S3 ViRGE Unleashed: RAM Upgrade, Overclocking, Resolution Scaling and more Games
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- čas přidán 7. 09. 2024
- We are revisiting the S3 ViRGE! I got great comments on the previous video, so we are back to give the original S3 ViRGE a fighting chance. We upgrade video RAM, overclock the card, check out lower resolutions and test more games.
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I programmed games for these cards between the mid 90s and early 2000s and the S3 Virge was always the most hated card as it was so slow but we had to support it. The only cards that we didn’t support were the early NVidia cards as they used forward mapped quads rather than reversed mapped triangles which made them impossible to use unless you designed your game to use them. I still have a bunch of old hardware from that time. 4 or 5 Pentium and Pentium 2 machines and around 20 graphics cards from that era.
Hello! Have you ever tried to work on Nv1 or at least test the speed compared to a Virge?
nice. i am fortunate that my wife is gracious with me re my parts hoarding ways 🤣
the s3 really sucked i remember this card you couldnt play anything with it
a square is just two triangles tho 😛
@@SevenCompletedquads force you to align the textures along the edges. Also instead of backface culling, you have back line of texture culling.
If you're not concerned about 3D performance, the S3 cards have really good VGA, EGA and even CGA/MDA/Hercules compatibility. An S3 PCI card in a 486 or pre-AGP Pentium makes for a really solid DOS gaming machine.
Good point! I admit haven't done much with EGA and other graphics standards...
Great card to pair with a Voodoo II XD
I'm using a DX 4MB purely as a 2D card paired with a Voodoo 1. Great combo!
Dunno about games but I used an S3 Trio for years, and later a Virge, and they never gave my work system a bit of trouble.
@@edsiefker1301Absolutely for a Voodoo 2 setup. A card with great 2D results basically screams for that.
My first 3D card was a S3 ViRGE in a Pentium 133 system. They were called 'graphics decelerators' for a reason; sure, the filtering was nice, but playing in software mode was pretty much always faster, even on the modest lower-end Pentiums of the day.
Thanks for giving the S3 Virge another shot. My results are similar to yours, but I still love the S3 cards. The Trio 64V+ was my first ever graphics card, and I played a lot of DOS games with that. I had a Virge later on and it got me into some early Windows games and served as my 2D card when I got a Voodoo 1.
More to come! DX will be next and hunting down a GX2.
Same, I think I havea few S3 Virges in the old hardware cupboard.
Wow Virge DX, I forgot about that one, I have no idea if it was any different from regular Virge. Now I have to wait to see your video :)@@philscomputerlab
I had a s3 virge and it just smooshed the textures a bit....what a waste of money. I have it still around here somewhere I think.
@@nikolakojic652 Come to think of it, seeing S3 Virge DX/GX in windows' device manager brings back a solid memory. I'll surely have to look at my stack of parts now.
I installed a LOT of S3 Virge cards back in the day. Not for gaming, just for display. In those days, almost no motherboard had on-board graphics. The S3 Virge was cheap and Windows 98 had a perfectly usable driver built in.
S3 ViRGE, why this crab on CZcams
why is he not able to understand it ?
This is how I ended up with mine ....for the roughly month or so before it was promptly replaced.
Yes...
I have always suspected that the Virge was originally targeted for a 320x240 resolution to match mainstream 3D game consoles like the PlayStation, as it provided nearly N64-level graphics. But out of nowhere, the release of the 3dfx Voodoo established 640x480 as the new gaming standard, which Virge cannot match.
The original specs of the Virge don't really seem like they were made for 640x480 gaming; for 16-bit color depth, two framebuffers already took up 1.2MB of video memory, not to mention the Z-buffer. There was no memory left for texture cache; most textures had to be streamed from system memory. I think this is the reason there is a nice performance boost when upgrading to 4MB of VRAM - much less texture streaming is needed.
For 320x240 the performance actually was ok as far as I can remember.
my first 3d card was a 4mb ATI rage pro, changed my gaming world forever. Got the card and Jedi Knight for a birthday and seeing that game run at 640x480 and looking amazing made me stick with PC gaming ever since.
