When 3DFX came out it was a revelation. i had the 1st voodoo card in 96ish and couldn't belive how good it was. i then move on too the voodoo 2 12mb in sli. that was another big jump. i still have my two diamond voodoo 2 cards , both 12mb. there boxed and still in my spareroom.
I went with the Creative Labs TnT2Ultra as soon as it came out. Although I was a big 3dfx fan at the time, I didn't think the V3 was that much of a leap from the existing 12mb Voodoo2 SLI setup that I already had for Glide games. I had a spanking new 21" CRT at the time and the TnT2 was just more vibrant with its 32bit color support.
I have that 3DFx Compaq variant, the only 3DFx card I managed to get during my youth days (getting a new one was just to expansive) . Glad I still have it and an PC from the era, to get a quick retro gaming session on the weekends :)
Two things I would like to add: there was a 3rd player in this battle of 1999 and that was the Matrox G400 MAXX. The Matrox actually would often beat the TNT2 in Direct3D titles but was let down by poor OpenGL performance. In general the D3D king was the Matrox card, OpenGL was V3 3500 and the best 'all-rounder' was the TNT2 Ultra. Also it wasn't that people didn't care for 32bit colour, they absolutely did! But it was too much of a performance hit on the TNT2 or G400 for it to be viably used in-game.
Loved it! Another terrific Pixel Pipes episode. And oh boy, the member berries are strong with this one. I still have both GPUs, and it was a tremendous era to be an enthusiast! Thanks for the vid Nathan, another great one.
I bought my first PC back in 1999: A Pentium III 550 MHz and a TNT2 Ultra! That graphics card served me well for years and was only replaced by the GeForce4 Ti 4200.
Ah I had a few of those machiens back in 1999. I was lucky enough to aquire five Dell Optiplex servers in amazing fold out cases and each contained dual P3 550's, 256MB SDRAM, onboard SCSI with Quantum SCSI 8GB HD's and Dell Viper 770 TNT2's - which were much like the TNT2 Ultra only custom to Dell machines I believe. For the time, those machines were absolute powerhouses, especially under Windows 2000/ME which made use of the dual CPU's, although I think only Quake III used the dual core ability in terms of games. I gave one to my brother who had never had a PC before, only a Playstation 1, and he was mesmerized by Deus Ex and Heretic 2 for months. Hilariously, he called me on night and asked me to come over because he had gotten really far in Deus Ex but had become stuck on the submarine base level (near the end of the game). I went over and discovered he hadn't applied a single skill point except those from the start of the game. He had gone ALL THE WAY to the sub base, being untrained in almost everything. Regardless, I still have one of those machines left in storage but I outfitted it with P3 700's and a Geforce 256 DDR before I retired it back in 2002. I did keep the vipers out of the other machines though, so I have 3 of those, the guy who bought the machines from me only wanted them for their SCSI capability and the SCSI drives they came equipped with. Considering I managed to get all 5 for nothing, I made a few quid on those PC's. Still, looking back, I should have kept more than one. Retro builders dreams, those Optiplex machines.
I had a TNT2 Ultra with my Duron 750 and I remember playing Gunman Chronicles on it and loving the game. Recently built a retro rig with an AMD K6-III 550Mhz and a TNT2 Ultra and Gunman was unplayable. Those K6-III's really sucked at floating point.
This channel is so awesome. Having such a specialised dive into this tech is so so so enjoyable. Thank you for this video, I remember 99 extremely well as I had just got into PC building and this era was so ferocious!
I agree 100%! :) Is just so, so satisfying, relaxing, nice, ... watching a short documentary produced as high of quality as a pixel pipes video. This one is one of my favourites.
Drooling over that Leadtek winfast A350 geforce 5900 behind you. And next to it the fail of the era: the hopeless 128 geforce fx5800 with its vacuum cleaner cooler. The design of that leadtek a350 is one of my absolute favorites still and only is bettered by the Gainward 6800 gt golden sample with similar design but in red and the ultra rare Chaintech Apogee GeForce FX 5800 Ultra golden card with blue LEDs inside. Love that period
Great job! I remember how I only had a 2MB video card back then and I was looking up to these 2.... Great memories! Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
i had a voodoo2, then my brother upgraded to a gf2 gts and i took his voodoo 2 and put in my system for SLI, which performed about the same as a voodoo 3 2000. good times.
1999 was a very exciting year. I moved jobwise to a new city and bought an ATI Rage128 to upgrade my Rage pro + Voodoo2 Rig. Voodoo3 was very expensive back then. Love your vids!
The TNT2 Ultra was my first graphics card, bought in the summer of 1999. I had a friend that was adamant about the Voodoo. And we argued a bit about it. But I do remember that pretty much all reviews put the TNT2 Ultra ahead. And that was the reason I bought it.
Yeah that was the changing of the guard. The TNT vs the VooDoo 2. They traded blows I guess, with TNT2 being faster (and with more colours and resolution support) in Direct 3D, but 3Dfx having the edge in some titles because of Glide. I saw a friend running Aliens vs Predator and Quake III with his TNT at a lan, however, and that made me take the plunge and sell my VooDoo 2 card and buy a TNT2 Pro. If only I'd have held out for a few more months I coulda aimed for the Geforce or Radeon. Ah well!
Mine was the WAY too common M64.. I remember playing C&C Generals with it. And it struggled even on the lowest settings. But i had a great time! Edit; I later bought the MX4000.
@@rembramlastname3631 TNT2 M64 ?? wow , i couldn't remember this graphics card . thanks for the info. I could remember only the normal TNT2 & the TNT2 Ultra. ----P.S. C&C Generals released around 3-4 years after the nVIDIA "TNT2" series , so an underpowered version of the TNT2 ,such as the M64, was logical to struggle with such titles. (If i remember correctly , during the time C&C Generals released , i had already moved to my next GPU , the GeForce 4 MX440.) Thanks for the memory ... update !!
@@Sitharii Theres also the Vanta. The "Celeron" amongst the TNT2 versions. I still have a box full of old GPU's. Including Intels first GPU, the I740, lol. If youre still interested, there are still modders active on C&C Generals, such as Shockwave, Rise of the Reds and Contra. Also Battlefield 2 with Forgotten Hope and Project Reality. All on ModDB.
@@rembramlastname3631 the Vanta ... yeah , it's been so long i had forgotten those models. Thanks. i also have the habit of keeping most of my old GPUs . I still keep my *beloved TNT2 Ultra* (a Creative model)and since it's my 1st discrete graphics card ever , i'll always keep it . I also keep a 6600GT( *Albatron* model , can you remember that company? ) ,a 7600GT , GTS450 , GTX460 , GTX560Ti , and my latest addition in my ...."bench-collection" , a highly factory-OC'd Palit GTX1080 GamerockPremiumEdition , which is a behemoth of a GPU !! (I'm certain that i could easily sell this GPU with all these shortages nowadays , but i'll keep it as well.) My current active GPU is an RTX2060. P.S. The only thing that i regret is gifting away my *beloved GeForce4 MX440* . I had very good memories from that GPU and i regret gifting it. So stupid of me. P.S.2 : thanks for the info about the mods , but sadly ,my gaming days are over ,i'm usually tired from work, and i rarely play games , i mostly enjoy watching other people playing games in youtube nowadays....
We must have been born the same era and was enthusiastic about these cards at the time! I bought 256, TNT, TNT2, and Almost all high end cards following these for the following 10-15 years!
LMAO, you don't know what you are talking about. Glide was a subset of OpenGL, a small API with limited capabilities that eventually failed to innovate (3DFX cards never could do 32bit colors, for example), while DirectX evolved to cater the evolving hardware and exists till today.
Went from a Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 at the tail end of its life, to a Diamond Monster II upon its release, to an ASUS V3800 TNT2 Ultra, to the GeForce 2 GTS. What an era of a few short years it was for graphics performance increase. Each generation, was a monumental leap forward in performance.
The advantage of having a 3dfx card is that you can run pretty nice exclusive programs like the ultra hle emulator and all without having a fast cpu or gpu, all you need is a pentium 2 and a 3dfx card
Went through a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, and that was it for me with 3DFx. Switched to the TNT 2 next, as colour depth and texture "were" important to me. Then, the GeForce 2 after that, until going over to ATI for a couple of cards. One of my good friends got the Voodoo 3 3500, and he had nothing but problems with it. I certainly don't regret having gotten my TNT 2 back in those days. It was the right time to dump 3DFx. 16-bit rendering was already archaic.
You're opening old wounds mate! Lost friendships over TNT2 and Voodoo 3, patched since, in a fragile bond, with the underlying chasms that will never be bridged! Whatever that means! :D
Would love to see a contemporary Matrox G400 MAX review. Crappy drivers hampered its OpenGL performance and all initial reviews were very critical. Then drivers improved but reviews were not updated. Probably the best card of the TNT2/Voodoo3/Rage 128 Pro/Savage4/G400 generation
Another well researched video and good comparison. Only wish you included a few of those later pushing games that had DX6 render paths just to see what they can really do. Otherwise, awesome video
The TNT2 Ultra was technically more poweful, but the 3dfx looked better and was faster when running many games that used the 3dfx Glide API (I had both cards in lower versions: the TNT2 "non-Ultra", and the Voodoo3 2000).
