3dfx Voodoo 3 retro review
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- čas přidán 11. 09. 2024
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Voodoo 3 3000 PCI was my first accelerated graphics card. It was a huge step up from software rendering.
+uzimonkey I had an eMachines eTower 300K (AMD K6-2 @ 300Mhz CPU.
It was all that I could afford at the time.It had crappy ATI Rage 2C+ graphics .
A few months later I obtained a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI graphics card for it as an upgrade so it was also my first discrete one as well.It drastically made that PC into a fun gaming machine.
but that rage did offer smooth dvd playback unlike the voodoo lol
Mine too, April 2000 ☺️
My first was the Voodoo 4 PCI. Unreal Tournament run horribly in software mode on my sub Ghz Celeron. Begged my mother for the Voodoo 4 and ended up getting one for Christmas. Sadly years later after I no longer needed it I used it to fix my aunts damaged video card in her PC which once eventually scrapped. Wish I had that dang card still. I still have the box though!
Same here.. I'm looking to buy one just cause it brings back memorys
When the Voodoo 3 came out, its cost was around 3 minimum wages here in Brazil (around 430 usd).
Only the rich could play computer games...a decent gaming computer build would cost as much as 3 thousand US dollars.
I'm so glad technology evolved and now you can buy used parts and computers. Even a minimum wager can game, saving a few bucks for some months.
Amazing video!
That didn’t age well
HAHAHA 2021, we are back to 3000 dollars again
My RTX 4090 had cost 2300€. Now it still costs 2100€. 😂
I remember some of us on a forum got together to send some poor guy some decent hardware as it was so overpriced in brazil we felt sorry for him so got him some nice stuff and sent it by saying it was $10 worth of electronics.
He was pretty happy when it arrived :)
That was more because of retarded Brazilian policy of import taxes on electronics.
Same build would likely cost half as much in Burgerland. Even in 1996 you could build a Pentium 120 PC with 32 MB of RAM for about 1.2k USD. That was enough for Quake to be relatively smooth in software mode.
I remember going to my local computer store to snag a Voodoo 3 3000 on a great sale but they were sold out so I grabbed the 3500 instead and they gave it to me for the sale price of the 3000 as an apology for the 3000 being out of stock and damn was I impressed! My college roommate was all about his ATI Radeon card but I preferred the Voodoo card by a mile. The late 90s and early 2000s were a great time for upgrading a building PCs and I miss having late night gaming sessions playing Counter Strike and TFC2
Awesome👍
3:38 similar thing with Voodoo2 - they came out when Pentium IIs were around, 350-400 MHz if I'm not mistaken, and they didn't achieve their full power until Pentium III 1000 or even higher. Hell, I know people that used to have Pentium 166s paired with Voodoo2! Yet somehow back then we just enjoyed the ride, having orgasms every time we saw spinning 3dfx logo before the game started, instead of raving about bottlenecks. I hate this about today.
Yeah, I did that once. The voodoo2 was amazing with slow CPUs, while the v3 was terrible. Glide mode even bypassed game checks for MMX on certain games. I found a free mini pentium pc once that I upgraded with a voodoo2, which I took to lan parties to play quake3. The FPS was around 30 with disabling 3d pickups, and it was responsive enough to beat opponents with faster machines.
Heck, I had a pentium 1 133mhz when I upgraded my video card to a voodoo 3 2000 PCI. It replaced a S3 virge dx which was a massive performance gain even though it was a massive bottleneck.
I had pentium 133 mhz, with voodoo2. It was definetly bottlenecked in Rollcage. I upgraded to 500 mhz because of rollcage, and voodoo2 handled it. Problem was really processor. Funny thing... had this configuration up to Morrowind in 2002, that game convinced me upgrade again.
My Voodoo 3 2000 gave way to a Geforce 2 mx 400. In 2001 I recall. I think a lot of Voodoo cards were supplanted by the Geforce 2 series.
Interesting to see people still have these! I’m happy there are people who still have retro setups. I have a spare Voodoo3 I think, would anyone want it? Cause it’s just collecting dust. 😂
When I first installed the voodoo card it felt like a quantum leap in gaming. like the quantum leap of going from 2d games to 3d games. You would be hard pressed to get the same leap today.
quantum leaps are sub-microscopic, sub-atomic even.
So you're saying the voodoo card made practically no difference to your PC's render rate. No wonder 3dfx went bankrupt.
Is called real time ray tracing, this is the next lvl shit.
