
The 3dfx Voodoo1 - fafner
http://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html
======
djmips
I was the lead and pretty much only programmer for the Canopus Pure3D. Ours
had 12 RAM chips for 6 MB of memory. 2 MB extra Woo hoo! We also featured a
Chrontel chip for composite and S-Video output. I wrote our DirectX driver
(performance enhancements) and other sundry software for the Pure3D (pictured)
and Pure3D II. Pretty cool to think back on those days.

~~~
tus87
Please write an extensive blog post about your recollections working in the
industry at the time. Seriously.

~~~
corint
I couldn't agree more!

------
rayiner
It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits)
to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4
years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz
Pentium 3.

What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015
MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine
was getting long in the tooth even back then.

~~~
derefr
The obvious comparison to the GPU arms race is the VR hardware arms race. Same
number of companies rising and falling in about the same period. Carmack is at
the forefront of both, too.

~~~
ekianjo
You cannot be serious. VR headsets have not been evolving at the pace of
hardware back then. The resolution of headsets does not double every year or
something and VR today is not much better than one year ago. Nothing
comparable.

~~~
taneq
Linear resolution maybe not, but pixel count is roughly doubling. Vive and
Rift are both ~1k x 1k pixels per eye, first gen Windows Mixed Reality
headsets came out a year or two later and are 1440 x 1600, and the just-
announced HP Reverb is ~2k x 2k. The teased Valve Index is likely to be 2k x
2k as well, with a field-of-view bump from 110° to 135°.

------
tmountain
Blast from the past. I have extremely fond memories of moving into my first
apartment in 1999 and having friends come over to play Quake on the “voodoo
box”. I had three PCs, a 10BASE-T LAN, and one machine that had been upgraded
to a 3dfx card. We would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to
play on the 3dfx box and spend many an all nighter playing till the sun came
up. Those were the days...

~~~
zcid
I still have my original Voodoo card. It's the one piece of computer hardware
I've never been willing to throw away. I still remember spending 8 hours
downloading the Quake demo and having my mind blown. The only other time that
holds a candle to that is when I got the GLQuake version. No other game has
ever taken me on a ride like that.

~~~
jeffbax
Same w/ my Voodoo2. I keep meaning to frame it.

------
guai888
This brings back the memory. I was working for a tiny company in Taiwan at
that time. We had been producing VGA cards for a while at that time. An IC
distributor brought us a demo board of Voodoo 3D (V1) card. I ran the demo and
told my boss that it was the best 3D graphic that I have ever seen. My boss
just decided to run with it. Back in those days, VGA card vendor standard
practice was to modify the reference in two way. 1. Modify the layout so it
can accommodate many different memory chips. If your board can use cheaper
memory chip, you will have better profit ( often mean chip which did meet
standard memory testing, but still usable with some effort in layout and
hardware design) 2. Modify the driver so you have a better benchmark score.

Since we were a tiny company with not many resources so we decided to just
manufacture the reference design. This decision enables us to be the first one
in Taiwan to ship the product. I cold call 50 companies in Europe. I did not
have much success at first since distributors in Europe were not convinced
that 3D card can sell. Internet was slow back then, we were still using dialup
modem and sending video capture was not an option. I finally got a break when
I called the 42nd company on the list: Guillemot (France). Guillemot got their
start in PC gaming sound card so they were already interested in the 3D card.
Guillemot was talking to Orchid Technology but they need a lower price than
what Orchid can offer. Since all other Taiwanese makers were still evaluating
or in the development process, we got the business because our price is US$50
lower than Orchid and able to ship right away.

------
BuckRogers
Being 14 years old and getting to experience and see it evolve first-hand with
a Commodore (at home), the Apple II (at school) and 286, 386, 486 and Pentium
era with a Diamond Multimedia 3dfx Voodoo card was amazing. People who missed
it either being busy with other things in life or weren't born yet, believe
me, as a technologist being there from the beginning of the home computer
market till about 2000 was amazing.

One thing I'm very thankful for in life. It hasn't been the same since around
the turn of the century, the magic and mystery is not like it was with PCs or
game consoles in decades prior. The advancements were just leaps and bounds
every few years.

It sparked your imagination more than things today, because creativity for
some reason reduced without technical limitations. Today, within any
reasonable definition, an artist's vision can be fulfilled. There's really
nothing left for the end user to imagine or fill in the gaps (think Zork).

Not to be crass but this is a relatable example for many I'm sure- it's no
different than finding a Playboy magazine back then, as opposed to extreme,
explicit hardcore websites today. There's no mystery at all there, and it's
not really an upgrade from your imagination being used at least a little bit.

I've actually rediscovered books because most media today (as in movies and
sitcoms, not THAT sort of media) is so poor quality. It's really all about the
writing, and I struggle to find games and films that are at the 20th century
or prior quality level. Books can be exquisite entertainment, and leave plenty
for your imagination to run free with. Which for me, is what it's all about.
That's the joyful part to entertainment, or at least a part of it that I find
critical.