This represents my experience from the day. I had a very fast AMD K6-III CPU that was overclocked to 508 MHz (113 * 4.5), with low-latency SDRAM, and a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 card that I attached a relatively large CPU cooler to, hehe. It would run 190 Mhz, faster even than the 3500's clock! My friend's Pentium II 400 Mhz system, when upgraded with a TNT 2 Ultra, was still far behind the performance of my machine in a lot of games. He felt like the tech websites must have been paid off, as he had the impression that his machine would be much faster! (*´▽｀*) The 256x256 texture limitation really wasn't a problem back then. 256x256 was still larger than most textures in most games (e.g. Half-Life, Quake III), and the real limitation was the fact that textures had to be sized in powers of 2 on 3dfx. Some games would bug out if you didn't run them in a special 3dfx mode, even if they didn't have Glide support. And while the "22-bit" thing was basically marketing, 16-bit output on 3dfx really did look way better than on anyone else's cards, even Matrox.
Can't even remember what PC I had in 99. I think it was about the time I was changing from a Pentium 133mhz to a AMD K6 300 with a ATI Rage pro 8mb and 64mb ram very happy playing CS with like 5 fps in the Aztec door on a 32 players server ;)
Hi Nathan, another good one, and those cards are looking sweet as brand new 😊 Enjoy following your channel, hope you make more excelent quality videos like this one. I remember that in ‘99 I had 1st contact with PCs, and they were nor even close to these babies... celeron at 433 and Rivas tnt2 m64... yet, so much fun and so much progress in so little time 👏
In the Sunday paper! I would always look at the Best Buy inserts! They always had the voodoo card in them! From 1998 to 1999! That’s my first knowledge of the cards!
Keep it up dude, way to few people are covering old tech! P.S. A video on the Radeon HD5970 would be an awesome way of eliminating the FOMO I've carried around for 11 years.
cards i REALLY wanted but missed out on: voodoo 3 (any of them) radeon 8500 PRO radeon 9700 PRO (got the 9800pro later so close enough) radeon HD 5850/70 Fury Nano Vega56 It's funny, the only nvidia cards i really lusted after were the geforce 2 series and then the geforce 4, which was a huge disappointment and made me not ever "wish" for a geforce again (although i'd buy them when they were good, like the geforce 8800gt)
The first PC I built had a Voodoo 3 with the TV tuner. The dongle was really annoying, but I could record Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my PC. So that was cool, even though I couldn't keep more that a few episodes due to the file size.
To be honest, i've never cared for 32 bit color depth or high texture resolution when i had a bulky crt and a voodoo 2 12mb and later on a voodoo 3 3000 until i've got a lcd monitor for myself (i was in my early teens, so i've basically knew nothing about all the tech stuff). Things had changed for me afterwards, when i realised how awfull the 16 bit dithering looked on my lcd monitor, some time later i've got my hands on a cheap geforce 4 mx 420 (i think it was the 420), which i replaced with a FX 5200 (128 bit, 256 mb), that i've got for free, just a year later (at this point i've replaced my whole system from a 866 mhz Pentium 3 to a Athlon XP 2200+). Oh the memorys of joy, passion and experimenting with games settings and editing ini and cfg files, to get best results of performance and visual fidelity. I love your videos, they always give me this retro vibe and memories of the past, when i've read almost every pc magazine i've got my hands on, that i could afford for my pocket money (and of course my love for my Voodoo 2 & 3).
The late 90's was an insane time for computers and 3D graphics in general. It was really special being a kid at the time and reading through PC magazines dreaming of owning a 3dfx card. Well 20+ years later, I now own most of the popular 3dfx cards 🤣
Great video. You captured the essential aspects of the cards well. And what a surprise how well the 3500 performs against the tnt2, as compared to the reviews at the time, as you noted. I got into gaming and pc hardware at the time, so remember the tnts vs voodoo3 battles well, my first card being a V3 3k. Endless amounts of graphs and exposition! I agree that 3dfx made a mistake making the 3500 a multimedia card; they shoud have done that with the 2k, and left the 3500 for the hardcore gamers. I do think though that the 22-bit effective colour was a very smart feature, as the bandwidth hit of 32bit was in most cases too big. And the founders admit making their own cards was a disastrous decision.
Yes it really was a special time. Each generation gave such massive performance gains for the same cost, and you really wanted and used that extra performance to boost resolution and graphics fidelity. You went from 320x200 prior to having a GPU, to 640x480 using a Voodoo1, then 800x600 using a Voodoo2 then 1024x768 with the Voodoo3. I was lucky to experience each generation and the night-and-day upgrade it provided. I guess it would be like going from a 980 to 1080ti to 3080 in the space of 3 years at a 3060-like price level (sans crypto). Interesting to see a look back at performance now. The reviews all made a big deal out of the 32 bit colour advantage for Nvidia, but this generation of hardware wasn't capable of pushing it at a nice frame-rate (ala ray-tracing) so everyone stuck with 16bit anyway. Glide support totally turned the tables to favour 3DFX. The tie up between STB and 3DFX was catastrophic and tragic end to the company. Many gamers saw it coming a mile off, too bad the corporate money-men didn't.
Thank you. Nvidia fans just don't understand the dominance 3Dfx had. Their only real mistake was turning their back on companies like Creative Labs who was a monster at the time. They made a lot of enemies which also led to bad press and lost sales - which then led to less money for R&D to stay competitive; but the Voodoo 4 and 5's were still very capable designs.
While I remember the whole STB × 3dFX commentary going on at the time... _realistically_ what ended up leading to the downfall of the Voodoo compared to the NVIDIA TNT2, ATI Rage128 and S3 Savage was OEM Deals and Support for what became the Industry Standards (OpenGL and DirectX) While NVIDIA did tout their 32bit Support., realistically even up to the GeForce FX Series... it was a novelty., because their Pixel Pipelines were 16bit; meaning to support 32bit they combined the Dual Pixel Pipeline into a Single Pipeline; which effectively halved the performance. This is different to ATI who increased their Pixel Pipeline to 24bit and S3 who increased theirs to 32bit... albeit both ended up with slow Core Clocks., meaning they couldn't really compete with either Voodoo or TNT2 in terms of 16bit Modes; with the Rage sitting about 20-25% behind and Savage 50% behind; but the Rage would show a CLEAR performance advanced in 24bit/32bit ("True" Color) while the Savage would have equal performance (at half the price point). Still as most would still game in 16bit., none of this seemed to even be a blip on reviewers' radars until Radeon Vs. GeForce; when 24/32bit did become more important with the introduction of Shaders. GLiDE while based upon OpenGL was a Limited Subset of the Instruction Set specific to the Voodoo Architecture., and so the Architecture had a hard time supporting the more complete OpenGL 1.x Specification... and the same was true for Direct3D. This meant that while Drivers were made available to support said APIs., performance and feature support would often be lacking on Voodoo. And by 1999., most Developers had abandoned supporting Manufacturer Specific Graphics APIs in favour of the Vendor Agnostic OpenGL and DirectX. Still as noted, the other side of this was NVIDIA with the TNT2 became *excellent* at the art of OEM Partnership. If you bought a new OEM PC (Pre-Built) from Compaq, Gateway, Dell, etc. from 1998 - 2001., it was almost guaranteed to have an OEM NVIDIA TNT2; which while were "Cut Down" from the Retail version; did cement the name recognition with PC Gamers., and due to a lack of most understanding there was a difference (which a BIG performance difference) between the TNT2 Ultra and TNT2 OEM ... would usually lead to them showing their mates at _how_ much better their Graphics Card was to their friends Voodoo. These deals also became lucrative enough for NVIDIA for them to be in a position to "Help" 3dFX when their market share dropped dramatically, and they found themselves in financial trouble.
Thanks for a nice video, but I think you should have done some comparison of the image quality too, in the very same games. You could just compare 16-bit quality since the Voodoo didn't support 32-bit. Because at the time I myself bought a TNT2, I felt the image quality was sharper. When looked at side by side the image quality output from the Voodoo 3 felt more smudged out. Wich made the deal for me. I knew the performance was a little stronger in the Voodoo card but I was happy with the performance both cards delivered at the time.
I was looking for voodoo3s a few years back. They were sold for peanuts. 11, 15 buckaroos, they were cheap. I found a 2000 in a computer I salvaged, and that prompted me to look them up again, 70 at the least.
Back in 2009 I gotten my first v5 5500 agp for a meager $10 shipped from eBay, those were the days of getting such cards for peanuts now they sell for $250-350 on bid these days.
