks for nice retrospective! That was warm, bulb time.
And I was playing quake 2 on software with pentinum 166MMX.
Sadly amd drop 3dnow on ryzen cpus. For some reason the industry used more sse than 3dnow. The instructions do the same, but are different.
I was very surprised to see the performance gains using 3DNow! Especially Quake 2 which was optimized for it. But I will revisit Quake 2 with Pentium MMX, Pentium II, and Pentium III in the future. At the moment I am heavy on AMD chips.
The 3DNow! set was an extension to the MMX and thus tied to the already depreciated x87 stack. Once AMD fully implemented all the SSE variants together with AVX in Bulldozer, there was even less reasons to keep the already redundant 3DNow!, that was dragged along by inertia since K7 Athlon and its 64-bit revisions later.
take away: Benchmark EVERYTHING! also, would like to see a banshee or sli v2's or v3,4,or5 with 3dNowextensions and maybe how different 3dnow extension versions do on the various levels of hardware. maybe the voodo1 can still benefit with an older version?
I see that I have to get going acquiring more retro hardware ;)
A friend of mine payed 3k for a pentium 2 and I built my K62-300 + S3-verge+Voodoo2 for $1200. He cried when mine out performed his in every game. Those where good times
You definitely could get a lot more for your money if you did research ans spend your money wisely.
I have a recollection of using the same trick, renaming the MiniGL DLL but putting it in the Windows System folder; it had a great effect on the OpenGL screensavers that were ported from NT, I think?
Good times! Thanks for this trip down memory lane!
Wow this brings back memories
"Better late than never". I'm playing The Saboteur and AC4:Black Flag on my shiny (not new) GTX 1080, finally. The Saboteur has to be seen at 4k. Ahead of it's time!
Excellent video, you however have one very important historical detail backwards, which is literally a point and reason which forced 3D accelerator industry to stop making very expensive if novel but ultimately useless toys and start making someting that can actually be used as very powerful tools with universal standardized non-vendor specific API all manufacturers comply with.
That is, when Quake was released it wasn't so much 3Dfx Voodoo _owners_ problem or a problem specific to just 3Dfx cards that there was no 3d accel version of the game availble, it was in-fact _every_ consumer grade 3D accelerator _manufacturers_ problem. Why? Well, because John Carmack had done one 3D accelerated version of Quake supporting Rendition Verite 1000 cards using Verite's proprietary RRedline API for DOS, and nearly burnt himself out emotionally and cognitively due to all the chip and API specific optimization he had to do and basically re-do the heavy lifting he'd already done to once for the engines DOS software renderer, which he would now have to do again for every single manufacturer and specific chip they've released that has sufficient market share and in particular for every chip in a generation capable enough the manufacturers provides support for in their API. And then optimize this to every chip version and variant...
Yeah, that would mean redoing everything he just went through twice for Software and vQuake at least several dozen times before Quake has any sort of widespread 3D accelerator support for major cards out there. And future development of his engine and its features would be on the mercy of these penny pinching assholes, who do not even bother implementing half the features their chips actually are capable of in their own APIs as he had realized when working with Verites hardware R&D guys on optimizing the vQuake release for the most common Verite 1000 cards made.
He was pissed. And if you're a 3D accelerator hardware manufacturer for the PC game industry, you shouldn't probably fuck with the guy who just released the first full 3D game engine for licensing to other game developers and broke sales records with the first game using it...
Carmack issued an ultimatum to the entire gaming 3D accelerator manufacturing industry. They have a choice of either supporting the entire OpenGL 1.1 API specification. Or, their products will not be supported by any iD tech engine or game in the future.
This lead to all sorts of infantile squealing from corporate executives who have the emotional maturity of a petulent adolescent canine with a crack habit, that this was impossible and that they couldn't do even half of the things this requires from their hardware in theory...
