When 3DFX came out it was a revelation. i had the 1st voodoo card in 96ish and couldn't belive how good it was. i then move on too the voodoo 2 12mb in sli. that was another big jump. i still have my two diamond voodoo 2 cards , both 12mb. there boxed and still in my spareroom.
Two things I would like to add: there was a 3rd player in this battle of 1999 and that was the Matrox G400 MAXX. The Matrox actually would often beat the TNT2 in Direct3D titles but was let down by poor OpenGL performance. In general the D3D king was the Matrox card, OpenGL was V3 3500 and the best 'all-rounder' was the TNT2 Ultra. Also it wasn't that people didn't care for 32bit colour, they absolutely did! But it was too much of a performance hit on the TNT2 or G400 for it to be viably used in-game.
Today is my favourite day! I recieve packs with Winfast A250 Ultra Geforce Ti4600, Voodoo5 5500 AGP and PixelPipes upload his new '99 comparison. I am very happy today, Thanks for upload :-)
This represents my experience from the day. I had a very fast AMD K6-III CPU that was overclocked to 508 MHz (113 * 4.5), with low-latency SDRAM, and a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 card that I attached a relatively large CPU cooler to, hehe. It would run 190 Mhz, faster even than the 3500's clock! My friend's Pentium II 400 Mhz system, when upgraded with a TNT 2 Ultra, was still far behind the performance of my machine in a lot of games. He felt like the tech websites must have been paid off, as he had the impression that his machine would be much faster! (*´▽｀*) The 256x256 texture limitation really wasn't a problem back then. 256x256 was still larger than most textures in most games (e.g. Half-Life, Quake III), and the real limitation was the fact that textures had to be sized in powers of 2 on 3dfx. Some games would bug out if you didn't run them in a special 3dfx mode, even if they didn't have Glide support. And while the "22-bit" thing was basically marketing, 16-bit output on 3dfx really did look way better than on anyone else's cards, even Matrox.
I bought my first PC back in 1999: A Pentium III 550 MHz and a TNT2 Ultra! That graphics card served me well for years and was only replaced by the GeForce4 Ti 4200.
Ah I had a few of those machiens back in 1999. I was lucky enough to aquire five Dell Optiplex servers in amazing fold out cases and each contained dual P3 550's, 256MB SDRAM, onboard SCSI with Quantum SCSI 8GB HD's and Dell Viper 770 TNT2's - which were much like the TNT2 Ultra only custom to Dell machines I believe. For the time, those machines were absolute powerhouses, especially under Windows 2000/ME which made use of the dual CPU's, although I think only Quake III used the dual core ability in terms of games. I gave one to my brother who had never had a PC before, only a Playstation 1, and he was mesmerized by Deus Ex and Heretic 2 for months. Hilariously, he called me on night and asked me to come over because he had gotten really far in Deus Ex but had become stuck on the submarine base level (near the end of the game). I went over and discovered he hadn't applied a single skill point except those from the start of the game. He had gone ALL THE WAY to the sub base, being untrained in almost everything. Regardless, I still have one of those machines left in storage but I outfitted it with P3 700's and a Geforce 256 DDR before I retired it back in 2002. I did keep the vipers out of the other machines though, so I have 3 of those, the guy who bought the machines from me only wanted them for their SCSI capability and the SCSI drives they came equipped with. Considering I managed to get all 5 for nothing, I made a few quid on those PC's. Still, looking back, I should have kept more than one. Retro builders dreams, those Optiplex machines.
I had a TNT2 Ultra with my Duron 750 and I remember playing Gunman Chronicles on it and loving the game. Recently built a retro rig with an AMD K6-III 550Mhz and a TNT2 Ultra and Gunman was unplayable. Those K6-III's really sucked at floating point.
We must have been born the same era and was enthusiastic about these cards at the time! I bought 256, TNT, TNT2, and Almost all high end cards following these for the following 10-15 years!
LMAO, you don't know what you are talking about. Glide was a subset of OpenGL, a small API with limited capabilities that eventually failed to innovate (3DFX cards never could do 32bit colors, for example), while DirectX evolved to cater the evolving hardware and exists till today.
The TNT2 Ultra was my first graphics card, bought in the summer of 1999. I had a friend that was adamant about the Voodoo. And we argued a bit about it. But I do remember that pretty much all reviews put the TNT2 Ultra ahead. And that was the reason I bought it.
Yeah that was the changing of the guard. The TNT vs the VooDoo 2. They traded blows I guess, with TNT2 being faster (and with more colours and resolution support) in Direct 3D, but 3Dfx having the edge in some titles because of Glide. I saw a friend running Aliens vs Predator and Quake III with his TNT at a lan, however, and that made me take the plunge and sell my VooDoo 2 card and buy a TNT2 Pro. If only I'd have held out for a few more months I coulda aimed for the Geforce or Radeon. Ah well!
1999 was a very exciting year. I moved jobwise to a new city and bought an ATI Rage128 to upgrade my Rage pro + Voodoo2 Rig. Voodoo3 was very expensive back then. Love your vids!
Loved it! Another terrific Pixel Pipes episode. And oh boy, the member berries are strong with this one. I still have both GPUs, and it was a tremendous era to be an enthusiast! Thanks for the vid Nathan, another great one.
The late 90's was an insane time for computers and 3D graphics in general. It was really special being a kid at the time and reading through PC magazines dreaming of owning a 3dfx card. Well 20+ years later, I now own most of the popular 3dfx cards 🤣
The advantage of having a 3dfx card is that you can run pretty nice exclusive programs like the ultra hle emulator and all without having a fast cpu or gpu, all you need is a pentium 2 and a 3dfx card
This channel is so awesome. Having such a specialised dive into this tech is so so so enjoyable. Thank you for this video, I remember 99 extremely well as I had just got into PC building and this era was so ferocious!
I agree 100%! :) Is just so, so satisfying, relaxing, nice, ... watching a short documentary produced as high of quality as a pixel pipes video. This one is one of my favourites.
The first PC I built had a Voodoo 3 with the TV tuner. The dongle was really annoying, but I could record Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my PC. So that was cool, even though I couldn't keep more that a few episodes due to the file size.
i had a voodoo2, then my brother upgraded to a gf2 gts and i took his voodoo 2 and put in my system for SLI, which performed about the same as a voodoo 3 2000. good times.
I was looking for voodoo3s a few years back. They were sold for peanuts. 11, 15 buckaroos, they were cheap. I found a 2000 in a computer I salvaged, and that prompted me to look them up again, 70 at the least.
Back in 2009 I gotten my first v5 5500 agp for a meager $10 shipped from eBay, those were the days of getting such cards for peanuts now they sell for $250-350 on bid these days.
@@MrKillswitch88 I bought a 1997 Sierra Screamin 3D card new in the box on eBay for $5 USD about 2 years ago and after making a video on my find here on CZcams within about a month I resold it for $960 USD to a vintage graphics card collector in Deutschland. In some ways I regret selling it as a rare collector item
@@m9078jk3 There was a recycling place in Manchester that had an eBay page about a decade ago. They must have gotten through some serious gear from all corners of the UK because they would post, weekly, hundreds of GPU's from old computers and ask between £3 and £15 for each one. Most of them were correctly identified, but not all. But all were sold as working so someone there must have been testing them. Over a year I bought more than 50 cards. Geforce 2 Ultras, Rage Fury Maxxes, VooDoos .... the works. Ended up being on first name terms with their office and in all those purchases, only ONE card didn't work when it arrived, so the guy sent me two identical (working) cards for free just a few days later. Awesome people. If you add up the sold listing prices of a lot of those cards now, you're looking at insane profit. Just can't seem to part with any though! They are all my babies.
Great job! I remember how I only had a 2MB video card back then and I was looking up to these 2.... Great memories! Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Yes it really was a special time. Each generation gave such massive performance gains for the same cost, and you really wanted and used that extra performance to boost resolution and graphics fidelity. You went from 320x200 prior to having a GPU, to 640x480 using a Voodoo1, then 800x600 using a Voodoo2 then 1024x768 with the Voodoo3. I was lucky to experience each generation and the night-and-day upgrade it provided. I guess it would be like going from a 980 to 1080ti to 3080 in the space of 3 years at a 3060-like price level (sans crypto). Interesting to see a look back at performance now. The reviews all made a big deal out of the 32 bit colour advantage for Nvidia, but this generation of hardware wasn't capable of pushing it at a nice frame-rate (ala ray-tracing) so everyone stuck with 16bit anyway. Glide support totally turned the tables to favour 3DFX. The tie up between STB and 3DFX was catastrophic and tragic end to the company. Many gamers saw it coming a mile off, too bad the corporate money-men didn't.