@@plasmaastronaut shut up
i had a PC but no GPU
I just bought a 3500 and the absolutely massive cable to go with it. The case mounting bracket caused it to bend up and out of the AGP slot when locked down, and the breakout cable has one side of the "DVI" screws broken, but once I got it all set in there, it works great still. It runs everything up to Y2K perfectly and now my Gateway GP7 is nearly perfect. It is such a national tragedy that the only potentially true challenger to Nvidia died in 2001. RIP 3dfx.
I bought a 3000 PCI to replace my old voodoo 1 in my heavily modded Packard Bell. It was a good card. I still have a Voodoo 3, 2, 1, and Banshee
I remember this. Andrew Tao was my chip lead on this. It was called avenger internally. We wished we did this instead of banshee which was 1 tmu. 2d was very fast, vga was also very fast
Yup, that was my favorite card of all time. Thanks for the retro visit.
I remember the image quality being a sticking point in reviews in gaming magazines. I distinctly remember one magazine reviewing the Voodoo 3 against the TnT2 and complaining of a grainy and washed-out image in the Voodoo 3.
That might be down to the 16-bit support and reliance on box filtering.
I got this in 1999 and bolted a fan on the heatsink for higher clocks. Major step up from the Diamond Monster 3D I had before.
My first graphics card, Voodoo 3 2000 PCI (all I could afford at the time). Bought it in Micro Center in Sunnyvale California, down the street from Intel and AMD HQ (where my parents worked in microprocessor fabrication).
It was an amazing time to be into computers and computer gaming. My whole family worked in the tech industry so I was quickly introduced into games like the original Rainbow Six, Half Life, and Quake 1/2. Software to hardware mode with the Voodoo 3 was like night and day.
Great video! It's like watching a video version of Tomshardware from back in 99. That is an awful lot of games to benchmark with that many cards. whew! I remember from that time too, people were very disappointed, to the point of quite angry, over 3DFX acquiring STB and limiting the supply of 3DFX components to only 1 company, their own. The lack of SLI in the Voodoo 3 cards was another big let down, and like you said, the performance wasn't much better than the Voodoo2SLI, which people had already invested in. Honestly, 3DFX did themselves in by purchasing STB when you look back at why the company folded and later got purchased by their main rival, nVidia. Sure was crazy times back then with everybody in Silicon Valley.
+WaybackTECH Yea it was a crazy time indeed. Someone should make a movie out of the 3dfx story. I wonder if the stories about the lavish staff parties are true :D
philscomputerlab
I'd put some money on that being true.
+WaybackTECH +philscomputerlab crazy times indeed! SEGA at one time had 3dfx build a graphics processor for the SEGA Saturn but then went with NEC and at the last second SEGA added a bunch of chips. What a hard console to program for because of last minute chip changes and many Developers complained that the Saturn couldn't do 3-D without some crazy programing! Some Programmers couldn't take advantage of a Dual Processor setup. even in early 1993, SEGA of America was kicking and screaming about the architecture of the Saturn and even tried to get Silicon Graphics for a graphics chip. Silicon Graphics went on and built the N64's Video Chipsets. 3dfx stock was 18 USD before SEGA contacted them and after SEGA of Japan declined there chipset dropped to 11 USD! I think this was the decline of 3dfx and I didn't blame them one bit for suing SEGA and NEC.
+WaybackTECH If I were in a decision making position with 3Dfx I would have called the Voodoo 3 the Banshee 2 and instead at least do a die shrink to the Voodoo 2 to nearly double its speed and added more video memory to each card like say a 16 mb version and a 24 mb version and call that the Voodoo 3 instead.
Just think what the Voodoo 2 could have been if it was improved instead.
The STB acquisition was a huge mistake too.
+Jason Hicks (TyrForFreedom) Dreamcast
This video is awesome. I love your attention to retro hardware, especially 3dfx. My first 3d accelerator was a 16MB Voodoo Banshee PCI, which I paired with a Pentium 233 MMX. My current Win98 retro gaming rig is a P3 800 w/128mb of RAM, a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, and an Aureal Vortex 2-based sound card. Perfect for Jedi Knight, Unreal, UT, Wing Commander Prophecy, Freespace 1+2, Half-Life, Quake 3, NBA Live 99, etc...
Is the Voodoo 3 capable of using SLI like the Voodoo 2?
@@T.K.Wellington1996 No. The Voodoo 3 3000 was roughly as fast as Voodoo 2s in SLI.
My first 3d card ever! Worried all the way home about how much it cost and whether it would make any difference. Got it installed, loaded up Thief and spent a good 10 minutes walking around one room just stunned at the difference. Well worth the money.