To which he replied that, he already has fucked around with their stuff and the proprietary APIs enough to know the cards do support around half the set of a serviceable partial set of the OGL APIs key features and effects, their bullshit APIs just do not and that you're R&D departments engineers have been wondering why they even bother to make the silicon when nobody is using most of it anyway. Have been wondering as to why the driver and software development teams are sitting with thumbs up their asses for the past couple of years now...
Wow, looks impressive! Thanks
It would be great to test with AMD K6-3 + 2x Voodo 2 SLI :)
Hope to get my hands on a second Voodoo 2! Regarding the K6-3+, I'll soon be making a video on this CPU. But it will be a modified K6-2+ 570.
Interesting. As far as I remember, Intel Pentium 133 or Intel Celeron 233 (no mmx) with voodoo 1 made a very playable Quake 2 in 640x480. As for Unreal and sin ... I had to select 512x384, because they were really power hungry.
Maybe, it was related to the Intel processors? Or my memory? :D (in my head, not in my machine)
Intel FPUs were better than others. I will definitely test Quake II in the future on several CPUs (Pentium 200@233, Pentium 233 MMX, K6 233, K6-2@233)
I was playing this on an AMD K6-2 300 and a Rova TNT graphics card. Must have been 1998...
When I first saw this game running on my mothers Compaq with AMD 3Dnow in Open GL it blew my mind since I was playing it with an ATI RAGE PRO in Software rendered
Fab video. Back in the day, when K6s were that bit older and cheap, I put together a k62 550, with v2 sli. All those parts were dirt cheap at that point. But I couldn't get 3dnow working in SLI. Are you able to test that?
I only have a single voodoo 2. Trying to get my hands on a second one
@@bitsundboltsAre you in Germany? You can borrow my Maxi Gamer 12mb if you want, I don't use it that often. I don't mind shipping it if you want it for a few months.
Unfortunately, I am not living in Germany. I left 17 years ago ;) thank you for the offer though!
I still remember my 3Dfx Vodoo 3d acclerator card... played Unreal Tournament with it, mindblowing performance.
Lol old times, k6 II 3D NOW, and a Voodoo Banshee, both were the first time I upgraded a PC, coming from a closed system Compaq Presario with a P166MMX, and no 3D acelerator, being a poor student and not knowing much about PC's at the time, the mobo I got for the K6 had no AGP slots, so my Banshee was a PCI one, Internet changed a lot of things
I can relate!
I can tell you first hand these were the days, I remember going to comp usa and getting a VooDoo II to play Quake 2, so good, so expensive.
I had an Pentium MMX 233Mhz sent to me in 2000 with 16bit ISA and PCI (it was my 1st PC - even tho I had been a PC techician & programmer since 1986). I got given an SB AWE64 as a consolation prize at the 1st ever Quake 2 Nationals in South Africa. A year after 3DFX went bust (got sold to NVidia) I bought 2x Voodoo 5 5500 (64Mb, 2 from a lot of 5). I could not afford the Voodoo 6 6600 prototype I found (10k). It ran Quake 2 & Unreal at 1280x1024 (3x ex-lease Compaq SVGA) "butter smooth" (sorry I cant remember what FPS I was getting, maybe 120-ish, maybe 140-ish), like "competition" level smooth. NOTE Voodoo 1 and Banshee are _very_ different from Voodoo 2 (I think maybe the 1st series only has 16bit registers, and the later ones are 32bit). The Voodoo 5 is like a Voodoo 3 but with more memory, and newer (=faster) 3DFX GPU. You should try compare Voodoo 2 to Voodoo 3 with Quake 2 and Unreal, and see if 3DNow also makes a difference (it should, but to what degree).
Thank you for sharing and the suggestion. I will revisit the topic once I get a Voodoo 3. I am still missing a lot of 3Dfx gear. But surely, I will get a second Voodoo 2 for SLI, Voodoo 3,4,5...
I remember playing this at my friends house when it came out, blew my mind on his dads pc. He was an engineer so he always seemed to have a super computer to my child brain.