Thank you. Nvidia fans just don't understand the dominance 3Dfx had. Their only real mistake was turning their back on companies like Creative Labs who was a monster at the time. They made a lot of enemies which also led to bad press and lost sales - which then led to less money for R&D to stay competitive; but the Voodoo 4 and 5's were still very capable designs.
While I remember the whole STB × 3dFX commentary going on at the time... _realistically_ what ended up leading to the downfall of the Voodoo compared to the NVIDIA TNT2, ATI Rage128 and S3 Savage was OEM Deals and Support for what became the Industry Standards (OpenGL and DirectX) While NVIDIA did tout their 32bit Support., realistically even up to the GeForce FX Series... it was a novelty., because their Pixel Pipelines were 16bit; meaning to support 32bit they combined the Dual Pixel Pipeline into a Single Pipeline; which effectively halved the performance. This is different to ATI who increased their Pixel Pipeline to 24bit and S3 who increased theirs to 32bit... albeit both ended up with slow Core Clocks., meaning they couldn't really compete with either Voodoo or TNT2 in terms of 16bit Modes; with the Rage sitting about 20-25% behind and Savage 50% behind; but the Rage would show a CLEAR performance advanced in 24bit/32bit ("True" Color) while the Savage would have equal performance (at half the price point). Still as most would still game in 16bit., none of this seemed to even be a blip on reviewers' radars until Radeon Vs. GeForce; when 24/32bit did become more important with the introduction of Shaders. GLiDE while based upon OpenGL was a Limited Subset of the Instruction Set specific to the Voodoo Architecture., and so the Architecture had a hard time supporting the more complete OpenGL 1.x Specification... and the same was true for Direct3D. This meant that while Drivers were made available to support said APIs., performance and feature support would often be lacking on Voodoo. And by 1999., most Developers had abandoned supporting Manufacturer Specific Graphics APIs in favour of the Vendor Agnostic OpenGL and DirectX. Still as noted, the other side of this was NVIDIA with the TNT2 became *excellent* at the art of OEM Partnership. If you bought a new OEM PC (Pre-Built) from Compaq, Gateway, Dell, etc. from 1998 - 2001., it was almost guaranteed to have an OEM NVIDIA TNT2; which while were "Cut Down" from the Retail version; did cement the name recognition with PC Gamers., and due to a lack of most understanding there was a difference (which a BIG performance difference) between the TNT2 Ultra and TNT2 OEM ... would usually lead to them showing their mates at _how_ much better their Graphics Card was to their friends Voodoo. These deals also became lucrative enough for NVIDIA for them to be in a position to "Help" 3dFX when their market share dropped dramatically, and they found themselves in financial trouble.
Drooling over that Leadtek winfast A350 geforce 5900 behind you. And next to it the fail of the era: the hopeless 128 geforce fx5800 with its vacuum cleaner cooler. The design of that leadtek a350 is one of my absolute favorites still and only is bettered by the Gainward 6800 gt golden sample with similar design but in red and the ultra rare Chaintech Apogee GeForce FX 5800 Ultra golden card with blue LEDs inside. Love that period
I have the VD3-3000 and the VD3-3500. My first experience with video cards was the VD3-3000 when I cracked open my mom's gateway PC to install that bad boy to get Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear running smooooooth as butter. My mom wasn't happy, but my 16 year old mind did not care lol
The main issue with some of these results is something that you actually mentioned: unlike the Voodoo 3, the Riva TNT2 Ultra supports high resolution 2048 x 2048 textures. For example, in games such as NFS Porsche, the Voodoo 3 looks completely washed out when compared to the TNT2 (because of the low resolution textures). Of course, this results in better performance for the Voodoo 3, but the image quality penalty is quite extreme. And, boy, people really didn't appreciate this at the time. I remember debating with my friends if it was worth the performance penalty with the TNT2, and with very few exceptions, most of us agreed that, yes, it was worth it (especially because, having played in software rendering for many years, we were quite used to MUCH lower framerates, so it didn't really bother us). Anyway, great video as always, keep up the good work! :)
Indeed... Same issue with 3DMark2000, Expendable, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament - they all support high resolution (mipmapped) textures between 512x512 and 2048x2048. So, when taking that into consideration, one can clearly see why the Voodoo 3 was the beginning of the end for 3dfx. :-)
@@the_motherfucker, who said it was? If you are talking about the upper case letters, I'm sure you are smart enough to understand WHY I chose to use them. ;-)
I went with the Creative Labs TnT2Ultra as soon as it came out. Although I was a big 3dfx fan at the time, I didn't think the V3 was that much of a leap from the existing 12mb Voodoo2 SLI setup that I already had for Glide games. I had a spanking new 21" CRT at the time and the TnT2 was just more vibrant with its 32bit color support.
I always love when new content from PixelPipes shows up because it's always an interesting topic. I had a Creative Labs TNT2 Pro paired with a Slot-A Athlon 650MHz, and though a friend and I debated whether the TNT2 was faster than his Voodoo 3 2000 (he had older Pentium 2 400Mhz though, so...he's also a massive racist now not a friend for years, so I think I win...), we both, as well as couple other friends, had tons of fun playing Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, No One Lives Forever, etc. Great times. I still have the CPU, TNT2 (and GeForce 2 mx that I bought to replace it), Sound Blaster PCI 128, and (AMD-750-chipset-based) motherboard from that PC, but the motherboard if flaky, even with some of the caps replaced. Though I had enjoyed PC hardware since the late 80s and still do, and in the mid-00s through ~2015 had worked for one of the large OEMs and had access to every piece of hardware imaginable and to some of the engineers in Taipei/Chonqing/Suzhou plus, at the time, had the income to stay current (990X+2xGTX690s probably being my most extravagant PC spending), I still feel like I had the most fun with PC hardware during the that area between those initial Slot-A Athlons through P4s and Athlon XP/MP until the 939/754 Athlon 64s. Now, I loved getting dual core CPUs, and really loved 1366 i7s later on (920...then the 990X, which I still have up and running in the small-form-factor PC in my living room with an old GT750ti, which I find a funny, and is why I pulled it out of my old desktop and swapped out the 920 in the SFF pc), but those late '99 through early-mid 00s hardware and games really call to me still.
Voodoo 3 Velocity was my first add on GPU that I installed myself. I bought it because it was cheap and the extra TMU could be unlocked easily by changing the readme.
Given how obscure and rare those two cards were even back in the day, i feel like a better and more relatable video would've been the TNT2 vs 3000 or even the Geforce vs the 3000. I had the 3000 during this generation and loved it. it killed everything i played. While Glide was still relevant Voodoo was unmatched and looked even better than cards with 32bit color for that 1998-2001 era. I feel like you should've thrown in some more games like Tomb Raider, Descent II, Driver, Thief II, Hitman and maybe even a couple 2001 games for fun.
I always liked the Voodoo cards and would read the reviews in my Boot magazine (Now Maximum PC). I had a Riva 128 and later upgraded to the Geforce 256. Good times back then.
Keep it up dude, way to few people are covering old tech! P.S. A video on the Radeon HD5970 would be an awesome way of eliminating the FOMO I've carried around for 11 years.
cards i REALLY wanted but missed out on: voodoo 3 (any of them) radeon 8500 PRO radeon 9700 PRO (got the 9800pro later so close enough) radeon HD 5850/70 Fury Nano Vega56 It's funny, the only nvidia cards i really lusted after were the geforce 2 series and then the geforce 4, which was a huge disappointment and made me not ever "wish" for a geforce again (although i'd buy them when they were good, like the geforce 8800gt)
Its crazy how fast technology was moving at that time. Nowadays you can play new games on 5 years old mid-end gaming PC with no problem, back then 5 years old PC was practically trash. I had Rivia TNT2 in my trashy PC in 2006 and as you can expect i was very unsatisfied because any game over 2002 just wouldn't run at all. My friends were rocking some 6800GT or even 7800's in their bulids and my parents were against spending money on computer, because they paid once for it and paying for upgrade was waste money for them. At this time i'd kill for even 6600GT or 9800Pro to play some newer titles. Nowadays i want to revisit my dream from that time and bulit ultimate retro gaming PC from mid-2006 with some X1900XTX/X1950XTX and Core 2 Extreme CPU to fulfill my dream from that era.
Great video. You captured the essential aspects of the cards well. And what a surprise how well the 3500 performs against the tnt2, as compared to the reviews at the time, as you noted. I got into gaming and pc hardware at the time, so remember the tnts vs voodoo3 battles well, my first card being a V3 3k. Endless amounts of graphs and exposition! I agree that 3dfx made a mistake making the 3500 a multimedia card; they shoud have done that with the 2k, and left the 3500 for the hardcore gamers. I do think though that the 22-bit effective colour was a very smart feature, as the bandwidth hit of 32bit was in most cases too big. And the founders admit making their own cards was a disastrous decision.