@@MrKillswitch88 I bought a 1997 Sierra Screamin 3D card new in the box on eBay for $5 USD about 2 years ago and after making a video on my find here on RUclips within about a month I resold it for $960 USD to a vintage graphics card collector in Deutschland. In some ways I regret selling it as a rare collector item
@@m9078jk3 There was a recycling place in Manchester that had an eBay page about a decade ago. They must have gotten through some serious gear from all corners of the UK because they would post, weekly, hundreds of GPU's from old computers and ask between £3 and £15 for each one. Most of them were correctly identified, but not all. But all were sold as working so someone there must have been testing them. Over a year I bought more than 50 cards. Geforce 2 Ultras, Rage Fury Maxxes, VooDoos .... the works. Ended up being on first name terms with their office and in all those purchases, only ONE card didn't work when it arrived, so the guy sent me two identical (working) cards for free just a few days later. Awesome people. If you add up the sold listing prices of a lot of those cards now, you're looking at insane profit. Just can't seem to part with any though! They are all my babies.
I have my gateway performance 700. Have a diamond stealth 3 in the agp slot and a diamond monster 3d 2 "a diamond voodoo 2" in the pci slot. Got both fir 10 bucks
I had a Voodoo 3 3500 TV, and i remember it was the king :D - think I had a slot A AMD CPU at 350Mhz, overclocked to 450 with a "afterburner" add on mod :D
I always liked the Voodoo cards and would read the reviews in my Boot magazine (Now Maximum PC). I had a Riva 128 and later upgraded to the Geforce 256. Good times back then.
Given how obscure and rare those two cards were even back in the day, i feel like a better and more relatable video would've been the TNT2 vs 3000 or even the Geforce vs the 3000. I had the 3000 during this generation and loved it. it killed everything i played. While Glide was still relevant Voodoo was unmatched and looked even better than cards with 32bit color for that 1998-2001 era. I feel like you should've thrown in some more games like Tomb Raider, Descent II, Driver, Thief II, Hitman and maybe even a couple 2001 games for fun.
Voodoo 3 Velocity was my first add on GPU that I installed myself. I bought it because it was cheap and the extra TMU could be unlocked easily by changing the readme.
3:44 this right here my friends....this is what destroyed 3dfx. Even to this day I cannot believe the CEO did that. He bought STB thus becoming a competitor to all their AIBs and then they banned them from making their chips. All flocked to Nvidia and all the cash flow 3dfx was making ended literally overnight.
Hey nice contents yet I Saw one of my photos at 06:13, it would of been nice if you added my nickname Gold Leader as credits to that photo, I still have that wooden table where the V3 3500 was laying on as well. As the video goes yea nice compilation would of been nice to see Descent 3 and Freespace 2 in here, but hey ya can't have everything, 32 bit wasn't great on the TNT2U I had the Diamond card and I found it too dark, 16Bit Glide looked much nicer multi texturing was miles better plus the 2D core was very good a 128Bit 2D core ideal for 2D games and overall image quality output was miles difference in advantage for the Voodoo3 3500 it's self, it's 350Mhz RAMDAC was also a nice thing to see plus 8 bit per pixel rendering support makes it ideal for older Dos games as well
I would liked to see some TNT overclocking results. Maybe this would change the results. Some cards theese days would OC for more than 30% unheard of in todays time. I still love your content. Pixelpipes is a gem. Greetings from Germany
my best overclocker was a 8600GT which overclocked a little over 50% on both memory and core clocks. went from shitty to actually pretty good. other than that, the next best was probably my geforce 2 gts, which overclocked from 200/333 to 285/383 and actually beat a geforce 2 ultra that way. i have a gt710 here that overclocks around that ballpark. low end / low power hardware overclocks best nowadays. or maybe we should count mods, so my geforce 6800GS which unlocked 4 extra rendering pipes for a total of 16 and overclocked a fair bit too, giving a huge performance boost over stock, might take a good position in that rank
@@GraveUypo It's always a difference between low end/midrange OC and high end OC. For a long time it was often easy to OC some cards to get in the ballpark of the high end variant. Overclocking a high end chip 30% is a rare thing these days. Last time I saw it was the 2700K
There were some TNT2 cards late in its life that shipped as fast as 175 MHz. They were faster than my V3 3500 overclocked at 202. Nvidia's cards overclocked better in those days. Late run GF2 GTS cards a couple of years later were easy to overclock faster than the GF2 Ultra.
I remember growing up I got a TNT 2 m-64 it was better than the ATI rage but it was lacking a lot. A few years later I got my hands on a Diamond Viper V770D that sucker was quick.
I bought the Voodoo 3 2000 card as it was much cheaper than the 3500 and I was lucky and had the desirable card with Hyundai memory chips which could hit 183mhz effortlessly. The core could also hit 183mhz no problem making it the exact same speed as the card that cost over $200 more. Mind you I had to run a huge box fan on the open side of my case to keep everything cool enough but that was part of the fun back then.
Man, I admit I didn't know this Voodoo 3 3500 with VGA output. I love it. For now, I'll settle for a Voodoo 3 3000 because that version of the Voodoo 3 3500 is very difficult to find. A pity that there is no 200MHz version (Voodoo 3 3500 SE). I have seen that there are people who modify the RAM memory for one of the ETRONTECH brand, to obtain more performance. Is there any information on this? A video about Voodoo 5 compared to Voodoo 3 would be interesting. It would be interesting to know which one is more compatible with the largest number of games.
I've seen memory replacement mods people have done to V5 5500s but not V3s. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't personally run across them. When I do a video about the V5 5500, a comparison to the previous gen will definitely be in there.
I had the TNT2 and the Voodoo2/3. The TNT just never could hit frame rate and would stutter from time to time. Once they got to the GeForce series, they never looked back!
I though the Voodoo3 3500tv was gimmicky as well, but I bought one and actually wound up using it in my main system for a very long time hooked up to cable tv. It's a tragedy Voodoo could never capitalize on the lead they had with the Voodoo 2.
So far as graphics cards go I look forward to your videos the most :) I know their much harder to get, and probably have a higher learning curve and monetary investment but it would be cool if you'd look into doing videos on older cards such as VESA or even ISA graphics cards at some point. I have a VESA card in my 486 that I think I upgraded to a womping 2mb of ram :) It can manage some basic 3d rendering, and is a major upgrade over the ISA card I was using previously.
I owned every generation of voodoo card starting with the voodoo 2 up until 3dfx went away after the 5 5500 iirc. Glorious times. Then I became an Nvidia fanboy for many years owning maybe one ATI card along the way. If I were buying a card now I'd go with an AMD Rx 7900 xtx or or if they release a rumoured 7950 xtx or 7990 xtx. Nvidia pricing is just insane.
Very cool video, well done! I just build a voodoo3 system and I too was under the impression that the tnt2 would be significantly faster, so I found your overall result very interesting! My build is running a much slower CPU though (PIII 450) so I think the results would be very different, but it was definitely interesting to see what they could actually do with a very fast CPU!
Nice! Btw I wanted to message you an invite to #GPUJune months ago but couldn't find any contact info. Offer is still on the table though if you'd like to join in!
@@PixelPipes Thanks! I did a rendition verite video a while back that would have been perfect for #GPUJune, but not sure I can get a new video out in time. Dont suppose re-branding an old video for #GPUJune would be in the spirit of things!
It's interesting to see how the CPU's back then were impacted by the API's and wrappers needed by the GPU, but the unleashed capability is also great to see.
I have the VD3-3000 and the VD3-3500. My first experience with video cards was the VD3-3000 when I cracked open my mom's gateway PC to install that bad boy to get Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear running smooooooth as butter. My mom wasn't happy, but my 16 year old mind did not care lol
The V3 was faster in real-world use; you didn't play 3DMark, and 32-bit color wasn't playable on most machines in 1999. The GF 256 at the end of the year changed the game, though. I had a V3 3500TV that I ran for years even after the industry had moved on. I mounted a cooling fan on it and got it to run at 202 MHz. It was running on a system with a K6-III+ 550 into the late 2000s when I let someone convince me to sell the rig to them. I wish like hell I hadn't.
The main issue with some of these results is something that you actually mentioned: unlike the Voodoo 3, the Riva TNT2 Ultra supports high resolution 2048 x 2048 textures. For example, in games such as NFS Porsche, the Voodoo 3 looks completely washed out when compared to the TNT2 (because of the low resolution textures). Of course, this results in better performance for the Voodoo 3, but the image quality penalty is quite extreme. And, boy, people really didn't appreciate this at the time. I remember debating with my friends if it was worth the performance penalty with the TNT2, and with very few exceptions, most of us agreed that, yes, it was worth it (especially because, having played in software rendering for many years, we were quite used to MUCH lower framerates, so it didn't really bother us). Anyway, great video as always, keep up the good work! :)
Indeed... Same issue with 3DMark2000, Expendable, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament - they all support high resolution (mipmapped) textures between 512x512 and 2048x2048. So, when taking that into consideration, one can clearly see why the Voodoo 3 was the beginning of the end for 3dfx. :-)
@@the_motherfucker, who said it was? If you are talking about the upper case letters, I'm sure you are smart enough to understand WHY I chose to use them. ;-)
Its crazy how fast technology was moving at that time. Nowadays you can play new games on 5 years old mid-end gaming PC with no problem, back then 5 years old PC was practically trash. I had Rivia TNT2 in my trashy PC in 2006 and as you can expect i was very unsatisfied because any game over 2002 just wouldn't run at all. My friends were rocking some 6800GT or even 7800's in their bulids and my parents were against spending money on computer, because they paid once for it and paying for upgrade was waste money for them. At this time i'd kill for even 6600GT or 9800Pro to play some newer titles. Nowadays i want to revisit my dream from that time and bulit ultimate retro gaming PC from mid-2006 with some X1900XTX/X1950XTX and Core 2 Extreme CPU to fulfill my dream from that era.