I remember that as well. A friend had the game Star Wars: X-Wing on 5 floppy disks. The copy protection were words printed on each page in the manual. I memorized each word on each page to be able to play my "copy". I later got the CD-Rom version of the game.
@@bitsundbolts oh man, the good old days!
Great benchmarking work - it would be interesting to see a k6-3 in the mix or an athlon :)
I only have an agp voodoo 3 so I can't quite test this 😅
You have the one card I am looking for 😅. I will get one eventually, just looking for a reasonable price. I am still trying to find my way to provide good content - I am sure that I am going to revisit this topic many times and create data to compare many CPUs and graphic cards. Thanks for your words of encouragement!
@@bitsundbolts Hi, ich habe eine voodoo 3 pci Version übrig, ich würde sie Dir gerne zusenden. Auf der Karte ist ein Kondensator abgerissen aber bei einem schnelltest hat sie noch funktioniert.
Hallo Michael, wir können das gerne per Email weiter besprechen: bitsundbolts@gmail.com
Quake 2 without RTX ? )))
Thanks for the video!
That was great game back in time.
No RTX beats this awesome look
If you can get your hands on the 3DFX Voodoo 3 card, I believe that you would be surprised by the resulting benchmarks.
At some point I had Voodoo I and Cyrix mx266, and if I recall correctly, the Quake II was quite playable at this setup. But probably I'm wrong, because I didn't play Quake II a lot.
What I can tell for sure, Unreal Tournament run great at this computer (and it looks not less demanding in resources, for me).
My Configuration in this time - Pentium 200/16mb ram/S3virge/3DFX voodoo2 x2inSLI/monitor 1024x800/some video-tuner with hardware unlocker for C+/ sound Yamaha 7xx
I bought a Voodoo 1 specifically for this game. I had a AMD Duron 700 if I'm remembering that correctly.
I played this game to death with many single player levels.
I even dabbled in some map making.
And when I discovered Machinima I made my own little movies.
Watching Father Frags Best inspired me to make my own.
Voodoo2 supports hardware multitexturing, so it is significantly faster than Voodoo 1 in games using it. As Quake2.
Excellent and useful video!
Glad you think so!
Great work! Thanks for the video!
Thank you
Nice channel! It's a travel to the past with nice memories... Keep it up!! Btw, it won't run Crysis.
Thanks!
At that time, I had the voodoo 2 with a intel 200mhz with MMX. And later upgraded too 450mhz Intel
Another excellent video. Quake 2 is much less CPU dependent than Unreal. Even with a slow CPU and a Voodoo 2 it runs with high fps. Unreal being very CPU dependent needs at least a P2 350 mhz and a Voodoo 2 or Banshee to run properly.
Thank you! Glad you liked it.
Looking at the benchmarks, that's not what I would call "much less CPU dependent". It takes a massive leap from 32 fps to 80 fps when you double the CPU clock speed and enable 3DNow. It's just that the starting point is a bit higher with the Voodoo 2 and the game thus playable.
There is no magic here - like most games, Q2 requires a faster CPU and GPU to scale properly. On Vogons, you can find a big benchmark showing Q2 performance on a Matrox G200 using something like 150+ different CPUs. Unsurprisingly, it scales all the way from a meager 5 fps on 486-class CPUs up to 40 fps on a Pentium III.
@@looks-suspicious in Quake 2 with a P2 233 mhz and Voodoo 2/3 you will get an average of 60 fps. In Unreal with the same CPU and video card you will only get around 35 fps. The difference is huge. Unreal is much more CPU dependent than Quake 2.
@@supermario8416 No, it just means that Unreal is slower. Or doing more work per frame.
When people talk about things being CPU dependent, they normally refer to the relative performance changes caused by different CPU speeds. In other words, if two games lose half their framerate each when you halve the CPU speed, then both are equally (and heavily) CPU dependent, because they both scale the same way with CPU speed. The actual framerate achieved in either game is irrelevant.