Hi Nathan, another good one, and those cards are looking sweet as brand new 😊 Enjoy following your channel, hope you make more excelent quality videos like this one. I remember that in ‘99 I had 1st contact with PCs, and they were nor even close to these babies... celeron at 433 and Rivas tnt2 m64... yet, so much fun and so much progress in so little time 👏
Another well researched video and good comparison. Only wish you included a few of those later pushing games that had DX6 render paths just to see what they can really do. Otherwise, awesome video
Went through a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, and that was it for me with 3DFx. Switched to the TNT 2 next, as colour depth and texture "were" important to me. Then, the GeForce 2 after that, until going over to ATI for a couple of cards. One of my good friends got the Voodoo 3 3500, and he had nothing but problems with it. I certainly don't regret having gotten my TNT 2 back in those days. It was the right time to dump 3DFx. 16-bit rendering was already archaic.
Can't even remember what PC I had in 99. I think it was about the time I was changing from a Pentium 133mhz to a AMD K6 300 with a ATI Rage pro 8mb and 64mb ram very happy playing CS with like 5 fps in the Aztec door on a 32 players server ;)
It's interesting to see how the CPU's back then were impacted by the API's and wrappers needed by the GPU, but the unleashed capability is also great to see.
I still have my TnT2 pro VIVO version with 3d glasses input from 1999, remember face of my buddy who had voodoo 2 when TnT2 flexed some power. He knew but would not admit TnT2 is better But when GF DDR arrived TnT2 days were gone Great video
You're opening old wounds mate! Lost friendships over TNT2 and Voodoo 3, patched since, in a fragile bond, with the underlying chasms that will never be bridged! Whatever that means! :D
If only 3dfx had not bought STB and Gigapixel....almost 200 million wasted on those two. I wish the Spectre cards had come out but they ran out of money. TNT2 Ultra was my second graphics accelerator after I my Voodoo 1. Great times, remember by dad taking me to buy it like it was yesterday.
The TNT2 Ultra was technically more poweful, but the 3dfx looked better and was faster when running many games that used the 3dfx Glide API (I had both cards in lower versions: the TNT2 "non-Ultra", and the Voodoo3 2000).
Would love to see a contemporary Matrox G400 MAX review. Crappy drivers hampered its OpenGL performance and all initial reviews were very critical. Then drivers improved but reviews were not updated. Probably the best card of the TNT2/Voodoo3/Rage 128 Pro/Savage4/G400 generation
I would liked to see some TNT overclocking results. Maybe this would change the results. Some cards theese days would OC for more than 30% unheard of in todays time. I still love your content. Pixelpipes is a gem. Greetings from Germany
my best overclocker was a 8600GT which overclocked a little over 50% on both memory and core clocks. went from shitty to actually pretty good. other than that, the next best was probably my geforce 2 gts, which overclocked from 200/333 to 285/383 and actually beat a geforce 2 ultra that way. i have a gt710 here that overclocks around that ballpark. low end / low power hardware overclocks best nowadays. or maybe we should count mods, so my geforce 6800GS which unlocked 4 extra rendering pipes for a total of 16 and overclocked a fair bit too, giving a huge performance boost over stock, might take a good position in that rank
@@GraveUypo It's always a difference between low end/midrange OC and high end OC. For a long time it was often easy to OC some cards to get in the ballpark of the high end variant. Overclocking a high end chip 30% is a rare thing these days. Last time I saw it was the 2700K
There were some TNT2 cards late in its life that shipped as fast as 175 MHz. They were faster than my V3 3500 overclocked at 202. Nvidia's cards overclocked better in those days. Late run GF2 GTS cards a couple of years later were easy to overclock faster than the GF2 Ultra.
To be honest, i've never cared for 32 bit color depth or high texture resolution when i had a bulky crt and a voodoo 2 12mb and later on a voodoo 3 3000 until i've got a lcd monitor for myself (i was in my early teens, so i've basically knew nothing about all the tech stuff). Things had changed for me afterwards, when i realised how awfull the 16 bit dithering looked on my lcd monitor, some time later i've got my hands on a cheap geforce 4 mx 420 (i think it was the 420), which i replaced with a FX 5200 (128 bit, 256 mb), that i've got for free, just a year later (at this point i've replaced my whole system from a 866 mhz Pentium 3 to a Athlon XP 2200+). Oh the memorys of joy, passion and experimenting with games settings and editing ini and cfg files, to get best results of performance and visual fidelity. I love your videos, they always give me this retro vibe and memories of the past, when i've read almost every pc magazine i've got my hands on, that i could afford for my pocket money (and of course my love for my Voodoo 2 & 3).
In the Sunday paper! I would always look at the Best Buy inserts! They always had the voodoo card in them! From 1998 to 1999! That’s my first knowledge of the cards!
The TNT2U just stomped it amongst my friends anyway, I only knew of one person who bought a Voodoo3 and this was after everyone owned Voodoo/Voodoo2 cards. TNT2U was basically the next step before the Geforce/Geforce2.
OMG first! How original am I, eh? xD EDIT: In all seriousness, I always had 3dfx accelerators, until 3dfx went under, and I remember how fiercely I was rooting and fanboying for 3dfx against Nvidia and ATi back in a day. Everything was moving so fast and it was so competitive. Man, I miss the 90's sometimes...
In the 8 Years from 1999 and 2007. We went from Quake III to Crysis. In 2021 GTA V will be rereleased on PS5. A game from 2013 also 8 Years. Yeah times moved fast then.
@@SirSilicon We also went from predominantly "2,5D" games to Quake 3 in ~4 years (1995-1999.). Or how about Voodoo2 almost doubling the performance of Voodoo Graphics in less than 2 years (1996-1998.). How's that for gen-on-gen leap? :) Or going from 4MB to 16MB+ of total memory on consumer graphics cards (basically quadrupling total graphics card VRAM in ~3 years, 1996-1999.). We also went from basic 3D accelerators in 1995. (with Rendition Verite, NVidia NV1 and similar) to fully T&L capable GPUs in 1999. Crazy times... :)
@@RandomlyDrumming and now it is like a stagnation in techindustry, no big improvements over the previous tech in the last couple of years. The only thing i like in todays tech is that the power consumption is going down while the performance is going up in the same time. But the overall performance hadn't changed that much.
we're kinda going in a mini revival of the 90's right now as far as hardware goes and i hate it. i just bought a 6700xt and amd is already leaking stuff saying how outdated my card will be by this time next year. come on!
I had the tnt2 ultra it boggled my mind that the gpu had a heatsink almost as big as my cpu's... here's the reason TNT2's dominated, simply they were giving them away. you bought a big box computer with a 3d video card it came with a TNT, TNT2, etc, and more often than not it was just the stock card in many HP, Compaq's late 90's home all rounder upper end offerings. 3DFX you had to go out and buy for the most part. In the late 90's / early 2000's I worked for a computer refurb house that dealt with the major brands of the time, and OMFG we had boxes of the things, I upgraded my dual V2's for a TNT2 , and all my friends got one ... including a few ultra's before I went out and bought a ge-force, again they were giving the whole damn TNT series away for free, and well that pretty much worked out for nvidia and poor ole 3dFX couldnt justify their prices (esp since most gamers bitd ran 800x600 and even the base model TNT could nail above 60FPS all day long)
The Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 Ultra was THE card to get if you went Nvidia back in the day. However, that would also be the last great product of Diamond Multimedia, because like 3DFX merging with STB, Diamond merged with S3 and created the S3 Savage 2000; a supposed Geforce 256 killer that turned out to be buggy and flopped (and the company basically died after that (although they are still around producing products nowhere to be seen) and are now a subsidiary of PowerColor).
Went from a Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 at the tail end of its life, to a Diamond Monster II upon its release, to an ASUS V3800 TNT2 Ultra, to the GeForce 2 GTS. What an era of a few short years it was for graphics performance increase. Each generation, was a monumental leap forward in performance.
I have my gateway performance 700. Have a diamond stealth 3 in the agp slot and a diamond monster 3d 2 "a diamond voodoo 2" in the pci slot. Got both fir 10 bucks
Very cool video, well done! I just build a voodoo3 system and I too was under the impression that the tnt2 would be significantly faster, so I found your overall result very interesting! My build is running a much slower CPU though (PIII 450) so I think the results would be very different, but it was definitely interesting to see what they could actually do with a very fast CPU!
Nice! Btw I wanted to message you an invite to #GPUJune months ago but couldn't find any contact info. Offer is still on the table though if you'd like to join in!
@@PixelPipes Thanks! I did a rendition verite video a while back that would have been perfect for #GPUJune, but not sure I can get a new video out in time. Dont suppose re-branding an old video for #GPUJune would be in the spirit of things!