~~~
GuiA
It is because you experienced these things during your formative years that
they have such a unique luster, and that nothing seems to quite compare.

People who are in their formative years today will look back upon the current
times with similar enthusiasm; just like your elders a few decades ago found
that your Playboy magazines and 3D video game cards were pointless debauchery.

So it has been for the billions of humans who have lived before us, and so
will it be for the billions who come after us.

~~~
BuckRogers
I've definitely considered that thought over the years, again and again. I do
think there truth to it and plays some role here, but overall would
respectfully disagree with it as a flat out conclusion if used as a dismissal
in this case. It's worth expanding on because you're not just wrong outright,
it's impossible to objectively state that nostalgia isn't a factor, but I
truly do think I'm onto something here on witnessing the home PC market first-
hand from the beginning. It really was special because of the intimate nature
of it, "home PC" market.

The reasoning that immediately comes to mind is two-fold.

The first is the obvious point I made, where from the very start I place books
as the supreme medium, and are far before my time. The written word can be
information dense, puts your mind and imagination to work and if in a book,
never needs recharged. :) It's just underrated, underappreciated. Books are
"inferior technology", which to me is the ideal abstraction layer for our
species. I think we'll continue to see back to basics as a movement as
corrosive societal effects from "social media" plays out. We need real
community, the kind humans evolved for, not that marketing nonsense chewing
people's brains up and spitting them out only left with capacity for short-
term attention spans. Most people don't need help with that. Facebook is the
new smoking. Things don't always get better with every generation for billions
of years, nor do most witness great change. You're assuming that because the
last 300 years have been relatively action-packed. Mostly thanks to Europe's
astonishing leap forward around 1600AD in and out into the world. Things are
objectively worse today from the 20th century, everyone knows it or can
definitely feel it. The deck is stacked against a young person with
opportunities slowly dwindling. That trend may continue if we don't solve
capitalism collapsing on itself in the western world, discover new
antibiotics, among numerous other very serious challenges that aren't being
effectively addressed. Our big, impressive move lately (speaking for the US)
is simply cutting taxes when already at historically low rates. Brilliance.

The second thought I had is that the home PC space undeniably hit it's stride
from ~1980-2000. That's just when that market had its golden age. Combine it
with the arcade experience of the day, and you had a sensory experience that
really isn't even widely available today anymore. You can't really explain it
to someone who didn't see it. It's not just generational placebo. It's like
the circus. They hardly exist now, but they were worth the trip and I regret
many kids may never go to one. Someone who did miss the way it was before
would likely insist I'm just a fool, but Netflix and Youtube is not a fair
replacement for these things. They're just not.

You have to go hunting for an arcade today, and I'm not even sure if there are
any truly modern ones around. A kid just won't get that sensory experience,
which isn't just technological but the social element of all the kids being
there too. That goes without mentioning the loss of comic books stores that
kids rode their bike to(!), toy stores, candy stores, Saturday morning
cartoons and all the waiting, anticipation and excitement attached. Just
nostalgia? Or is it real. The examples sound real.

Back to addressing your point, certainly the cotton gin, the steam engine,
home electricity (which my grandma told me about when they were the first
house in town to have it installed because her dad was so enthusiastic about
it), among others, were more monumental on a macro level than seeing the home
PC space explode from 1978 to 2000. Yet I have my doubts that an old timer was
passionately reminiscing about "seeing the cotton gin come to be", and how
amazing it was. It harkened great change to society, but I'm not sure people
were living their lives in a way at that point to personally experience rapid
iteration as people witnessed in the home PC market. Being a market
specifically targeting them/us. It really is different today than it was then,
it has normalized, there's less excitement for sure, and it's far more
difficult to be impressed with advancements.

We're at the point now where we need to go back to step one, bring back
creativity. That's why I circled back to books being the ultimate medium. What
good is an 8K TV is there's nothing good to watch? Zero. I'm back to hunting
for good books instead. Choose Your Own Adventure were better than what
Hollywood is putting out today. Writers often do the best job at expressing
thought-provoking creativity, which without that human spark of creativity
injected into your technological medium, it would all be pointless.

From our human perspective at least, once they're unleashed, our AI overlords
won't care.

~~~
badpun
> Things are objectively worse today from the 20th century, everyone knows it
> or can definitely feel it.

