The Banshee had fantastic 2D output for the time, when I later switched to a GeForce 256 there was a noticeable downgrade in 2D image quality in terms of sharpness and stability
The actual sharpness of the 2d was determined by the analog filtering on the card. Most venders just used the cheapest that was possible where as 3dfx actually enforced some standard on it. In the digital realm the nvidia 2d engine of the GF256 was close to the banshee. Though I do agree it was not as feature complete or as fast.
I have a Matrox G200A, a Voodoo 3 2000, and a GeForce 256 (3D Blaster Annihilator Pro) and they all give good 2D image quality at 1280x1024. I also had a GeForce 2 MX 200 from ELSA and that card was absolutely terrible at higher resolutions, blurry and such, so I got rid of it.
I had the Voodoo 2/Nvidia Riva128 and upgated to the Matrox G400 (dual VGA head) and then to the GeForce 2-Ti. The 2D/3D image, sharpness and colours on the Matrox were amazing and the 2D/3D image on the GeForce2-Ti was terrible with washout colours and badly blurred. The colours could not be fixed however removing the "EMI/RFI" ceramic filter capacitors (signal to ground) on the RGB video traces to the RGB connector fixed the blurred image making it nice and sharp!
My first 3D accelerator ever and the only 3Dfx card i owned back in the day : the allmighty Gainward Dragon 4000 16Mb AGP. Paired with a AMD K6-2 300Mhz CPU was my gaming machine from 98 to 2000. It was such a pleasure to play games like FIFA99, Unreal, Quake 2, Half-Life, Shogo and many, many other gems from the period. Great card in my opinion!
Same here as well the Voodoo Banshee was nice but if memory serves slower in 3D. -Banshee doesn't take advantage of agp bus. -Banshee better then single voodoo 2 in games that don't use multitexturing. (higher clocks) -Voodoo 2 better then banshee in games that use multitexturing. (most games at the time) -voodoo 2 in sli vastly superior to banshee. -Banshee has more texture memory, which can reduce stuttering compared to Voodoo2 in some games. -Banshee has more resolution flexibility. -Banshee can do 3D in a window. -Banshee has excellent VGA and GUI acceleration. These are from two old forum posts from the time.
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing.
@@GodKitty677 I have 2 Banchee cards today. My first, which I got for Xmas around 98 or 99 and it was PCI, But than later picked up a 2nd card that was AGP. So Banchee "Can" work with AGP...
Call back to the K6-2 300Mhz w/ 3dNOW!!!! My 1st BIG PC UPGRADE XMAS!!!! I begged everyone in my family to buy me the upgrades on my Xmas list, and I got them. All becuase I spilled milk into the keyboard of my good old pentium 133 socket 7 system, and it shorted the KB port in just the way the sys would turn on but not let me pass the "NO keyboard Detected"... So my dad took me to the local shop and got me a new main board that would work with all my existing parts, including the Pentium 133 I already had... But this new Shuttle Board would work with the K6-2 300, so that's what went on my Xmas list. Along with Creative Voodoo Blaster Banchee, PCI Sound Blaster Live Gold, a 4X Internal CDRW drive, and another small upgrade which got me upto 32MD's of SIMM ram.... I had a VisionMaster Pro 22in CRT back then and I could just watch for day after day playing Quake, Unreal, Quake 2, Full Throttle, and a bunch more. Thanks for the strole.
This is one of my favorite GPU's for a DOS gaming PC. The great 2D engine and Glide support make it fantastic for this era. The Voodoo3 is much of the same with better 3D performance.
Yeah it was not so bad. My main coputer at the time was a Celeron 450A and i had a voodoo2 and Matrox G200 Marvel for 2d. And used a monitor with two inputs so I didn't have to worry about the loopback. My second computer was a Celeron 400@500 on the 83mhz bus and a pci banshee on an intel 810 based board. And honestly both computers played very good. The banshee in that computer was overclocked slightly, to something like 110 or 115. And it pulled some good numbers compared to my main box.
@@wishusknight3009 Loved those old celerons. I was an avid overclocker back in the day and had a lot if fun with those cpus. My main system was a P2 300, S code was SL2W8. These chips were famous for being underclocked 450mhz models. I was able to hit well over 500 with mine. A couple years later I took a coppermine celeron from 600mhz to 1087mhz.
The VESA support for DOS 2D was quite good, though I seem to remember there being glitches at 400x300 and 512x384 modes, which were carried forward to the Voodoo3. Still a heck of a card at the price point considering how many flawed to awful options were in the market in 1998.
Also, it was a Voodoo card that runed 2D - if you wanted to own 3Dfx and had to replace your 2D card (It was clear that cards like S3 Trio couldn't support new 2D games in 1998) then Voodoo Banshe was quite a good deal in general.
I remember this card because i had a Voodoo Rush this time and when i able to upgrade i didnt want two VGA cards in my PC but when i read the first test in some magazine i decide to buy a S3Trio 4MB and a Voodoo II 12MB instead of a Banshee :)
I just got my first 3dfx card 2 days ago, and it happens to be a 16mb Voodoo Banshee PCI! What splendid timing for this video! Also, I love the classy garden footage of the cards. Very relaxing.
I was an engineer from 3dfx. (And yes the AGP as all the functions that was turned off). Avenger turned it on. Sad that it was a loss at that point, but there was a level bus power problem.
Cool to see a new video from you man. I bought a Banshee back in the day for my HP Pavilion K6-2 and was pretty happy with it for about a year, not bad considering how fast things were moving back then
Lets not forget that there were many Banshee cards sold with higher frequencies. For example the Gigabyte GA630 runs with 110/130 mhz instead of the standard 100/100 mhz, being 15-20% faster than the standard version. The Monster Fusion Banshee run with 105/120 mhz, being also much faster than the standard version.
i sure like the exposed circuitry and components vs. todays mother boards and cards that are all covered up, kinda like car engines from back in the day compared to todays modern cars with a big plastic cover on the engine.
I second that. Unfortunately, the average user doesn't want to see any of this, it is too scary. Same goes for boot screens actually showing useful information, like memory test. At least it is still possible to configure Linux to show the boot log.
Very nicely put together, with lovely b-roll. I'll waltz myself down to the lab with the music of the opening sequence in my head to try and get the last piece of footage I need.
A lot of people confuse the banshee to the actually hated on rush. Banshee was the shit up until u played multi textured games. So underrated. Pretty much for the try hard 3dfx fan on a budget.
I really enjoy the Banshee. It is in my opinion the perfect card for a build targeting games up to 1998 (it looses too much steam in anything newer). I personally treat it as a Voodoo 1+, something that the Rush should have been in the first place. Great image quality, great compatibility, doesnt cause problems with early AGP systems, the late drivers just work. Perfect card for SS7 systems. Very convinient package that ships everything one needs for Win95 gaming in a single card.