GarethFlatlands loved thief so much. My favorite game 4 sure. Also Bought A Sound Blaster card for thief.
every time I watch one of your videos that include a 3Dfx card it makes me wish I could go back in time and give my younger self the money he was looking for to upgrade to the latest & greatest so I could bring those well-loved cards back to the future (no movie tie-in) and have them back in my possession once more... especially the Voodoo 5 5500 I loved so much but when all the game makers switched from Glide to OpenGL couldn't keep up, I think I sold that card just 9 months after buying it for a mere $50.... it's a shame
Ouch. But impossible to tell back in the day that they would become so collectable.
@@philscomputerlab That's true about the collectablity. In the early 2000's I gave my Voodoo4 away to someone and now it's one of the most collectable 3dfx cards out there. I still have the original box though so that's something.
the nice thing about the Voodoo3 is how affordable it is, especially in comparison to other 3dfx cards.
while in terms of performance its really not much better than a V2 SLI setup , its also usually 1/4 the cost (if not less).
its a great card for late Pentium IIs and early PIII based systems and the PCI variants are great 2D cards for older systems.
also important to note that most games of the time didn't really get much from running in 32bit colour mode, and the performance hit often means youre running in 16 bit anyway.
+lightdark28 Good comment regarding price, and very true.
+lightdark28 I remember paying $130 USD for a 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 PCI card at CompuUSA back in mid 1999 so it was rather inexpensive and a great upgrade choice for my AMD K6-2 @ 300 Mhz system.
Yes, it was a good card for AMD users. Didin't need a high end Intel and they had software optimised for AMD.
+PhilsComputerLab Sure did. I never used anything but 3DFX cards in those days; had the V2 SLI, a V3 3500, and a V5 5500.
John Cate Very nice!
Ohhh the memories! I came across my voodoo3 box a couple months ago and I know that damn thing is in the box. I remembered saving up to buy it then had no idea how to install it.... now I'm rocking a gtx 1080. How did we ever manage back then?!
Yay! Another cool video!
I still having a Voodo 4500 PCI, i use to play some old game on this card.
And you are doing really well, because i always go back to my childhood when i watch your videos.
Thanks.
+Necr0manceR Thank you :D
During my teens days, I always wanted to buy Voodoo 3 3500 but I couldn't afford it even though I took part time job after school.
I sacrifice my summer holidays to work full time and finally got myself one.
And it was worth it, it totally change how Quake 2 and half-life looked and it lasted all the way to World of Warcraft vanilla days until I had build a new rig due PCI-E was all the rage.
PCI-E wasn't all rage until late 2004's That's a lot of years of Voodoo usage. Not even then many cards used that. The real change started in 2005 and became mainstream at least in late 2005. After that getting AGP cards became difficult.
I was lucky to get a voodoo 3 3000 pci from my school, must have been a pack in card for an old pc, i paired it with the pc bpught the year i was born, with a p3 celeron at 667mhz and 512mb of ram, as well as the creative/ensoniq audiopci under ensoniq drivers for soundscape support, not sure if its a bad setup but it was free, and i love it for getting into retro pc's.
1st had a ATI @ Play with 4 mb memory piece of crap playing games. Replaced with a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP and wow my games were played so smoothly. It was tops late 90s early 2000s. Well Done Dude !
I love your channel Phill! It reminds me very good old times. I don´t have time for gaming any more. But always see your Channel. Cheers from Argentina
Thank you :D
I had a Voodoo 3 3000 and a Voodoo 5 5500. Loved both of those cards but I took them out for some other one but I can not remember what I had in my 2000 PC that I built and sold after making a new one in 2004. So cool that you are showing these with older games. I don't even think new cards can make these games look good anymore. It makes it look fun to play in your videos. I think I never had good processor and Ram at the time so it never looked that good when I used them. :(
My first decent video card was a Voodoo3 3000 AGP, and the upgrade from a generic S3 Trio on an ISA bridge was enormous. The main reason I had seen a Voodoo card in my dreams was Need For Speed 2 (not the underground, I am talking about the 1997 version - yes I am a bit old) and some effects were only available on the 3dfx Glide API. Gaming has never been so thrilling
Holy shit you are me. That's exactly what I wanted... NFS 2 was my first real 3D game.
I bought a Voodoo 3 card for about 10 CAD long before they became collector's items (it was less than 10 years old when I first got it).
I put together a retro system and had it working perfectly, but sadly I abandoned the system along with a bunch of other stuff due to some complications during a long distance move. I didn't realize how valuable the system probably already was to collectors at the time, but I would have liked to have had it just for myself regardless of what it was worth.
Phil, every time when I watch these sorts of videos from your channel, it takes me back to my childhood. :)
+MasterDXT Yup, that's the idea :)
+philscomputerlab Greate :D
On my P2 233MHz I managed to kill the AGP port trying to overclock the S3 card the computer came with.