Same!! That was also my first 3D card. Rock on brother. :)
I had that card (or one based on the same chip) and they bundled the ATI version of Mechwarrior 2, which ran at 512x384 and looked pretty good. I think it ran at a higher frame rate than the S3 could manage, as well.
Thank you very much for the flashbacks of my late 90´s gaming experience...
Was Celeron 266 MHz (boosted to 333MHz) and had 4mb S3 Virge in it :) ... Played nicely Viper Racing on low res/details, GTA / GTA London....
But struggled with GTA 2... It had black boxes around gun flare and lights + overall performance was shite...
Still have fond memories and i want that S3 Virge back :(
It's not double scanning at 512x384. It's just that modern scalers get confused by this resolution. Try using a CRT and you'll see quite big gaps between lines.
Yea and some will not work with resolution, i have one that does not
So you're telling me the modern monitor he has supports 24KHz? I feel like that's fairly unlikely, though color me surprised if it is.
@@kunka592 my guess it’s the lowest it goes
@@kunka592 It doesn't have to run at 60Hz refresh rate. With 75Hz vertical you would get 30kHz horizontal. Which would be perfectly fine for modern displays.
@@pvc988 Just like the 720x400 70 Hz mode. Which is just 80x25 text mode, but as bitmap.
Great review, as usual. But the Virge core had some revisions during its lifetime. You've been reviewing the "325" core. If possible, try to review the DX/GX upgraded core, from a decent maker like STB or Diamond ("Nitro 3D" comes with 4MB onboard) Looking forward to seeing a lot more great content from you in 2024. Best wishes!
Mentioned at the end of the video 😊
I remember to run tomb raider on a Virge GX at 320x240. Good times when we were humble and played with what we had! Have a good new year!
Also after that in december 98 the card Starter to crash on every game and the store replaced the card with a Ati Rage IIc. Played all tomb taiders till the 3 with that at 640x480
The fact that 3dfx came just a couple of months later, is also exactly how I remember it.
So people who had the money, went for a S3 or similar, for fast and good 2D graphics and used a 3Dfx for all the 3D stuff.
I don't remember that anyone ever thought that the S3 was an amazing 3D card?
Seems just an idea from recent years maybe?
Yea I had a S3 Trio 64 and Voodoo. Best of both worlds.
People who really had money bought a Matrox for 2d ...
@@federicocatelli8785 yeah, that was insane! :)
I always use 512x384 on 15" 1024x768 in order to get the best visuals on ultra lowend 3d cards (including voodoo1!)
Wow, I remember discovering Terminal Velocity at a friend's house back in the day. Free flight in 3D was a completely new thing for me, and I was hooked.
yes. and microsoft was pushing it so it was everywhere. ive always ment to check out the others in the series.
I'd love to see a roundup with the ViRGE / DX / GX. I keep a DX in one of my Pentium setups, and an interesting card from Creative - 3D Blaster with Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D in another, but I migrated some others to a modified AliExpress special RageXL
Always wanted to upgrade RAM on an S3. I still have one. Might be worth a look :)
another video that takes us back to the dawn of 3D Gaming The era of patches when developers optimized titles to adapt to the hardware. With the arrival of 3dfx and glide this world became even more fantastic. However, the Virge, like the Matrox Mystique and the first Renditions, have their own charm and each of these cards has something special to give us. Recently I finally tried a PowerVR PCX2 accelerator in its custom Matrox M3D it was a great experience that I want to further explore. Thanks for these videos, best wishes for 2024.
Thank you!
Yhm, so many memories, when trying to squeeze anything from my Virge DX 4MB to see at least a slideshow gameplay from Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit back in 1998. Finally using 400x300 resolution I could at least complete one lap at HomeTown map :) Regardless from Direct3D experience, Virge was a real beast with DirectDraw and this is why you can enjoy the Athlon boost for Software Mode, as the bitblt operation and double buffering is not creating a bottleneck for the CPU. Same test with SIS PCI card from that era and you would not have 30fps on Software D3D Mode
Back then I was in highschool and happy to have any video card.
^.^
Great video✌ and happy New year
So it really was the S3 Decelerator :)
😅
And I thought that only SiS cards earned the 3D decelerator title.