@@looks-suspicious look at the results, in Quake 2 the 200 mhz CPU and Voodoo 2 are much faster than the 400 mhz CPU and Voodoo 1. In Unreal its exactly the other way around. Quake 2 is more GPU dependant that Unreal and Unreal is more CPU dependant than Quake 2.
when I built my first pc to replace the pre built one from London Drugs my dad got I took 4 computers my uncle was replacing and took them all apart, and used the best parts to build as best a computer as I could.
It had AMD k6, with 2 Voodoo2's in sli. First PC game I ever got that was not freeware or a demo was QUAKE 2. I miss those times
few years later I got into the quake 3 alpha test (had 2 or 3 maps) and my dad got me a Voodoo 3 3000. I am so glad I got that ghx card, as when I downloaded the doom 3 alpha 2 years before the game came out, it was actually able to run it at a very playable frame rate. I would show my friends that doom 3 alpha, and NO ONE could believe it was actual gameplay I remember my friends laughing at me for thinking the screenshots where GAMEPLAY, saying "thats a cutscene, NO WAY those graphics are of actual game play" and I was like "nah bro, I got that game already running on my PC.. that is actual gameplay ghx..." I really really miss being able to wow people back then. Seeing the look on peoples faces as that Doom 3 alpha loaded up and they actually got to play it, and you can see the thought in there head "OMG this is what computer graphics are going to look like soon!" was sick. Made me feel like a computer god for being able to give them that experience.
Thanks for sharing! Interesting experience
Those were the days. Today you play online with Xbox or PS whatever. No comparison. You built a machine, tweaked it, then game on. Although, I was not privileged enough to own a 3DFX. I had an S3.
Same here, I never had a 3Dfx card for myself. I got the Voodoo 1 as part of a used secondary PC which was used by family. I don't remember what graphics card I had, but I think it was some ATI Chipset.
Man, we hit a lot of licks back in the day to get Voodoo 2's and K6's. The hustle was too real.
My Pentium ii 450mhz, 256MB RAM, and riva TNT2Ultra with 32MB of Ram ran Quake 2 at 120. 😆
IIRC back then a fast cpu for high FPS mattered for Q2 because the games frame rate determined the speed of the packets sent to the host multiplayer server.
I took a look at that list of banned games in Germany. And it's shockingly large. And most of them are staples of gaming that everyone has to play.
Yes, I agree! And I don't know what is worse: banning the original game or releasing a special German version like original Half-Life when Marines were replaced with some sort of mech robot warrior - calling for "Medic" when injured...
@@bitsundbolts so that's where the robot models come from. I was wondering why they wasn't used. I suppose now it's much easier to get past these dumb restrictions if youre a pc player over there thanks to mods. Or make a Xbox or playstation account for another country. We here in the US was very close to having this happen too back in the 90s. But thankfully our 1st amendment came into play, and the ESRB pleased the courts enough. A few people like Hillary Clinton tried again in the mid 2000s, but by then studies had already been done to show that video games do not cause violence, so now anytime a court, lawyer or politician goes on one of these anti video game rants, they are laughed out of court
Yeah, it's much better today with information being available online. It gets really annoying when you pay money to own something but due to those restrictions your property right vanishes (e.g. DVD regions, digital ownership, recently hardware iPhones, etc.)
I have a Voodoo 1, 2 , 3 PCI and 3 AGP. I have the Voodoo 3 PCI inside a Pentium 133 with 48mb ram and can actually play vanilla Half-Life using glide. It is sick how well these cards can perform when their potential is fully utilized
Yes, it makes such a big difference. And although the Voodoo 3 may be a bit bored in that Pentium system, it is not about getting the best possible frame rates, it is about making games playable! Need to get my hands on a Voodoo 3 soon!