That may be true in the US (although of course it's debatable). In the global
scale however, things have improved tremendously. For example, my region,
Central and Eastern Europe, has been freed from comunism and flourished for
the most part after 1989. But that's small change compared to vast
improvements in living standards of hundreds of millions in Asia (China,
India, other countries). So, it'd say the boom is far from over, it's just
getting more evenly distributed now, as opposed to most of the XX century,
where the US was in an unique position to get so much richer than almost
everybody else.

~~~
BuckRogers
Indeed. My point of view is fixated on a working-class perspective from the
USA. I wouldn't say things here feel like hell, it's just more effort and
people aren't used to studying or instilling discipline in their children so
they can get up to par. There's no more jobs where you have no advanced
education or specific skillset, where you walk in and walk out buying a house,
motorcycle and 2 cars. People aren't used to not having that available. I've
spent most of my career trying to be skills-based to not fall out of the
middle class here. It's no longer easy, and it was felt after 9/11 and
definitely after 2008.

I certainly dislike the shift of money out of the US (and western Europe,
which is really in the same boat as we are), but tough to wish poverty, dismay
or anything of the sort on the rest of the world.

In my career so far, I've worked with many people from Bulgaria, along with
India. Really enjoyed the experience to be honest. I'm a best-person-for-the-
job sort of guy (a concept that is actually falling by the wayside in the
increasingly job-strapped USA in favor of nepotism and cronyism), and don't
fret over macro-economic issues that I don't control. Just do my best to
survive in the environment I was born in like everyone else.

I wouldn't say everyone is getting a great deal out of the US's economic
system eating its own people, plenty of the world is being ignored outright.
Eastern Europe and Asia are definitely some hotspots gaining though. I think
global scale might be a stretch. But I could be wrong, just thinking about the
parts of the world where capitalists aren't investing as much.

I love talking to folks from Bulgaria and such about their lives from the
Soviet era till today. One told me that "we didn't have much, but you didn't
care or notice because everyone else was". Lack of envy etc, that individual
was actually admiring his previous life in ways, which I understand given how
miserable so many people appear today..

Very interesting perspectives on life and the world, to me at least. I also
enjoy teams with folks from India, usually upbeat and smiling and that's
(almost) all I ask for. I also suspect working with developers in Latin
America would be a similar experience. The culture differences get a little
abrasive though once you move out of India into the rest of Asia.

------
samlittlewood
I was working on 3D rendering and games around this time - pretty much all the
PC cards were burdened with terrible CPU->GPU interfaces. The handshaking,
setup calculations and register wrangling was such that below a certain
triangle size, it would have been quicker for the CPU to just draw the pixels
itself. Some cards (Um, Oak?) required per-scanline setup.

I got one of these cards - confirmed it was indeed hella fast (even for large
meshes of small triangles), and then dropped into SoftICE a few times, winding
up at this code:

[https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-
sezero/glid...](https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-
sezero/glide2x/sst1/glide/src/xdraw.asm)

My thoughts were - "Wow, somebody gets it!" \- Very tight triangle setup, and
a simple PCI register layout that means that the setup code just writes the
gradients out to a block - the last write pushes the triangle into the huge
on-card FIFO.

That performance, along with the simplicity of glide, made it a a no-brainer
to drop all other card support and focus on that exclusively.

------
docker_up
When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era.

I bought thousands of dollars in stock in the company. I lost it all because
unfortunately nVidia ate their lunch because they marketed themselves better.
They had full 32-bit color vs 3dfx who had the superior technology but only
had 16 or 24 bit color. 3DFX spent a lot of time trying to explain why it
didn't matter but in the end it did. It mattered to the gamers at the time,
and they basically died and I lost a huge amount of money that took years to
pay off. It took me a long time to move over to nVidia because of my hurt ego
but they were the superior technology in the long run.

~~~
taneq
32-bit colour is still just 24-bit colour with 8 bits of stencil or whatever
(or at least was back when 3dfx was relevant). The only company I know of that
was doing higher bit depths was Matrox who had 10-bit colour iirc.

I remember back in the day "serious gamers would never use a combined 2D/3D
card". Then nVidia came out with their Riva chipset and suddenly 2D graphics
cards weren't really a thing any more.

~~~
eecc
I had a Riva 128, what a piece of crap it was... I used to assemble gaming
boxes for friends and delaying delivery a day or two to take a ride on the
Dual Voodoo setups.

Edit: well, according to Wikipedia it was somewhat competitive although
drivers and support for rendering stacks was erratic for a while. I guess
that’s what soured me up, and I was probably too n00b to have a clue

~~~
taneq
Huh... We had a Diamond Viper V330 or something and it was rock solid. Worked
fine on everything I threw at it, seemed comparable with a Voodoo 2 in terms
of speed/quality. Maybe it was the card vendor rather than the chipset?

------
LeonM
Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof!

I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back
then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip,
so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable.

I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the
'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was
actually cheaper, internet wasn't very useful back then, so there was no easy
way to compare prices.

I didn't have a computer of my own yet (I must have been 14 years old or so),
so I bought it for our 'family' computer, an IBM P166. I remember getting up
super early to put the card in before my dad would wake up. He would certainly
have freaked out if he saw that I opened up the expensive computer to put it
some gaming thing.

Good times.

~~~
ZoomStop
Remember clearly buying my Voodoo Banshee from Babbage's for $250 USD. My high
school girlfriend at the time was so annoyed that I would spend so much on
something so strange at the time.

GLQuake blew my mind, but I was just trying to get Daggerfall to run
acceptable more than anything at that point, and run it did.