Im looking forward to DX variant
Me too! Have to find a GX2 also 😊
Supposedly the variant of the ViRGE that is best for OC'ing is a ViRGE DX/GX with fast EDO ram., in my case a STB Nitro 3D I got for stupid cheap on ebay. The main issue with it is the bios has a habit of nullifying your OC in DOS, so I'll have to figure out how to hack the bios for more speed once I've figured out how much headroom the chip has using Powerstrip in W98. The DX and GX variants actually had some improvements to the silicon and have an IPC advantage compared to the original ViRGE. I'm planning to have my Nitro 3d (ViRGE GX based, yes some of those chips were mated to EDO ram) with 35ns ram stock that I'm planning to send off to get swapped out for 25ns ram (not comfortable with smd stuff) and see how far I can OC it. Basically maximized compatibility and power for S3D games without as much monkeying around with patches and hacks like you'd have to do with a GX2. Now if you were willing so pop off the stock SGRAM on a GX2 and solder on some faster chips you might get some more speed assuming the silicon had some headrroom, but the GX2's compatibility with some S3D games is somewhat iffy. May as well just go full hacker and get one of the Trio3D cards that still had S3D support in the silicon. It's supposedly more advanced than the GX2. I already have a Rage XL for ATICIF, next will ne hunting down a Rendition Verite and I'll have reasonably fast examples of 3 out of 4 early Voodoo alternatives with a decent sized libraries. I'd love a PowerSGL card but those are obnoxiously priced.
Even the DX needs patched games sometimes. Only the OG ViRGE runs everything out of the box ...
@@philscomputerlab yeah, I know. Its a bit less of a pain and more overclockable than the GX2, though.
I didn't have the S3 Virge, but had a similar experience with the Ati Rage IIc 4mb back in 1998. It made things prettier (even did 32bit) but was painfully slow... good thing I bought two used Voodoo 2 cards in SLI ;) back then.
Das ist diesen Artikel noch einmal lesen kann, ist echt erstaunlich!
1996, das ist Ewigkeiten her! Ich war derzeit erst 11 Jahre alt und.
Vielen Dank!
I see this as 320x240 graphics card. Anything beyond this resolution was really hard for any computer during that time because of low amount of VRAM and other resources.
One suggestion of graphics card to test in the future: Trident Blade3D 9880 8MB AGP
I agree in making these categories for hardware. Both separating by resolution and OS support. I got some hardware that came out in the XP era but I categorize it as 98 hardware cause it's overkill enough to play any game for that OS at full HD or 1920x1200 maxed out if supported and said hardware has drivers for 98SE.
Using that very hardware on XP would mean not maxing out some of the games I got in that era like Oblivion or Fallout 3, so I'd rather slap a 750ti or my old HD4890 onto an i3/5/7 up to the Haswell Refresh gen and use that for XP instead.
@@OfficialDJSoru A very interesting situation is my old 7300 GT. Yes, it can drive a 1080p screen. More than that. Back in the day I ran my CRT at 2048x1536 on it, but there was obviously no gaming at that resolution, so I usually went with good old 1024x768
My Geforce 3 Ti 200 on the other hand is overkill for 98 SE, but performs perfect in basically everything I throw at it. Runs Unreal in 1280x960 without a hitch, but I play in 640x480 because I prefer how it looks. Morrowind and Halo are more a limitation of the CPU than the graphics.
And my GTX 660 Ti is a perfect XP card. Pretty much overkill as well. I have no game that doesn't run on 7 that needs that much power. But then the XP rig is pretty overkill in general and does double duty is multimedia system.
On the other hand, the Geforce FX are pretty good DX8 cards, but will bog down in DX9 because of the way they implemented it.
And good examples for "XP era but actually 98 cards" are the smaller Radeon 9000 cards. Like the 9600 or 9200 Pro
I'm going to have to try out some software rendered gaming with my Athlon 64 x2. I didn't realize you could get that smooth of performance. The unfiltered textures have a bit of charm to them in this video, much like the look the PS1 versus the "muddy" N64 textures.
Many games support it! Quake, Quake II, Half-life...