Nice to see these old cards which were unaffordable at the time, had to use onboard SiS graphics like SiS 5598 & SiS 651 for a long time until I was finally able to buy an used Geforce 4 440MX in 2006
Well I don't know about other people but I upgraded a Matrox G200 with a 3D Blaster Banshee back in the day and I couldn't be happier. In fact I just got another for a retro build I'm putting together.
Unloved? This was my first proper 3D accelerator (had an S3 Virge prior) and it was a massive step up for people like me - it's true it didn't perform as well in certain games/scenes due to the lack of a second texturing unit, but the faster clock speed meant it performed admirably in a lot of titles. I remember grabbing my PC Gamer demo discs and trying all the games I previously couldn't play because they required 3D acceleration.
@@sprucemaroose IIRC it was adopted pretty heavily in the OEM PC market so I imagine a fair number of people had a Banshee. I remember it playing Half-Life quite well, and I could even push 1024x768, though I think I remember dropping back down to 800x600 for performance. It handled pretty much everything I threw at it quite well by my standards, but then I was coming from an S3 Virge so any proper accelerator would have been a huge step up.
Great video! I'm glad that you mentioned the technology link, where the Banshee acted as a stepping stone between the original architecture and the later cards. While it's not as interesting from a marketing perspective, it's a crucial step for R&D that most people don't think about, and it also provides valuable feedback to tweak the architecture in later releases (which 3dfx did do - much of what they learned from the Banshee was modified and integrated into the VSA-100, which is clear from the die shots). By the way, the 2D engine being 128-bit was another way to say that it could do 4 pixel per cycle raster operations (which were far simpler than 3D). But the operations done were highly specialized to cover all of the niche cases needed by CAD programs like AutoCAD. None of that stuff is done in hardware anymore though, which makes it seems even more cryptic. A slight nitpick, the TMUs operated in passes consisting of multiple clock cycles, where the throughput was 1 per cycle. So the Voodoo 2 could apply two textures in a single pass, at a rate of one pixel per cycle that contained two textures. The actual pipeline depth was variable due to the FIFOs, but it was likely on the order of 60-100 cycles per pixel (for comparison, I believe the Geforce256 had a depth of 220 cycles, and modern GPUs are thousands of cycles).
Oh interesting! I ripped it off an old record we found at Goodwill, and it went under a slightly different name, but it's exactly the same. Never heard of that particular release!
The first look of this Graphics Card in 1998 got when my tech magazine reviewed it. And I believe it as top line gfx of time, if not exceptional ofcourse
In the late 90's, the Voodoo Banshee was an absolute game-changer that provided a significant upgrade from graphics cards like S3. It could effortlessly handle most 3Dfx games, eliminating the need for multiple graphics cards to handle 2D and 3D graphics separately. This was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time, as gamers could now enjoy superior graphics performance with just one card.
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing. I was sharing the PC with my dad at the time and one day it started having some issues and he took it in to the computer shop to have it repaired. The owner told my dad that I had a fire hazard sitting there and had removed the riva128 and replaced that and the voodoo2 with a S3 virge dx card instead. Told my dad, I need to buy a nintendo instead because computers weren't designed for games.
My first 3D card. A proper 2D and 3D card that best every other card at the time but ignorance of many who loves to criticize because they had Riva TNT with crappy 2D and awful directX who had to compete with glide. People who had much more expensive voodoo 2 also with their 2 tmu loved to criticize. Banshee brought voodoo experiences to the mass.
Just found your channel. Love these trips down memory lane. I got my first computer about 2001, it was my dad's old computer had a Pentium III 900mhz, 128mb ram, Geforce4 Ti 4200 128mb graphics card. Loved playing Hellbender and Fury 3 with the Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick. Had the Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Sim City 2000, Sim Farm. Had a game called Ice and Fire that was really cool would love to play again. I got my dad's old PC cause he upgraded to a Pentium 4, 512mb ram, Radeon 9800xt 256mb. I remember staying up late the day we got a 10/100 switch and figuring out how to share files with each other....lol
I feel like most of the people saying the Banshee was disliked likely were not around at the time the card was actually out. The Banshee was very popular for budget builds. I owned one at the time and I knew several others that did. An SLI Voodoo 2 setup was beyond the reach of most teenagers in 1998. Sure journalists that got video cards for free bagged on it. Also most of the forum complainers were likely just kids that were fanboying. Also the whole argument about poor driver support I don’t recall being an issue in the time. It ran every game I wanted to play. I am glad you pointed out games like Quake 3. It was really amazing at the time to play that game and UT99 on such a humble graphics card. Great video.
Great video I like the presentation. A great and affordable vga in my oppinion. I had the Voodoo 3 16MB AGP back in the day with a P3 450MHz and after that the GeForce 256. Great times :-) and the music is gorgeous.
Great video as always! It's definitely a card that gets passes up too often. Solid for any retro machine of the era and this summed it up great. Nice creativity with the shots and music!
I picked up a random beige box for a few bucks recently. It had one of the worst motherboards ever made, one of the PC Chips “BXpro” ones that over reports the FSB and crashes if you try to run it at the advertised 100MHz. Expectations weren’t high as I removed the AGP card to find out what it was, so my eyeballs nearly fell out when from within the dust and cat hair the sacred inscription “3dfx” rose up. The mystery trashbox had a Banshee in it🙂 Now I’m a convert. Love ‘em. Great to see more pixelpipes👍 really enjoyed the calming montages.
I love my Banshee. It was a great replacement for my Stealth ii. I even convinced a friend or two to purchase one. Much loved by me. I had the lovely Phoenix model.
In the late 90s I had a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 2 card. One of my best friends had a Voodoo Banshee. I remember it feeling really crippled when playing the same games, but thinking back it was probably because we were running the same games in 1024x758 whereas my Voodoo 2 topped out at 800x600. I bought a Voodoo 3 like the day they came out after seeing all of the hype. I stuck with that until upgrading to a Geforce 2 a year or two later.
I remember how I got the card for christmas in like 99 and paired it with my Pentium 3 500 and I freaking loved it. Finally I was able to play the 3Dfx only games and they ran wonderful.
I loved my Voodoo Banshee :) I had a Skywell Magic Twinpower, I have 3 in my collection now including a boxed version of the Maxi Gamer Phoenix PCI like the one shown in your video :) Great to see all the Banshee love haha :)
I still have a Voodoo Banshee, i swap it out with my Voodoo 3500TV on one of my retro rigs all the time. In the day i had 2 Voodoo12s and a banshee as my 2D card.
I had the rush as my first 3d card, then the banshee and I was thrilled to have it, wasn’t at all disappointed with it. But it did start the thirst of the upgrade over the next 20 years !