I'm curious - when you benchmarked NFS Porsche Unleashed on the Voodoo3, did you let the game configure itself stock or did you regedit the rendering driver from dx7z.dll to voodoo2z.dll? I'm assuming you left it stock but I've seen SIGNIFICANT performance increases w/ Voodoo3 in this game if we manually tell it to run in Glide mode. I bet it would even beat the nVidia card in this scenario!
NFS Porsche runs by default with Glide with Voodoo 3 cards but he tested it with direct3d which is non-sense for a 3dfx Voodoo card. With Glide the performance would have been 10-30% higher.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 That's weird because in my case I actually had to tell the game to run in Glide; same w/ Voodoo2. It (my copy) only picks Glide by default for the Voodoo1, although there IS a second Glide driver called voodoo2z.dll that runs up to 1024x768 w/ Voodoo2 SLI and 1280x1024 w/ Voodoo3 - but I have to edit the registry or 3dsetup.ini file to make use of it. Other thing I thought of is HE MIGHT HAVE TO run direct3d to get a framerate measurement. I don't think NFSPU has a built-in frame counter, so you'd have to rely on something like Fraps which cannot count Glide framerates.
@@angieandretti my V3 2000 and 3000 run NFS Porsche by default with Glide. Maybe it depends on the driver you use, I used the latest relased by 3dfx 1.07. It is impossible to see the FPS in Glide in NFS Porsche, Fraps does not run in Glide. 3dfx Voodoo cards have significantly lower FPS when running in Direct3d instead of Glide. 3dfx cards run best with Glide.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 Okay I'm using AmigaMerlin, 2.9 I think, for the V3 3000, and FastVoodoo2 4.6 for V2-SLI. I certainly agree about the difference in framerate. Also I was only offered a max resolution of 800x600 on the V2-SLI until I manually selected voodoo2z.dll instead of dx7z.dll as game rendering driver. Then with the Glide driver selected, 1024x768 felt faster than how 800x600 felt under directx.
The discrepancies between the circa 1999 benchmarks and these is likely related to the use of Nvidia's newer drivers. Nvidia always hamstrings it's older products with driver updates, this goes all the way back to their switch to a Unified driver model in the late nineties.
Are all comparisons Direct3D vs. Direct3D or was the Voodoo3 benchmarked running on Glide in those games that support it? Anyway nice video and I fully agree that many reviews back in the day were pretty bad, I even thought so back then. In practical use the Voodoo3 was the much better card unless you absolutely wanted to try the hyped 3D glasses like the ELSA Revelator. I'm not sure but I think at that point the Voodoo3 cards even were cheaper than the corresponding TNT2 model.
@@PixelPipes Fair enough, would be good though if the graphs would've shown that it was Direct3D and even better would be showing Glide result besides the D3D results. Thanks for the answering! Greets!
I love your channel it's lead me to learn and start collecting on my own I find it very entertaining and very informative can't wait to see future videos, and I just now got my first sought after card, the voodoo5 5500 agp I got it for 75$ but I have no way to test it
Great video. But I can't even begin to understand why on earth would you choose the 45.23 driver for the TNT2!! Using a period-correct driver for the TNT2 (or at least =< 44.03) would have skewed the results much more in it's favor. 44.03 was the last decent driver for anything under the FX Series.
@@PixelPipes yeah, i edited my comment (apparently not in time, lol) coz it actually isn't the final driver. And also seems that the TNT2 is the least affected by driver version (after quickly checking one of PHILL's videos, to doublecheck if i'm spewing bullcrap or not). Yeah 45.23 seems to be just fine for the TNT2. Sorry for the hasty comment :)
The v3 ended up being the much more desirable card. And back in the day the comparison was between the V3 3000 and just the 16mb tnt2. And the Tnt2 got slaughtered.
The biggest flaw (fatal) of the Voodoo 3 was the lack of sufficient cooling. Passive cooling with a heat sink large or not doesn't cut it. An owner has to put an active cooling fan on it or else it will become quickly heat damaged. Otherwise it's a very versatile and worthwhile 2D/3D graphics card that runs glide based games which were very popular and widespread at the time. I've owned a couple of PC games that ran on either Direct3D, OpengGL or Glide mode and I usually preferred the games in Glide as the API. They looked better to me for the games that I played at the time European Air War being my favorite in 1999. This is why I went with the Voodoo 3 graphics card.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 Been there done it since 1999.Even PhilsComputerLab here on RUclips recommends using a cooling fan on a Voodoo 3 as well. I've personally witnessed damaging multicolored artifacts by not cooling it which will lead to electron transmigration damage on the silicon just like not cooling a fast Pentium processor. Using sufficient active cooling will lead to a much longer component lifetime
@@m9078jk3 philspcomputerlab tested his V3 3500 at a room temperature of 34 degrees celsius which is ridiculous and he got 85 degrees maximum. At 25 room temperature my V3 2000 and V3 3000 only get to a maximum of 65-70 degrees celsius with standard cooling (no fan) which is not much for a video card.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 Back in 1999 I purchased a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI graphics card. I live in Tacoma Washington USA and the climate there is quite mild with a fair amount of rain. In an air conditioned room I had my computer systems. After a couple of weeks (3 I believe) of game play I started having color thermographic artifacts on my screen during 3D gaming which wrecked the visuals during play. Being suspicious I removed the case cover of my PC to do a simple test. Just after a little 3D gaming I touched the heat sink with my finger and it practically burned it. I couldn't leave my finger tip on it and It was very hot to the touch . Immediately I knew something was wrong. Just like earlier faster Pentium processors and even very fast 486 microprocessors had cooling fans with heat sinks , I decided to put a cooling fan on that Voodoo 3 2000 PCI. The artifacts went away and it solved the problem. Had I not done this the lifetime of that graphics card would have been greatly shortened (which 3Dfx may have designed it that way for built in obsolescence and a possible neat scheme to have the user have to purchase another replacement card. Steve Jobs made the same mistake with the Apple III and also with the original Macintosh.They didn't have sufficient cooling
@@m9078jk3 I had 5 V3 2000 and 3000 from 1999 until now and never had any problems. I tested the my V3 2000 and 3000 at like I said at 25 degrees room temperature the maximum temperature was 65-70 degrees celsius with standard hearsink (no fan) which is low for a video card.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
When 3DFX came out it was a revelation. i had the 1st voodoo card in 96ish and couldn't belive how good it was. i then move on too the voodoo 2 12mb in sli. that was another big jump. i still have my two diamond voodoo 2 cards , both 12mb. there boxed and still in my spareroom.
I went with the Creative Labs TnT2Ultra as soon as it came out. Although I was a big 3dfx fan at the time, I didn't think the V3 was that much of a leap from the existing 12mb Voodoo2 SLI setup that I already had for Glide games. I had a spanking new 21" CRT at the time and the TnT2 was just more vibrant with its 32bit color support.
I have that 3DFx Compaq variant, the only 3DFx card I managed to get during my youth days (getting a new one was just to expansive) . Glad I still have it and an PC from the era, to get a quick retro gaming session on the weekends :)
Two things I would like to add: there was a 3rd player in this battle of 1999 and that was the Matrox G400 MAXX. The Matrox actually would often beat the TNT2 in Direct3D titles but was let down by poor OpenGL performance. In general the D3D king was the Matrox card, OpenGL was V3 3500 and the best 'all-rounder' was the TNT2 Ultra. Also it wasn't that people didn't care for 32bit colour, they absolutely did! But it was too much of a performance hit on the TNT2 or G400 for it to be viably used in-game.
Where’s rage 128?
@@fenixlolnope361 rage 128 had a solid image quality, but such a mediocre card. Too little too late on ATI there
And Savage4 ?
yours is the best channel on 90's tech by such a long shot.
And LGR!
90 sucks 80 RULES
Loved it! Another terrific Pixel Pipes episode. And oh boy, the member berries are strong with this one. I still have both GPUs, and it was a tremendous era to be an enthusiast!
Thanks for the vid Nathan, another great one.
I bought my first PC back in 1999: A Pentium III 550 MHz and a TNT2 Ultra! That graphics card served me well for years and was only replaced by the GeForce4 Ti 4200.
Whoa that was the same upgrade for me too! I had the Creative Labs TNT 2 Ultra.
What was the heaviest game you were able to play with that TNT2 Ultra?
@@Just_a_Lad I think it was UT2003. But it was also one of the reasons why I upgraded. ^^
Ah I had a few of those machiens back in 1999. I was lucky enough to aquire five Dell Optiplex servers in amazing fold out cases and each contained dual P3 550's, 256MB SDRAM, onboard SCSI with Quantum SCSI 8GB HD's and Dell Viper 770 TNT2's - which were much like the TNT2 Ultra only custom to Dell machines I believe. For the time, those machines were absolute powerhouses, especially under Windows 2000/ME which made use of the dual CPU's, although I think only Quake III used the dual core ability in terms of games.