@@bitsundbolts Indeed, this P1 is not really the best thing to have that card in but it is more about the feel of using it. I got a ton of other computers and parts too but I am one who split each computer to their own purpose. This P1 is mostly for playing certain games such as Tyrian which just won´t play on a different system, it just got a Re-cap too because these nasty electrolytics on the motherboard had started to leak all over the PCB but I found out just in time before it developed any damage which was good
I also have a board that seems to be a victim of bad caps. I am trying to get replacements. This is a Socket A board though. Athlon XP
@@bitsundbolts I see, the Amd and Intel P4 was the start of the capacitor plague which can explain why your board is having problems. I seen so many good parts decay because of this. But also many older devices start getting so old the capacitors start to leak. As far as I can see it is much less common for older caps to swell up and burst on the top as it seems. My guess is that the good capacitors gotten so old they corrode internally eventually breaking the rubber seal instead. The problem with this is that it kills the pcb in a silent way slowly eating away the board until it fails. Capacitor plague caps rarely been leaking at the bottom as they burst and dry up at the top instead. I guess everything gonna be doomed by time in the end
Ahhh I was a Matrox guy back then, Mystique with a M3D. Did go to a Banshee after that though.
I always wanted to own a Matrox card. A friend praised the picture quality the fact you could use multiple monitors.
@@bitsundbolts Yeah I think the best setup in the day for 3D image was to use the Matrox Millennium (had the best 2D output) with the Voodoo 2 doing the 3D part. The Mystique was a later slightly cut down Millennium with a couple of 3D 'aware' features.
Exactly what I remember!
I wondered why the Q II was so slow on my P166MMX + 16MB Ram + Voodoo I and looked so awful even compared to the Q I, while the Carmageddon 2 had a clear advantage over the Carmageddon 1 under the same conditions. Therefore, I just ran through all the maps with noclip and forgot this crooked lagodrome.
I still remember when i got a voodoo 5 5500 and was the envy of all my friends XD
I envy you right now right here!
I would've loved to have 7fps in Unreal when it came out :P It was more like 1 frame per three seconds.
I remember it so well: My brother bought a Voodoo card just to be able to play Quake 2 with acceleration. It was worth it, baby!
Great review i always wonder in 1998 how to enable 3dnow! on my voodoo2, i got the patch from a cd magazine no internet access back then
Exactly why I got bitten by the retro-bug! 25 years ago, I couldn't afford most top hardware and information was provided by PC magazines. Happy to see you here!
@@bitsundbolts already subscribed to your channel
That's where I got my patches from and demos great times
Thank you so much bro. Sending virtual hugs. Worked like a charm ;-)
I have played doom and blood bath with pentium 133 back then when i'm still in elementary school
Good times. My first real gaming PC build was back in 1998 thanks to that holographic Unreal display box at Costco.
I HAD to have it. So I put together an AMD build which was a 350mhz K6-2 on an Asus P5A motherboard and a Voodoo 2 2000 GPU.
To say I was addicted would be an understatement. I played the keys off my keyboard lol.
It's still true today that game developers can neuter a game by not implementing code that is beneficial to one brand or another.
Nvidia used this dirty tactic over the decades to great effect.
Hehe, good memories! And yes, optimized games towards one manufacturer can significantly reduce performance for other market participants... nVidia's "The way it's meant to be played" comes to mind...
I always thought 3dnow! Was just a gimmick, boy was I wrong...
Not sure yet, but this may be the best-case scenario. Nevertheless, it is impressive in Quake II.
When I saw the title of the video I thought: how much can 3DNow bring to this? Thank you for the schooling!
I went into this not expecting much, but was positively surprised as well. Thanks for watching
I started playing q2 with some terrible onboard in software. I later bought a tnt & my jaw hit the floor when I changed to opengl. Great times.
The good ol days of GPU, when NVIDIA cartel was not the bully it is today.
Totally rocked this on a voodoo banshee back in the day.. was in one of the world's top clans.. still jam sometimes but I can't get anywhere near my old fph scores even at 240hz on a 49" ultrawide (though my fph is better now at 240hz then it was at 60hz)
What do you think of the nVidia RTX version of Quake 2?
