zlacker

I still remember installing a Voodoo and playing glquake. It was so amazing after relative disappointments like the S3 Virge. Lots of nostalgia for that period.

The article touches on this a bit, but one of the quirky things about the original Voodoo and Voodoo 2 were that they lacked 2D entirely. You had to use a short VGA passthrough cable to some other 2D card. This also meant that they only supported fullscreen 3D, since 2D output was completely bypassed while the 3dfx card was in use.

The Voodoo 3 finally came with 2D, but I think I jumped ship to Nvidia by then.

>>jvolkm+(OP)
I think Voodoo Banshee was a full blown 2d+3d solution that was released before Voodoo 3. Don't take my word for it, though

>>beebee+v9
And the Voodoo Rush was a 2D/3D card that came out a little before that (August 1997, compared to the Banshee in late-1998). I didn't own either, mind, my only 3dfx card was a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI :D

>>smcl+he
Ah, you're absolutely right. Forgot about the Voodoo Rush. I was a poor kid and couldn't afford either.

>>beebee+vk
Oh me too - my motherboard had no AGP slot (hence the V3 2000 PCI). If I was smart I would've saved up for a few months, bought a more future-proof motherboard (I was on the dying Socket 7 platform, with an AMD K6-2 466MHz) and I would've had a nice little setup that would've kept me going for a while. But I was an impatient kid, and I wanted to play Quake 3 and ended up doing piecemeal upgrades over the next few years that ultimately cost me more overall :D

>>jvolkm+(OP)
> You had to use a short VGA passthrough cable to some other 2D card

And the lossy, double-clutched analog nature of this crushed 2D clarity IME. I could immediately tell the difference just looking at a desktop screen. It was by far my biggest grievance and resulted in me staying away until fully-integrated solutions were available.

>>beebee+v9
It was, but the Banshee wasn't popular because the 3d side was only half a Voodoo 2, with one texture unit instead of two. It had a higher clock speed to try to compensate but that wasn't enough.

The Voodoo Rush a year before that also had problems - it was a Voodoo 1 chip, but coupled to a slow 2d processor (back when that still mattered, like for just drawing windows or wallpaper in Windows) and had some compatibility problems.

It took until 3dfx's third iteration, with the Voodoo 3, to finally get 2d/3d integration right.