I gave one to my brother who had never had a PC before, only a Playstation 1, and he was mesmerized by Deus Ex and Heretic 2 for months. Hilariously, he called me on night and asked me to come over because he had gotten really far in Deus Ex but had become stuck on the submarine base level (near the end of the game). I went over and discovered he hadn't applied a single skill point except those from the start of the game. He had gone ALL THE WAY to the sub base, being untrained in almost everything.
Regardless, I still have one of those machines left in storage but I outfitted it with P3 700's and a Geforce 256 DDR before I retired it back in 2002. I did keep the vipers out of the other machines though, so I have 3 of those, the guy who bought the machines from me only wanted them for their SCSI capability and the SCSI drives they came equipped with. Considering I managed to get all 5 for nothing, I made a few quid on those PC's. Still, looking back, I should have kept more than one. Retro builders dreams, those Optiplex machines.
I had a TNT2 Ultra with my Duron 750 and I remember playing Gunman Chronicles on it and loving the game. Recently built a retro rig with an AMD K6-III 550Mhz and a TNT2 Ultra and Gunman was unplayable. Those K6-III's really sucked at floating point.
This channel is so awesome. Having such a specialised dive into this tech is so so so enjoyable. Thank you for this video, I remember 99 extremely well as I had just got into PC building and this era was so ferocious!
I agree 100%! :) Is just so, so satisfying, relaxing, nice, ... watching a short documentary produced as high of quality as a pixel pipes video. This one is one of my favourites.
This is a really well thought out review of a really special time in a lot of people's lives. Thank you for doing such a good job.
Drooling over that Leadtek winfast A350 geforce 5900 behind you. And next to it the fail of the era: the hopeless 128 geforce fx5800 with its vacuum cleaner cooler. The design of that leadtek a350 is one of my absolute favorites still and only is bettered by the Gainward 6800 gt golden sample with similar design but in red and the ultra rare Chaintech Apogee GeForce FX 5800 Ultra golden card with blue LEDs inside. Love that period
Yes I LOVE the design of that Leadtek card. They made a 5800 with the same cooler but good luck even seeing one
i really enjoy when you release new videos keep it up buddy you deserve way more subs than you have
Great job! I remember how I only had a 2MB video card back then and I was looking up to these 2.... Great memories! Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Very nice video, I remember these battles in "first person", I was on 3dfx "side" with my Voodoo3 2000 (which I still have and still works!)
i had a voodoo2, then my brother upgraded to a gf2 gts and i took his voodoo 2 and put in my system for SLI, which performed about the same as a voodoo 3 2000. good times.
1999 was a very exciting year. I moved jobwise to a new city and bought an ATI Rage128 to upgrade my Rage pro + Voodoo2 Rig. Voodoo3 was very expensive back then. Love your vids!
The TNT2 Ultra was my first graphics card, bought in the summer of 1999.
I had a friend that was adamant about the Voodoo. And we argued a bit about it.
But I do remember that pretty much all reviews put the TNT2 Ultra ahead. And that was the reason I bought it.
Same with my friend and I. Tnt2 ultra!!!
Yeah that was the changing of the guard. The TNT vs the VooDoo 2. They traded blows I guess, with TNT2 being faster (and with more colours and resolution support) in Direct 3D, but 3Dfx having the edge in some titles because of Glide.
I saw a friend running Aliens vs Predator and Quake III with his TNT at a lan, however, and that made me take the plunge and sell my VooDoo 2 card and buy a TNT2 Pro. If only I'd have held out for a few more months I coulda aimed for the Geforce or Radeon. Ah well!
3dfx was the better card but nvidiots were so dum to fall for paid reviews.
My first discrete graphics card was the *nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra* !!!
what a great experience !!
Always been an nVidia fan since then !!
Mine was the WAY too common M64..
I remember playing C&C Generals with it.
And it struggled even on the lowest settings.
But i had a great time!
Edit; I later bought the MX4000.
@@rembramlastname3631 TNT2 M64 ?? wow , i couldn't remember this graphics card . thanks for the info.
I could remember only the normal TNT2 & the TNT2 Ultra.
----P.S. C&C Generals released around 3-4 years after the nVIDIA "TNT2" series , so an underpowered version of the TNT2 ,such as the M64, was logical to struggle with such titles.
(If i remember correctly , during the time C&C Generals released , i had already moved to my next GPU , the GeForce 4 MX440.)
Thanks for the memory ... update !!
@@Sitharii
Theres also the Vanta. The "Celeron" amongst the TNT2 versions.
I still have a box full of old GPU's.
Including Intels first GPU, the I740, lol.
If youre still interested, there are still modders active on C&C Generals, such as Shockwave, Rise of the Reds and Contra.
Also Battlefield 2 with Forgotten Hope and Project Reality.
All on ModDB.
@@rembramlastname3631 the Vanta ... yeah , it's been so long i had forgotten those models. Thanks.
i also have the habit of keeping most of my old GPUs .
I still keep my *beloved TNT2 Ultra* (a Creative model)and since it's my 1st discrete graphics card ever , i'll always keep it .
I also keep a 6600GT( *Albatron* model , can you remember that company? ) ,a 7600GT , GTS450 , GTX460 , GTX560Ti , and my latest addition in my ...."bench-collection" , a highly factory-OC'd Palit GTX1080 GamerockPremiumEdition , which is a behemoth of a GPU !! (I'm certain that i could easily sell this GPU with all these shortages nowadays , but i'll keep it as well.)
My current active GPU is an RTX2060.
P.S. The only thing that i regret is gifting away my *beloved GeForce4 MX440* . I had very good memories from that GPU and i regret gifting it. So stupid of me.
P.S.2 : thanks for the info about the mods , but sadly ,my gaming days are over ,i'm usually tired from work, and i rarely play games , i mostly enjoy watching other people playing games in youtube nowadays....
We must have been born the same era and was enthusiastic about these cards at the time! I bought 256, TNT, TNT2, and Almost all high end cards following these for the following 10-15 years!
Awesome channel ... can’t believe you never showed up on my feed ! Love these Riva TNTs
Glad you finally found me! lol, RUclips algorithm strikes again
Glide > Direct3D
3DFx gone, but never forgotten!
Great video!
LMAO, you don't know what you are talking about. Glide was a subset of OpenGL, a small API with limited capabilities that eventually failed to innovate (3DFX cards never could do 32bit colors, for example), while DirectX evolved to cater the evolving hardware and exists till today.
I had the tv version. Was pretty cool being able to have the features
I love these videos so much!
Excellent video! Thanks!
Went from a Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 at the tail end of its life, to a Diamond Monster II upon its release, to an ASUS V3800 TNT2 Ultra, to the GeForce 2 GTS. What an era of a few short years it was for graphics performance increase. Each generation, was a monumental leap forward in performance.
The advantage of having a 3dfx card is that you can run pretty nice exclusive programs like the ultra hle emulator and all without having a fast cpu or gpu, all you need is a pentium 2 and a 3dfx card
13:18 right in the feelz, dude. right in the feelz
Went through a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, and that was it for me with 3DFx. Switched to the TNT 2 next, as colour depth and texture "were" important to me. Then, the GeForce 2 after that, until going over to ATI for a couple of cards.
One of my good friends got the Voodoo 3 3500, and he had nothing but problems with it. I certainly don't regret having gotten my TNT 2 back in those days. It was the right time to dump 3DFx. 16-bit rendering was already archaic.
You're opening old wounds mate! Lost friendships over TNT2 and Voodoo 3, patched since, in a fragile bond, with the underlying chasms that will never be bridged! Whatever that means! :D
awesome vid man!
Would love to see a contemporary Matrox G400 MAX review. Crappy drivers hampered its OpenGL performance and all initial reviews were very critical. Then drivers improved but reviews were not updated. Probably the best card of the TNT2/Voodoo3/Rage 128 Pro/Savage4/G400 generation
Very true
Love the content! More 2000s reviews please!
Another well researched video and good comparison. Only wish you included a few of those later pushing games that had DX6 render paths just to see what they can really do. Otherwise, awesome video
The TNT2 Ultra was technically more poweful, but the 3dfx looked better and was faster when running many games that used the 3dfx Glide API (I had both cards in lower versions: the TNT2 "non-Ultra", and the Voodoo3 2000).
This represents my experience from the day. I had a very fast AMD K6-III CPU that was overclocked to 508 MHz (113 * 4.5), with low-latency SDRAM, and a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 card that I attached a relatively large CPU cooler to, hehe. It would run 190 Mhz, faster even than the 3500's clock! My friend's Pentium II 400 Mhz system, when upgraded with a TNT 2 Ultra, was still far behind the performance of my machine in a lot of games. He felt like the tech websites must have been paid off, as he had the impression that his machine would be much faster! (*´▽｀*)
The 256x256 texture limitation really wasn't a problem back then. 256x256 was still larger than most textures in most games (e.g. Half-Life, Quake III), and the real limitation was the fact that textures had to be sized in powers of 2 on 3dfx. Some games would bug out if you didn't run them in a special 3dfx mode, even if they didn't have Glide support. And while the "22-bit" thing was basically marketing, 16-bit output on 3dfx really did look way better than on anyone else's cards, even Matrox.
yeah, and I entered millennium with Intel 740 wondering why Direct3D support was so wonky on it. Had to upgrade to Rage128 quite quickly
Rage128 was pretty ghetto in 2000, no?
