Remember 3DFX?

[GohanX]

Roguetrip: You can probably still find them on Soundblaster.com. Last time I had to install the drivers I found them pretty easily.

I used to have one of those ATI Stealth cards, great for 2d but I never found any games that would work in 3d. I did replace my Banshee with a ATI Rage Fury, which was their top gaming card before the first Radeon came out, if I recall correctly. The gaming performance wasn't as good as the Voodoo 3 or a dual Voodoo 2, but it had awesome hardware assisted DVD decoding so I could toss the DXR2/3 card, which was important back then.

[roguetrip]

Don't hurt the feelings of my orange juice...

Looks more like Orange Soda to me


Welp, your looking at the new owner of a Voodoo5 5500 AGP 64MB, sure hope it plays older glide games just as well as my Voodoo 2 Sli setup

LOL, I was reading about the VSA-100 pulls 15watts per chip and the V5 5500 has 2 chips so it has a whooping 30watt draw, seems like drop in the bucket compared to today's heavy hitters using up near 200+watts for the card alone!!

I'm Sure my Future Power 400w will handle it just fine

[Guntz]

N.Saibot is right, there's a PCI PATA+SATA RAID card... I don't use the RAID function, but I use it for four extra HDDs ^^

Man, that looks pretty enticing. If I had some more hard drives I'd so totally pick up one of those cards.

I also see there's a bracket holding all the drives together (they also appear to be resting on the bottom of the case). Do you need that bracket or is it more for stability?

[Pulstar]

Yup, we would have had something worse than what we actually ended up with. Allegedly 3dfx was only offering something like Banshee level hardware (makes sense given the proximity of the Banshee's release to the Dreamcast's Japanese release date), but even if it had been somewhat improved it would likely have been inferior to the PowerVR solution. You have to remember the things that 3dfx hardware was weak on: no hardware texture compression, 16-bit 256x256 textures only, and no hardware hidden surface removal. These problems were not fixed until the Voodoo 5 and would have produced a console with significant limitations compared to the one we got (texturing was an area that the DC was pretty strong in).

I pretty much agree with this, +rep for setting the record straight! 3dfx dropped the ball after the Voodoo3, which was mostly renowned for its performance but little else.

I had an PI MMX PC and an HP P.Pro workstation with 64 megs of EDO-RAM. Guess which machine received the Voodoo3 upgrade? The Voodoo 3 offered significant performance boosts but image quality left something to be desired. The underdog I rooted for was S3 which produced a very capable Savage4 chipset but by the time Nvidia unveiled their geForce line every other manufacturer save for ATI was doomed to fail. There was news circulating of S3 suing Nvidia for patent infringements but I don't know what actually transpired of it.

[David J.]

S3 was making good progress, but the Savage 4 and the Savage 2000 looked good on paper, IIRC, but had severe driver issues.

[Jax184]

The Awe 64 gold drivers are on the creative site, but the original software is not. You really need that software to take advantage of the Awe 64's capabilities. I'm trying to find a copy of the original CD.

[TmEE]

Man, that looks pretty enticing. If I had some more hard drives I'd so totally pick up one of those cards.

I also see there's a bracket holding all the drives together (they also appear to be resting on the bottom of the case). Do you need that bracket or is it more for stability?

HDDs stacked on top of each other can be fatal if anything tips over, plus you will most definitely get overheating problems which can induce head crashes :/
I need to install a low RPM fan there as the HDDs get hot like that...

[GameUser-16-32-128]

I have the Voodoo 3 3000 with 16MB of VRAM back at my parent's house. That thing made my Old Mac 7300 fast! Yes, it worked on a MAC (unofficially, with 3dfx drivers)!

[evildragon]

I got a powermac 7500 with a 1ghz g4 processor, 1gb ram, and an ati radeon 7500.

[Jax184]

I got a powermac 7500 with a 1ghz g4 processor, 1gb ram, and an ati radeon 7500.

...And a 3DFX?

[evildragon]

...And a 3DFX?

nope, since my 7500's pci bus is 50mhz a voodoo never would have worked right. but as i said before i did have a voodoo3 3000 agp 16mb on a pc though, which at the time was my gaming platform anyway.

[roguetrip]

The Awe 64 gold drivers are on the creative site, but the original software is not. You really need that software to take advantage of the Awe 64's capabilities. I'm trying to find a copy of the original CD.

That would be awesome! Thanks! Once I got my computer up last night I installed the 64AWE, windows detected without issue, I haven't actually tested the sound out of it yet, lol!

So now with my new Voodoo5 5500 and the Soundblaster I figured I'd upgrade the case since there is a bit of rust on the one the system is housed in now, I choose a Thermaltake V3 Black Edition http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811133094 on sale for 24.99 after rebate, it looks pretty snazzy!

I'm also thinking about pulling my WD 120GB 7200 8MB out of my XP machine and transferring it to my win98SE Retro build. Dunno why I get soo excited with this old hardware Oh, I'll have to bust out my Litestep skills again!

[Pulstar]

S3 was making good progress, but the Savage 4 and the Savage 2000 looked good on paper, IIRC, but had severe driver issues.

I recall people complaining about Savage's performance with games like GTA3. Nvidia got the drivers bit right for the past decade or so, but their MX cards were rubbish. The first mid-range Nvidia that truly impressed me was the GeForce 6600 (GT), which lasted me a really long time.

[Jax184]

I had so much trouble with S3s at a store I used to work at. Part of the problem was that there were 10 different identical sounding cards with different drivers. Was it the S3 savage pro, the S3 prosavage, the S3 savage 4, the Savage 4 pro? etc

[David J.]

I recall people complaining about Savage's performance with games like GTA3. Nvidia got the drivers bit right for the past decade or so, but their MX cards were rubbish. The first mid-range Nvidia that truly impressed me was the GeForce 6600 (GT), which lasted me a really long time.

Oh wow. S3 and Savage cards where long dead by time GTA3 hit PC. Do you mean Quake 3? I remember reading about that, and I honestly never thought that games would get much better and a computer could max out Quake 3 at highest settings at 1600x1200 resolution - or whatever the max was haha.

Besides GTA 3 on the PC was pretty sluggish - not as bad as GTA IV, no where nearly as bad, but I believe people who later bought VC got better performance out of GTA3 by moving some files from VC over - I don't fullly remember, it's been years. Hell, I don't even remember what computer I was using in 2002 anymore to play the PC version. Was it the 800mhz Celeron or the Dual P3 machine I had? I dunno.

Wonder where you read that? I was still in to PCs hard core then, but by time 2003 hit, I lost interest until 2008 or so and I'm just now hardcore into it again.

Now I will agree the MX cards where garbitch and best to be avoided back then and even today as they where quite common in budget machines!