So my solution was to buy a Voodoo 3 PCI (think it was a 2000, could not afford the 3000).
But I was SOO happy with that Voodoo 3 card! It was a huge step up from the 4MB S3 card I previously had.
And I remember being a bit disappointed later when I got a Geforce card, and some of the old games that supported Glide did not look as good (imho.) as it did on the Voodoo 3.
Voodoo cards were my childhood dream. I got a Riva TNT2 instead though.
I still remember that day my brother owned me money and someone owed him money. I told him to never mind once he told me that the guy was giving him a computer to give to me instead of money. He insisted. This was in 1999/2000
He brings over a cardboard box of computer parts, not the computer I was expecting. This card with this large aluminum heatsink catches my attention. It's written 3Dfx on it. Meh, I set all the parts aside. A week or so later I decided to build up a computer using those parts. The CPU in the box? Pentium !!! 650MHz (SLOT1). A stick of 256MB of PC100 RAM, a SB 128 PCI, and this odd graphics card. Get it all installed. I think I had to look up the P/N and found the 3Dfx forum.
The card?
Voodoo3 3000 16MB AGP.
Amazing!
Ah, the memories...
My first PC around 2001 was: Voodoo 3 2000, Celeron 450, 64MB of Ram, Sound Blaster 128, and Abit ZM6 motherboard (if I recall).
I still remember how I was skeptical, saying 'this can never beat consoles!' Until my brother launched the first game - Rally Championship 2000... Jesus, the photo-realistic (at the time) graphics, real car sounds, 800x600 sharp resolution. This was one hell of a shock. And then we launched Aliens vs. Predator 1, and my jaw hit the floor (still looking for it to this day).
Voodoo 3 was truly impressive. I know that now, 16-bit color limitation seems like a deal-breaker, but it wasn't. Back then, the usual configuration for a PC around here was: Riva TNT2 M64 32MB (which was a slow crap), and a 400-700 Mhz Celeron. Most people simply could not afford a PC that would allow them to run something at 32 bits with acceptable FPS (that didn't happen until GeForce 2 MX 200/400 hit the market). That's why 3dfx chose to go with 16bits + dithering - it was fast, and it looked really, really GOOD (MUCH better than Riva TNT's 16-bit mode)! Voodoo's compatibility was also top-notch - I played dozens of games - both Windos and DOS, and NEVER had any issues with it, while friends running Rivas were regularly struggling with compatibility. The image quality was also great...
Don't get me wrong, I realize that the 'full' TNT2 and TNT2 ultra were faster in some games, but they needed a VERY expensive machine to show it's real power. And people who could afford that usually went for GeForce anyway.
... if only 3dfx didn't get so greedy in the end :(
I had the 3500 TV and the first thing I did to it was take a fan from a parts bin and screwed it to the heat sink. The problem these had were the proprietary dongle you needed to hook up to your monitor, was so heavy that it eventually pulled down on the card causing the connection to fail. I used to copy movies from dvd to MPEG2 with amazing quality for the time using the standard Voodoo3 3500 TV suite. It had an MPEG2 recorder app. I just had to make sure to stop the record when the movie was over. It completely bypassed the DVD copy protection built into dvd players at the time so it wouldn't fade to blue screen like it would when you connected a VCR to the DVD. You could stuff a bunch of movies on 1 DVD-R or a couple on a CD-R. This card also came with a real CD copy of Unreal that was a blast to play. I would play it non-stop in multiplayer COOP with random people all night long. One time I took the level for The SunSpire, which was really cool dark/huge level and turned it into a death match level. It was super fun to play especially in the large and dark corridors.
Oh how I miss my 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000.
There were also Velocity cards, which also rocked Voodoo3 chipset, with one locked TMU (easily unlocked via registry) and only 8MB of memory.
I always wondered why the PC gaming mags in the late 90s had loads of dots all over the screenshots and now I know it was due to the 16bit limitation lol.
Impressive! That sort of detail to show up in printed screenshots...
I absolutely love the way you say "khaad."
Oh yeah, Prophecy.
I used to go to bed with my head spinning.
My Voodoo 3 turned it into a new game.
Great game, for sure! A good USB joystick is what makes it even better. It's amazing how USB sticks work with Windows 98.
@@philscomputerlab I broke two Thrustmaster Topguns at the neck, then went CH HOTAS, because of this.
good times!
:)
My parents bought a P3 500 with an ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB, which I decided to sell on ebay as a teenager when we still used 56k. With the money I got myself the Voodoo 3 2000 giving up on twice the size of memory, AGPx4 and 32bit just for 3dfx greatness in UT :D
I have had a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP softmodded with a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP Bios. Time usind was the release day in 1999 until 2001, than a geforce 2 mx comes into the system and the T&L Unit gives more life to the PIII 500 Katmai CPU.