I had a VOODOO 1 attached to a Matrox Mystique (For those who don't know, the VOODOO 1 didn't offer any 2d output. It had a passthrough port for that)... Then I upgraded to the Creative 3d Blaster Banshee (a Voodoo Banshee from Creative Labs) and I LOVED IT!!! It was fast, worked with all my older games, the only downfall I had was the early drivers were junk for Windows98. But this was fixed around 1999 and with internet it was easy to update. It worked GREAT after and I still have it. I don't use it in my retro machine, as I have a 64mb VooDoo 5 that I can use for that. I still love playing Quake 1 with the KQP (Killer Quake Patch) and using my 3dFx Card which just makes it look GREAT!!! I play multiplayer with friends on my local network using my old Pentium 3- 1.3Ghz with 256mb Ram, 128gb SSD and Voodoo5... Runs fast and looks great!!!
I have nothing but fond memories for my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee. Unreal, unreal tournament, GLQuake, quake three Arena, King pin. Winamp with the amp can visualizer. So many good memories. And all the games were guaranteed to be screamers for performance on the Banshee if you could run them in glide.
Ditto - even as a young teen I knew there were likely far faster 3D cards, but the Voodoo 2/Riva TNT etc. were expensive and the Banshee allowed me to play games that required a 3D accelerator that had been out of my reach while offering decent performance at common resolutions.
The banshee was my 3rd gpu ever and to go from a 1megabyte pci ATI to the banshee on agp and 16 megabytes was huge. From 800x600 to 1024x768 was wow factor. I wish I still had it.my fourth gpu was a radeon 9600xt which I still have.
i had a trident 1mb VLB, and when upgrading my computer jumped from that to a voodoo banshee (1998) ... i loved that card. never had any issues with it. my next upgrade was to a geforce 2 32mb (2000) ...
Nice video! I think you should've mentioned though that the Banshee in contrast to the Voodoo2 also had the new 22 bit color filter rendering to improve 16 bit 3D game rendering image quality. I really liked the Banshee. Decided to have it as the graphics solution in the PC we ordered for Christmas 1998 which was based on 440BX and PII 350. What I hated about it though was that the cockpit view in NFSIII would not work with it which was a huge letdown since I was absolutey adoring the cockpits when I played that game prior on a friend's V2 equipped PII 300. It was the Creative 3D Blaster Banshee AGP which was passively cooled. The cooler got really hot, but the card still works today. I even ran it overclocked from mid-99 onwards. I can't remember if the chip or memory or both were overclocked, but I remember it being 112 MHz which was funny since that was also the frequency I had set the FSB to. It was nice that the Banshee ran stable despite being overclocked itself and on an overclocked AGP bus. To improve cooling I only added a front case intake fan to the system prior to overclocking it.
I had a Banshee way back and I loved it, let me play games my old GPU would not. I knew it was not as fast as the others but I could afford it and it let me play games which is all that mattered to me.
I actually sold both of my Voodoo2 12MB cards recently because I had decided the Ensonique Banshee I have is "good enough" Voodoo for me in my PII 450MHz rig. The 2D video quality through the loopback cable on the V2 sucked. So, while 3D games were great I had to deal with a sub-par Windows desktop. Games are not the only thing I use this computer for so the poor visual was a deal breaker. The Banshee 2D quality is superb...extremely crisp. Games (to my eyes) look just fine and the lack of the second texture unit really does not bother me at all. And, it is natively supported in BeOS 5 which was another plus for me at least. This machine also functions as a BeBox. So yeah, I really love this card. It is overall a fantastic 2D and 3D card and worthy of owning.
I had an i740, then changed to the Banshee. My friend had an Riva128 and then additionally a Voodoo 1. In the end the Banshee was the best, and quite affordable back then.
I upgraded to the Voodoo Banshee from my Diamond Monster (Voodoo 1) card and was quite happy with it. I was disappointed at the time I couldn't get an AGP version. AGP versions were in limited supply. I later upgraded to a Voodoo 3 3000, Voodoo 3 3500 TV and finally Voodoo 5 5500. The only card I don't have anymore is the Voodoo 3 3000, as I sold that to get the Voodoo 3 3500 TV. What I appreciated most about 3dfx products was their quality and practicality. Sure TNT had 32-bit rendering, but it was mostly a slideshow and memory limitations meant that texture quality had to be sacrificed. Apparently even the Voodoo 1 would render everything in 32-bit, then down-sample it to 16-bit for storing in the frame buffer.
Great video! I couldn't agree more. The Banshee deserves a lot more love. It was many firsts for 3dfx and the 2D core was excellent. I find that the loss in image quality through the V1/V2s passthrough setup can be quite significant - especially at higher resolutions. I never owned one back in the day (went from a Voodoo straight to a Voodoo 3 3000) but I really like the Ensoniq model I have now. It's a great card.
Unloved? No way, this was my first and favorite 3D card. It was so much my favorite that I specifically went for one when building my Win98 gaming computer.
I had a Quantum 3D Banshee and I loved it. I had it running alongside my Pentium 166MMX and then when I upgraded to an AMD Duron 700, it went into that until I upgraded to an Nvidia MX 400.
Oh yeah, it was really a pretty excellent choice with a budget concern, back in 1998 I used K6-2+voodoo banshee, this combination gave me pretty good performance, still miss it to this day!!
3DFX's main innovation was to trim the fat to the bone; that one trick made them popular early on, but later they failed to add the fat back in a timely manner and they did not understand the value of "ticking boxes" for the marketing critters at places like Dell (e.g. "AGP 2X support" and "AGP texturing support" are boxes to tick, even if they didn't matter one iota; 32 bit rendering didn't really matter for the voodoo 3, it looked better than TNT2 16 bit with its painful dither anyway and you would have used 16 bit colours on both, but it ticks a box). Not having a 2D core or T&L drastically simplified the chip. T&L was a standard feature in high end graphics since the early 80's (see e.g. flight simulators like the Evans and Sutherland CT5, it then trickled down to workstations and then to arcade machines and so on). Games in 1996 had to assume most people would use software rendering, so they couldn't use very high polygon counts. World polygons in something like quake is up to a few hundred visible at the same time, with light maps applied as a second texture; models were less restricted but also very low polygon (~low hundreds per model). T&L was not *that* costly to perform on the CPU with such low polycounts and certainly nothing compared to just perspective correct texturing of triangles where vertex parameters (light values, normals, U-V texture coordinates etc) were interpolated across the triangle and then the texture value was bilinear filterered by interpolation between the 4 nearest texels in the correct MIPMAP level. 3DFX found the very minimum feature set they possibly could and made the minimum viable product and it was pretty cheap and faster than pretty much anything else. After that one trick played out with the voodoo 1 and voodoo 2 they never were quite able to anticipate the market and keep up. Already in 1998, software rendering had become a bit of a joke and every OEM was trying to find a cheap 2D windows GUI accelerator + 3D accelerator combo card that would run current games reasonably, ticked a bunch of boxes even those that didn't matter(e.g. AGP texturing), had a reasonable RAMDAC that could output an acceptable image at a reasonable desktop resolution (even a Riva 128 from 1997 supports 1600x1200). The banshee was just too late.
