zlacker

>>BirAda+(OP)
My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it.

Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.

In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.

Sigh.

>>ChuckM+25
Around 1999 we had a PC with both a Riva TNT and a Voodoo 2. The main games I played were Half Life and Unreal 1 (in addition to various games that came bundled with hardware like Monster truck madness and Urban Assault). I found the Riva TNT to work much better than the Voodoo 2 for the main games I played (e.g. when choosing in the game options, the D3D or OpenGL options had less glitches, better looking translucency in Unreal, etc..., than the options that used the voodoo card), and in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward passthrough.

Maybe being 1999 it was just a little bit too late to still fully appreciate 3dfx and modern day D3D and OpenGL took over around that time, so I just missed the proper Voodoo era by a hair.

Note that by OpenGL here I meant OpenGL using the Riva TNT (I assume the Voodoo card drivers must have been called Glide or 3DFx in the settings). I've always seen D3D and OpenGL existing side by side, performing very similarly in most games I played, and supporting the same cards, with GeForce cards etc that came later. I mainly game using Wine/Proton on Linux now by the way.

>>Aardwo+wp
> in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward passthrough.

32bit on TNT at half the framerate, performance hit was brutal. 16bit on TNT was ugly AF due to bad internal precision while 3dfx did some dithering ~22bit magic

"Voodoo2 Graphics uses a programmable color lookup table to allow for programmable gamma correction. The 16-bit dithered color data from the frame buffer is used an an index into the gamma-correction color table -- the 24-bit output of the gamma-correction color table is then fed to the monitor or Television."

>>rasz+Jw1
I was never a fan of the 3dfx dithering/filtering, personally. Things usually looked just a bit too muddled for my taste in most games. It wasn't as bad as others (I remember the Matrox M3D having some very interesting features, but Image quality was definitely worse than Voodoo. Marginally better than a Virge at least, lol.)

16 bit on TNT was fine for most of what I played at the time, although at the time it was mostly Quake/Quake2 and a few other games. Admittedly I was much more into 2d (especially strategy) games at the time, so 2d perf (and good VESA compat for dos trash and emulators) was more important to me for the most part.

I think 3dfx had a good product but lost the plot somewhere in between/combination of their cutting 3rd parties out of the market, and not deeply integrating as quickly vs considering binning. VSA-100 was a good idea in theory but the idea they could make a working board with 4 chips in sync at an affordable cost was too bold, and probably a sign they needed to do some soul seeking before going down that path.

Now, it's possible that comment is only discernable in hindsight only. After all, these folks had seemed like engineering geniuses with what they had already pulled off. OTOH, when we consider the cost jump of a '1 to 2 to 4 CPU' system back then... maybe everyone was a bit too optimistic.