I don't like filtered textures, I always use openglnb on DOSBox so software rendering need to be tested I guess
Danka Phil! Enjoyed the examination :)
Well Phil, you gave it a fighting chance and it still couldn’t live up to its 3D expectations. I definitely admire your dedication in this series. It astounds me that they put this out as a 3D card presumably knowing its deficiencies, but maybe the bar was still low for PC 3D graphics in the pre-3Dfx era?
Something people should be aware of regarding the software render performance shown in this video is that at the time of this s3 card the fastest processor clocked in at under 133mhz. The 3d render performance was actually quite a bit better than what the processors of the era could muster at the same resolutions.
We checked with period correct hardware in the last one and ultimately performance was worse. So in this video I'm showing what's required to show the card in its best light,!
Usually the faster the cpu is the less Is the bottleneck🤔
@@federicocatelli8785 He's talking about the software renderer. That means, that the graphics is rendered on the CPU, not the GPU. So faster CPU is better in that. He didn't meant, that a faster CPU will slow down the GPU... But the comparision between software render and gpu render performance will look bad for the gpu of that era, if you use a very fast CPU.
@@AstroTechGuy
Understood 👍
Yeah. I bought Diamond Stealth 3D 2000, featuring S3 Virge. I've had very slow framerate in games i've been previously playing in software mode.
But those filtered textures... i've been crying :)
My first rig I ever built from scratch used this card, Cyrix 6x86 166, 16mb ram, and the brand of the card was BOCA, VLB version. I even purchased the extra 1mb of vram while I was at the computer fair. It boasted HW Mpeg1 I believe and came with a CD of ski videos. It wasnt totally horrible, then again I didnt know much better at the time.
You can overclock the Virge?! I gotta give this a go.
I always revisit Phil's Computer Lab to watch more videos!
Very interesting experiments, thanks! I think it's time I revisted the mighty ViRGE...
Spread the S3 love 😘
G'day Phil,
🥳🎉 Happy New Year to Everyone, I am really liking the format of these retro videos, plus the positivity of the content & comments so can't wait for more next year.
I got eXoDOS & so excited because when skimming through the included game I found it has 😲Street Rod.
I remember Street Rod!
When I was a kid we had a Cyrix processor and an S3 Virge. It was a tough time
"Terminal Velocity"! Yes! 🙌😀
Descent 2 - Yay!!!!! This made my day. Great comparison video Phil!
Nice review
I remember trying out the demo of Tomb raider III, and it ran about this well on a k6 board’s SiS video. Never tried it with our eventual Rage 128 Pro 16MB PCI.
This was my exact config, diamond stealth 4mb and poverstrip @77hz, thank you for reminding me :)
Really cool to see Terminal Velocity featured. I really enjoyed playing that as a kid.
My first video card!
There were so many video manufacturers back then--it was easy to be confused. Then 3DFX ended all the confusion haha.
I seem to remember certain games with S3 specific drivers did actually run OK. A racing game called Motorhead springs to mind.
My first PC in the 90's was built by a guy in town and had this card. I was mad because I could not play any 3D game, they would not open stating that some DLL was missing, so I always assumed all I needed was a different / new card.
I'm now thinking all it was missing were appropriate drivers, and we had no internet to check at th time.
My job money as kid were enough to by one magazine a mount and I am glad I always bought a gaming magazine instead of PC hardware magazine.
I had one of these in my first custom built pc, got it swapped out within days, true bilge!
I didn't know about the double-scan, but 512x384 used to be my favourite resolution. I was writing software rendering code in the late 90s/early 2000s, and my code was nowhere fast enough for acceptable performance in 640x480, but it was usually good enough in 512x384, and it looked a lot better than 320x240. I also went down to 400x300 when I was desperate, but that wasn't universally supported, and it didn't look much better than 320x240 anyway...
It also seems to double scan 400x300 to 800x600. I'm not sure if this is specific to this chip ...
It's kinda funny exploring the situations this DOES accelerate 3D, and while I currently don't have one, apparently on a 486 platform it's definitely faster at rendering 3D than the CPU in tests I've seen.
Or on an early Pentium, and even then it's minimal at best. On a faster Pentium software render starts to take the lead, maybe on a P133 or so it's even?