Ah yes, the woes of the K6-2 platform! Sorry to hear it was a pain in the ass, but I'm really glad to see this video. I really had no impression of the Banshee before seeing this, so I feel better-informed. I've never actually come across one in real life, though, and, with a Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 2s in SLI, I can't see myself ever needing one. Given how hard such cards are to acquire, it's nice to know there's a worth option for machines of that era.
I remember there was a driver that allowed 2D on Voodoo 2 without external 2D card. When pc was powered on, nothing was on screen until windows booted up, and then desktop showed and it worked to some degree.
Great video, as always! The Voodoo Banshee is actually more similar to the Voodoo 3 than it is to the Voodoo 2 (in fact, Banshee was the code name that 3dfx used internally for Voodoo 3). All in all, I love the PCI Banshee, it's a very good card for Pentium MMX builds and I own three of them (though, in some instances, even the Pentium MMX is bottlenecked by the Banshee - and that's at low resolutions like 640 x 480). On the other hand, the AGP Banshee is a card that I don't even want to have in my collection, its performance is extremely bad and there are much better AGP alternatives out there for a fraction of the Banshee's price (I don't even understand why the AGP Banshee is so expensive nowadays).
All true. In most respects it was the Voodoo Rush done right, with a bigger framebuffer, much higher triangle throughput, and a better triangle setup engine than the Voodoo Graphics chip ever offered. The lack of multitexturing was the only real bummer, though at 480p for contemporary games it was a better performer than Matrox's competitor-on-paper G200. And 3Dfx was good about incorporating contemporary SIMD optimizations into their drivers, so the Banshee scaled well across every CPU on the market. There was at least one 2D benchmark back then where the Banshee would nearly hit the theoretical maximum values a given CPU could push - the 2D core was strikingly good. In the long run the lack of multitexturing and blending modes (a problem common to all pre-VSA 100 3Dfx cards) hindered its viability, though things moved so fast in the late '90s that even buying big would only buy you another year and a half or so. I'd take a Banshee over most of its budget market contemporaries...
loved my banshee agp card back in the day.. got me through many great games.. will always remain a cherished purchase.. although i migrated to nvidia after the banshee.
There's nothing to hate about Banshee IMO - very good budget-friendly option for mainstream users at the time. It was exactly what they neededback in 1998. People just expected another powerhouse, and Voodoo Banshee never supposed to be one.
I didn't have extra PCI slots for two graphics cards so ended up with the awful, unstable Voodoo Rush. I was so happy to sell that and get this when it was released. It worked great with my PII, 266.
@@PixelPipes Awesome! Just had a look and found a full recording on RUclips (not sure if you've got links turned off so I'll add it to the Twitter post)
Oh wow I didn't even think to look for it on RUclips! Figured it was too obscure Here's the link he found for anyone else curious: ruclips.net/video/s7q8eixjx9s/видео.html
This was my first PC upgrade in 1998/1999, and lord what a difference made it back then! I played Incoming and Pod racer many hours with it. I had the PCI Version from Creative labs. But i soon found out after 2 years it became obsolete very fast... And my K6-2 300mhz aswell.. i still own the card!
Love the mid century music used i the video, but I have to say I don't have the most fond memories for the Voodoo Banshee, as I had a PCI version in my system at the time which did not have an AGP slot, and one night in mid 99 while on Lycos chat talking to some friends, I looked over, and saw my PC on FIRE, so I quickly said goodbye, turned my PC off, ripped open the case, saw the tantalum caps has gotten way too hot, and burned the board of my Banshee, I was in high school at the time, and did not drive but was working at local gas station not too far from our house I could walk too, so I had money, and begged my mother to take me to Staples, the next day which was a saturday, and I came home with an Nvidia Riva TNT2 16MB PCI card, and was happy as could be. 🙂
Oh wow! That would have been pretty scary. Even the best built Banshees can burn themselves out which is something I didn't mention in the video. Cooling is critical, and many (most?) Banshees had inadequate cooling on their own.
@@PixelPipes Yes Banshee cards did in general run hot when compared to many other cards at the time, and why all of them did not come with a cooling fan is beyond me, as it might have saved my card, but ever since the incident, in all my builds I've made sure to have plenty of cooling to reduce the risk of something like that ever happening again.
My first 3d card was a voodoo banshee. I eventually sold it to a friend and used the money to buyu a voodoo 3 2000. I still have the card and use it in my retro rigs
Excellent video 😌
Thank you! 😃
Excellent indeed ♥
Nathan likes 👦
The Banshee had fantastic 2D output for the time, when I later switched to a GeForce 256 there was a noticeable downgrade in 2D image quality in terms of sharpness and stability
The actual sharpness of the 2d was determined by the analog filtering on the card. Most venders just used the cheapest that was possible where as 3dfx actually enforced some standard on it. In the digital realm the nvidia 2d engine of the GF256 was close to the banshee. Though I do agree it was not as feature complete or as fast.
I have a Matrox G200A, a Voodoo 3 2000, and a GeForce 256 (3D Blaster Annihilator Pro) and they all give good 2D image quality at 1280x1024. I also had a GeForce 2 MX 200 from ELSA and that card was absolutely terrible at higher resolutions, blurry and such, so I got rid of it.
@@lordwiadro83 Creative tended to put some decent components on their cards at the higher end. This was also often reflected in the price.
Yes, I had the same feeling, fortunately I only borrowed it from my classmate just to see how it performed.
I had the Voodoo 2/Nvidia Riva128 and upgated to the Matrox G400 (dual VGA head) and then to the GeForce 2-Ti. The 2D/3D image, sharpness and colours on the Matrox were amazing and the 2D/3D image on the GeForce2-Ti was terrible with washout colours and badly blurred. The colours could not be fixed however removing the "EMI/RFI" ceramic filter capacitors (signal to ground) on the RGB video traces to the RGB connector fixed the blurred image making it nice and sharp!
My first 3D accelerator ever and the only 3Dfx card i owned back in the day : the allmighty Gainward Dragon 4000 16Mb AGP. Paired with a AMD K6-2 300Mhz CPU was my gaming machine from 98 to 2000. It was such a pleasure to play games like FIFA99, Unreal, Quake 2, Half-Life, Shogo and many, many other gems from the period. Great card in my opinion!
Same here as well the Voodoo Banshee was nice but if memory serves slower in 3D.
-Banshee doesn't take advantage of agp bus.
-Banshee better then single voodoo 2 in games that don't use multitexturing. (higher clocks)
-Voodoo 2 better then banshee in games that use multitexturing. (most games at the time)
-voodoo 2 in sli vastly superior to banshee.
-Banshee has more texture memory, which can reduce stuttering compared to Voodoo2 in some games.
-Banshee has more resolution flexibility.
-Banshee can do 3D in a window.
-Banshee has excellent VGA and GUI acceleration.
These are from two old forum posts from the time.
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing.
@@GodKitty677 I have 2 Banchee cards today. My first, which I got for Xmas around 98 or 99 and it was PCI, But than later picked up a 2nd card that was AGP. So Banchee "Can" work with AGP...