3.20 is the latest official quake 2 patch
Runs sick on a 2080ti 😂
What I'd have given for my current PC back in 1998
Great follow up video. Still believe should have been a nice in-between. Voodoo2 and overclocking your cpu. I used to get 249mhz out of Pentium 200s and 290 out of 233s. And that's not even k6-2's. Have a K6-2 266AFR at 375mhz (5.5x 66fsb) in my ECS socket 7 machine. About to toss in a 500AFX and do 6x 83fsb for 494 (2x multi = 6x). Nothing fancy, 430TX chipset. My s3 Trio3d 4mb or mach32/64 PCI cards should hopefully not go nutty with the high PCI speed. Luckily ISA is locked. From what I've read they should be ok provided i don't use any other PCI cards other then a network card (modern realtek). Most regular socket 7 boards can do 83fsb or at min 75fsb. Anywho I chose wisely. 👍 I've owned a few Voodoo 1's and sold all them as fast as possible. Overpriced. Kept all my VooDoo 2 and 3's though.
Thank you! I have plans to check 200 MHz CPUs. Waiting for K6 to arrive to compare some FPU performance. May do some overclocking then.
@@bitsundbolts Really where it's at with this platform and when overclocking became mainstream as didn't have to swap crystals... Also alot of fake labeled cpus as well from greedy people.
I tried 75fsb, but my Matrox Millennium II 8MB doesn't play ball. I do have a Trio64 4MB which does work, but I am worried overclocking old hardware. At the moment, this is just a hobby of mine and old hardware is rare and expensive - I have to choose wisely where to spend money on. Fake chips are an issue - hope I do not have to deal with those!
My 233 MMX also accepted to run at 290 :)
And as you write, on a TX chipset, with a 83 MHz fsb which was not mentionned in the manual. I just tried playing with the jumpers ...
No problem also with a Ati Rage Play + Voodoo 1.
I had a PCI network card (classic NE2000 probably Realtek 8029), and a Vibra 16 ISA, but also a Tekram SCSI card for the cdrom writer. No problem with the SCSI card.
I think S3 Trio64 may be difficult to break :)
Do the 3D now instructions works with a Banshee? I have one in a K6-2 500Mhz system, only manage to push 47 fps @ 640*480 and 37 fps @ 800x600 with 3D Now GL render. No difference than OpenGL so i'm confused...
I think 3Dfx released Voodoo 2 drivers with 3DNow! support. Voodoo 1, Rush, and Banshee did not receive any 3DNow! optimizations as far as I know.
@@bitsundbolts I was affraid of this... And on the unofficial side?
I haven't put the time into research as I do not own a Banshee or anything after voodoo 2. I briefly came across two major unofficial drivers: MesaFX and Wicked3D - but I don't know if they support Banshee cards and 3DNow.
I am afraid that they don't support Banshee cards.
You were never able to get your hands on quake 2? Been in the budget bin for ages a couple years after release ;)
Edit: I see, 🇩🇪
I wouldn't run a Voodoo 1 higher than 512x384. Got to have that butter smooth frame rate
Играл в Q2 еще на своем (Pentium 200) и S3 ViRGE (позже поставил и Voodoo 2 от Inno Vision). Кстати, понятитие miniGL и породил Q2 - это минимальный набор функций API OpenGL нужный для работы этой игры...
Для ку1 тоже был miniGl
@@Samopal.VanoZz Да, был официальный порт - GLQuake, который как раз и был тестом нового апаратного рендера для будущего Quake 2.
Да, был не совсем точен - GLQuake стал основой для miniGL, тк при его выходе не было ниодного чипа (для массового рынка) который умел работать с OpenGL, и 3DFx в спешке выпустили переходник с минимальным набором OpenGL API - miniGL.
3dfx voodoo 3 3000 agp, was the first video card that I bought with my own money...
A very nice card! Hope it served you well!