Maybe because the first accelerators like the 3dblaster was meant to accelerate 486 machines but we know how that end up instead
@@philscomputerlab With the DX version at least I found it to be even with a P133. You'd get more or less the same framerate as software but in a 16-bit dithered+bilinear filtered way.
This is pretty funny. I litterally found my s3 64 today and you post a video about it HAHA!
Now I'm wondering if anyone is willing to try soldering faster RAM onto an S3 Virge and pushing the overclock, that was quite a significant improvement.
Doctor, are you sure you want to transplant this bionic heart into that dead horse?
I used S3 virge DX for a short time in1998. As i remember, there was one game run smoothly with my Pentium 100mhz setup. It is the Moto Racer. This game run without stutter in both hardware 3d and software render mode.
Great video! Hope you had a good Christmas - have a Happy New Year!
Thank you! You too!
that card does pretty well for what it is
400х300 is my go-to resolution for low power cards like this
S3 Virge. The beloved 3D decelerator 😁
At least we had filtered textures.
Terminal Velocity was great.
Wasn't there an unofficial sequel? Fury something?
edit: Fury ³ from the same developer
Yes and Hellblender was the next game in that row and had Direct3D support
Fury3, yes, Basically Microsoft ripped off the game. I actually played the demo back in the day. I recall the music in the demo level was a bop but combing through the game's soundtrack on youtube I can't find it.
@@RetroScorp You're right. I already forgot that game
I remember S3 cards needing a color remap TSR in the autoexec when combined with voodoo cards. I remember having issues with a friends PC not being able to load the TSR and have enough base memory for DOS games using 3Dfx.
If you want to overclock that vga card, at least You need to put a fan and heatsink on top of its vga chip.
i was wondering if the new ram chips are the same speed as the originals. phil did mention specs so i suppose they are. i have seen some newer made chinese nvidia cards with really slow ram onboard.
Virge is always memory chip speed limited when overclocked. No need for placing a heatsink on top of the vga chip.
Thanks for the video! Still have my Elsa Victory 3D with the pre-installed 4MB. I had the 2MB version on loan for a short while as the 4MB one wasn't available at launch. Yes, I or rather my parents bought me the 4MB version for 550 DM back then... Never bought something without reading a review again after that experience. I'll have to check if the card still works, only missing a board and case for the 200MMX I still have from that time.
Ah, this was my first 3D graphics decelerator, paired with a Pentium MMX. I remember Motoracer and Jedi Knight running reasonably well frameratewise (might be thanks to the processor) but not being able to load all the textures. Probably ended up using software mode in most other games!
I remember being foold, I had a mach64 and wanted to try to upgrade it so I bought a diamond stealth 3d 2000. By its name I thought it was a good card but i didnt noticed a single change.
Yes, first thing I did when buying S3 ViRGE display card was to upgrade the onboard RAM to 4MB, but I soon discovered it made no difference, short of 3D gaming issue, I noticed that this chip couldn't handle MPEG-1 video playback well, it didn't smooth the image during playback. All these problems were finally solved by a simple Riva 128 3D display card.
By the way, I'm surprised to see Athlon 64 CPU running those retro PC games in software render mode, turns out it runs much smoother than S3 ViRGE, so people didn't call it 3D decelerator for nothing.
Love this retro stuff! Excellent video! I did the same with my Trident 9680 (upgraded VRAM) to get higher res and fps on Win and Duke3D. Then I bought a Trident Blade 3D which was really good for the price, I could even play Quake 3 at 640x480 at 15 fps!
Trident cards aren't that bad, sort of middle of the pack. Should be fairly compatible afaik.
Our computer from January of 97 had one of these. Paried with 166mmx
In 1998 I use my mother's office pc with pentium II 233 and S3 trio3D agp. 3d gaming performance was bad. I managed to play through Half Life on barely playable graphical settings. Since then, when I started with build my own computer I never choosed S3 cards but I pick up GeForce 2 GTS and was super happy with it. It was combined with second hand eizo CRT monitor
Daym I love Descent / Descent 2 I need to go play them now.
this little chip did some amazing stuff in K6-2 laptops. s3 Verge 6mb version
I'm really enjoying your latest videos, the topics have been well thought and well researched. Also your videos have gained more personality since you started appearing on camera. Well done!