I bought the Voodoo 3 2000 card as it was much cheaper than the 3500 and I was lucky and had the desirable card with Hyundai memory chips which could hit 183mhz effortlessly. The core could also hit 183mhz no problem making it the exact same speed as the card that cost over $200 more. Mind you I had to run a huge box fan on the open side of my case to keep everything cool enough but that was part of the fun back then.
Thanks for a nice video, but I think you should have done some comparison of the image quality too, in the very same games. You could just compare 16-bit quality since the Voodoo didn't support 32-bit. Because at the time I myself bought a TNT2, I felt the image quality was sharper. When looked at side by side the image quality output from the Voodoo 3 felt more smudged out. Wich made the deal for me. I knew the performance was a little stronger in the Voodoo card but I was happy with the performance both cards delivered at the time.
I've just build a machine with a P3 500Mhz and Voodoo 3 3000. Unreal tournament getting 60fps. Prior to 3dfx cards this was unthinkable. If 3dfx announced they had started up again and were bringing out a GPU to rival Nvidia and AMD I would pay £1500 as i'm sure many would
I had TNT2 Ultra along with celeron 533mhz(my first 3D card back in 1999)I choose it because of 32bit support and 32MB vram vs similar priced voodoo3 2000.Card served me for years untill i upgraded to Geforce4 MX440.
I remember that back in the day we went from the Voodoo Banshee to the Riva TNT2. We would have gotten a Voodoo 3, but they were much harder to find because 3dfx insisted on manufacturing everything themselves. Didn't regret it though. The TNT 2 remained surprisingly useful for a fairly long time.
TNT2 was better for a long-term purchase, because once CPUs caught up, you could just run it in 32-bit rendering mode and it would deliver the goods. But in 1999, the 3dfx card was the one to have because it was a little faster and did better 16-bit rendering because of the post-processing. It really did render at about 22-bit effective. Also, if you were running an AMD CPU at the time, their proprietary 3DNow! instructions were supported by 3dfx in games that used them, far better than with anything from Nvidia. I ran K6-2 and K6-III and built systems based on it, and I always used 3dfx cards unless the person wanted something else.
I remember growing up I got a TNT 2 m-64 it was better than the ATI rage but it was lacking a lot. A few years later I got my hands on a Diamond Viper V770D that sucker was quick.
I had the TNT2 and the Voodoo2/3. The TNT just never could hit frame rate and would stutter from time to time. Once they got to the GeForce series, they never looked back!
So far as graphics cards go I look forward to your videos the most :) I know their much harder to get, and probably have a higher learning curve and monetary investment but it would be cool if you'd look into doing videos on older cards such as VESA or even ISA graphics cards at some point. I have a VESA card in my 486 that I think I upgraded to a womping 2mb of ram :) It can manage some basic 3d rendering, and is a major upgrade over the ISA card I was using previously.
Mine was the WAY too common M64.. I remember playing C&C Generals with it. And it struggled even on the lowest settings. But i had a great time! Edit; I later bought the MX4000.
@@rembramlastname3631 TNT2 M64 ?? wow , i couldn't remember this graphics card . thanks for the info. I could remember only the normal TNT2 & the TNT2 Ultra. ----P.S. C&C Generals released around 3-4 years after the nVIDIA "TNT2" series , so an underpowered version of the TNT2 ,such as the M64, was logical to struggle with such titles. (If i remember correctly , during the time C&C Generals released , i had already moved to my next GPU , the GeForce 4 MX440.) Thanks for the memory ... update !!
@@Sitharii Theres also the Vanta. The "Celeron" amongst the TNT2 versions. I still have a box full of old GPU's. Including Intels first GPU, the I740, lol. If youre still interested, there are still modders active on C&C Generals, such as Shockwave, Rise of the Reds and Contra. Also Battlefield 2 with Forgotten Hope and Project Reality. All on ModDB.
@@rembramlastname3631 the Vanta ... yeah , it's been so long i had forgotten those models. Thanks. i also have the habit of keeping most of my old GPUs . I still keep my *beloved TNT2 Ultra* (a Creative model)and since it's my 1st discrete graphics card ever , i'll always keep it . I also keep a 6600GT( *Albatron* model , can you remember that company? ) ,a 7600GT , GTS450 , GTX460 , GTX560Ti , and my latest addition in my ...."bench-collection" , a highly factory-OC'd Palit GTX1080 GamerockPremiumEdition , which is a behemoth of a GPU !! (I'm certain that i could easily sell this GPU with all these shortages nowadays , but i'll keep it as well.) My current active GPU is an RTX2060. P.S. The only thing that i regret is gifting away my *beloved GeForce4 MX440* . I had very good memories from that GPU and i regret gifting it. So stupid of me. P.S.2 : thanks for the info about the mods , but sadly ,my gaming days are over ,i'm usually tired from work, and i rarely play games , i mostly enjoy watching other people playing games in youtube nowadays....
and a **NEW KING** of **LEGACY GAMING** was born... (take my advice or don't, but you won't be disappointed if you do) if you like retro boxes that much, and want the power of a computer from today, i know a variety of good gear combinations and will readily share. (my best setup being an old core 2 quad i used to run not long ago) it RAN EVERYTHING...
I owned every generation of voodoo card starting with the voodoo 2 up until 3dfx went away after the 5 5500 iirc. Glorious times. Then I became an Nvidia fanboy for many years owning maybe one ATI card along the way. If I were buying a card now I'd go with an AMD Rx 7900 xtx or or if they release a rumoured 7950 xtx or 7990 xtx. Nvidia pricing is just insane.
I though the Voodoo3 3500tv was gimmicky as well, but I bought one and actually wound up using it in my main system for a very long time hooked up to cable tv. It's a tragedy Voodoo could never capitalize on the lead they had with the Voodoo 2.
The V3 was faster in real-world use; you didn't play 3DMark, and 32-bit color wasn't playable on most machines in 1999. The GF 256 at the end of the year changed the game, though. I had a V3 3500TV that I ran for years even after the industry had moved on. I mounted a cooling fan on it and got it to run at 202 MHz. It was running on a system with a K6-III+ 550 into the late 2000s when I let someone convince me to sell the rig to them. I wish like hell I hadn't.
I love your channel it's lead me to learn and start collecting on my own I find it very entertaining and very informative can't wait to see future videos, and I just now got my first sought after card, the voodoo5 5500 agp I got it for 75$ but I have no way to test it
When 3DFX came out it was a revelation. i had the 1st voodoo card in 96ish and couldn't belive how good it was. i then move on too the voodoo 2 12mb in sli. that was another big jump. i still have my two diamond voodoo 2 cards , both 12mb. there boxed and still in my spareroom.
Two things I would like to add: there was a 3rd player in this battle of 1999 and that was the Matrox G400 MAXX. The Matrox actually would often beat the TNT2 in Direct3D titles but was let down by poor OpenGL performance. In general the D3D king was the Matrox card, OpenGL was V3 3500 and the best 'all-rounder' was the TNT2 Ultra. Also it wasn't that people didn't care for 32bit colour, they absolutely did! But it was too much of a performance hit on the TNT2 or G400 for it to be viably used in-game.
Where’s rage 128?
@@fenixlolnope361 rage 128 had a solid image quality, but such a mediocre card. Too little too late on ATI there
Today is my favourite day!
I recieve packs with Winfast A250 Ultra Geforce Ti4600, Voodoo5 5500 AGP and PixelPipes upload his new '99 comparison.
I am very happy today,
Thanks for upload :-)
This represents my experience from the day. I had a very fast AMD K6-III CPU that was overclocked to 508 MHz (113 * 4.5), with low-latency SDRAM, and a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 card that I attached a relatively large CPU cooler to, hehe. It would run 190 Mhz, faster even than the 3500's clock! My friend's Pentium II 400 Mhz system, when upgraded with a TNT 2 Ultra, was still far behind the performance of my machine in a lot of games. He felt like the tech websites must have been paid off, as he had the impression that his machine would be much faster! (*´▽｀*)
The 256x256 texture limitation really wasn't a problem back then. 256x256 was still larger than most textures in most games (e.g. Half-Life, Quake III), and the real limitation was the fact that textures had to be sized in powers of 2 on 3dfx. Some games would bug out if you didn't run them in a special 3dfx mode, even if they didn't have Glide support. And while the "22-bit" thing was basically marketing, 16-bit output on 3dfx really did look way better than on anyone else's cards, even Matrox.
yours is the best channel on 90's tech by such a long shot.
And LGR!
90 sucks 80 RULES
I bought my first PC back in 1999: A Pentium III 550 MHz and a TNT2 Ultra! That graphics card served me well for years and was only replaced by the GeForce4 Ti 4200.