@@bitsundbolts it was great card, with my first computer, board Chaintech 6ATA2-F100A VIA Apollo Pro 133/133A - Slot 1, pentium 3 600 mhz slot 1 and 64 mb ram, unreal was one of the first game that
i played withe that computer, and unreal tournament still have it in my computer, the same that I used in that computer copy and paste the game folder from then til now...
This is so weird to hear. I played the original Q2 here in Germany back in the 90s soon after release. I wasn't even aware it was banned here. Edit: just found out it was sold in shops here for a short time before being banned.
This is what I've read. They were quite quick to ban it. You were lucky then to get a copy.
Is there any data on how software mode impacted CPU performance compared to having hardware acceleration?
I am asking because I used to run this game well on software mode on a Pentium MMX 233MHz but I don't know how the performance would be with a graphics card back in the day.
I think I have read that Quake II doesn't take advantage of MMX. However the floating point unit of Intel CPUs was superior to other manufacturers. Quake II benefits from better FPU performance. With a graphics card you'll get better image quality, higher resolution, and better performance - depending on the graphics card. There'll be more comparisons in the future for sure!
@@bitsundbolts I know of the benefits of graphics cards but I was wondering why software mode stopped being supported circa 1999 after Unreal Tournament.
It would have been of great benefit for CPUs without much 3D power.
Which is why I started considering that it must hit the performance of the CPU hard for it to be just ignored after 2000.
Yes, I think CPUs were just too slow with ever advancing graphic requirements. Transform & Lighting for instance. Probably the tradeoff was too large to pursue software renderers
@@MashupsByMandy the big differences in overall game performance are mainly a resolution related thing. But first things first before going into this resolution stuff a lil deeper. One needs to understand that a typical ego shooter game like Quake II or Unreal basically needs to do two different types of 3D related calculations. One type contains 3D position related data of everything while happening, the other type of 3D stuff is related just with processing the images that are to be shown on the display output, every single pixel for target resolution. If a Pentium 233MMX needs to do all necessary workloads including the software rendered image output of a 3D world, this only works for a very very low number of overall pixels to be dsiplayed, at 512x384 it is already unplayable with slow 12,5 frames per second. If the 233MMX can focus on 3D position stuff and hardware accelerators do the whole image displaying work --->> the same 233MMX can do up to 1024*768 pixels at over 40 frames per second with way higher visual quality, what looked awesome and played great back in the day.
And finally, as you asked for data to compare, here you go, benchmarks to compare : www.soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/compare2.htm
Man I miss the old Windows UI. Always try to find something similar when I use Linux. All the beveled edges made it feel a little more physical than modern uber-minimal stuff, without going overboard.
Also, it's so funny to me that people ever thought those blurry filtered textures looked better
This happens to me every time I see Windows 95. I remember the brave moment when I first tried to install Windows 95 on my AMD 486 DX4 100. To my surprise, it worked and for the next week's i was glued to the screen
That design is so functional. Every design choice has a thought process to make it easier to use and understand even on old crt monitors.
That design is so functional. Every design choice has a thought process to make it easier to use and understand even on old crt monitors.
That's my old system
Magic Mini gl driver for K6-2 patch 3.20
I remember this. 3dnow! mode patch for q2. Glide got outdated real quick. The athlon really blew the k6 series out of the water
I had an AMD Athlon 700 MHz. I never paid much attention to 3DNow! because mainly people were talking about MMX at that time. Since Quake II works so well with 3DNow! I have to find something that benefits from MMX (or SSE later on). Future content...
Funy how idTech has *always* been mostly unbothered about what CPU you use
Quake II seems to be the exception! Heavily optimized for 3DNow!
on Program inside the screen.
I you whant to make a beast machine with 3dnow .
Wel this are the cpu serie that have it .