~~~
rasz
You probably meant Redguard, Daggerfall sadly lacked any 3d acceleration
support.

------
CoryOndrejka
Oh, memories. We built a custom arcade board based on SLI Voodoo1, mips r5k,
and custom jpeg decompression in hardware to do Magic the Gathering:
Armageddon. [https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss](https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss) We
wanted to run at highrez (640x480 vga) at 60hz with tons of animating sprites
on screen and realized nothing had the fill rate we needed. Rather than
changing the game design, we kept looking and met the 3Dfx team when they had
barely taped out the Voodoo1. We gambled that SLI would work and started
designing the hardware and adapting the game to an early alpha of Glide. We
prototyped on SLI cards running on Windows NT and pentium pros. In parallel,
Atari Ganes built Voodoo1-based hardware to replace Zoid. Mace and War shipped
on that hardware.

~~~
ido
Interesting! I didn't realise SLI was available before the Voodoo2.

------
tom_
My claim to fame is that the only Voodoo card I've ever owned was a Voodoo 5
6000.

I picked it up in the early 2000s during a pre-closure clearout at my then-
employer, a UK video games developer. The sheer size of the thing made me LOL,
that and the number of fans and the additional power connector. Then I noticed
it was a 3dfx - oh, hey! I could play that Glide-based motorbike game, that I
remembered enjoying at a friend's house a few years previously.

The game wasn't as good as I remembered. I threw the card away.

~~~
rasz
at least you didnt throw away Voodoo5 9000
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI)

~~~
rambojazz
Did this card genuinely exist or is it some kind of joke?

~~~
megablast
Are you serious?

~~~
rambojazz
Yes. It could have been some kind of prototype I don't know.

------
Zenst
My flatmate owned a Voodoo2, was impressive though the market soon caught up
and and when the following year I did get myself a 3500, after a month I sold
it and got a Matrox G400Max as it did the 3D level I needed (more so the less
demanding games of the time). But more so, the colour gamut was so much
sharper and stood out on a CRT of the time.

I was curious so I had a dig on the specs to relive the decision of the time
and can see the Matrox did 32bit colour whilst the 3500 was 24bit. Not seen
any comparisons in performance but I certainly had no complaints and was
happier with the G400Max on many levels (2nd monitor - no problem).

[EDIT ADD] This looks worth a watch for nostalgia circa 1999 graphics cards
and compares the G400MAX, 3DFX 3500 and the TNT2 Ultra
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4LvoGQ2lgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4LvoGQ2lgI)

~~~
bla3
24bit and 32bit both have 8bit per RGB color channel, the extra 8 bit are
either alpha (for textures) or padding (for performance). All other things
being equal, colors should look the same on both.

~~~
sliken
Yes, but keep in mind that monitors of the time were analog devices. Matrox
was well known for higher quality at the time. It was visible even just with
black text on a white background. Basically their implementation of moving
from pixels to the analog signal was better. Less artifacts, less shadows,
better colors, better frame to frame stability, etc.

~~~
blattimwind
Good RAMDACs cost good money. That's why analog outputs of laptops (those that
still have them) are usually crap.

------
AdmiralAsshat
3dfx had some rather infamous commercials for their Voodoo line:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOYoZGoXsw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOYoZGoXsw)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qp2TUNEFY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qp2TUNEFY)

------
kken
Nice article. I would be interested in learning more about the rendering
pipeline. Is anybody aware of a more detailed description? Or an online
datasheet?

Btw - already EDO DRAM favours reading entire memory blocks/lines. My
suspicion is that the trick in increausing memory bandwidth is not only based
on interleaving, but also on block transfers with on-chip caching. Especially
critical for texture reads.

