[Cyker]

A push towards more standardised 3D APIs is why.

I'm in two minds about this - On the one hand, I liked Glide; It was heavily based on a subset of OpenGL, and a really nice API to code with.
In fact, when learning 3D programming basics, Glide is a great API to start off with.

Of course, it was 3Dfx-only, and thus propriatory which is not a good thing. I like Standards.

That said, the main Standard we're stuck with is D3D, which is *not* a nice API to code with IMHO - Everything seems done in really odd ways. I don't know if that's just because I was used to OpenGL and Glide, but I really hated Direct3D.
(This may have changed quite a lot - Most of my D3D experience was from DirectX3 to 5...!)

OpenGL will never compete with D3D I think - OpenGL is a stable API which was primarily create for use with CAD, 3D Modelling etc.

D3D is designed purely for games, so the standard is not very well thought out and full of holes, but it's on the cutting edge of graphical effects.
OpenGL extensions gave OGL an edge in the early days (Voodoo2 owners loved OpenGL because D3D didn't support multi-textures for a relatively long time!), but now D3D is evolving a lot faster; In fact, it's driving the feature-set of modern 3D cards instead of the other way around as it was when OpenGL was the bigger API!

I just wish DirectX didn't break backwards compatibility all the time - Some of my more obscure older games blow up with DirectX 9, but luckily I can still dual-boot to Win98, and even use Glide if I need to (Yup, that Voodoo2 SLI is still hooked up Now if only it bloody worked in Win2k!!)

[CP5670]

You've GOT to be kidding me.  I'm pretty sure anyone who's been up on hardware already knows about this.  But I got one little gripe about Voodoo cards. The only thing that card had going for it was GLIDE, and that's IT.  The ONLY Games I thought ran well on a 3dfx card were any games that used Gilde natively, such as Hexen II, and Deus Ex to name a couple.  Of course, if you had an nvidia card like I had way back then (Riva TNT, the FIRST TNT card) all you needed was the Glide wrapper for DOS and it'd play with that Glide accel, just as good as one of those voodoo 2's that I think were out at the time

Yeah, I got a V3 over a TNT2 back then because almost all the games I played in those days were Glide only or ran best in Glide. There were a lot of such games back then, which gave 3dfx cards a huge advantage.

What glide wrapper is that? I've never seen one that works on modern hardware, at least in my Glide-only games.

Best card setup ever was that 6xVoodoo2 thing that Quantum 3D did.

That was actually 8 of them, if you're referring the Mercury system:

http://digilander.libero.it/F1Land/3dfxarchive/download/media/gallery/quantum3D-mercury-16x3dfxvoodoo2pci-96mb-3.jpg
http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/albums/q3dmercury/quantum3d_mrecury_008.sized.jpg

This thing has a coolness factor that still remains unrivalled today.

[Descenterace]

I could put it next to this unnamed VESA 10/100 Ethernet card and my AWE-32 (Which has RAM sockets on it!) and sigh happily

Until today, I thought VESA was related only to graphics hardware, but it seems that the VESA bus has other uses too...

We learn something every day.

[knn]

OpenGL will never compete with D3D I think - OpenGL is a stable API which was primarily create for use with CAD, 3D Modelling etc.

D3D is designed purely for games, so the standard is not very well thought out and full of holes, but it's on the cutting edge of graphical effects.

OpenGL was originally developed for workstations. But it is also perfectly suited for today's hardware accelerated graphics. Direct3d on the other hand was an api developed by a small company, primarily for software 3d rendering. MS bought it in 1996. When hardware acceleration became a reality, OpenGL was a perfect choice for a standard api, but MS only supported D3d on W9x, and gave it an unfair advantage. WinNT was a completely different story, they had to put in OpenGL because the OS was designed for workstations. So they had to support OpenGL but prevent the game industry from using it instead of their crappy D3D. That's when they came up with this *ingenious* BS about OpenGL being a stable api for modelling and CAD, implying it was a raytrace renderer not suited for realtime graphics. As for the cutting edge effects, how many games do you recognize on this list?

Here's an interesting bit of history from an OpenGLvsD3d page:

The following letter was posted on the Direct X mailing list. It was written by Mark Kilgard in response to an article in the EE Times written by some folks at Intel.

3D programmers,

The following article is a very interesting, though technical, criticism of Direct3D by graphics engineers at Intel. Check out:

    http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19970526S0082

The above EE Times article explains that when CPU-based 3D engines batch together vertex information so that all the information for a single vertex is in a single contiguous structure, this is in fact not optimal for current Intel microprocessors.

While the article does not directly mention Direct3D, the analysis is a clear criticism of Direct3D's vertex specification scheme. Intel's criticisms still apply even when DirectX 5's new DrawPrimitive interface is used! (By comparsion, as will be explained, OpenGL's vertex array mechanism is extremely well suited for precisely the vertex processing optimizations described by Intel's engineers in the article.)

<snip>

I won't comment on Mark's extrapolations, however as an experienced x86 programmer, I can confirm that this analysis is right on the money. The performance hit sounds about right to me. D3D is not just hard to use, its not just a lesser API than OpenGL, it not only has less functionality than OpenGL but it has also been designed in such a way that there are serious performance implications that can't be worked around. I believe the folks at 3DFX have noticed precisely this same thing some time ago which was their motivation for building GLide and for their current work on OpenGL drivers.

