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I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.

'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.

It was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.

> The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones

Duke3D -> Quake (software rendered of course) definitely fit that description

Yessss...I got a friend who went on vacation to the US to bring back a Voodoo (2,I think?). I played a lot of Quake 1 and I remember playing online and seeing the water transparency and my rivals underwater...good times.

WTF is TFC?

Really nice background in the recent book The Nvidia Way. The gist of it was Jensen recognized that having the best chip once wasn’t enough.

The result: Nvidia organized around delivering something new every six months. This meant a new architecture followed by two improved derivatives over an approx 18 month period. That turned 3dfx’s development schedule into a trap.

Conclusion: disciplined execution above all else.

Its interesting how even I didn't realize how competitive he was...until after the market realized recently. Wish these books would come out a year earlier than they did. :/

I guess i'm not cut out for stock trading. I'm always arriving as the train is departing both in real life and on the market.

I still remember playing Quake 2 to death in software then finally getting a 3dfx card (I want to say it was a Banshee?), loading up the game and my mind being blown by how much more immersive it was.

Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.

I wanted a 3DFX card so bad when I was 10yo.

And then I wanted a GeForce so bad. But I only got £10 a week from my paper round.

If I’d invested just one week of my paper round in Nvidia shares though, it would be worth over £10 million today.

Me too. I lost all my money at the time betting on TDFX. I was salty as fuck against Nvidia for decades until I had no choice but to buy their GPU 10-ish years ago. Now I’m a stockholder. I only wish I chose properly 25 years ago…

> In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...

...they would still have fumbled it.

3dfx failed for a single reason: Failure to design for the future.

They had a hyperfocus on brute force rasterization and fill rate that became detrimental. They dropped the ball on 32-bit rendering because they thought having a higher fill rate was more important. They dropped the ball on implementing hardware transform because they considered that the CPU's job.

And then they blew up their own business model buying STB Systems and manufacture cards themselves, rather than selling chips to other manufacturers. That ended up being a gift to NVIDIA who adopted the opposite strategy of providing chips, reference designs, drivers, etc. and let a large number of board manufacturers compete to sell them.

And then there's the fact that NVIDIA was allowing themselves to create new architectures, while 3dfx was basically just saying "Let's make the same GPU, but with more texture units". By the time the Voodoo5 came out, NVIDIA was already on the GeForce 2.

3dfx lost because it kept optimizing for yesterday. NVIDIA understood where the industry was going and 3dfx didn't, and there's little reason to think AI would have gone any differently. If 3dfx had somehow survived another 20 years, I'd expect them to arrive at the AI boom with the world's fastest rasterizer.

I remember watching those promos of need for speed 2 SE running on a 3DFX and feeling like a peasant for not having one.

Rampage!

https://www.slideserve.com/hedy-gilmore/3dfx-rampage

I've been maintaining an emulated Pentium Pro 200 MHz Windows 95 machine on 86Box for some time with all my favorite old software from childhood. It's great for nostalgia, and if friends come over they have fun showing their kids things like SkiFree, Jezzball, and Encarta 96. Still holds up great for kids.

You had me at Winamp

TIL you could SLI Vodoo 2's, and 3dfx invented it. Very cool. (It's different from the nvidia SLI, same acronym, different tech.)

I had that with GTA3: seemed photorealistic at the time.

Yep, I remember playing everything without a 3D card and then being completely blown away when I got my Voodoo2 and all the pixelation and jerkiness was suddenly gone. I left the little "3DFX" splash screen enabled for a while there just because I was so enamored with the whole experience.

Author of the article/site here, I have a MacBook neo I could test 86box on with this same build. But practically speaking yes, it has reasonable ST perf and my guess would be it's competitive with the best x86 chips available today for this workload.

Yeah, I still remember the first time I ran glxgears on accelerated hardware and I could not believe my eyes

It ran VisualBoyAdvance pretty well! I haven't tried Project64 but I think the emulated Voodoo3 should support Jabos D3D6/7 backend with older versions. Was quite thrilled today to see my article blow up so if there's anything you'd want me to test I have mostly a free weekend.

No modern hypervisors emulate a Voodoo 3D card. The upcoming 86Box release will probably have Riva 128 and ATI Rage 128 emulation as well.

Using an accurate emulation of such a device means you can use the drivers that existed back then that games back then were QA'd on.

Most modern hypervisors aren't built with Windows 98 in mind, either - it's not really what they're for, and a modern Mac can't run an x86 hypervisor anyway.

Second sentence in the article:

> CPU timing, chipset behaviour, ISA and PCI buses, graphics chipsets, sound devices, and disk controllers all matter to getting period software to behave properly.

Because that requires x86 hardware which some people no longer have.

86Box has been around for 10 years and it'ss a fork of an even older emulator called PCem which started in 2007. 86Box is an amazing cross-platform project if you want to emulate an entire computer (up to Pentium III era) as acurately as possible.

NSX !

That's Box86 [not a joke].

I'd play Messiah[1] - such a hidden gem

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(video_game)

Yes, you can.

Or a Rosetta-based emulator (like Parallels). But 86Box is going to be very bad there.

While they claim "accuracy" as one of the goals for 86Box, I believe accuracy is overrated in PC emus (you don't really need that much accuracy due to the variety of PC clones, and emus are not that accurate anyway). For me the biggest point for using 86Box over other PC emulators/virtualizers is the large selection of virtual hardware available to emulate, not performance.

Which motherboard did you have those in? I had a dual socket 370 EPoX board, but I never put a second CPU in it.

Also, sounds like I should work on upstreaming my Rage Fury 128 emulation...and the EPoX SMP emulation...(the perils of too much ADHD and too few tokens)

Heh I had one of those back in the day with an Intel made L440GX+ and SCSI disks. One of my favourite machines.

I miss Windows 2000. Win32 was such a good time in desktop computing.

It can run Doom for sure.

Hardly, given that the hardware predates the game.