The Voodoo is a nice example of how much execution matters. They were not the
only ones to follow this path back then, but by only concentrating on the core
functionality they managed to beat all others to the market without
compromise. (Compare to S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, Nvidia NV1, Tseng, NEC and
many others)

~~~
fabiensanglard
The datasheet (i assume you mean the register mapping) is linked at the bottom
of the article.

------
rasz
Loving those early 3d hardware retrospections. Some corrections:

>they started they own company

typo

>EOM'es only leverage on the cards they produced was the RAM they selected
(EDO vs DRAM), the color of the resin and the physical layout of the chips.
Pretty much everything else was standardized.

\- EDO is DRAM, EDO vs FPM? I didnt know that, always assumed every V1 shipped
with EDO, just like every card on your pictures is EDO.

\- video signal switching was also up to the vendor (relay/mux)

\- and one of the cards has TV encoder section with TV out, pretty neat
selling point

>It is not specified if the bus used address multiplexing or if the data and
address lines were shared. Drawing it non-multiplex and non-shared makes
things easier to understand.

You are addressing 512 kB, but datapath is 16 bit/2 Byte wide, so we only need
18 bit address bus. As for multiplexing thats not how DRAM addressing works
IRL (understandable misconception/simplification for non EEs). Row/Column
address lines are multiplexed, meaning we are down to 9 address pins +OE/WE.
Comes down to ~110 pins assuming full 4 way interleaving. Seems doable with
>200pin ASICs.

>21-bit address generates two 20-bit where the least significant bit is
discarded to read/write two consecutive pixels.

still too many bits, 2MB at 4 byte granularity is 19 overall, 18 per 1MB bank

>TMU was able to perform per-fragment w-divide

This was a HUGE deal at the time, and achieved by doing serious low level
optimizations/tricks (lookup tables/approximation if I remember Oral Panel
correctly). 3dfx engineers were big fans of good enough hacks vs slow but
correct way of doing things. Another one was color dithering, too bad you
didnt mention "24-bit color dithering to native 16-bit RGB buffer using 4x4 or
2x2 ordered dither matrix" \- this is the reason straight ram dump screenshots
from Voodoo1 dont really look the same as on directly connected monitor. 3dfx
called it ~22bit color, it was noticably better than Nvidias pure 16bit.

Btw afaik Quake pushed somewhere between 500-1000 polygons per frame, earlier
games like Actua Soccer rarely went up to 500 with fatal consequences of
single digit framerate on S3 Virge. You might enjoy Profiling Of 3 Games
Running On The S3 ViRGE Chip [http://www-
graphics.stanford.edu/~bjohanso/index-virge-study...](http://www-
graphics.stanford.edu/~bjohanso/index-virge-study.html)

------
p0rkbelly
Playing Unreal and coming out of the spaceship at 800x600 on my voodoo2 and
400mhz Pentium II (I was spoiled and got the !2MB version!!!) was still one of
the greatest gaming moments of my life

~~~
skocznymroczny
Coming out of the spaceship never did it for me, but the intro in the menu
did.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I remember firing up the game just to sit and watch that intro run. Good
times.

------
rasz
Computer history museum 3dfx Oral History Panel is fantastic
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-
GhU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU)

------
3dfxiter
They forgot to mention at the end of the article that 3dfx filed for
bankruptcy as they literally became "drunk on their success." Everybody
started showing up to work intoxicated. Some investors got left out in the
cold.

~~~
fabiensanglard
I would be curious to read the source for this.

------
kbenson
The Voodoo2 was my first 3D video (addon) card. I was working tech support at
the local ISP, and a failure on a circuit caused all authentication to fail
for dialup customers for a few hours. They called in every off-duty support
person they could get to come in and along with the scheduled staff we all
(~20 of us) took 3-4 hours answering calls telling many of our 20k customers
that yes, we had a major problem, no, we couldn't help them at that time, and
hopefully it would be fixed within a couple hours.

To thank the support staff, the management/owner offered the choice of a
Voodoo2 card or a DVD player (~$200 each IIRC) to every support rep that
helped with the load that day. I ended up working for that company three
separate times in different positions, leaving for college and coming back,
and working for a relative's company for a while and returning again later.
It's the wonderful people there and actions like that which keep that company
in a special place in my heart. (For those wondering, it's Sonic.net, now
Sonic.com, or just Sonic maybe. I'm not sure the official branding, and I have
years of history with it being Sonic.net)

------
pault
I remember the first time someone told me about a card that you could put in
your computer that would make quake run faster. It sounded so strange and
exotic. Then I saw the screen caps with all their anti aliased glory and was
devastated that I could never afford it on a movie theater clerk's salary.

~~~
shereadsthenews
On many computers it did not run faster just differently. Regular quake and
glquake were two totally different programs.

~~~
int_19h
How would it not run faster, given that otherwise CPU had to shoulder the
rendering entirely, in addition to everything else? Even high-end CPUs at the
time would struggle with that, especially with resolution and bit depth being
equal. IIRC the original Quake didn't even allow more than 256 colors in
software rendering for this purpose, and even then I recall having to run it
in weird resolutions like 400x300 to get framerates comparable to what Voodoo
owners had for 640x480x16bit.

~~~
ahje
The Voodoo was the indisputable king of 3D accellerators back then. Not
everyone was running GLquake with a Voodoo card in their PC though.

I had an S3 Virge in my PC at the time. It was quite possible to get GLQuake
running using a Direct3D to OpenGL wrapper, but damn it was slow. It sure
_looked_ better than regular Quake, but it wasn't really noticeably faster
than software rendering.

------
vgoh1
I collect vintage electronics, mostly computers and gaming consoles. The
Voodoo cards are considered quite collectable because of their GLIDE API.
There is a decent stack of games that will ONLY run on Voodoo cards, or will
only support Voodoo natively, which matters to a lot of collectors. Back then,
a good eye could sometimes identify a card just by looking at the game. For
one, for a brief period, games were only made to run on specific cards, so you
could narrow it down just by what game is playing. Also, the artifacts would
give them each a different look. Some were grainy, washed out, etc. The Voodoo
1 cards would stand out by the artifact that I can only describe as what
looked like faint artificial scan lines.