Today I'm using a V3 3000 PCI in my retro System, also with a PIII 500 Katmai. :) I also have a 2000 AGP, 3000 AGP and 3500 AGP (the original one, not the compaq).
+TheAslinger Nice collection!
I'm using a VooDoo3 2000 AGP in my Windows 98 computer, also with 500 mhz Pentium III :)
For those that don't know... Not all voodoo 3500's are built the same.
Look at the ram chips.
If they say TC-6, you basically have a voodoo 3000 with TV out because those only run at 166mhz. Overclocking to 183 will be rarely achievable.
If they say TC-55 you have 5.5ns ram. You'll have a card that is factory clicked at 183mhz solid. Can maybe OC to 200 but not much more.
If you have a card that says TC-5, this is a unicorn and will likely run 200+ all day. Factory clicked at 183. The only limit being the GPU frequency stability. The ram itself is fast.
Man, I loved the voodoo chipsets , 3dfx was always one of my top picks for graphics cards, but I was also a loyalist to creative labs , almost every thing had to be creative labs 😁. I was quite disappointed when 3dfx lost out on the graphics card wars
Yea that's what makes them so desirable now, especially playing Glide API games.
I know what you mean. I had a Creative Voodoo Banshee and Creative Geforce 256. When I upgraded to the Geforce 2 GTS, I switched to ASUS.
My first computer was a HP Pavilion 8570c.
Pentium 3, 450mhz and 96mb of ram with a 20GB Hard Drive.
I added the Voodoo 3 3000
3DFX has better marketing and I choose them ova the other makers.
After only playing Quake II in software mode, adding the V3 and playing in Open GL blew my fucking mind.
Quake II
Quake III
Half Life
Command and Conquer
Counter Strike
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Strikeforce
Janes USAF
Falcon 4.0
Team Apache
Soldier of Fortune.
So many other games.
Best computer gaming years ever.
Eventually I replaced it with the Geforce MX400.
I saw considerable improvement in graphics. 3DFX went under not much later.
Now I stick with Nvidia Geforce Titans on my Core i9.
Nice video. I remember my V3 being OMG hot. So i attached a small 80486 fan on it. I was scared it would melt haha:D
There are actually very rare versions of the Voodoo 3, I don't know how much exactly, but one is the EvilKing voodoo 3 3000, it has an orange PCB, it also actually has a fan so it should run cool.
I bought (Voodoo 3 3000) one of these at a computer trade show for $225 when they were around $400. The one I picked up with that price tag on it was next to the ones that had the $499 price tag on it. I handed it to the person and said how much is this. They looked at the price tag and sold it for $225. I think the person working the booth at the time did not know anything about the cards and was just manning the booth at the time. It was an awesome GPU for the time.
I just purchased one of these from amibay. Fantastic card, everything with a Glide API runs smooth as sync. Could you do some more in depth videos about the settings (I've just watched your alpha blending one)
I almost wonder if they hadn't acquired STB, if they would have stayed on track. Good relationships with their board partners would be much more important, but they wouldn't be actively driving them into nVidia's arms. The money they spent on that might have been spent on bringing the VSA-100 cards to market earlier. I don't know if we'd still have a 3dfx today, but it'd certainly be interesting to think about.
We had STB Voodoo 3 2000 16Mb, it really was a dream after ATI Rage Pro 8Mb :)
I used to have a Voodoo 3 on my 1998 PowerMac G3 back in the days. Incredibly powerful and a massive upgrade compared to the built in VRAM. Sadly they never released drivers for Mac OS X so i had to get a Radeon card in 2001 and a year later i retiered the old work horse for good.
AMD K6 II 350 + Voodoo3 2000 + Unreal 1.......:)
I played Alien VS Predator 2 silk smooth with a 3dfx VooDoo card with 4mb of vram :)
Used to love the voodoo cards just for the cool box it came in
They stayed the same with the PCI masquerading as AGP right the way up to the end, with 5500. In the long term this has been a plus for me personally as it means I don't loose the performance on my VIA mini ITX system with its single PCI slot and my bios flashed Mac PCI Voodoo 5
Testing 3dfx voodoo cards without talking about glide?? That was another level compared with tnt's 2 direct 3d. Ex owner of voodoo banshee 16mb, p2 300mhz 64mb ram........and athlon 900, voodoo5 5500 64mb, 256mb ram,SB live 5.1....now I m going to see your voodoo5 built ;) hope you did it well there.
The 3dfx Voodoo 3 looks beautiful. I wonder why they never put a fan on it to regulate the temperature. I never had one so I don't know if people put fans on them back in the day or not. It seems like a reasonable thing to do since they run so hot.