Thank you, I really appreciate it!
Love this video and the goal of extracting every bit of performance out of the ViRGE! It might not be anybody's first choice of GPU (except maybe as a 2D card paired with a Voodoo), but I know there are many late 90s and early 00s laptops with S3 graphics inside, and it's very useful to know the limits of what can or can't run at a playable framerate! Am also curious about how the best S3 laptop chips and some of the early mobile ATI Rage/Radeon cards performed, can't find much information about those beyond "they are slow, don't use them." I've got a few laptops from that era, mostly ThinkPads. Haven't spent the time testing them yet, need to find the motivation to tinker with them again...
I feel laptops from the XP era that have 98 compatible drivers, can be suitable for 98 retro gaming. If you're lucky and have a DOS compatibility sound chip, then DOS as well...
In the days this card was in my clone pc paired with a voodoo 2 and a 486dx4-100. Still have that setup but i'm using an Amd 5x86@133 Mhz and the voodoo 2 is long gone since I use it for dos gaming now. The windows stuff I play on my p2-333mhz (although it does all dos stuff too).
Very good video, thank you very much 👍
Virge/DX was my first 3D card. Mostly used maximum resolution 400x300, but usually even lower. Ive got later update to 4MB as well, only one noticeable usefull difference was to be able enable space textures in wing commander phophecy, so space looked much better.
This "3D Deccelerator" was my very first upgrade on my first PC (Pentium 133). It replaced the non 3D Trio 64+ also from S3.
It was kind of a "short filler" until the Voodoo1 became affordable for me at the end of the 90s. The 2D performance & compatibility of both S3 cards was outstanding but the 3D concept of S3 was outdated already the day it was released... but their chips are still very common on mainboards from that era.
"Danke für die Zeit die ich Ihnen gestohlen habe." ❤
The first time I saw what accelerated graphics with filtered textures looked like was on S3Virge at my friend's house around 1997. He owned a P166MMX with S3 Virge. And it was in the Monster Truck Madness game. It was impossible to play because the S3 Virge was too slow, but it gave a foretaste of what you could see in real accelerators like Voodoo.
I am very happy with my ATi 3D Charger Rage II + DVD - 4 MB. I bought this on eBay for ~30 EUR (already equipped with 4 MB)
I still have to cover the ATI 3D API at some point. These 3D accelerated cards, it's a rabbit hole. All have their unique drivers, patches and little quirks...😊
I was shocked to see a 50% boost in performance with the extra 2Mb of RAM, i wonder how the earlier 90's 3D environment would of changed if S3 mandated a minimum of 4Mb's of RAM to resellers on their cards. Can you get any more overclocking out of that card if you up the power and/or use a heat-sink and fan to cool the GPU?
Looking forward to seeing a performance comparison between a memory maxed out S3 Virge vs maxed out Virge DX vs maxed out Virge GX.
The Voodoo 2 also did better with 12 MB than with 8 MB.
I never had an S3, but seen it other systems over the years when upgrading. I had the Diamond Monster 3D back in the day. I never realized how expensive it was. When I wanted to spend my chore money on a GPU my dad had stepped in and bought it for me. I knew it was pricey because of that, but wow...16MB version at that. Also, the pamphlet in the box was advertising something totally new and unique at the time. The Diamond RIO. A compact digital MP3 player, the first of it's kind. It probably won't catch on, right? ;)
I used to have a S3 ViRGE! card back in the day. Luckily for me for a very, very short period of time 😂. Oh, it was so long ago. Not really sure what memory capacity it had, but I clearly remember, I was not satisfied with the card's performance to say the least. I swapped it for a GeForce 2 as soon as I got the money. It was awesome 🤘🤘!
Thanks for reviving my memories, Phil 😉👍!
Hi Phill.
I've got a game to recommend: Viper Racing.
I played a lot this game, the car model gets deformed everytime you have an accident and it was very realistic to me at that time. I used to run on the wrong way just to get craches :D
There is also a plane that can be driven off the game field.
Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!