Call back to the K6-2 300Mhz w/ 3dNOW!!!!
My 1st BIG PC UPGRADE XMAS!!!!
I begged everyone in my family to buy me the upgrades on my Xmas list, and I got them. All becuase I spilled milk into the keyboard of my good old pentium 133 socket 7 system, and it shorted the KB port in just the way the sys would turn on but not let me pass the "NO keyboard Detected"... So my dad took me to the local shop and got me a new main board that would work with all my existing parts, including the Pentium 133 I already had... But this new Shuttle Board would work with the K6-2 300, so that's what went on my Xmas list. Along with Creative Voodoo Blaster Banchee, PCI Sound Blaster Live Gold, a 4X Internal CDRW drive, and another small upgrade which got me upto 32MD's of SIMM ram.... I had a VisionMaster Pro 22in CRT back then and I could just watch for day after day playing Quake, Unreal, Quake 2, Full Throttle, and a bunch more. Thanks for the strole.
@@jameswiz It works but as stated back in the reviews. The board doesn't take advantage of the extra agp performance.
This is one of my favorite GPU's for a DOS gaming PC. The great 2D engine and Glide support make it fantastic for this era. The Voodoo3 is much of the same with better 3D performance.
Yeah it was not so bad. My main coputer at the time was a Celeron 450A and i had a voodoo2 and Matrox G200 Marvel for 2d. And used a monitor with two inputs so I didn't have to worry about the loopback. My second computer was a Celeron 400@500 on the 83mhz bus and a pci banshee on an intel 810 based board. And honestly both computers played very good. The banshee in that computer was overclocked slightly, to something like 110 or 115. And it pulled some good numbers compared to my main box.
@@wishusknight3009 Loved those old celerons. I was an avid overclocker back in the day and had a lot if fun with those cpus. My main system was a P2 300, S code was SL2W8. These chips were famous for being underclocked 450mhz models. I was able to hit well over 500 with mine. A couple years later I took a coppermine celeron from 600mhz to 1087mhz.
The VESA support for DOS 2D was quite good, though I seem to remember there being glitches at 400x300 and 512x384 modes, which were carried forward to the Voodoo3. Still a heck of a card at the price point considering how many flawed to awful options were in the market in 1998.
Agreed ♥
In 1998 just two things was important for me to buy Banshee. 1)It was 3Dfx. 2)It had huge 16MB VRAM. Back in a days that was enough to make a choice:)
Similar as 16 gb as nowadays :)
Also, it was a Voodoo card that runed 2D - if you wanted to own 3Dfx and had to replace your 2D card (It was clear that cards like S3 Trio couldn't support new 2D games in 1998) then Voodoo Banshe was quite a good deal in general.
I remember this card because i had a Voodoo Rush this time and when i able to upgrade i didnt want two VGA cards in my PC but when i read the first test in some magazine i decide to buy a S3Trio 4MB and a Voodoo II 12MB instead of a Banshee :)
I just got my first 3dfx card 2 days ago, and it happens to be a 16mb Voodoo Banshee PCI! What splendid timing for this video!
Also, I love the classy garden footage of the cards. Very relaxing.
Hahahhaahah that thing is pre historic
I was an engineer from 3dfx. (And yes the AGP as all the functions that was turned off). Avenger turned it on. Sad that it was a loss at that point, but there was a level bus power problem.
I would like a VooDoo Banshee 2, please.
Cool to see a new video from you man. I bought a Banshee back in the day for my HP Pavilion K6-2 and was pretty happy with it for about a year, not bad considering how fast things were moving back then
Lets not forget that there were many Banshee cards sold with higher frequencies. For example the Gigabyte GA630 runs with 110/130 mhz instead of the standard 100/100 mhz, being 15-20% faster than the standard version. The Monster Fusion Banshee run with 105/120 mhz, being also much faster than the standard version.
i sure like the exposed circuitry and components vs. todays mother boards and cards that are all covered up, kinda like car engines from back in the day compared to todays modern cars with a big plastic cover on the engine.
I second that. Unfortunately, the average user doesn't want to see any of this, it is too scary. Same goes for boot screens actually showing useful information, like memory test. At least it is still possible to configure Linux to show the boot log.
A much beloved card for its time. It was the only card I could afford back then, one which filled a very needed cab until my Voodoo 3
I'm loving the music choice for the montage
Thanks! I definitely took a chance with it 😅
@@PixelPipes not what I would call typical of this type of content, but it was refreshing!
Very nicely put together, with lovely b-roll. I'll waltz myself down to the lab with the music of the opening sequence in my head to try and get the last piece of footage I need.
A lot of people confuse the banshee to the actually hated on rush. Banshee was the shit up until u played multi textured games. So underrated. Pretty much for the try hard 3dfx fan on a budget.
I really enjoy the Banshee. It is in my opinion the perfect card for a build targeting games up to 1998 (it looses too much steam in anything newer). I personally treat it as a Voodoo 1+, something that the Rush should have been in the first place. Great image quality, great compatibility, doesnt cause problems with early AGP systems, the late drivers just work. Perfect card for SS7 systems. Very convinient package that ships everything one needs for Win95 gaming in a single card.
"Voodoo 1+, something that the Rush should have been in the first place" couldnt have said it better, mate
Nice to see these old cards which were unaffordable at the time, had to use onboard SiS graphics like SiS 5598 & SiS 651 for a long time until I was finally able to buy an used Geforce 4 440MX in 2006
Well I don't know about other people but I upgraded a Matrox G200 with a 3D Blaster Banshee back in the day and I couldn't be happier. In fact I just got another for a retro build I'm putting together.
Great video, thanks for telling us the Banshee story \o/
the intro with Voodoo Banshee in the bushes is pure gold (and that music) take five 🍻
A friend had a Voodoo Banshee back in the day and it performed awesome to us. We never got the hate.
Great video!
Unloved? This was my first proper 3D accelerator (had an S3 Virge prior) and it was a massive step up for people like me - it's true it didn't perform as well in certain games/scenes due to the lack of a second texturing unit, but the faster clock speed meant it performed admirably in a lot of titles. I remember grabbing my PC Gamer demo discs and trying all the games I previously couldn't play because they required 3D acceleration.
I had one too, but after i had a voodoo 2... my banshee went up in smoke.
Oh it was very unloved.
Same here
Same here. Only one I could afford, and it ran Quake 2, Unreal, Unreal Tournament & Half Life in the glory days of PC gaming. Loved the card
@@sprucemaroose IIRC it was adopted pretty heavily in the OEM PC market so I imagine a fair number of people had a Banshee. I remember it playing Half-Life quite well, and I could even push 1024x768, though I think I remember dropping back down to 800x600 for performance. It handled pretty much everything I threw at it quite well by my standards, but then I was coming from an S3 Virge so any proper accelerator would have been a huge step up.
