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
Yep, as soon as the TNT came out it was pretty much over for 3dfx. Quake II on a Riva TNT running in 1024x768 was a sight to behold.

>>flohof+Op
3D gaming at 1024x768 in 1998 would be like 8K gaming today.

>>ChuckN+es
No, 4K. 1280x720 would be 640x480, the minimum usable for a Windows 95/98 desktop and most multimedia based software. Today that resolution it's almost the minimum for 720p video and modern gaming.

1920x1080 would be 800x600 back in the day, something everyone used for a viable (not just usable) desktop in order to be confortable with daily tasks such as browing and using a word processor. Not top-end, but most games would look nice enough, such as Unreal, Deus Ex and Max Payne at 800x600, which looked great.

>>anthk+ek1
It was much more common to run games at a lower resolution than regular desktop, though. Even as 1024x768 became the norm for desktop, mostly, the crazy iteration rates on 3D hardware meant that most people who couldn't afford a new card every year would stick to 640x480 for the more recent 3D games.

>>int_19+0Z2
Yes, I did that even in the Geforce 2MX days. Games maxed @800x600, desktop at 1024x768.

Ditto with today's 1920x1080 desktop resolution on my Intel NUC and games at 1280x720.

But I could run 1280x1024@60 if I wanted. And a lot games would run fine at 1024x768.