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

Whatever. In late 1996, I got a PowerMac 8500/180DP (PowerPC 604e) and a 1024x768 monitor. The 8500 didn't even have a graphics card, but had integrated/dedicated graphics on the motherboard with 4MB VRAM (also S-video and composite video in and out). It came bundled with Bungie's Marathon[1] (1994) which filled the screen in 16-bit color.

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

>>Maursa+7U
Probably cost a heck of a lot more than a comparable PC gaming setup in those days. Not to say it's not a great game, but Marathon uses a Doom-like 2.5D raycasting engine which doesn't need a 3D accelerator, just enough memory speed to draw each frame (which the PowerMac obviously had). Life gets a lot more complicated when you have to render perspective correct triangles with filtered textures, lighting and z-buffers in a true 3D space.

>>bzzzt+m93
> Probably cost a heck of a lot more than a comparable PC gaming setup in those days.

Until 2020, this was always a myth. When matching features and performance, the price of a Mac was always within $100 of a PC that is its equal. Not anymore with Apple Silicon. Now when matching performance and features you'll have a PC costing twice as much or more.

>>Maursa+dz3
Here in the Netherlands Macs were outrageously expensive in the 90's. I only knew a few people who bothered to buy them (mostly because they wanted something simpler than a PC or because of Adobe stuff). Macs also used 'better' components at the time (SCSI drives instead of slow IDE, better sound, etc) so yes, if you wanted a comparable PC you had to pay up. But most people here had a much cheaper PC...

>>bzzzt+9Tb
Depending on options, there are at least 2-4 different US-made SUV models that cost half as much as a BMW X1, which is not exactly expensive afa BMWs go.

The "Apple is expensive"-myth has been perpetuated since the days of 8-bit computing. Less expensive computers are cheaper because they have fewer features, use inferior parts, and are simply not as performant. But all that is behind us with Apple Silicon. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a PC that performs half as well as the current line up of low-end Macs for their price.