Fixed thanks. Maybe CPUs weren't fast enough back in the day to make them run hot?
That's an interesting point. That gives me something to test out in the near future. I edited my comment as well. :)
Deadly Gaming LV The Voodoo 3 cards do not have a fan because they don't need one, they only reach maximum 60-65 degrees Celsius, thats a very low temperature for a video card. The Voodoo 3 1000 card is even sold totally naked without any cooling device on the chip, and it words perfectly because the chip is not getting hot. Voodoo 2 also didnt had any cooling device at all, with the chip being naked just like it was with the Voodoo 3 1000.
That would had been crazy back then
Had the Voodoo 3 AGP card and loved it with games like Castrol Honda Racing RC45, Need For Speed 111 Hot Pursuit, Half Life, Mission Studios combat flight sim, there were many games written in Glide & Open GL this chipset was mandatory if you had these games. Now looking to get Alienware for flight sims. Perhaps you can direct me. BTW it replaced a ATI @ Play 4 mb memory card. Well Done Presentation 👍
Recently acquired a Socket A setup and have a Voodoo 3 on the way to. Worried that I have messed up with this combo (3.3V AGP mobo, Athlon XP 1900+, 1.5GB RAM, Win2k) in terms of being "period correct" and having sane performance scaling for the Voodoo 3 ? I could not afford to go Slot 1 as prices for that platform are nuts on eBay.
Yea that should work fine, and you can always just get a lower clocked Athlon or Duron!
Super late to the party but I still want to thank you. I am about to get myself a retro system ( Pentium 3 800mhz with a ati rage card) but I want to modify the rig with another card and according to my research the vodoo 3 would be decent choice. Thanks a lot for sharing more information about the card.
Awesome 😎
That being said I just scored a voodoo 3 3500 and played a game on it for the first time. DOS Compatibility is going to really help when trying to play buzz aldrin's race into space.
it was great at that time. i still have 3dfx Voodoo 3 it still works great
+Andrew Dupuis So true!
Need for speed 3 is a great game.
First card I bought was a Voodoo3 2000 PCI. It ran TFC and CS Beta nicely. Paired with my AMD K6-2 500Mhz CPU.
I remember going by performance back then and bought Voodoo 3 instead of TNT2, the card gave monster FPS with 3DFX support in FPS gaming. Nowadays i'd probably go for image quality and TNT2 instead. But luckily nowadays i can afford to buy RTX 2080S and i can get both :D
Elsa Erazor? Was that the one with the 3d glasses?
At the time of launch 1024x768 was a pretty high resolution for gaming and we considered the minimum playable frame rate to be 30 FPS. Context for the benchmarks...
I know this is an old video, but maybe you could do a new one going more in depth into the Voodoo 3's compatibility with earlier (mainly DOS, but also Windows) Glide games.
Strangely, this is a review I wanted to know. Because I'm looking at buying one of them in 2021, a bit sad I got rid of my Voodoo 3 years ago.
I had the 3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 with a P3 500. I had a 3dfx Voodoo 1 Canopus Pure 3d with a Pentium 133 before that. I eventually upgraded the Vooodoo 3 3500 to an ELSA GLADIAC GeForce 2 GTS, with the same PIII 500, I think.
How did you capture your footage? I just installed a Voodoo 3 on my dad's old P3 so I can play Rogue Squadron, Battle For Naboo the way it was meant to be played. I just want to capture and discus my set and how to go about setting up THE BEST GAME EVER!!!!!! Happy Holidays and thanks for the awesome info.
The performance between the PCI and AGP Voodoo 3 cards were very very minor to non-existant.
You also forgot the Voodoo 3 1000, it was a weaker 2000 at 125mhz and had 8mb RAM.
Awesome choice of games to show!
With a P&D connector, you do not need a break out connector to use the 3500
does the V3 support the SST batch? I own the glide version of Mechwarrior 2 which where shipped with the voodoo Righteous 3D Orchid. It was confirmed to work with voodoo 2 through the batch method but don't see anything on the voodoo 3.
Also made a nice discovery with a last ditch attempt on a Ensoniq 3D Banshee with SGram "EliteMT". Finding compatible drivers where near impossible, only the first and second referance drivers worked but not all games where stable. So with research and knowing creative bought Ensoniq around the time of the Banshee I looked into the 3D blaster banshee and found they where pretty much the same, soooo I took the blaster bios and flashed it on the Ensoniq.