Whoa that was the same upgrade for me too! I had the Creative Labs TNT 2 Ultra.
What was the heaviest game you were able to play with that TNT2 Ultra?
@@Just_a_Lad I think it was UT2003. But it was also one of the reasons why I upgraded. ^^
Ah I had a few of those machiens back in 1999. I was lucky enough to aquire five Dell Optiplex servers in amazing fold out cases and each contained dual P3 550's, 256MB SDRAM, onboard SCSI with Quantum SCSI 8GB HD's and Dell Viper 770 TNT2's - which were much like the TNT2 Ultra only custom to Dell machines I believe. For the time, those machines were absolute powerhouses, especially under Windows 2000/ME which made use of the dual CPU's, although I think only Quake III used the dual core ability in terms of games.
I gave one to my brother who had never had a PC before, only a Playstation 1, and he was mesmerized by Deus Ex and Heretic 2 for months. Hilariously, he called me on night and asked me to come over because he had gotten really far in Deus Ex but had become stuck on the submarine base level (near the end of the game). I went over and discovered he hadn't applied a single skill point except those from the start of the game. He had gone ALL THE WAY to the sub base, being untrained in almost everything.
Regardless, I still have one of those machines left in storage but I outfitted it with P3 700's and a Geforce 256 DDR before I retired it back in 2002. I did keep the vipers out of the other machines though, so I have 3 of those, the guy who bought the machines from me only wanted them for their SCSI capability and the SCSI drives they came equipped with. Considering I managed to get all 5 for nothing, I made a few quid on those PC's. Still, looking back, I should have kept more than one. Retro builders dreams, those Optiplex machines.
I had a TNT2 Ultra with my Duron 750 and I remember playing Gunman Chronicles on it and loving the game. Recently built a retro rig with an AMD K6-III 550Mhz and a TNT2 Ultra and Gunman was unplayable. Those K6-III's really sucked at floating point.
We must have been born the same era and was enthusiastic about these cards at the time! I bought 256, TNT, TNT2, and Almost all high end cards following these for the following 10-15 years!
Glide > Direct3D
3DFx gone, but never forgotten!
Great video!
LMAO, you don't know what you are talking about. Glide was a subset of OpenGL, a small API with limited capabilities that eventually failed to innovate (3DFX cards never could do 32bit colors, for example), while DirectX evolved to cater the evolving hardware and exists till today.
The TNT2 Ultra was my first graphics card, bought in the summer of 1999.
I had a friend that was adamant about the Voodoo. And we argued a bit about it.
But I do remember that pretty much all reviews put the TNT2 Ultra ahead. And that was the reason I bought it.
Same with my friend and I. Tnt2 ultra!!!
Yeah that was the changing of the guard. The TNT vs the VooDoo 2. They traded blows I guess, with TNT2 being faster (and with more colours and resolution support) in Direct 3D, but 3Dfx having the edge in some titles because of Glide.
I saw a friend running Aliens vs Predator and Quake III with his TNT at a lan, however, and that made me take the plunge and sell my VooDoo 2 card and buy a TNT2 Pro. If only I'd have held out for a few more months I coulda aimed for the Geforce or Radeon. Ah well!
3dfx was the better card but nvidiots were so dum to fall for paid reviews.
1999 was a very exciting year. I moved jobwise to a new city and bought an ATI Rage128 to upgrade my Rage pro + Voodoo2 Rig. Voodoo3 was very expensive back then. Love your vids!
Loved it! Another terrific Pixel Pipes episode. And oh boy, the member berries are strong with this one. I still have both GPUs, and it was a tremendous era to be an enthusiast!
Thanks for the vid Nathan, another great one.
The late 90's was an insane time for computers and 3D graphics in general. It was really special being a kid at the time and reading through PC magazines dreaming of owning a 3dfx card.
Well 20+ years later, I now own most of the popular 3dfx cards 🤣
The advantage of having a 3dfx card is that you can run pretty nice exclusive programs like the ultra hle emulator and all without having a fast cpu or gpu, all you need is a pentium 2 and a 3dfx card
This channel is so awesome. Having such a specialised dive into this tech is so so so enjoyable. Thank you for this video, I remember 99 extremely well as I had just got into PC building and this era was so ferocious!
I agree 100%! :) Is just so, so satisfying, relaxing, nice, ... watching a short documentary produced as high of quality as a pixel pipes video. This one is one of my favourites.
This is a really well thought out review of a really special time in a lot of people's lives. Thank you for doing such a good job.
The first PC I built had a Voodoo 3 with the TV tuner. The dongle was really annoying, but I could record Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my PC. So that was cool, even though I couldn't keep more that a few episodes due to the file size.
Very nice video, I remember these battles in "first person", I was on 3dfx "side" with my Voodoo3 2000 (which I still have and still works!)
i had a voodoo2, then my brother upgraded to a gf2 gts and i took his voodoo 2 and put in my system for SLI, which performed about the same as a voodoo 3 2000. good times.
I was looking for voodoo3s a few years back. They were sold for peanuts. 11, 15 buckaroos, they were cheap. I found a 2000 in a computer I salvaged, and that prompted me to look them up again, 70 at the least.
Back in 2009 I gotten my first v5 5500 agp for a meager $10 shipped from eBay, those were the days of getting such cards for peanuts now they sell for $250-350 on bid these days.
@@MrKillswitch88 I bought a 1997 Sierra Screamin 3D card new in the box on eBay for $5 USD about 2 years ago and after making a video on my find here on CZcams within about a month I resold it for $960 USD to a vintage graphics card collector in Deutschland.
In some ways I regret selling it as a rare collector item
@@m9078jk3 There was a recycling place in Manchester that had an eBay page about a decade ago. They must have gotten through some serious gear from all corners of the UK because they would post, weekly, hundreds of GPU's from old computers and ask between £3 and £15 for each one. Most of them were correctly identified, but not all. But all were sold as working so someone there must have been testing them.
Over a year I bought more than 50 cards. Geforce 2 Ultras, Rage Fury Maxxes, VooDoos .... the works. Ended up being on first name terms with their office and in all those purchases, only ONE card didn't work when it arrived, so the guy sent me two identical (working) cards for free just a few days later. Awesome people.
If you add up the sold listing prices of a lot of those cards now, you're looking at insane profit. Just can't seem to part with any though! They are all my babies.
Back in the day, I went from a 3DFX Voodoo 2 to a Riva TNT 2, what a huge difference it was back then
Great job! I remember how I only had a 2MB video card back then and I was looking up to these 2.... Great memories! Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Yes it really was a special time. Each generation gave such massive performance gains for the same cost, and you really wanted and used that extra performance to boost resolution and graphics fidelity. You went from 320x200 prior to having a GPU, to 640x480 using a Voodoo1, then 800x600 using a Voodoo2 then 1024x768 with the Voodoo3. I was lucky to experience each generation and the night-and-day upgrade it provided. I guess it would be like going from a 980 to 1080ti to 3080 in the space of 3 years at a 3060-like price level (sans crypto).
Interesting to see a look back at performance now. The reviews all made a big deal out of the 32 bit colour advantage for Nvidia, but this generation of hardware wasn't capable of pushing it at a nice frame-rate (ala ray-tracing) so everyone stuck with 16bit anyway. Glide support totally turned the tables to favour 3DFX.
The tie up between STB and 3DFX was catastrophic and tragic end to the company. Many gamers saw it coming a mile off, too bad the corporate money-men didn't.
Thank you. Nvidia fans just don't understand the dominance 3Dfx had. Their only real mistake was turning their back on companies like Creative Labs who was a monster at the time. They made a lot of enemies which also led to bad press and lost sales - which then led to less money for R&D to stay competitive; but the Voodoo 4 and 5's were still very capable designs.
While I remember the whole STB × 3dFX commentary going on at the time... _realistically_ what ended up leading to the downfall of the Voodoo compared to the NVIDIA TNT2, ATI Rage128 and S3 Savage was OEM Deals and Support for what became the Industry Standards (OpenGL and DirectX)
While NVIDIA did tout their 32bit Support., realistically even up to the GeForce FX Series... it was a novelty., because their Pixel Pipelines were 16bit; meaning to support 32bit they combined the Dual Pixel Pipeline into a Single Pipeline; which effectively halved the performance.
This is different to ATI who increased their Pixel Pipeline to 24bit and S3 who increased theirs to 32bit... albeit both ended up with slow Core Clocks., meaning they couldn't really compete with either Voodoo or TNT2 in terms of 16bit Modes; with the Rage sitting about 20-25% behind and Savage 50% behind; but the Rage would show a CLEAR performance advanced in 24bit/32bit ("True" Color) while the Savage would have equal performance (at half the price point).