Great video! I'm glad that you mentioned the technology link, where the Banshee acted as a stepping stone between the original architecture and the later cards. While it's not as interesting from a marketing perspective, it's a crucial step for R&D that most people don't think about, and it also provides valuable feedback to tweak the architecture in later releases (which 3dfx did do - much of what they learned from the Banshee was modified and integrated into the VSA-100, which is clear from the die shots).
By the way, the 2D engine being 128-bit was another way to say that it could do 4 pixel per cycle raster operations (which were far simpler than 3D). But the operations done were highly specialized to cover all of the niche cases needed by CAD programs like AutoCAD. None of that stuff is done in hardware anymore though, which makes it seems even more cryptic.
A slight nitpick, the TMUs operated in passes consisting of multiple clock cycles, where the throughput was 1 per cycle. So the Voodoo 2 could apply two textures in a single pass, at a rate of one pixel per cycle that contained two textures. The actual pipeline depth was variable due to the FIFOs, but it was likely on the order of 60-100 cycles per pixel (for comparison, I believe the Geforce256 had a depth of 220 cycles, and modern GPUs are thousands of cycles).
Thanks for the feedback and clarification!
Love me some Banshee. It was my first 3d accelerator and paired with a 233mmx. Diamond Monster Fusion. 👍
Loved the music sequence! Here's the song name for anyone that's interested: It Had To Be Moonglow (feat. Neil Richardson Orchestra & Singers)
Oh interesting! I ripped it off an old record we found at Goodwill, and it went under a slightly different name, but it's exactly the same. Never heard of that particular release!
I am emulating the Banshee in PCEM so this was very enlightening. Thanks, Excellent job!
Woo. been waiting for this one. :D very well done.
Thanks man!
The first look of this Graphics Card in 1998 got when my tech magazine reviewed it. And I believe it as top line gfx of time, if not exceptional ofcourse
In the late 90's, the Voodoo Banshee was an absolute game-changer that provided a significant upgrade from graphics cards like S3. It could effortlessly handle most 3Dfx games, eliminating the need for multiple graphics cards to handle 2D and 3D graphics separately. This was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time, as gamers could now enjoy superior graphics performance with just one card.
I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing. I was sharing the PC with my dad at the time and one day it started having some issues and he took it in to the computer shop to have it repaired. The owner told my dad that I had a fire hazard sitting there and had removed the riva128 and replaced that and the voodoo2 with a S3 virge dx card instead. Told my dad, I need to buy a nintendo instead because computers weren't designed for games.
My first 3D card. A proper 2D and 3D card that best every other card at the time but ignorance of many who loves to criticize because they had Riva TNT with crappy 2D and awful directX who had to compete with glide. People who had much more expensive voodoo 2 also with their 2 tmu loved to criticize. Banshee brought voodoo experiences to the mass.
The interesting history, the ridiculous yet beautiful B-roll... I love it.
I enjoyed every second of it.
God. The music and glamour shots are perfect
The production quality of this channel is top notch
Just found your channel. Love these trips down memory lane. I got my first computer about 2001, it was my dad's old computer had a Pentium III 900mhz, 128mb ram, Geforce4 Ti 4200 128mb graphics card. Loved playing Hellbender and Fury 3 with the Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick. Had the Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Sim City 2000, Sim Farm. Had a game called Ice and Fire that was really cool would love to play again. I got my dad's old PC cause he upgraded to a Pentium 4, 512mb ram, Radeon 9800xt 256mb. I remember staying up late the day we got a 10/100 switch and figuring out how to share files with each other....lol
The video is a piece of art!
I bought a banshee back in the day and it was a fantastic card. Handled anything I threw at it and was a very capable and compatible little guy.
I owned a banshee back in the day and enjoyed it. It was a budget friendly alternative that hit a sweet spot for me...
Love your videos! It get's me right in the nostalgia! Keep it up!
I burned the bus from my mainboard with the heat emanated from that video card! God damn!
Had a Voodoo Banshee back then.
Never regretted the buy.
I feel like most of the people saying the Banshee was disliked likely were not around at the time the card was actually out. The Banshee was very popular for budget builds. I owned one at the time and I knew several others that did. An SLI Voodoo 2 setup was beyond the reach of most teenagers in 1998.
Sure journalists that got video cards for free bagged on it. Also most of the forum complainers were likely just kids that were fanboying.
Also the whole argument about poor driver support I don’t recall being an issue in the time. It ran every game I wanted to play.
I am glad you pointed out games like Quake 3. It was really amazing at the time to play that game and UT99 on such a humble graphics card.
Great video.
Banshee is a cool card. I wrote it off at first but its a great card for mid 90s gaming.
Great video I like the presentation. A great and affordable vga in my oppinion. I had the Voodoo 3 16MB AGP back in the day with a P3 450MHz and after that the GeForce 256. Great times :-) and the music is gorgeous.
Great video as always! It's definitely a card that gets passes up too often. Solid for any retro machine of the era and this summed it up great. Nice creativity with the shots and music!
Thanks Rik! Definitely a solid card if you don't expect too much from it
Rik Rik!how are you
ps:i have collect voodoo2 and 3.but i don't like banshee T.T
I picked up a random beige box for a few bucks recently. It had one of the worst motherboards ever made, one of the PC Chips “BXpro” ones that over reports the FSB and crashes if you try to run it at the advertised 100MHz. Expectations weren’t high as I removed the AGP card to find out what it was, so my eyeballs nearly fell out when from within the dust and cat hair the sacred inscription “3dfx” rose up. The mystery trashbox had a Banshee in it🙂 Now I’m a convert. Love ‘em.
Great to see more pixelpipes👍 really enjoyed the calming montages.
I love my Banshee. It was a great replacement for my Stealth ii. I even convinced a friend or two to purchase one. Much loved by me. I had the lovely Phoenix model.
In the late 90s I had a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 2 card. One of my best friends had a Voodoo Banshee. I remember it feeling really crippled when playing the same games, but thinking back it was probably because we were running the same games in 1024x758 whereas my Voodoo 2 topped out at 800x600. I bought a Voodoo 3 like the day they came out after seeing all of the hype. I stuck with that until upgrading to a Geforce 2 a year or two later.
I remember how I got the card for christmas in like 99 and paired it with my Pentium 3 500 and I freaking loved it. Finally I was able to play the 3Dfx only games and they ran wonderful.
I had a blast playing on my first Pentium II 350 and Banshee PC. NFS Porshe Unleashed, Monster Truck Madness, Tomb Raider... Fun times.
My favorite graphics card of all time
Never had a Banshee. But i remember i really wished i had one since i read about it in PC magazines of the era.
I loved my Voodoo Banshee :) I had a Skywell Magic Twinpower, I have 3 in my collection now including a boxed version of the Maxi Gamer Phoenix PCI like the one shown in your video :) Great to see all the Banshee love haha :)
Your Content is absolutely lovely.
Greetings from Austria!
I loved the Banshee so much, I bought one a few days ago in a fit of nostalgia.