I believe I've heard of that game but don't think I've played it much, if at all.
Hey Phil! Thanks for your continued support of the retro PC scene! I wish you a perfect new year. Now, I don't think if someone already said that, but the S3 Virge is a 1995 card and the Athlon 64 is a CPU from 2003. This test is kinda pointless, because the CPU is many times faster than whatever else that was combined with the GPU around its release. Running the games through the Virge will be absolutely worse, way worse than any software render. So, I don't got it. I was more interested on the newer GOTEK floppy disc emulator device. Maybe you could talk about it on a future video. Thanks again for the countless videos and tools that you have made for the retro PC scene.
You didn't watch the previous one it seems. Disappointed 😞
Finally, I can fully agree with the video :) This is how we used these cards back in the day. A typical resolution was 400x300 and 512x384. There were games with a very optimized software renderer but plenty of games used the internal Direct3D software renderer which was not very fast (and often limited to 320x240 only). In such cases, it could be better to use the Virge for acceleration.
However, it is true that the original Virge core (325, and VX which is the same in terms of 3D) is not very good. DX/GX improved the texturing performance significantly (perspective correction done in parallel). Together with a fast CPU (which is any Pentium II), you could play a lot of games. Some of them in 640x480.
I hope you will find a good Virge DX/GX. There are anemic 45MHz ones with slow RAM (no room for overclocking) and very fast 75MHz ones (lite STB Nitro 3D) which can be typically overclocked to at least 83MHz (RAM is always the limit). If equipped with EDO RAM, 83MHz is comparable to a 100MHz GX2 (SDRAM). SDRAM being slower on Virge does not seem intuitive but it is connected with the inefficient use of it by the Virge core (no internal cache).
It should be noted that the S3 Virge uses 16-bit color. This requires 2 bytes per pixel, instead of 1 byte for 8-bit color. In such a case, even a 512x384 framebuffer is 30% larger than a 640x480 framebuffer in software mode.
I would say that the S3 Virge should achieve at least 300% better performance compared to a 133-200 MHz CPU if every S3 effect was replicated in software rendering.
The S3 Virge was somewhere in between the PS1 and N64, much closer to the N64 than the PS1. However, it never had a chance to shine, since 3DFX and other 3D accelerators arrived and CPUs were improving rapidly, going from 100 MHz to 1000 MHz in just a few years.
"This is borderline getting into the territory where you could say it's playable."
Glowing endorsement there. LOL.
😅
I had a 2 or 3Mb card of that some years ago in my youth. it was so cool and i liked it because driver support seemed most stable of all my various cards at the time.. sad to see that i gave myself worse gpu performance, but eh. tech was amazingly moving fastback then in my eyes :D
I was only 24 or 25 when the elephant version 3dfx card came out and I got one straight away. Paired it with my Ati and was amazed at the performance difference. If I got the card I'm this video - I'd just feel like I wasted money.
honestly the ViRGE was a pretty good card for 2D alongside a 3Dfx for 3D.
This was very cool to see, because I played the Descent games and I can remember seeing on the box that they supported 3D acceleration...unfortunately, my computer at the time was a 486 with ISA only. I always wondered what it looked like, and whether it was worth it. I seem to recall that there is also an MS-DOS (perhaps Windows 95 as well?) Glide wrapper for Descent I and II. It would be fun to see that, if you have a Voodoo1 card.❤
Yes it runs in DOS actually! Your 486 might have run it so so at 320x200.
The ability to upgrade the video memory sure feels like something that should have stuck around even now, especially with how new game releases make it seem like we're going to need to install an SSD just to run the game without it choking on texture packs. Too bad neither of the existing gpu makers will allow that.
Seen some memes over the years.
The issue is the speed used on modern cards. Back in the day cards used pretty much the same stuff that was used as on motherboard cache. Wouldn't even know how to make a 64-bit interface that is small enough populate a modern card. And modern doesn't even mean now.