Still as most would still game in 16bit., none of this seemed to even be a blip on reviewers' radars until Radeon Vs. GeForce; when 24/32bit did become more important with the introduction of Shaders.
GLiDE while based upon OpenGL was a Limited Subset of the Instruction Set specific to the Voodoo Architecture., and so the Architecture had a hard time supporting the more complete OpenGL 1.x Specification... and the same was true for Direct3D.
This meant that while Drivers were made available to support said APIs., performance and feature support would often be lacking on Voodoo.
And by 1999., most Developers had abandoned supporting Manufacturer Specific Graphics APIs in favour of the Vendor Agnostic OpenGL and DirectX.
Still as noted, the other side of this was NVIDIA with the TNT2 became *excellent* at the art of OEM Partnership.
If you bought a new OEM PC (Pre-Built) from Compaq, Gateway, Dell, etc. from 1998 - 2001., it was almost guaranteed to have an OEM NVIDIA TNT2; which while were "Cut Down" from the Retail version; did cement the name recognition with PC Gamers., and due to a lack of most understanding there was a difference (which a BIG performance difference) between the TNT2 Ultra and TNT2 OEM ... would usually lead to them showing their mates at _how_ much better their Graphics Card was to their friends Voodoo.
These deals also became lucrative enough for NVIDIA for them to be in a position to "Help" 3dFX when their market share dropped dramatically, and they found themselves in financial trouble.
i really enjoy when you release new videos keep it up buddy you deserve way more subs than you have
Drooling over that Leadtek winfast A350 geforce 5900 behind you. And next to it the fail of the era: the hopeless 128 geforce fx5800 with its vacuum cleaner cooler. The design of that leadtek a350 is one of my absolute favorites still and only is bettered by the Gainward 6800 gt golden sample with similar design but in red and the ultra rare Chaintech Apogee GeForce FX 5800 Ultra golden card with blue LEDs inside. Love that period
Yes I LOVE the design of that Leadtek card. They made a 5800 with the same cooler but good luck even seeing one
I have the VD3-3000 and the VD3-3500. My first experience with video cards was the VD3-3000 when I cracked open my mom's gateway PC to
install that bad boy to get Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear running smooooooth as butter. My mom wasn't happy, but my 16 year old mind did not care lol
yeah, and I entered millennium with Intel 740 wondering why Direct3D support was so wonky on it. Had to upgrade to Rage128 quite quickly
Rage128 was pretty ghetto in 2000, no?
The main issue with some of these results is something that you actually mentioned: unlike the Voodoo 3, the Riva TNT2 Ultra supports high resolution 2048 x 2048 textures. For example, in games such as NFS Porsche, the Voodoo 3 looks completely washed out when compared to the TNT2 (because of the low resolution textures). Of course, this results in better performance for the Voodoo 3, but the image quality penalty is quite extreme. And, boy, people really didn't appreciate this at the time. I remember debating with my friends if it was worth the performance penalty with the TNT2, and with very few exceptions, most of us agreed that, yes, it was worth it (especially because, having played in software rendering for many years, we were quite used to MUCH lower framerates, so it didn't really bother us). Anyway, great video as always, keep up the good work! :)
Good point, higher res textures means higher use of memory bandwidth
Indeed... Same issue with 3DMark2000, Expendable, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament - they all support high resolution (mipmapped) textures between 512x512 and 2048x2048. So, when taking that into consideration, one can clearly see why the Voodoo 3 was the beginning of the end for 3dfx. :-)
"Much" isn't an acronym
@@the_motherfucker, who said it was? If you are talking about the upper case letters, I'm sure you are smart enough to understand WHY I chose to use them. ;-)
I went with the Creative Labs TnT2Ultra as soon as it came out. Although I was a big 3dfx fan at the time, I didn't think the V3 was that much of a leap from the existing 12mb Voodoo2 SLI setup that I already had for Glide games. I had a spanking new 21" CRT at the time and the TnT2 was just more vibrant with its 32bit color support.
I always love when new content from PixelPipes shows up because it's always an interesting topic. I had a Creative Labs TNT2 Pro paired with a Slot-A Athlon 650MHz, and though a friend and I debated whether the TNT2 was faster than his Voodoo 3 2000 (he had older Pentium 2 400Mhz though, so...he's also a massive racist now not a friend for years, so I think I win...), we both, as well as couple other friends, had tons of fun playing Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, No One Lives Forever, etc. Great times. I still have the CPU, TNT2 (and GeForce 2 mx that I bought to replace it), Sound Blaster PCI 128, and (AMD-750-chipset-based) motherboard from that PC, but the motherboard if flaky, even with some of the caps replaced. Though I had enjoyed PC hardware since the late 80s and still do, and in the mid-00s through ~2015 had worked for one of the large OEMs and had access to every piece of hardware imaginable and to some of the engineers in Taipei/Chonqing/Suzhou plus, at the time, had the income to stay current (990X+2xGTX690s probably being my most extravagant PC spending), I still feel like I had the most fun with PC hardware during the that area between those initial Slot-A Athlons through P4s and Athlon XP/MP until the 939/754 Athlon 64s. Now, I loved getting dual core CPUs, and really loved 1366 i7s later on (920...then the 990X, which I still have up and running in the small-form-factor PC in my living room with an old GT750ti, which I find a funny, and is why I pulled it out of my old desktop and swapped out the 920 in the SFF pc), but those late '99 through early-mid 00s hardware and games really call to me still.
Voodoo 3 Velocity was my first add on GPU that I installed myself. I bought it because it was cheap and the extra TMU could be unlocked easily by changing the readme.
Compaq Gaming Desktop. That's something I didn't ever expect to hear.
Awesome channel ... can’t believe you never showed up on my feed ! Love these Riva TNTs
Glad you finally found me! lol, CZcams algorithm strikes again
Given how obscure and rare those two cards were even back in the day, i feel like a better and more relatable video would've been the TNT2 vs 3000 or even the Geforce vs the 3000. I had the 3000 during this generation and loved it. it killed everything i played. While Glide was still relevant Voodoo was unmatched and looked even better than cards with 32bit color for that 1998-2001 era. I feel like you should've thrown in some more games like Tomb Raider, Descent II, Driver, Thief II, Hitman and maybe even a couple 2001 games for fun.
I always liked the Voodoo cards and would read the reviews in my Boot magazine (Now Maximum PC). I had a Riva 128 and later upgraded to the Geforce 256. Good times back then.
Keep it up dude, way to few people are covering old tech!
P.S. A video on the Radeon HD5970 would be an awesome way of eliminating the FOMO I've carried around for 11 years.
cards i REALLY wanted but missed out on:
voodoo 3 (any of them)
radeon 8500 PRO
radeon 9700 PRO (got the 9800pro later so close enough)
radeon HD 5850/70
Fury Nano
Vega56
It's funny, the only nvidia cards i really lusted after were the geforce 2 series and then the geforce 4, which was a huge disappointment and made me not ever "wish" for a geforce again (although i'd buy them when they were good, like the geforce 8800gt)
I still run an HD6970 in one of my rigs here to this day. It's not supported by AMD anymore, but works well in Linux.
Love the content! More 2000s reviews please!
Its crazy how fast technology was moving at that time. Nowadays you can play new games on 5 years old mid-end gaming PC with no problem, back then 5 years old PC was practically trash. I had Rivia TNT2 in my trashy PC in 2006 and as you can expect i was very unsatisfied because any game over 2002 just wouldn't run at all. My friends were rocking some 6800GT or even 7800's in their bulids and my parents were against spending money on computer, because they paid once for it and paying for upgrade was waste money for them. At this time i'd kill for even 6600GT or 9800Pro to play some newer titles. Nowadays i want to revisit my dream from that time and bulit ultimate retro gaming PC from mid-2006 with some X1900XTX/X1950XTX and Core 2 Extreme CPU to fulfill my dream from that era.
Always great to see a 3dfx comparison video.
Great video. You captured the essential aspects of the cards well. And what a surprise how well the 3500 performs against the tnt2, as compared to the reviews at the time, as you noted. I got into gaming and pc hardware at the time, so remember the tnts vs voodoo3 battles well, my first card being a V3 3k. Endless amounts of graphs and exposition! I agree that 3dfx made a mistake making the 3500 a multimedia card; they shoud have done that with the 2k, and left the 3500 for the hardcore gamers. I do think though that the 22-bit effective colour was a very smart feature, as the bandwidth hit of 32bit was in most cases too big. And the founders admit making their own cards was a disastrous decision.
Hi Nathan, another good one, and those cards are looking sweet as brand new 😊 Enjoy following your channel, hope you make more excelent quality videos like this one. I remember that in ‘99 I had 1st contact with PCs, and they were nor even close to these babies... celeron at 433 and Rivas tnt2 m64... yet, so much fun and so much progress in so little time 👏
celeron kicks ass !