They are really special cards, and two of my vintage computers were built
around a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, meaning, I started with the cards, and knew I
had to build a PC to run them optimally.

~~~
StrictDabbler
The Voodoo cards had that odd glossy, liquid look that made the surfaces of
objects seem deeply physical. The ADCs (EDIT: RAMDACs, of course) that they
were using did an odd sort of "poor man's antialiasing" and running any games
from that era on modern equipment is a shocking exercise in explicitly defined
pixels.

------
Nr7
I remember the first time I saw that you could walk right up to a wall in a
game and the texture didn't become a mess of giant pixels. Sure, it was a mess
of blurry pixels instead but still it seemed like (voodoo) magic to young me.

------
itgoon
The Voodoo was, very literally, a game-changer. The difference in quality
between Quake and GLQuake was astounding.

Just a few seconds of gameplay was enough to get someone to make the purchase.

~~~
xenospn
Same with PC speaker vs SoundBlaster.

~~~
BuckRogers
If you only had or experienced IBM-compatible PCs. If you started on a
Commodore or Amiga, the PC speaker to Sound Blaster/Adlib shift was more akin
to just catching up. I wasn't completely happy until the 486 era because of
this.

The Voodoo1 4MB which I had back then as well, was unprecedented. I agree that
the Sound Blaster was great (in isolation against older x86 PCs), but 3dfx was
the first standout example of the fruit in the IBM-compatible space, and a
clear demonstration in the gaming sense as to why it took over the market.

~~~
armitron
The first standout example was VGA and games that fully took advantage of it.
I was an Amiga user but AGA was too little too late and architecturally a
disaster for certain games (DOOM, Quake). Even games like Monkey Island and
Indiana Jones were a lot better on VGA than Amiga.

The game that did it for me was Privateer vs Elite II. I had to get a PC after
I saw it. It was crystal clear the Amiga could not compete.

------
dev_dull
Fabien can you tell me how your website is generated? It’s very readable.

~~~
julianlam
... generated? It's just HTML.

~~~
tomjakubowski
I would be quite surprised if Fabien's website HTML was completely hand-
written.

The site does seem to run some PHP scripts.
[http://fabiensanglard.net/appleTechTalk2009/index.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/appleTechTalk2009/index.php)

~~~
fabiensanglard
I have a php script inserting the header and footer. There is also a php
function that accumulate references and prints them at the end.

Apart from that, it is all hand-written HTML, these is no CMS.

------
jugg1es
I still remember getting my first 3dfx card. Mowed lawns all summer to save up
to get a Voodoo.

------
ben7799
Fond memories of these cards for me.

I bought one my junior year of college as a CS major. I had some good
internships and that year I had some money. Instead of a car I had built a
Pentium MMX 200Mhz box with Diamond Stealth card & 16MB ram. Pretty hot
machine among my friends at that time... when the Voodoo 1 became available I
was able to get one and it's performance was mind blowing at the time, even
though I had access to SGI machines and such on campus that had way more
impressive demos on them.

My senior year of college I took an Open GL course and did a bunch of my
projects in linux with the Voodoo 3D drivers. Cool stuff. Played a lot of
quake too, I remember writing a program to render the quake characters on my
own as one of my projects. The data model formats were open source IIRC so it
wasn't too hard to read in the data. Very cool since we didn't have any good
3D tools to build our own models.

I remember playing AH-64 Longbow or something on it too.. some of the flight
sims were amazing at that point right before flight sim popularity tanked at
the same time the remaining programs got unbelievably complex.

Voodoo was kind of a pain the neck in day to day usage. In 1999 I built a new
machine and went to an NVIDIA Riva TNT and then later that year got a GeForce
256 when those came out.

Kind of the end of my heyday of PC gaming.. the combination of working on
computers all day + games at the time still requiring a lot of debugging to
get them to work well wore me out.

------
cmroanirgo
I worked with all of the cards mentioned in the article. It was a pretty sweet
time, where the card manufacturers would happily send out a reference card.

Some things the article did seem to miss out on:

\- You could have two Voodoo's in your PC for extra throughput (I can't
remember the numbers). I seem to recall there was a ribbon cable between the
two boards...

\- The reason 3dfx ultimately failed was due to hefty lawsuits ongoing with
NVidia about IP theft and headhunting the 3dfx staff.

During this time there was a mailing list (can't remember it's name) that
existed and a lot of game devs operated in it, mainly around DirectX (v1
onwwards), but it was in existence much before that. All the card
manufacturers were on it that I recall. One day John Carmack posted a comment
(I'm paraphrasing somewhat) how rubbish DirectX and Direct3D was. A month or
so later glquake was available.

I think it was about 12-18months later Unreal (the game... before the engine)
was announced as a demo on this list and we all thought: Awesome -- who the
__* are these guys!?

I'd like to say 'Good times' were had, but seriously, I burnt out due to the
insansely fast changing pace of 3D dev during those times.

------
pselbert
I recall purchasing two of these in the late 90s for relatively little money.
Both cards could work in conjunction and it radically changed how games
looked—really amazing how much of a difference it made. I can distinctly
recall the difference in crispness, and how disappointing it was that didn’t
apply to everything I used or played (3DS Max, CAD, etc).

They were the first thing I ever sold on eBay, sometime around 1999.