The 8800 Ultra had a 384-bit interface, which means 6 slots. The GTX 280, 285 and HD 2900 XT had 512-bit, which means 8 slots. The GTX 295 had two GPUs each with 448-bit, which means 14 slots in total. The 9800 GX2 had two GPUs with 512 bit each, which means 16 slots.
its good that you are summing up the timeline and pricing. i had a bunch of ati cards, and some s3. had most of the riva variants. the first voodoo i bought...was surreal. nothing was close at the time. but that quickly was caught up quick. i have to give nvidia credit for the first transform/shading/lighting gpu, but i rocked early..... i forget the model. cost me 3 paychecks at the time. ati still i think, far cry ran like glass on it. water effects were unmatched by my geforce cards on my athlon at the time.
I think people nowdays get S3 Virge wrong with that "3D accelerator" thing. Back in the day, nobody really considered this card a 3D accelerator. After a few years, its was a great cheap 2D card to add Voodoo or Voodoo2 to. It was great for 2D games and it came with 4MB (unlike S3 Trio) which was great for Windows color depth thing, because at that time monitors were slowly getting bigger and supported better resolutions in usable modes (non-interlaced).
Also, I upgraded S3 Trio to S3 Virge back when it costed like 120 DM ($70), so it was probably year 1998. I had a slow Pentium 120Hz and no 3D card. I loved playing Quake1, but can play it with usable framerate at like 400x300 resolution. I knew S3 Virge can't do 3D, but, being a newer card, I somehow expected it to be faster in like fillrate tasks or something, thus maybe giving improvement in Quake. I was wrong, framerate in software renderer was exactly the same, so I was dissapointed, still no improvements in quake, and I had no money to upgrade CPU because it would also require changing Mobo and RAM, maybe PSU etc. Still, I was at least happy that S3 Virge now had 4MB of memory for Windows color depth.
Then after a while, in late 1999 (it was snowtime), I bought a used Voodoo1 (Diamond Monster 3D) for a mere 70 DM ($40) from a local guy who bought Voodoo2 and was already planning if he could get Voodoo3. I was in awe with his up-to-date PC, running everything so smooth. Still, I popped Voodoo1 in my Pentium120, 32 MB ram, S3 Virge PC, and suddenly I could play Quake2 and Tomb Raider in 640x480 with silky smooth framerates, Voodoo really did offload all the work from other components. It was an amazing upgrade for cheap, going from Q1 in software lowres to smoth Glide.
As a pure DOS card it's actually pretty good... though I've got the DX version that has the upgraded RAM factory installed.
From what I remember in using this graphics card and and research I've done from other people using it what made these somewhat popular in Niche groups was the fact that they had some of the sharpest VGA output you could get at the time which especially once the price dropped made them pretty desirable companion cards for 3D FX cards
I use a Trio64V2/DX in my DOS rig which is more or less a VIRGE without the 3D stuff. Has the 4MB upgrade too (same chips as what you found), it was just a few dollars for a bunch from china. The Trio does an excellent job with older standards like CGA/EGA and DOS software rendering, likely why many virtualization software uses it as base graphics adapter.
Anything 3D is handled by a diamond monster 3d.
I bought it for 2D together with my Voodoo 2 😁
Great Video Phil! You do a great job mixing the history and the usability of the hardware. Keep on keeping on Man!
Omg it has been ages since I played terminal velocity 🥺
Very interresting card to me, I think it was my first gpu because I got a S3 CD-Rom laying around with TerminalVelocity and Descent II probably sold with it and the games can only run with S3 card installed (I tried just in case). I suspect these games version were highly optimised to give better performance. Cool video as always 😌!
I had a pci Virge in my very first 486DX4 pc which ran just fine for the components I had, second pc was a Pentium 100 that ran at 133 that also had a virge that ran my most played game of all time, Midtown Madness 2 in software rendering at low. Then got a Pentium III 450 with a agp S3 Trio that played Unreal very smoothly.
By running Descent II with "-superhires" you can set resolutions up to 1280x1024.
Thanks for the 2MB Tomb Raider shadow tip, never knew that!
May not have been the fastest card, but it was a durn sight faster than a Trident. Holy crap could those lag. I had an S3 Trio as my everyday workstation card for years, no idea on performance but when I got a Virge it had much better color. (Both came with 4MB, so didn't have to mess with that!) I still have them here somewhere... Next I got a Matrox G200 16mb and that was so much better. :D