Major Success! Stable and runs every game a throw at it except 1 " Jane's F-15E " ( It will lock up after so many minutes ) and running on creatives latest banshee driver as well. other games I have run with no problems are Rogue Squadron 3D, Quake II, Starseige, G-Police, Future COP LAPD, Expendable, JANE's WWII Fighters, Jane's Longbow, F-22 Lightning 3, F-16 MRF, Mig-29 and Starlancer.
One of the first cards i bought :D
My first card right here. I still think glide looks better than opengl, theres a certain.. glidyness to it.
+sidraket Glide was awesome! The best thing about it was the performance it offered on computers back in the day.
Awesome review
Hi I bought a gaming windows 98 gaming pc it have the voodoo 3 , my problem is when I play wolf3d and touch the wall or tables the game get slow any idea what cause these ? Is there a way to fix these ? Other games I tried works fine doom , quake , but some not desert strike is slow
It is sad that 3dfx acquired STB and limited into just company selling oem their own cards, my brother & his friends moved from Intel/3dfx to AMD/Nvidia, that was back in mid 1999 when AMD produced Athlon K7 Agon.
Wow, this takes me back... I had a Voodoo 3 3000 back in the day, one of the longest-lived graphics cards I ever owned. The first time I encountered problems with it was in GTA 3, which crashed after about one minute of gameplay. (probably because of the missing AGP features and/or because it only had 16 MB of memory, which by 2002 was laughable). I replaced the Voodoo 3 with an old Riva TNT2 M64 that I had laying around so I can play GTA 3. It ran like crap but it was stable.
Thanks for sharing!
Istvan Kovasznai The TNT 2 M64 cards were able to run GTA3 but the frame rate was ~2x lower than than in the case of Voodoo 3 or a normal TNT2 (not M64). The M64 didn't crushed but the frame rate was so low that the game was unplayable. The Voodoo 3 cards had a low but playable frame rate but the game crushed.
Istvan Kovasznai i had the same problem, i solved it playing with the top perspective 😂
grandhoch You mean GTA2? :)
Istvan Kovasznai no, i just changed camera view until i get the top down and then played without the fatal freeze
This is the place and time where I actually went over to Nvidia from 3dfx the 32-bit color was very visible back in the day when playing Kingpin that just came out you could really tell a difference I'm telling ya. 😀
The benchmarks in Unreal Tournament are biased in favour of the Tnt2 because with Glide the option "Detail Textures" is enabled and with Direct3d it is disabled. When "Detail textures" is disabled the performance increases by ~40%. That's why the Voodoo cards have a higher performance with Direct3d and lower with Glide. The Voodoo cards have to be tested with Glide with this option off because that option is disabled for Direct3d by default. I remember even back in the years 1999-2000 all sites and magazines tested the cards with Unreal Tournament and didn't said anything about this, they didn't noticed but it changes the results dramatically in favour of the cards run with Direct3d (Tnt2 in this case). In Unreal Gold or Deus Ex "Detail Textures" can be turned off from the menu of the game but in Unreal Tournament you have to turn it off by pressing "~" write preferences and from Rendering - 3fx Glide - "Detail textures" off or false.
Thanks for letting me know, I did not know about this and shall use this for any future tests. So Unreal and Deus Ex are also affected by this?
PhilsComputerLab No. The only game affected is Unreal Tournament. I checked it and for Unreal Gold, Deus Ex and Rune this option "Detail textures" is activated by default for both Direct3d and Glide. In Unreal Tournament this option is not present in the video menu of the game and can only be changed by pressing "~" writing "preferences" - rendering - Glide or Direct3d. Unreal Gold and Deus Ex have this option in the video menu of the game. It is very tricky with Unreal Tournament because you cannot see this option in the video menu and you think that the benchmarks on Glide and Direct3d are made on equal terms but in reality the Voodoo cards on Glide lose ~40% of the frame rate just because of this hidden option that is activated only for the 3dfx cards.
Sweet, thanks for clearing that up!
PhilsComputerLab The same with "Volumetric lighting". "Detail textures" and "Volumetric lighting" are by default turned on for 3dfx glide and turned off for Direct3d.
PhilsComputerLab Back in 1999-2000 all the site and magazines who tested the Voodoo 3 cards against the Tnt2 Geforce and G400 used Unreal Tournament as benchmark. Because like I said by default those 2 options are activated for Glide but not for Direct3d the Tnt2 cards were shown to be faster than the Voodoo 3 cards and all potential buyers thought that the Tnt2 cards are faster in this game and engine specially made for Glide and 3dfx.. such a pity.
I think I still have some old Vesa Local Bus Slot graphics cards from the 1980's. Can you do a video on these cards?...