Another well researched video and good comparison. Only wish you included a few of those later pushing games that had DX6 render paths just to see what they can really do. Otherwise, awesome video
Matrox was still a contender during this period, surprised you haven't done any videos on the G200 or G400 cards.
I owned a TNT2, and I remember what upgrade it was over the Riva 128. I played Sin and Halflife 2 on TNT2. Good times...
Excellent video! Thanks!
Went through a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, and that was it for me with 3DFx. Switched to the TNT 2 next, as colour depth and texture "were" important to me. Then, the GeForce 2 after that, until going over to ATI for a couple of cards.
One of my good friends got the Voodoo 3 3500, and he had nothing but problems with it. I certainly don't regret having gotten my TNT 2 back in those days. It was the right time to dump 3DFx. 16-bit rendering was already archaic.
I had the tv version. Was pretty cool being able to have the features
Can't even remember what PC I had in 99. I think it was about the time I was changing from a Pentium 133mhz to a AMD K6 300 with a ATI Rage pro 8mb and 64mb ram very happy playing CS with like 5 fps in the Aztec door on a 32 players server ;)
It's interesting to see how the CPU's back then were impacted by the API's and wrappers needed by the GPU, but the unleashed capability is also great to see.
I still have my TnT2 pro VIVO version with 3d glasses input from 1999, remember face of my buddy who had voodoo 2 when TnT2 flexed some power.
He knew but would not admit TnT2 is better
But when GF DDR arrived TnT2 days were gone
Great video
You're opening old wounds mate! Lost friendships over TNT2 and Voodoo 3, patched since, in a fragile bond, with the underlying chasms that will never be bridged! Whatever that means! :D
If only 3dfx had not bought STB and Gigapixel....almost 200 million wasted on those two. I wish the Spectre cards had come out but they ran out of money. TNT2 Ultra was my second graphics accelerator after I my Voodoo 1. Great times, remember by dad taking me to buy it like it was yesterday.
My father once worked for 3Dfx and tells tales to this day
Oh !amazing
The TNT2 Ultra was technically more poweful, but the 3dfx looked better and was faster when running many games that used the 3dfx Glide API (I had both cards in lower versions: the TNT2 "non-Ultra", and the Voodoo3 2000).
So detailed, so much history. One of the best retro gpu videos on you tube . Thank you
Would love to see a contemporary Matrox G400 MAX review. Crappy drivers hampered its OpenGL performance and all initial reviews were very critical. Then drivers improved but reviews were not updated. Probably the best card of the TNT2/Voodoo3/Rage 128 Pro/Savage4/G400 generation
Very true
ahhhh memories.... I had a creative TNT2 Ultra. Times in which I was between Need for Speed and UltraHLE.
I would liked to see some TNT overclocking results. Maybe this would change the results. Some cards theese days would OC for more than 30% unheard of in todays time. I still love your content. Pixelpipes is a gem. Greetings from Germany
my best overclocker was a 8600GT which overclocked a little over 50% on both memory and core clocks. went from shitty to actually pretty good. other than that, the next best was probably my geforce 2 gts, which overclocked from 200/333 to 285/383 and actually beat a geforce 2 ultra that way. i have a gt710 here that overclocks around that ballpark. low end / low power hardware overclocks best nowadays. or maybe we should count mods, so my geforce 6800GS which unlocked 4 extra rendering pipes for a total of 16 and overclocked a fair bit too, giving a huge performance boost over stock, might take a good position in that rank
@@GraveUypo It's always a difference between low end/midrange OC and high end OC. For a long time it was often easy to OC some cards to get in the ballpark of the high end variant. Overclocking a high end chip 30% is a rare thing these days. Last time I saw it was the 2700K
There were some TNT2 cards late in its life that shipped as fast as 175 MHz. They were faster than my V3 3500 overclocked at 202. Nvidia's cards overclocked better in those days. Late run GF2 GTS cards a couple of years later were easy to overclock faster than the GF2 Ultra.
To be honest, i've never cared for 32 bit color depth or high texture resolution when i had a bulky crt and a voodoo 2 12mb and later on a voodoo 3 3000 until i've got a lcd monitor for myself (i was in my early teens, so i've basically knew nothing about all the tech stuff). Things had changed for me afterwards, when i realised how awfull the 16 bit dithering looked on my lcd monitor, some time later i've got my hands on a cheap geforce 4 mx 420 (i think it was the 420), which i replaced with a FX 5200 (128 bit, 256 mb), that i've got for free, just a year later (at this point i've replaced my whole system from a 866 mhz Pentium 3 to a Athlon XP 2200+).
Oh the memorys of joy, passion and experimenting with games settings and editing ini and cfg files, to get best results of performance and visual fidelity. I love your videos, they always give me this retro vibe and memories of the past, when i've read almost every pc magazine i've got my hands on, that i could afford for my pocket money (and of course my love for my Voodoo 2 & 3).
I remember when I got my VooDoo II and could finally play Drakan Order of the Flame. Good times.
In the Sunday paper! I would always look at the Best Buy inserts! They always had the voodoo card in them! From 1998 to 1999! That’s my first knowledge of the cards!
The TNT2U just stomped it amongst my friends anyway, I only knew of one person who bought a Voodoo3 and this was after everyone owned Voodoo/Voodoo2 cards. TNT2U was basically the next step before the Geforce/Geforce2.
OMG first! How original am I, eh? xD
EDIT: In all seriousness, I always had 3dfx accelerators, until 3dfx went under, and I remember how fiercely I was rooting and fanboying for 3dfx against Nvidia and ATi back in a day. Everything was moving so fast and it was so competitive. Man, I miss the 90's sometimes...
In the 8 Years from 1999 and 2007. We went from Quake III to Crysis. In 2021 GTA V will be rereleased on PS5. A game from 2013 also 8 Years. Yeah times moved fast then.
@@SirSilicon We also went from predominantly "2,5D" games to Quake 3 in ~4 years (1995-1999.).
Or how about Voodoo2 almost doubling the performance of Voodoo Graphics in less than 2 years (1996-1998.). How's that for gen-on-gen leap? :)
Or going from 4MB to 16MB+ of total memory on consumer graphics cards (basically quadrupling total graphics card VRAM in ~3 years, 1996-1999.).
We also went from basic 3D accelerators in 1995. (with Rendition Verite, NVidia NV1 and similar) to fully T&L capable GPUs in 1999.
Crazy times... :)
@@RandomlyDrumming and now it is like a stagnation in techindustry, no big improvements over the previous tech in the last couple of years. The only thing i like in todays tech is that the power consumption is going down while the performance is going up in the same time. But the overall performance hadn't changed that much.
It was still an emerging technology it was only a matter of time for it to slowdown.
we're kinda going in a mini revival of the 90's right now as far as hardware goes and i hate it. i just bought a 6700xt and amd is already leaking stuff saying how outdated my card will be by this time next year. come on!
I had the tnt2 ultra it boggled my mind that the gpu had a heatsink almost as big as my cpu's... here's the reason TNT2's dominated, simply they were giving them away. you bought a big box computer with a 3d video card it came with a TNT, TNT2, etc, and more often than not it was just the stock card in many HP, Compaq's late 90's home all rounder upper end offerings. 3DFX you had to go out and buy for the most part.
In the late 90's / early 2000's I worked for a computer refurb house that dealt with the major brands of the time, and OMFG we had boxes of the things, I upgraded my dual V2's for a TNT2 , and all my friends got one ... including a few ultra's before I went out and bought a ge-force, again they were giving the whole damn TNT series away for free, and well that pretty much worked out for nvidia and poor ole 3dFX couldnt justify their prices (esp since most gamers bitd ran 800x600 and even the base model TNT could nail above 60FPS all day long)
I was a young police officer with my tnt2 ultra, sony g520 and pe 550e
Some games tested have a Glide support. You run these tests in glide (into Voodoo) or OpenGL?
No Glide, apples-to-apples
@@PixelPipes It would've been neat to see the glide performance along with OpenGL.
@@OvermannOnline This won't be my last video on the Voodoo3 series!
This channel is nostalgia heaven.
Great video,3dfx lovely company ahead of their time..
My voodoo 3500 tv still work like a new..
The Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 Ultra was THE card to get if you went Nvidia back in the day. However, that would also be the last great product of Diamond Multimedia, because like 3DFX merging with STB, Diamond merged with S3 and created the S3 Savage 2000; a supposed Geforce 256 killer that turned out to be buggy and flopped (and the company basically died after that (although they are still around producing products nowhere to be seen) and are now a subsidiary of PowerColor).