~~~
animal531
If I remember correctly they had it so that the one would render the top half
of the screen and the other the bottom.

------
blt
My first 3D accelerator was a Voodoo2, first used on Quake 2. The cast light
from the moving rocket on the floor is unforgettable.

~~~
KozmoNau7
The difference from software-rendered Quake 2 to hardware rendering was
massive, not least because of the colored lighting. In some places, it
definitely bordered on overkill.

~~~
blt
game developers cannot help themselves, after colored lighting they moved on
to SSAA and bloom...

------
jersully72
I have a box of 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in storage. No SLI cables but you can make
them out of floppy ribbon cables.

What should I do with them?

~~~
lsh
There is a niche market for vintage gaming machines, I wouldn't be surprised
if you could sell them for a few hundred each.

------
jonplackett
I wanted a 3DFX card so bad in 1998 but I'd already convinced my dad to pay
extra for a Matrox Mystique 3D card (which didn't support openGL) and he just
couldn't get his head around why i now also needed another 3D card add-on.
Even seeing the names of all those cards brings back so many memories.

------
ct520
Ahh man I remember GL quake dropping and before the voodoo, or Riva 128 I had
the ... Matrox Mystique 4mb!!! Was amazed and also sorely dissatisfied. Thus
began the video card race/upgrade journey.

Voodoo, Riva 128, tnt, voodoo2, lol don’t forget that power VR, what an
amazing time to live

~~~
smcl
That PowerVR card - was it the Kyro or Kyro 2 or is there another one?

~~~
rasz
PCX was first [http://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php](http://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php)

~~~
smcl
Cool! Thanks this looks interesting

------
chongli
Wow, the lack of gamma correction in the Voodoo1 screenshot completely ruins
the mood of the game.

~~~
jeffbax
Fortunately modern Quake engines handle making it look closer to the software
renderer in those regards...

------
biesnecker
Such good memories. I spent all of my first few high school job paychecks on a
Diamond Monster 3D. In retrospect, adult me says I should have bought $AAPL,
but 16-year old me is still pretty sure it was the right decision.

~~~
craz8
At least you didn’t by TDFX stock, like I did!

------
mpalfrey
I had a Voodoo Banshee (combined 2d/3d card). It wasn't as good as a V2 but
was OK for me back in the day.

I then moved to NVidia predominantly (TNT2 Ultra), although I did pick up a
cheap V5 5500 which I ran for a bit.

Like other's have said, it was a fun time to be involved with PC gaming.
Unfortunately life has got in the way since, although I do spend time on
Vogons looking at old systems and wondering if I should build a couple of
retro machines!

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
You definitely should. I have a 486 DX4/100 running DOS / Win3.1 and a Slot A
Athlon 650MHz with a GeForce MX440 running 98. So much fun reliving my youth
in DOOM, Red Alert, and Half-Life!

If you need justification you can tell yourself that these machines will only
go up in value. Works for me ;)

------
sprash
The main reason for the success of 3dfx were drivers that let you talk to bare
metal hardware registers instead of dozens of GL abstraction layers. The
simplicity of it all is very impressive. This is something programmers
absoluteley love. Hence many games supported it and it was very easy to write
drivers. Maybe it is time to reimplenent the glide interface in an FPGA ang
make a super powered Voodoo card.

~~~
ryacko
I miss software rendering, games with that as an option are the only old games
that still run on modern PCs.

~~~
Crinus
OpenGL games should run fine, some old games that used static sized buffers to
hold extensions (like all Quake/Quake2 games that dump the available extension
string to the console and the console having a hardcoded buffer for each line)
will crash it because of how long the extension string is nowadays, but most
drivers have an option to limit the string size (AFAIK Nvidia and AMD drivers
check the executable name and do it automatically for known faulty games).

For Direct3D games you must use a 32bit color mode otherwise Windows 8.x/10
will force software rendering which is very slow. Even better, use dgVoodoo2
which is a reimplementation of DirectX 1 to 7 (with a some bits of 8) in
Direct3D 11 and provides much better compatibility (also gets rid of the
Direct3D 7 2048 surface width limitation, making it possible to play games at
2560x1440 and up).

For Glide, dgVoodoo2 is also very good and you can "cheat" the game to force
higher resolutions than what the game thinks it is running at.

I have a lot of old games and everything that isn't DRM encumbered works fine
in Windows 10 using dgVoodoo2 and/or some game-specific hacks (Tomb Raider 1
for example is normally a DOS game that you can play using a Glide-enabled
build of DOSBox but there was also a Windows version made that used an ancient
proprietary 3D API by ATI - someone reimplemented that API and placed extra
hacks in there for high resolutions and widescreen support).

~~~
ryacko
Software rendering will only be slow until everyone has manycore processors
with SIMD. The die area of threadripper isn’t far from a GPU’s die area.