If I were doing a retro rig with a fast P4, like this video seems to have done, I think I'd go with a TNT2 over a Voodoo 3. The TNT2's 32-bit support, although played up at the time, wasn't all that useful at the time it was released; this was before hardware transform and lighting and even before SSE, so CPU power was very important, especially x87 FPU performance that is almost totally deprecated today. You needed a powerful CPU to get decent framerates at full 32-bit rendering with this generation of cards, which is one reason why 3dfx didn't bother to implement it until the VSA-100.
The Voodoo 3 was a very good card, though. I picked up a V3-3500TV and used it for a very long time, eventually mounting a fan on the heatsink and running the core at 213 MHz on a K6-III+ at 550 MHz. Because of the TV feature, it got used quite a bit even after I'd built a second rig around an Athlon Thunderbird, which had a V5 5500 and later a GeForce 2 GTS (after 3dfx died).
+John Cate The fast P4 I use is really just for benchmarking. It's part of a massive Windows 98 SE benchmarking project to help retro PC builders pick a suitable graphics card.
Personally the TNT2 and V3 are too slow for my liking because I like to play at 1600 x 1200 if I can :D But at 1024 x 768 they both are good options.
In games based on Quake 2 & 3 what API should be used by Voodoo 3 owners 3dfx opengl or default opengl ? I read that 3dfx opengl should be used only by Voodoo 1 & 2 owners but I saw some videos that showed that the Voodoo 3 is 25% faster when using 3dfx opengl. But in the same time I remember that back in those days my Voodoo 3 card was faster using default opengl in both Quake 2&3 engine games. Phil can you please give an answer to this issue ? Thanks !
Voodoo 3 and Banshee have full OpenGL support. No need for MiniGL or 3dfx OpenGL :) Voodoo 1 and 2 are not compatible, so they need MiniGL or 3dfx OpenGL option.
PhilsComputerLab That's exactly what I read on the Internet and indeed my Voodoo 3 was faster on default opengl but I noticed that other people have higher frame rates using 3dfx opengl with their Voodoo3 cards. I was wondering which API is faster on the Voodoo 3 in quake 2&3 engine games. Thanks for the reply.
Mari Paul Well I gave you my recommendation.
I've got a new Diamond Viper V770 Ultra sitting in my drawer. Need to scrape together parts to build a retro gaming PC.
+PhilsComputerLab
1) You're music sounds like Goosebumps... what is it?
2) What is the difference between graphics cards and accelerator cards?
I wish they made a 3dfx Voodoo 3 CPU Card.Voodoo5 was bit shitty because CPU's hadn't caught up to power and boost the card enough till a year or 2 later.
given the fct that Voodoo 3 did not take advantage of the agp port and struggled under 32bit color mode, what would you recommend, a voodoo 3 or a pair of voodoo 2 cards in SLI?
+chinitosoccer1 V3 hands down. V2 SLI is col, and a novelty thing, but the V3 offers the same performance, better image quality, 1 card vs having to use 3 and full OpenGL. The V2 is not OpenGL compatible, only miniGL.
I had the Voodoo 3 2000 :D
But i also had rigs with TNT 2's as well :D
Best of both worlds :D
I had a Matrox video card for my main and Voodoo gpu as add on, the combo seemed to work great at the time.
Very informative, thank you good sir.
Awesome video Phil! :)
+RetroCompaqGuy Thank you :)
I am still loving this graphic card.
Me too :D
+PhilsComputerLab I was twenty years old when I buyed it, with a pentium II 350 mhz. 64 mb ram. So beautiful time
+PhilsComputerLab I was twenty years old when I buyed it, with a pentium II 350 mhz. 64 mb ram. So beautiful time
Superior 16-bit, and open source drivers enable high res textures, 22 bit color, and AGP.
Trilinear filtering disables single pass multitexturing. Same with all similar era cards, v2, tnt2, etc. Bonus features like AF and HSR can be found in 3rd party drivers with spotty support.
Voodoo3 was more cpu dependent than v2, explaining the complaints. It's not the best overall card aside from glide. Better retro cards would be a GF4, 8500, or cheap 9000 paired with a voodoo 2 for glide.
A few days ago I realized that one of my Voodoo 3 cards is a PCI and now I guess that is even better than AGP since it will work in more modern systems. My AGP one runs fine in my Pentium III 550. Have a 1GHZ PIII I might try it in at a later date.
The PCI cards are indeed rarer and more sought after. In terms of performance there shouldn't be much difference either!
There might be modern mainboards with PCI but you have all kinds of problems with incompatibility with Windows 98.
very good card .play all old games especially if this support 3dfx glide api.
1:40 what about my measly voodoo 3 1000 that I have
I think it's OEM only. I've got one.
Is the Voodoo 3 capable of using SLI, like the Voodoo 2?