Went from a Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 at the tail end of its life, to a Diamond Monster II upon its release, to an ASUS V3800 TNT2 Ultra, to the GeForce 2 GTS. What an era of a few short years it was for graphics performance increase. Each generation, was a monumental leap forward in performance.
The V3 3500 would have won easily in NFS Porsche too, but you run it in Direct3d instead of 3dfx Glide.
I have my gateway performance 700. Have a diamond stealth 3 in the agp slot and a diamond monster 3d 2 "a diamond voodoo 2" in the pci slot. Got both fir 10 bucks
Very cool video, well done! I just build a voodoo3 system and I too was under the impression that the tnt2 would be significantly faster, so I found your overall result very interesting! My build is running a much slower CPU though (PIII 450) so I think the results would be very different, but it was definitely interesting to see what they could actually do with a very fast CPU!
Nice! Btw I wanted to message you an invite to #GPUJune months ago but couldn't find any contact info. Offer is still on the table though if you'd like to join in!
@@PixelPipes Thanks! I did a rendition verite video a while back that would have been perfect for #GPUJune, but not sure I can get a new video out in time. Dont suppose re-branding an old video for #GPUJune would be in the spirit of things!
I bought the Voodoo 3 2000 card as it was much cheaper than the 3500 and I was lucky and had the desirable card with Hyundai memory chips which could hit 183mhz effortlessly. The core could also hit 183mhz no problem making it the exact same speed as the card that cost over $200 more. Mind you I had to run a huge box fan on the open side of my case to keep everything cool enough but that was part of the fun back then.
13:18 right in the feelz, dude. right in the feelz
Those dark green PCBs are so characteristic of Compaq, i wonder if they manufactured them.
Thanks for a nice video, but I think you should have done some comparison of the image quality too, in the very same games. You could just compare 16-bit quality since the Voodoo didn't support 32-bit. Because at the time I myself bought a TNT2, I felt the image quality was sharper. When looked at side by side the image quality output from the Voodoo 3 felt more smudged out. Wich made the deal for me. I knew the performance was a little stronger in the Voodoo card but I was happy with the performance both cards delivered at the time.
I love these videos so much!
You always knew back then! If the graphics card had a fan cooler on it! It was an excellent card!
Lot of fond gaming memories back in the day with my Diamond Viper V770 Ultra 32mb. :)
Great production quality.
Providing user engagement.
I've just build a machine with a P3 500Mhz and Voodoo 3 3000. Unreal tournament getting 60fps. Prior to 3dfx cards this was unthinkable. If 3dfx announced they had started up again and were bringing out a GPU to rival Nvidia and AMD I would pay £1500 as i'm sure many would
I got a Voodoo 3 3500 Agp boxed for free, over 9 years ago and it have a cooling fan on it which i havent seen often.
I had TNT2 Ultra along with celeron 533mhz(my first 3D card back in 1999)I choose it because of 32bit support and 32MB vram vs similar priced voodoo3 2000.Card served me for years untill i upgraded to Geforce4 MX440.
Woo Pixel Pipes. Also reviewing cards that you can still buy new in the box. (I mean sure it's being sold on ebay, but still new and in the box.)
I remember that back in the day we went from the Voodoo Banshee to the Riva TNT2.
We would have gotten a Voodoo 3, but they were much harder to find because 3dfx insisted on manufacturing everything themselves. Didn't regret it though. The TNT 2 remained surprisingly useful for a fairly long time.
TNT2 was better for a long-term purchase, because once CPUs caught up, you could just run it in 32-bit rendering mode and it would deliver the goods. But in 1999, the 3dfx card was the one to have because it was a little faster and did better 16-bit rendering because of the post-processing. It really did render at about 22-bit effective.
Also, if you were running an AMD CPU at the time, their proprietary 3DNow! instructions were supported by 3dfx in games that used them, far better than with anything from Nvidia. I ran K6-2 and K6-III and built systems based on it, and I always used 3dfx cards unless the person wanted something else.
If you didnt already, you should do a video about cleaning those old cards. :D
I remember growing up I got a TNT 2 m-64 it was better than the ATI rage but it was lacking a lot. A few years later I got my hands on a Diamond Viper V770D that sucker was quick.
I had the TNT2 and the Voodoo2/3. The TNT just never could hit frame rate and would stutter from time to time. Once they got to the GeForce series, they never looked back!
awesome vid man!
So far as graphics cards go I look forward to your videos the most :) I know their much harder to get, and probably have a higher learning curve and monetary investment but it would be cool if you'd look into doing videos on older cards such as VESA or even ISA graphics cards at some point. I have a VESA card in my 486 that I think I upgraded to a womping 2mb of ram :) It can manage some basic 3d rendering, and is a major upgrade over the ISA card I was using previously.
My first discrete graphics card was the *nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra* !!!
what a great experience !!
Always been an nVidia fan since then !!
Mine was the WAY too common M64..
I remember playing C&C Generals with it.
And it struggled even on the lowest settings.
But i had a great time!
Edit; I later bought the MX4000.
@@rembramlastname3631 TNT2 M64 ?? wow , i couldn't remember this graphics card . thanks for the info.
I could remember only the normal TNT2 & the TNT2 Ultra.
----P.S. C&C Generals released around 3-4 years after the nVIDIA "TNT2" series , so an underpowered version of the TNT2 ,such as the M64, was logical to struggle with such titles.
(If i remember correctly , during the time C&C Generals released , i had already moved to my next GPU , the GeForce 4 MX440.)
Thanks for the memory ... update !!
@@Sitharii
Theres also the Vanta. The "Celeron" amongst the TNT2 versions.
I still have a box full of old GPU's.
Including Intels first GPU, the I740, lol.
If youre still interested, there are still modders active on C&C Generals, such as Shockwave, Rise of the Reds and Contra.
Also Battlefield 2 with Forgotten Hope and Project Reality.
All on ModDB.
@@rembramlastname3631 the Vanta ... yeah , it's been so long i had forgotten those models. Thanks.
i also have the habit of keeping most of my old GPUs .
I still keep my *beloved TNT2 Ultra* (a Creative model)and since it's my 1st discrete graphics card ever , i'll always keep it .
I also keep a 6600GT( *Albatron* model , can you remember that company? ) ,a 7600GT , GTS450 , GTX460 , GTX560Ti , and my latest addition in my ...."bench-collection" , a highly factory-OC'd Palit GTX1080 GamerockPremiumEdition , which is a behemoth of a GPU !! (I'm certain that i could easily sell this GPU with all these shortages nowadays , but i'll keep it as well.)
My current active GPU is an RTX2060.
P.S. The only thing that i regret is gifting away my *beloved GeForce4 MX440* . I had very good memories from that GPU and i regret gifting it. So stupid of me.
P.S.2 : thanks for the info about the mods , but sadly ,my gaming days are over ,i'm usually tired from work, and i rarely play games , i mostly enjoy watching other people playing games in youtube nowadays....
and a **NEW KING** of **LEGACY GAMING** was born... (take my advice or don't, but you won't be disappointed if you do)
if you like retro boxes that much, and want the power of a computer from today, i know a variety of good gear combinations and will readily share.
(my best setup being an old core 2 quad i used to run not long ago) it RAN EVERYTHING...
I owned every generation of voodoo card starting with the voodoo 2 up until 3dfx went away after the 5 5500 iirc. Glorious times. Then I became an Nvidia fanboy for many years owning maybe one ATI card along the way. If I were buying a card now I'd go with an AMD Rx 7900 xtx or or if they release a rumoured 7950 xtx or 7990 xtx. Nvidia pricing is just insane.
Good stuff as always.
I though the Voodoo3 3500tv was gimmicky as well, but I bought one and actually wound up using it in my main system for a very long time hooked up to cable tv. It's a tragedy Voodoo could never capitalize on the lead they had with the Voodoo 2.
I've had both same exact cards (compaq v3500 + creative tnt2u)... Both great but the V3500 has that magic going :)
The V3 was faster in real-world use; you didn't play 3DMark, and 32-bit color wasn't playable on most machines in 1999. The GF 256 at the end of the year changed the game, though.
I had a V3 3500TV that I ran for years even after the industry had moved on. I mounted a cooling fan on it and got it to run at 202 MHz. It was running on a system with a K6-III+ 550 into the late 2000s when I let someone convince me to sell the rig to them. I wish like hell I hadn't.
I love your channel it's lead me to learn and start collecting on my own I find it very entertaining and very informative can't wait to see future videos, and I just now got my first sought after card, the voodoo5 5500 agp I got it for 75$ but I have no way to test it
Great video Nathan, thanks a lot.
Everyone was super jealous of my Voodoo 3 back in the day. Then my buddy got a Geforce 256 and then everyone made fun of my Voodoo 3.
I love it when its a single guy in his bedroom calling it 'we' lol