Some games tested have a Glide support. You run these tests in glide (into Voodoo) or OpenGL?
No Glide, apples-to-apples
@@PixelPipes It would've been neat to see the glide performance along with OpenGL.
@@OvermannOnline This won't be my last video on the Voodoo3 series!
awesome review!
Can't even remember what PC I had in 99. I think it was about the time I was changing from a Pentium 133mhz to a AMD K6 300 with a ATI Rage pro 8mb and 64mb ram very happy playing CS with like 5 fps in the Aztec door on a 32 players server ;)
Hi Nathan, another good one, and those cards are looking sweet as brand new 😊 Enjoy following your channel, hope you make more excelent quality videos like this one. I remember that in ‘99 I had 1st contact with PCs, and they were nor even close to these babies... celeron at 433 and Rivas tnt2 m64... yet, so much fun and so much progress in so little time 👏
celeron kicks ass !
Always great to see a 3dfx comparison video.
So detailed, so much history. One of the best retro gpu videos on you tube . Thank you
In the Sunday paper! I would always look at the Best Buy inserts! They always had the voodoo card in them! From 1998 to 1999! That’s my first knowledge of the cards!
Keep it up dude, way to few people are covering old tech!
P.S. A video on the Radeon HD5970 would be an awesome way of eliminating the FOMO I've carried around for 11 years.
cards i REALLY wanted but missed out on:
voodoo 3 (any of them)
radeon 8500 PRO
radeon 9700 PRO (got the 9800pro later so close enough)
radeon HD 5850/70
Fury Nano
Vega56
It's funny, the only nvidia cards i really lusted after were the geforce 2 series and then the geforce 4, which was a huge disappointment and made me not ever "wish" for a geforce again (although i'd buy them when they were good, like the geforce 8800gt)
I still run an HD6970 in one of my rigs here to this day. It's not supported by AMD anymore, but works well in Linux.
I owned a TNT2, and I remember what upgrade it was over the Riva 128. I played Sin and Halflife 2 on TNT2. Good times...
The first PC I built had a Voodoo 3 with the TV tuner. The dongle was really annoying, but I could record Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my PC. So that was cool, even though I couldn't keep more that a few episodes due to the file size.
To be honest, i've never cared for 32 bit color depth or high texture resolution when i had a bulky crt and a voodoo 2 12mb and later on a voodoo 3 3000 until i've got a lcd monitor for myself (i was in my early teens, so i've basically knew nothing about all the tech stuff). Things had changed for me afterwards, when i realised how awfull the 16 bit dithering looked on my lcd monitor, some time later i've got my hands on a cheap geforce 4 mx 420 (i think it was the 420), which i replaced with a FX 5200 (128 bit, 256 mb), that i've got for free, just a year later (at this point i've replaced my whole system from a 866 mhz Pentium 3 to a Athlon XP 2200+).
Oh the memorys of joy, passion and experimenting with games settings and editing ini and cfg files, to get best results of performance and visual fidelity. I love your videos, they always give me this retro vibe and memories of the past, when i've read almost every pc magazine i've got my hands on, that i could afford for my pocket money (and of course my love for my Voodoo 2 & 3).
The late 90's was an insane time for computers and 3D graphics in general. It was really special being a kid at the time and reading through PC magazines dreaming of owning a 3dfx card.
Well 20+ years later, I now own most of the popular 3dfx cards 🤣
My father once worked for 3Dfx and tells tales to this day
Oh !amazing
ahhhh memories.... I had a creative TNT2 Ultra. Times in which I was between Need for Speed and UltraHLE.
Great video. You captured the essential aspects of the cards well. And what a surprise how well the 3500 performs against the tnt2, as compared to the reviews at the time, as you noted. I got into gaming and pc hardware at the time, so remember the tnts vs voodoo3 battles well, my first card being a V3 3k. Endless amounts of graphs and exposition! I agree that 3dfx made a mistake making the 3500 a multimedia card; they shoud have done that with the 2k, and left the 3500 for the hardcore gamers. I do think though that the 22-bit effective colour was a very smart feature, as the bandwidth hit of 32bit was in most cases too big. And the founders admit making their own cards was a disastrous decision.
Yes it really was a special time. Each generation gave such massive performance gains for the same cost, and you really wanted and used that extra performance to boost resolution and graphics fidelity. You went from 320x200 prior to having a GPU, to 640x480 using a Voodoo1, then 800x600 using a Voodoo2 then 1024x768 with the Voodoo3. I was lucky to experience each generation and the night-and-day upgrade it provided. I guess it would be like going from a 980 to 1080ti to 3080 in the space of 3 years at a 3060-like price level (sans crypto).
Interesting to see a look back at performance now. The reviews all made a big deal out of the 32 bit colour advantage for Nvidia, but this generation of hardware wasn't capable of pushing it at a nice frame-rate (ala ray-tracing) so everyone stuck with 16bit anyway. Glide support totally turned the tables to favour 3DFX.
The tie up between STB and 3DFX was catastrophic and tragic end to the company. Many gamers saw it coming a mile off, too bad the corporate money-men didn't.
Thank you. Nvidia fans just don't understand the dominance 3Dfx had. Their only real mistake was turning their back on companies like Creative Labs who was a monster at the time. They made a lot of enemies which also led to bad press and lost sales - which then led to less money for R&D to stay competitive; but the Voodoo 4 and 5's were still very capable designs.
While I remember the whole STB × 3dFX commentary going on at the time... _realistically_ what ended up leading to the downfall of the Voodoo compared to the NVIDIA TNT2, ATI Rage128 and S3 Savage was OEM Deals and Support for what became the Industry Standards (OpenGL and DirectX)
While NVIDIA did tout their 32bit Support., realistically even up to the GeForce FX Series... it was a novelty., because their Pixel Pipelines were 16bit; meaning to support 32bit they combined the Dual Pixel Pipeline into a Single Pipeline; which effectively halved the performance.
This is different to ATI who increased their Pixel Pipeline to 24bit and S3 who increased theirs to 32bit... albeit both ended up with slow Core Clocks., meaning they couldn't really compete with either Voodoo or TNT2 in terms of 16bit Modes; with the Rage sitting about 20-25% behind and Savage 50% behind; but the Rage would show a CLEAR performance advanced in 24bit/32bit ("True" Color) while the Savage would have equal performance (at half the price point).
Still as most would still game in 16bit., none of this seemed to even be a blip on reviewers' radars until Radeon Vs. GeForce; when 24/32bit did become more important with the introduction of Shaders.
GLiDE while based upon OpenGL was a Limited Subset of the Instruction Set specific to the Voodoo Architecture., and so the Architecture had a hard time supporting the more complete OpenGL 1.x Specification... and the same was true for Direct3D.
This meant that while Drivers were made available to support said APIs., performance and feature support would often be lacking on Voodoo.
And by 1999., most Developers had abandoned supporting Manufacturer Specific Graphics APIs in favour of the Vendor Agnostic OpenGL and DirectX.
Still as noted, the other side of this was NVIDIA with the TNT2 became *excellent* at the art of OEM Partnership.
If you bought a new OEM PC (Pre-Built) from Compaq, Gateway, Dell, etc. from 1998 - 2001., it was almost guaranteed to have an OEM NVIDIA TNT2; which while were "Cut Down" from the Retail version; did cement the name recognition with PC Gamers., and due to a lack of most understanding there was a difference (which a BIG performance difference) between the TNT2 Ultra and TNT2 OEM ... would usually lead to them showing their mates at _how_ much better their Graphics Card was to their friends Voodoo.
These deals also became lucrative enough for NVIDIA for them to be in a position to "Help" 3dFX when their market share dropped dramatically, and they found themselves in financial trouble.
Great production quality.
Providing user engagement.
Thanks for a nice video, but I think you should have done some comparison of the image quality too, in the very same games. You could just compare 16-bit quality since the Voodoo didn't support 32-bit. Because at the time I myself bought a TNT2, I felt the image quality was sharper. When looked at side by side the image quality output from the Voodoo 3 felt more smudged out. Wich made the deal for me. I knew the performance was a little stronger in the Voodoo card but I was happy with the performance both cards delivered at the time.
I was looking for voodoo3s a few years back. They were sold for peanuts. 11, 15 buckaroos, they were cheap. I found a 2000 in a computer I salvaged, and that prompted me to look them up again, 70 at the least.
Back in 2009 I gotten my first v5 5500 agp for a meager $10 shipped from eBay, those were the days of getting such cards for peanuts now they sell for $250-350 on bid these days.