I still have a Voodoo Banshee, i swap it out with my Voodoo 3500TV on one of my retro rigs all the time. In the day i had 2 Voodoo12s and a banshee as my 2D card.
I'm using my sli v2's with a g4 mx440 for 2d, might swap it for a banshee for 2d
I had the rush as my first 3d card, then the banshee and I was thrilled to have it, wasn’t at all disappointed with it. But it did start the thirst of the upgrade over the next 20 years !
mmm i yearned for that 32mb for 1024x768 and 32bit color. damn voodoo2 couldn't do squat.
I had a VOODOO 1 attached to a Matrox Mystique (For those who don't know, the VOODOO 1 didn't offer any 2d output. It had a passthrough port for that)... Then I upgraded to the Creative 3d Blaster Banshee (a Voodoo Banshee from Creative Labs) and I LOVED IT!!! It was fast, worked with all my older games, the only downfall I had was the early drivers were junk for Windows98. But this was fixed around 1999 and with internet it was easy to update. It worked GREAT after and I still have it. I don't use it in my retro machine, as I have a 64mb VooDoo 5 that I can use for that. I still love playing Quake 1 with the KQP (Killer Quake Patch) and using my 3dFx Card which just makes it look GREAT!!! I play multiplayer with friends on my local network using my old Pentium 3- 1.3Ghz with 256mb Ram, 128gb SSD and Voodoo5... Runs fast and looks great!!!
I have nothing but fond memories for my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee.
Unreal, unreal tournament, GLQuake, quake three Arena, King pin.
Winamp with the amp can visualizer.
So many good memories. And all the games were guaranteed to be screamers for performance on the Banshee if you could run them in glide.
love the into cinematography and soundtrack lmao
Welcome back!
I absolutely fu*king loved my Creative Banshee 😍
Hopefully, one day, I can get another.
love it or hate it, it was my first graphics card to game on, and boy did it provide a ton of fun in dark forces 2: Jedi knight.
Ditto - even as a young teen I knew there were likely far faster 3D cards, but the Voodoo 2/Riva TNT etc. were expensive and the Banshee allowed me to play games that required a 3D accelerator that had been out of my reach while offering decent performance at common resolutions.
The banshee was my 3rd gpu ever and to go from a 1megabyte pci ATI to the banshee on agp and 16 megabytes was huge. From 800x600 to 1024x768 was wow factor. I wish I still had it.my fourth gpu was a radeon 9600xt which I still have.
i had a trident 1mb VLB, and when upgrading my computer jumped from that to a voodoo banshee (1998) ... i loved that card. never had any issues with it.
my next upgrade was to a geforce 2 32mb (2000) ...
Well put together video love looking back at the older tech
Nice video! I think you should've mentioned though that the Banshee in contrast to the Voodoo2 also had the new 22 bit color filter rendering to improve 16 bit 3D game rendering image quality.
I really liked the Banshee. Decided to have it as the graphics solution in the PC we ordered for Christmas 1998 which was based on 440BX and PII 350. What I hated about it though was that the cockpit view in NFSIII would not work with it which was a huge letdown since I was absolutey adoring the cockpits when I played that game prior on a friend's V2 equipped PII 300. It was the Creative 3D Blaster Banshee AGP which was passively cooled. The cooler got really hot, but the card still works today. I even ran it overclocked from mid-99 onwards. I can't remember if the chip or memory or both were overclocked, but I remember it being 112 MHz which was funny since that was also the frequency I had set the FSB to. It was nice that the Banshee ran stable despite being overclocked itself and on an overclocked AGP bus. To improve cooling I only added a front case intake fan to the system prior to overclocking it.
I had a Banshee way back and I loved it, let me play games my old GPU would not. I knew it was not as fast as the others but I could afford it and it let me play games which is all that mattered to me.
I played Half life and Unreal for the first time on a Banshee. It was the bees knees in my book.
Would be nice to see a benchmark video with the best cards from 1998: Tnt1 vs Voodoo2 vs Banshee
I actually sold both of my Voodoo2 12MB cards recently because I had decided the Ensonique Banshee I have is "good enough" Voodoo for me in my PII 450MHz rig.
The 2D video quality through the loopback cable on the V2 sucked. So, while 3D games were great I had to deal with a sub-par Windows desktop. Games are not the only thing I use this computer for so the poor visual was a deal breaker.
The Banshee 2D quality is superb...extremely crisp. Games (to my eyes) look just fine and the lack of the second texture unit really does not bother me at all.
And, it is natively supported in BeOS 5 which was another plus for me at least. This machine also functions as a BeBox.
So yeah, I really love this card. It is overall a fantastic 2D and 3D card and worthy of owning.
I loved the Banshee. My first and only 3DFX card back then. A great buy.
This - was my first proper 3D Accelerator.
I had an i740, then changed to the Banshee.
My friend had an Riva128 and then additionally a Voodoo 1.
In the end the Banshee was the best, and quite affordable back then.
I upgraded to the Voodoo Banshee from my Diamond Monster (Voodoo 1) card and was quite happy with it. I was disappointed at the time I couldn't get an AGP version. AGP versions were in limited supply.
I later upgraded to a Voodoo 3 3000, Voodoo 3 3500 TV and finally Voodoo 5 5500. The only card I don't have anymore is the Voodoo 3 3000, as I sold that to get the Voodoo 3 3500 TV.
What I appreciated most about 3dfx products was their quality and practicality. Sure TNT had 32-bit rendering, but it was mostly a slideshow and memory limitations meant that texture quality had to be sacrificed. Apparently even the Voodoo 1 would render everything in 32-bit, then down-sample it to 16-bit for storing in the frame buffer.
Great video! I couldn't agree more. The Banshee deserves a lot more love. It was many firsts for 3dfx and the 2D core was excellent. I find that the loss in image quality through the V1/V2s passthrough setup can be quite significant - especially at higher resolutions. I never owned one back in the day (went from a Voodoo straight to a Voodoo 3 3000) but I really like the Ensoniq model I have now. It's a great card.
Banshee was my first 3D-card. Liked it a lot.
My first GPU, loved that thing
U r a legend ❤ .. u deserve millions of views
I had a Banshee, offered the best value for me at the time as I was on a tight college budget. Good times.
Unloved? No way, this was my first and favorite 3D card. It was so much my favorite that I specifically went for one when building my Win98 gaming computer.
very nice video ! All effort you put in worth it ! Really like the jazzy retro computer 90' thingy... Thanks for this time capsule
I had a Quantum 3D Banshee and I loved it. I had it running alongside my Pentium 166MMX and then when I upgraded to an AMD Duron 700, it went into that until I upgraded to an Nvidia MX 400.
Oh yeah, it was really a pretty excellent choice with a budget concern, back in 1998 I used K6-2+voodoo banshee, this combination gave me pretty good performance, still miss it to this day!!