3DNow!: K6-2/K6-3 series
3DNow! Enhanced (ook wel genoemd 3DNow!+): K6-2+/K6-3+ series, Athlon (Classic/Thunderbird), Duron (Thunderbird core)
3DNow! Professional: AthlonXP, Duron (Morgan Core)
3DNow! = 21 Multimedia instructies (ook wel "FPU MMX")
3DNow! Enhanced = 3DNow! uitgebreid met 24 extra Multimedia instructies
3DNow! Professional = 3DNow! Enhanced + SSE.
Always got me how much better software looked than using hardware. Almost a shame to use opengl. It looks beautiful in software.
you could turn of bi- or trilinear filtering and have the same look as software. Most people liked the filtered textures better though
@@what9418 it was better for competivie play. 512x was awesome as it ran like lightening and didn't have that orange fog so you could see people in the distance clearly and it removed shadows on warehouse. I think I played for around 8 years. GameSpy MSN gaming and many other services I forgot. It's swings and roundabouts I guess it depends on what you want it to look like me well lit and high frame rate was all I wanted how it looked was second to those
i had no idea. i played it firstimy uncle house i was 13
Interesting tests, I need to try them on my numerous processors and Voodoo 3000. BTW, I'm the 666th like for this video 😈
Now go Voodoo2 SLI with that rig running 1024*768.
I have an rtx2060super and the rtx version still can bring it to its knees
I have k6-3+ @600mhz with fastest ram the board could run and still it's a turd compared to pentium2.
Everything just works hassle free, and the agp works world better on anything thats not supersocket7
I'll probably have fun trying AGP on a super socket 7. Can't wait to pull my hair!
@@bitsundbolts generally Voodoo3 agp works best, because it doesn't use any of the agp features that are bugged on ss7
Good to know. I'll keep this in mind. Still need to get a Voodoo 3 though...
After seeing this video I tried the same thing, but my results are a bit different:
Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-III 450 2x Voodoo2 in SLI: 37,1 FPS 3Dfx OpenGL
Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-III 450 2x Voodoo2 in SLI: 46,6 FPS 3DNow! 3DfxGL
Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-III 450 2x Voodoo2 in SLI: 22,7 FPS 3DNow! OpenGL
I also redid the test om my AMD K6-2+ 550 system:
Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-2+ 550 Voodoo 3 3000 65,5 FPS 3DNow! OpenGL
De 3DNow! 3DfxGL doesn't work with a Voodoo 3
I used patch 3.20 and I also installed MESAFX 6.2
Have you got any idea's why I can't get a higher result?
I also never new that this version existed, but I'm glad I now it know. Quake II play's a lot smoother than before (from 37,1 --> 46,6 FPS, just with a patch :-) So thank you for this upload!
I used a resolution of 640x480 and reference drivers. Maybe the 3DNow! support is different using the reference drivers.
Do you have a super socket 7 board?
@@bitsundbolts thats the difference. Resolution of 1024x768 vs 640x480. Than the scores are not that bad at all.
Both machines have a SuperSocket 7 motherboard in them. An GIGABYTE with Alladin 5 chipset and an Aopen AX59Pro.
I shudder to think where we would be right now graphically if Nvidia hadn't bought 3Dfx and buried glide.
Glide was powerfull because there was few competition. DirectX was not so great at first, and OpenGL only for professionnal use.
So I doubt it would have survived anyway.
3Dffx cards were not as powerfull as the others after the Voodoo 3.
Nvidia is not guilty :)
@@nalinux Yes, exactly, they weren't as powerful and they SMOKED Nvidia cards. Nvidia always went the brute force route. With the brute force they have now, with glide on top of it... *shudder"
@@VroodenTheGreat I had a Voodoo 3 when my friend bought a 256 DDR.
I prefered the image of the Voodoo, but the 256 was way more powerfull.
Glide was mainly a "mini GL".
When cards could achieve to use the full OpenGL, Glide was dead, 3Dfx or not.
@@nalinux You missed the point again. I don't know how I could have been any clearer.
why is all the video capture so choppy and tearing? also I bet you this game runs at over 200 FPS on my 2080ti and my 3090. LOL
V-Sync is disabled - that is why you get screen tearing.