@@MrKillswitch88 I bought a 1997 Sierra Screamin 3D card new in the box on eBay for $5 USD about 2 years ago and after making a video on my find here on RUclips within about a month I resold it for $960 USD to a vintage graphics card collector in Deutschland.
In some ways I regret selling it as a rare collector item
@@m9078jk3 There was a recycling place in Manchester that had an eBay page about a decade ago. They must have gotten through some serious gear from all corners of the UK because they would post, weekly, hundreds of GPU's from old computers and ask between £3 and £15 for each one. Most of them were correctly identified, but not all. But all were sold as working so someone there must have been testing them.
Over a year I bought more than 50 cards. Geforce 2 Ultras, Rage Fury Maxxes, VooDoos .... the works. Ended up being on first name terms with their office and in all those purchases, only ONE card didn't work when it arrived, so the guy sent me two identical (working) cards for free just a few days later. Awesome people.
If you add up the sold listing prices of a lot of those cards now, you're looking at insane profit. Just can't seem to part with any though! They are all my babies.
I remember when I got my VooDoo II and could finally play Drakan Order of the Flame. Good times.
I have my gateway performance 700. Have a diamond stealth 3 in the agp slot and a diamond monster 3d 2 "a diamond voodoo 2" in the pci slot. Got both fir 10 bucks
Those dark green PCBs are so characteristic of Compaq, i wonder if they manufactured them.
I had a Voodoo 3 3500 TV, and i remember it was the king :D - think I had a slot A AMD CPU at 350Mhz, overclocked to 450 with a "afterburner" add on mod :D
I always liked the Voodoo cards and would read the reviews in my Boot magazine (Now Maximum PC). I had a Riva 128 and later upgraded to the Geforce 256. Good times back then.
Matrox was still a contender during this period, surprised you haven't done any videos on the G200 or G400 cards.
I got a Voodoo 3 3500 Agp boxed for free, over 9 years ago and it have a cooling fan on it which i havent seen often.
Given how obscure and rare those two cards were even back in the day, i feel like a better and more relatable video would've been the TNT2 vs 3000 or even the Geforce vs the 3000. I had the 3000 during this generation and loved it. it killed everything i played. While Glide was still relevant Voodoo was unmatched and looked even better than cards with 32bit color for that 1998-2001 era. I feel like you should've thrown in some more games like Tomb Raider, Descent II, Driver, Thief II, Hitman and maybe even a couple 2001 games for fun.
Is that an ASRock Steelseries X570 board I see there?
Yep
If you didnt already, you should do a video about cleaning those old cards. :D
Voodoo 3 Velocity was my first add on GPU that I installed myself. I bought it because it was cheap and the extra TMU could be unlocked easily by changing the readme.
3:44 this right here my friends....this is what destroyed 3dfx. Even to this day I cannot believe the CEO did that. He bought STB thus becoming a competitor to all their AIBs and then they banned them from making their chips. All flocked to Nvidia and all the cash flow 3dfx was making ended literally overnight.
You always knew back then! If the graphics card had a fan cooler on it! It was an excellent card!
Hey nice contents yet I Saw one of my photos at 06:13, it would of been nice if you added my nickname Gold Leader as credits to that photo, I still have that wooden table where the V3 3500 was laying on as well.
As the video goes yea nice compilation would of been nice to see Descent 3 and Freespace 2 in here, but hey ya can't have everything, 32 bit wasn't great on the TNT2U I had the Diamond card and I found it too dark, 16Bit Glide looked much nicer multi texturing was miles better plus the 2D core was very good a 128Bit 2D core ideal for 2D games and overall image quality output was miles difference in advantage for the Voodoo3 3500 it's self, it's 350Mhz RAMDAC was also a nice thing to see plus 8 bit per pixel rendering support makes it ideal for older Dos games as well
Hello Gold Leader! Look again in the bottom right hand corner. I did credit you.
@@PixelPipes ah is see now yea my bad was hard to see, the yt scroll bar probably covered it
i had voodoo 1 and 2 in 90's
Back in the day, I went from a 3DFX Voodoo 2 to a Riva TNT 2, what a huge difference it was back then
Great was waiting for this duel :)
I would liked to see some TNT overclocking results. Maybe this would change the results. Some cards theese days would OC for more than 30% unheard of in todays time. I still love your content. Pixelpipes is a gem. Greetings from Germany
my best overclocker was a 8600GT which overclocked a little over 50% on both memory and core clocks. went from shitty to actually pretty good. other than that, the next best was probably my geforce 2 gts, which overclocked from 200/333 to 285/383 and actually beat a geforce 2 ultra that way. i have a gt710 here that overclocks around that ballpark. low end / low power hardware overclocks best nowadays. or maybe we should count mods, so my geforce 6800GS which unlocked 4 extra rendering pipes for a total of 16 and overclocked a fair bit too, giving a huge performance boost over stock, might take a good position in that rank
@@GraveUypo It's always a difference between low end/midrange OC and high end OC. For a long time it was often easy to OC some cards to get in the ballpark of the high end variant. Overclocking a high end chip 30% is a rare thing these days. Last time I saw it was the 2700K
There were some TNT2 cards late in its life that shipped as fast as 175 MHz. They were faster than my V3 3500 overclocked at 202. Nvidia's cards overclocked better in those days. Late run GF2 GTS cards a couple of years later were easy to overclock faster than the GF2 Ultra.
I remember growing up I got a TNT 2 m-64 it was better than the ATI rage but it was lacking a lot. A few years later I got my hands on a Diamond Viper V770D that sucker was quick.
Good stuff as always.
I bought the Voodoo 3 2000 card as it was much cheaper than the 3500 and I was lucky and had the desirable card with Hyundai memory chips which could hit 183mhz effortlessly. The core could also hit 183mhz no problem making it the exact same speed as the card that cost over $200 more. Mind you I had to run a huge box fan on the open side of my case to keep everything cool enough but that was part of the fun back then.
Man, I admit I didn't know this Voodoo 3 3500 with VGA output. I love it. For now, I'll settle for a Voodoo 3 3000 because that version of the Voodoo 3 3500 is very difficult to find. A pity that there is no 200MHz version (Voodoo 3 3500 SE). I have seen that there are people who modify the RAM memory for one of the ETRONTECH brand, to obtain more performance. Is there any information on this? A video about Voodoo 5 compared to Voodoo 3 would be interesting. It would be interesting to know which one is more compatible with the largest number of games.
I've seen memory replacement mods people have done to V5 5500s but not V3s. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't personally run across them. When I do a video about the V5 5500, a comparison to the previous gen will definitely be in there.
Great video Nathan, thanks a lot.
This channel is nostalgia heaven.
I had the TNT2 and the Voodoo2/3. The TNT just never could hit frame rate and would stutter from time to time. Once they got to the GeForce series, they never looked back!
I love it when its a single guy in his bedroom calling it 'we' lol
I though the Voodoo3 3500tv was gimmicky as well, but I bought one and actually wound up using it in my main system for a very long time hooked up to cable tv. It's a tragedy Voodoo could never capitalize on the lead they had with the Voodoo 2.
I was a young police officer with my tnt2 ultra, sony g520 and pe 550e
So far as graphics cards go I look forward to your videos the most :) I know their much harder to get, and probably have a higher learning curve and monetary investment but it would be cool if you'd look into doing videos on older cards such as VESA or even ISA graphics cards at some point. I have a VESA card in my 486 that I think I upgraded to a womping 2mb of ram :) It can manage some basic 3d rendering, and is a major upgrade over the ISA card I was using previously.
I owned every generation of voodoo card starting with the voodoo 2 up until 3dfx went away after the 5 5500 iirc. Glorious times. Then I became an Nvidia fanboy for many years owning maybe one ATI card along the way. If I were buying a card now I'd go with an AMD Rx 7900 xtx or or if they release a rumoured 7950 xtx or 7990 xtx. Nvidia pricing is just insane.
Compaq Gaming Desktop. That's something I didn't ever expect to hear.
Very cool video, well done! I just build a voodoo3 system and I too was under the impression that the tnt2 would be significantly faster, so I found your overall result very interesting! My build is running a much slower CPU though (PIII 450) so I think the results would be very different, but it was definitely interesting to see what they could actually do with a very fast CPU!
Nice! Btw I wanted to message you an invite to #GPUJune months ago but couldn't find any contact info. Offer is still on the table though if you'd like to join in!
@@PixelPipes Thanks! I did a rendition verite video a while back that would have been perfect for #GPUJune, but not sure I can get a new video out in time. Dont suppose re-branding an old video for #GPUJune would be in the spirit of things!
It's interesting to see how the CPU's back then were impacted by the API's and wrappers needed by the GPU, but the unleashed capability is also great to see.
Mmm and the voodoo3 pci edition? I have one in my PIII 450mhz with 384mb ram and Windows XP retro pc
I have the VD3-3000 and the VD3-3500. My first experience with video cards was the VD3-3000 when I cracked open my mom's gateway PC to
install that bad boy to get Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear running smooooooth as butter. My mom wasn't happy, but my 16 year old mind did not care lol
The V3 was faster in real-world use; you didn't play 3DMark, and 32-bit color wasn't playable on most machines in 1999. The GF 256 at the end of the year changed the game, though.