~~~
tntn
(Hi Larabee)

~~~
Crinus
Whenever i re-read Tom Forsyth's (who worked on it) article about Larrabee
[1], i facepalm hard at Intel's decision to drop it. It is one of the few
cases where i really wanted to put my hands on that sort of hardware. An
essentially standalone manycore CPU on a PCI express form that is running
FreeBSD or Linux, with a bit of graphics specific functionality that doubles
as a video card and you can fully program like a PC?

I have "I WANT! I WANT! I WANT!" signs blinking in my head as i type this :-P.

(facepalm mainly because i wanted it, i do not know the economical details)

Funny enough, the Forsyth's (and another one from another team member i do not
remember now) article sold me more on Larrabee than any PR speak Intel made.

[1]
[http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...](http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20didn%27t%20Larrabee%20fail%3F%5D%5D)

------
kabdib
A cow-orker of mine mentioned this card a few months before it was actually
released. "Transparent water," he would say, wistfully. I wasn't convinced it
would be that interesting.

We both bought cards. I was convinced.

I really wish I'd gotten back into game programming then (I was doing mostly
systems stuff, boring things like storage and operating systems). It would
have been a lot of fun.

------
dfischer
I remember being obsessed with graphics cards back in the day. My first
graphics card i knew of was a 3dfx voodoo. I loaded it up to play Everquest. I
vaguely remember going all the way up to a gforce 3 or so trying to get my
games running smooth. Because of games I learned what every component in my
system did and eventually started coding too. I miss those days :).

------
ChrisRR
Another great article. I read absolutely everything Fabien writes. His Doom
and Wolfenstein books make for great reading too.

------
mrbill
I was one of the poor folks who could only afford the Matrox m3d (aka PowerVR
PCX2), which shuffled video data to and from the 3d accelerator over the PCI
bus, and was therefore slow as crud.. but, I had GL Quake!

[http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php](http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php)

------
pgt
The 3dfx Voodoo1 was the first hardware I bought with my own money to put in
my 200Mhz AMD K6 machine, which I kept cool with two industrial fans. I paid
R450 (~$30) for my Voodoo1 and have fond memories of multiplayer Half-Life 1
and Alien vs. Predator (AVP1) with friends.

~~~
daneyh
awww man those were the days!!

------
danmaz74
I couldn't afford a Voodoo at the time, but I was so fascinated that I bought
a S3 Virge, which really underwhelmed me.

Then Nnvidia came along, and I remember wishing I had money to invest on it
early on. Wished I could go back and do it :D

------
pjmlp
I was quite sad to exchange my newly bought 3dfx card by a NVidia TNT one due
to PCI connection issues on my motherboard, specially since I was looking
forward to play with Glide.

------
manav
I remember the Voodoo 2 SLI. I know it stands for something slightly different
now but at least its a small remnant of that past.

I wonder if nvidia actually got much ip out of the acquisition.

~~~
tntn
I've heard that GeForce fx was designed by ex-3dfx employees.

------
saluki
How about the Voodoo3 with the giant blue dongle?

~~~
shdon
The Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP? I had one of those (after a Voodoo 1 and a Voodoo
Banshee) and it was a huge disappointment to me. The whole thing seemed
terribly unstable. Heat issues? driver bugs? hardware conflicts? I could never
figure it out.

On a side note, that blue cable was so incredibly stiff you could probably
club somebody over the head with it and it still wouldn't bend.

------
davesque
I had a Diamond Voodoo card. When I first fired it up on GLQuake, it
absolutely blew my 16 year old mind.

------
jordache
how about an article on the 3dlabs glint 500tx? I lusted for one of those to
run my 3d software...

------
Exuma
I used to draw the 3dfx logo all over my trapper keeper using white out. Good
old 90s days

------
jaequery
Someone start a Quake hackernews LAN party! Gosh I miss the Rocket Arena / TF
days!

~~~
ismail
Count me in for this, good times. Carting your massive box + monitor To a
buddies house and then playing lan games all day!

------
shereadsthenews
Maybe it was the voodoo 2, but I seem to recall that 3dfx cards could render
into a chroma-keyed window, not just full screens. In any case the main
problem with them was they made your 2D desktop look like junk for the 99% of
the time you were not playing Quake, due to the extra analog-digital-analog
conversion.

~~~
corysama
One of the best features of the Voodoos was that they were a cheap, early-
adopter way to get dual monitor debugging. Full-screen debugger on one
monitor. Full-screen game in a breakpoint on the other.

------
almost_usual
I haven’t thought about my Voodoo card in a long time, good memories

------
alvalentini
Oh dear. Little tear streaming down my face.

------
Lapsa
Oh the nostalgia... Had one.

------
sureaboutthis
I want to say I still have this in my basement in a box. I also want to say I
have this in my old workstation computer and it still works, sitting in my
basement.