3DFX's main innovation was to trim the fat to the bone; that one trick made them popular early on, but later they failed to add the fat back in a timely manner and they did not understand the value of "ticking boxes" for the marketing critters at places like Dell (e.g. "AGP 2X support" and "AGP texturing support" are boxes to tick, even if they didn't matter one iota; 32 bit rendering didn't really matter for the voodoo 3, it looked better than TNT2 16 bit with its painful dither anyway and you would have used 16 bit colours on both, but it ticks a box).
Not having a 2D core or T&L drastically simplified the chip. T&L was a standard feature in high end graphics since the early 80's (see e.g. flight simulators like the Evans and Sutherland CT5, it then trickled down to workstations and then to arcade machines and so on). Games in 1996 had to assume most people would use software rendering, so they couldn't use very high polygon counts. World polygons in something like quake is up to a few hundred visible at the same time, with light maps applied as a second texture; models were less restricted but also very low polygon (~low hundreds per model). T&L was not *that* costly to perform on the CPU with such low polycounts and certainly nothing compared to just perspective correct texturing of triangles where vertex parameters (light values, normals, U-V texture coordinates etc) were interpolated across the triangle and then the texture value was bilinear filterered by interpolation between the 4 nearest texels in the correct MIPMAP level. 3DFX found the very minimum feature set they possibly could and made the minimum viable product and it was pretty cheap and faster than pretty much anything else.
After that one trick played out with the voodoo 1 and voodoo 2 they never were quite able to anticipate the market and keep up. Already in 1998, software rendering had become a bit of a joke and every OEM was trying to find a cheap 2D windows GUI accelerator + 3D accelerator combo card that would run current games reasonably, ticked a bunch of boxes even those that didn't matter(e.g. AGP texturing), had a reasonable RAMDAC that could output an acceptable image at a reasonable desktop resolution (even a Riva 128 from 1997 supports 1600x1200). The banshee was just too late.
Very true, and excellent comment. Thank you!
come back to us!!! we miss your videos!!
Ah yes, the woes of the K6-2 platform! Sorry to hear it was a pain in the ass, but I'm really glad to see this video. I really had no impression of the Banshee before seeing this, so I feel better-informed. I've never actually come across one in real life, though, and, with a Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 2s in SLI, I can't see myself ever needing one. Given how hard such cards are to acquire, it's nice to know there's a worth option for machines of that era.
I acknowledge your geode.
I remember there was a driver that allowed 2D on Voodoo 2 without external 2D card. When pc was powered on, nothing was on screen until windows booted up, and then desktop showed and it worked to some degree.
Great video, as always! The Voodoo Banshee is actually more similar to the Voodoo 3 than it is to the Voodoo 2 (in fact, Banshee was the code name that 3dfx used internally for Voodoo 3).
All in all, I love the PCI Banshee, it's a very good card for Pentium MMX builds and I own three of them (though, in some instances, even the Pentium MMX is bottlenecked by the Banshee - and that's at low resolutions like 640 x 480). On the other hand, the AGP Banshee is a card that I don't even want to have in my collection, its performance is extremely bad and there are much better AGP alternatives out there for a fraction of the Banshee's price (I don't even understand why the AGP Banshee is so expensive nowadays).
All true. In most respects it was the Voodoo Rush done right, with a bigger framebuffer, much higher triangle throughput, and a better triangle setup engine than the Voodoo Graphics chip ever offered. The lack of multitexturing was the only real bummer, though at 480p for contemporary games it was a better performer than Matrox's competitor-on-paper G200. And 3Dfx was good about incorporating contemporary SIMD optimizations into their drivers, so the Banshee scaled well across every CPU on the market. There was at least one 2D benchmark back then where the Banshee would nearly hit the theoretical maximum values a given CPU could push - the 2D core was strikingly good. In the long run the lack of multitexturing and blending modes (a problem common to all pre-VSA 100 3Dfx cards) hindered its viability, though things moved so fast in the late '90s that even buying big would only buy you another year and a half or so. I'd take a Banshee over most of its budget market contemporaries...
loved my banshee agp card back in the day.. got me through many great games.. will always remain a cherished purchase.. although i migrated to nvidia after the banshee.
There's nothing to hate about Banshee IMO - very good budget-friendly option for mainstream users at the time. It was exactly what they neededback in 1998. People just expected another powerhouse, and Voodoo Banshee never supposed to be one.
I could have had a Celeron A/300 with a Riva TNT1, but instead went for a K6-2/350 and Voodoo Banshee for the same money. Well, you live, you learn :)
my first 3d card was a Banshee, loved that card
I think I finished Max Payne on a Banshee and it was still a decent experience!
I didn't have extra PCI slots for two graphics cards so ended up with the awful, unstable Voodoo Rush. I was so happy to sell that and get this when it was released. It worked great with my PII, 266.
Love the production in this video Nathan, what song did you use for the nature shot?
I used an old record from the 60s that we found at Goodwill. I posted a picture of it on my Twitter page
@@PixelPipes Awesome! Just had a look and found a full recording on RUclips
(not sure if you've got links turned off so I'll add it to the Twitter post)
Oh wow I didn't even think to look for it on RUclips! Figured it was too obscure
Here's the link he found for anyone else curious: ruclips.net/video/s7q8eixjx9s/видео.html
This was my first PC upgrade in 1998/1999, and lord what a difference made it back then! I played Incoming and Pod racer many hours with it. I had the PCI Version from Creative labs. But i soon found out after 2 years it became obsolete very fast... And my K6-2 300mhz aswell.. i still own the card!
Seems like a decent card for the time, honestly. If you can get 60fps in Unreal with it, then I'd say that's pretty good.
Love the mid century music used i the video, but I have to say I don't have the most fond memories for the Voodoo Banshee, as I had a PCI version in my system at the time which did not have an AGP slot, and one night in mid 99 while on Lycos chat talking to some friends, I looked over, and saw my PC on FIRE, so I quickly said goodbye, turned my PC off, ripped open the case, saw the tantalum caps has gotten way too hot, and burned the board of my Banshee, I was in high school at the time, and did not drive but was working at local gas station not too far from our house I could walk too, so I had money, and begged my mother to take me to Staples, the next day which was a saturday, and I came home with an Nvidia Riva TNT2 16MB PCI card, and was happy as could be. 🙂
Oh wow! That would have been pretty scary. Even the best built Banshees can burn themselves out which is something I didn't mention in the video. Cooling is critical, and many (most?) Banshees had inadequate cooling on their own.
@@PixelPipes Yes Banshee cards did in general run hot when compared to many other cards at the time, and why all of them did not come with a cooling fan is beyond me, as it might have saved my card, but ever since the incident, in all my builds I've made sure to have plenty of cooling to reduce the risk of something like that ever happening again.
I think it was a good card for the time. It was extremely popular in the oem/prebuilt market and brought real 3d acceleration to the masses.
My first 3d card was a voodoo banshee. I eventually sold it to a friend and used the money to buyu a voodoo 3 2000. I still have the card and use it in my retro rigs