I had a V3 3500TV that I ran for years even after the industry had moved on. I mounted a cooling fan on it and got it to run at 202 MHz. It was running on a system with a K6-III+ 550 into the late 2000s when I let someone convince me to sell the rig to them. I wish like hell I hadn't.
Great video,3dfx lovely company ahead of their time..
My voodoo 3500 tv still work like a new..
The main issue with some of these results is something that you actually mentioned: unlike the Voodoo 3, the Riva TNT2 Ultra supports high resolution 2048 x 2048 textures. For example, in games such as NFS Porsche, the Voodoo 3 looks completely washed out when compared to the TNT2 (because of the low resolution textures). Of course, this results in better performance for the Voodoo 3, but the image quality penalty is quite extreme. And, boy, people really didn't appreciate this at the time. I remember debating with my friends if it was worth the performance penalty with the TNT2, and with very few exceptions, most of us agreed that, yes, it was worth it (especially because, having played in software rendering for many years, we were quite used to MUCH lower framerates, so it didn't really bother us). Anyway, great video as always, keep up the good work! :)
Good point, higher res textures means higher use of memory bandwidth
Indeed... Same issue with 3DMark2000, Expendable, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament - they all support high resolution (mipmapped) textures between 512x512 and 2048x2048. So, when taking that into consideration, one can clearly see why the Voodoo 3 was the beginning of the end for 3dfx. :-)
"Much" isn't an acronym
@@the_motherfucker, who said it was? If you are talking about the upper case letters, I'm sure you are smart enough to understand WHY I chose to use them. ;-)
Its crazy how fast technology was moving at that time. Nowadays you can play new games on 5 years old mid-end gaming PC with no problem, back then 5 years old PC was practically trash. I had Rivia TNT2 in my trashy PC in 2006 and as you can expect i was very unsatisfied because any game over 2002 just wouldn't run at all. My friends were rocking some 6800GT or even 7800's in their bulids and my parents were against spending money on computer, because they paid once for it and paying for upgrade was waste money for them. At this time i'd kill for even 6600GT or 9800Pro to play some newer titles. Nowadays i want to revisit my dream from that time and bulit ultimate retro gaming PC from mid-2006 with some X1900XTX/X1950XTX and Core 2 Extreme CPU to fulfill my dream from that era.
I'm curious - when you benchmarked NFS Porsche Unleashed on the Voodoo3, did you let the game configure itself stock or did you regedit the rendering driver from dx7z.dll to voodoo2z.dll? I'm assuming you left it stock but I've seen SIGNIFICANT performance increases w/ Voodoo3 in this game if we manually tell it to run in Glide mode. I bet it would even beat the nVidia card in this scenario!
NFS Porsche runs by default with Glide with Voodoo 3 cards but he tested it with direct3d which is non-sense for a 3dfx Voodoo card. With Glide the performance would have been 10-30% higher.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 That's weird because in my case I actually had to tell the game to run in Glide; same w/ Voodoo2. It (my copy) only picks Glide by default for the Voodoo1, although there IS a second Glide driver called voodoo2z.dll that runs up to 1024x768 w/ Voodoo2 SLI and 1280x1024 w/ Voodoo3 - but I have to edit the registry or 3dsetup.ini file to make use of it. Other thing I thought of is HE MIGHT HAVE TO run direct3d to get a framerate measurement. I don't think NFSPU has a built-in frame counter, so you'd have to rely on something like Fraps which cannot count Glide framerates.
@@angieandretti my V3 2000 and 3000 run NFS Porsche by default with Glide. Maybe it depends on the driver you use, I used the latest relased by 3dfx 1.07. It is impossible to see the FPS in Glide in NFS Porsche, Fraps does not run in Glide. 3dfx Voodoo cards have significantly lower FPS when running in Direct3d instead of Glide. 3dfx cards run best with Glide.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 Okay I'm using AmigaMerlin, 2.9 I think, for the V3 3000, and FastVoodoo2 4.6 for V2-SLI. I certainly agree about the difference in framerate. Also I was only offered a max resolution of 800x600 on the V2-SLI until I manually selected voodoo2z.dll instead of dx7z.dll as game rendering driver. Then with the Glide driver selected, 1024x768 felt faster than how 800x600 felt under directx.
The discrepancies between the circa 1999 benchmarks and these is likely related to the use of Nvidia's newer drivers. Nvidia always hamstrings it's older products with driver updates, this goes all the way back to their switch to a Unified driver model in the late nineties.
Are all comparisons Direct3D vs. Direct3D or was the Voodoo3 benchmarked running on Glide in those games that support it?
Anyway nice video and I fully agree that many reviews back in the day were pretty bad, I even thought so back then. In practical use the Voodoo3 was the much better card unless you absolutely wanted to try the hyped 3D glasses like the ELSA Revelator. I'm not sure but I think at that point the Voodoo3 cards even were cheaper than the corresponding TNT2 model.
No Glide testing, just apples-to-apples comparisons. I'd expect the Voodoo3 to look even better when using it.
@@PixelPipes Fair enough, would be good though if the graphs would've shown that it was Direct3D and even better would be showing Glide result besides the D3D results. Thanks for the answering! Greets!
I love your channel it's lead me to learn and start collecting on my own I find it very entertaining and very informative can't wait to see future videos, and I just now got my first sought after card, the voodoo5 5500 agp I got it for 75$ but I have no way to test it
Great video. But I can't even begin to understand why on earth would you choose the 45.23 driver for the TNT2!!
Using a period-correct driver for the TNT2 (or at least =< 44.03) would have skewed the results much more in it's favor.
44.03 was the last decent driver for anything under the FX Series.
45.23 are by no means the latest and perform very well in my tests. Don't worry, the TNT2 Ultra was performing at peak.
@@PixelPipes yeah, i edited my comment (apparently not in time, lol) coz it actually isn't the final driver. And also seems that the TNT2 is the least affected by driver version (after quickly checking one of PHILL's videos, to doublecheck if i'm spewing bullcrap or not).
Yeah 45.23 seems to be just fine for the TNT2. Sorry for the hasty comment :)
The v3 ended up being the much more desirable card. And back in the day the comparison was between the V3 3000 and just the 16mb tnt2. And the Tnt2 got slaughtered.
Woo Pixel Pipes. Also reviewing cards that you can still buy new in the box. (I mean sure it's being sold on ebay, but still new and in the box.)
The biggest flaw (fatal) of the Voodoo 3 was the lack of sufficient cooling.
Passive cooling with a heat sink large or not doesn't cut it.
An owner has to put an active cooling fan on it or else it will become quickly heat damaged.
Otherwise it's a very versatile and worthwhile 2D/3D graphics card that runs glide based games which were very popular and widespread at the time.
I've owned a couple of PC games that ran on either Direct3D, OpengGL or Glide mode and I usually preferred the games in Glide as the API.
They looked better to me for the games that I played at the time European Air War being my favorite in 1999.
This is why I went with the Voodoo 3 graphics card.
FALSE. The V3 maximum temperature is 65-70 degrees celsius which is farly low.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 Been there done it since 1999.Even PhilsComputerLab here on RUclips recommends using a cooling fan on a Voodoo 3 as well. I've personally witnessed damaging multicolored artifacts by not cooling it which will lead to electron transmigration damage on the silicon just like not cooling a fast Pentium processor.
Using sufficient active cooling will lead to a much longer component lifetime
@@m9078jk3 philspcomputerlab tested his V3 3500 at a room temperature of 34 degrees celsius which is ridiculous and he got 85 degrees maximum. At 25 room temperature my V3 2000 and V3 3000 only get to a maximum of 65-70 degrees celsius with standard cooling (no fan) which is not much for a video card.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 Back in 1999 I purchased a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI graphics card.
I live in Tacoma Washington USA and the climate there is quite mild with a fair amount of rain. In an air conditioned room I had my computer systems.
After a couple of weeks (3 I believe) of game play I started having color thermographic artifacts on my screen during 3D gaming which wrecked the visuals during play.
Being suspicious I removed the case cover of my PC to do a simple test.
Just after a little 3D gaming I touched the heat sink with my finger and it practically burned it. I couldn't leave my finger tip on it and It was very hot to the touch .
Immediately I knew something was wrong.
Just like earlier faster Pentium processors and even very fast 486 microprocessors had cooling fans with heat sinks , I decided to put a cooling fan on that Voodoo 3 2000 PCI. The artifacts went away and it solved the problem.
Had I not done this the lifetime of that graphics card would have been greatly shortened (which 3Dfx may have designed it that way for built in obsolescence and a possible neat scheme to have the user have to purchase another replacement card.
Steve Jobs made the same mistake with the Apple III and also with the original Macintosh.They didn't have sufficient cooling
@@m9078jk3 I had 5 V3 2000 and 3000 from 1999 until now and never had any problems. I tested the my V3 2000 and 3000 at like I said at 25 degrees room temperature the maximum temperature was 65-70 degrees celsius with standard hearsink (no fan) which is low for a video card.