But that's history. D3D9 is much better than D3D5 and comparable to OpenGL (it's gone through a few radical redesigns), and thanks to MonopolySoft, in the near future, new features will be implemented in D3D first, and then in hardware (they plan to do that with D3D10). Thanks to extensions however, OpenGL won't be far behind.

[karajorma]

As for the cutting edge effects, how many games do you recognize on this list?

Oi! Someone's nicked our name!

[Turnsky]

a voodoo three makes a mean little oven, i've baked my internal modem with one once. 

but my current best ever card (i know there's better, but money dictates otherwise )


mean little card, pratically flawless in operation of pretty much all my games, still want to see how it would handle oblivion.

[Unknown Target]

Voodoo 2 was the best card ever; played everything right up until Mechwarrior 4 didn't support it anymore.

[Nix]

What card IS that exactly?  I'm guessing it's an ATI, but with that monster AC heatsink (BTW, if the manufacturer put that on, kudos, if YOU put it on, even more kudos) it's hard to tell WHAT card it actually is.

People can go on and on about what the best card was, but honestly, there's no perfect card.  ATI's always been plagued with shoddy OGL performance, and linux driver updates are sparse compared to nvidia's, and nVidia's had runs of cards that didnt like to run AA and AF (specifically the 5xxx series cards).  3dFX was based upon an old, nonstandardized rendering method, which required people to code for an additional API.  Personally, I've felt nVidia has had the nicest cards.  The Geforce 4 series was a great set of cards, while I'd be embarassed to own a 5 series card.  They cleaned up thier mess with the 6 series, and still have good performance in OGL, D3D, Linux, and IMO, a better, tighter driver set than ATI's hunk of junk.  I ran most of my games on my old Riva TNT, even Quake 3 on it, and I am proud of what it did, but it's surely not worthy of saying "best card ever".  There were things that my trusty first-run version of the ATI All-in-Wonder did better than the Riva TNT card did. 

OH BTW, the GLIDE wrapper I mentioned is really really old, and I've lost it a long time ago.  It was a wrapper of sorts so I could play Hexen II and Quake 2 in the 3dFX Glide modes on my Riva TNT.

[Nuke]

i think my voodoo3 3500 was the longest lasting video card ive had. my geforce 4 barely got two years out of it before i upgraded again. but my voodoo3 lasted like 4. i finally got a geforce 4 to replace it and gave the voodoo3 to my brother. a shame 3dfx went under. considering theyre the ones who started the 3d acceleration craze.

[Turnsky]

What card IS that exactly?  I'm guessing it's an ATI, but with that monster AC heatsink (BTW, if the manufacturer put that on, kudos, if YOU put it on, even more kudos) it's hard to tell WHAT card it actually is.

HIS Radeon x850 XT

[Nuke]

the only thing i didnt like about glide was that it was inconsistant between 3dfx cards. games designed for the voodoo 1 or voodoo 2 worked poorly or not at all with banshee and voodoo 3 cards. trying to get descent 2 3dfx to run on my voodoo3 was damn near impossible. but thats just the nature of anything proprietary. it elimeates the quality baseline so that the effect cannot be measured by an external source. meaning you have to take their word that it doesnt suck. unlike with ogl, where your expected to get a certain performance and if you dont your not putting enough effort into your product.

[KARMA]

I used to have a voodoo2 too.
When I started modding (before SCP) I used to test my stuff with freespace2 played in Glide mode.
What an error... as I discovered after some months Glide was many times more reliable than d3d, and I was creating bugged stuff simply because I couldn't see the bugs:) Namely the problems were the z-buffer and some other minor modelling issues.
Maybe Glide wasn't all that good for the world but for voodoo owners it was simply superior

[Nix]

Hence the need for more standardized rendering methods.  GLIDE was just too proprietary, at least for my taste, and it seemed that only game devs were taking advantage of it at it's height of use.  OGL and D3D are used in a lot of other things rather than just games, and a hell of a lot easier to work with if everything's the same.  Having the choice between the two is great, and I wish game devs would give us that option again, instead of coding thier game speifically for D3D or OGL.  ID did it with Q2, and hell, Outrage did it with Descent 3.  The only game I know of today that still lets you choose is the UT series, UT2K4 at least. 

[CP5670]

trying to get descent 2 3dfx to run on my voodoo3 was damn near impossible. but thats just the nature of anything proprietary.

It worked fine for me when I was still using mine. Although I do have other games like Nuclear Strike, which only works right on a V2 and nothing else. On the other hand, D1 3dfx worked great on the V3 but it crashes every few minutes on the V2. I guess no card does everything well.

I have always used Nvidia cards since that V3 and probably prefer them slightly just because I know my way around their drivers and third party tools. Although SLI's half-baked vsync support and the 7800 line's crap default AF quality have left a sour taste in my mouth recently.

[Gortef]

I must compliment Voodoo 3 aswell, since it really was a long lasting card in my case aswell. Despite it obvious downsides allready mentioned here, it truly was a nice gaming card in it's time.

[Col. Fishguts]

....I can still dual-boot to Win98, and even use Glide if I need to (Yup, that Voodoo2 SLI is still hooked up Now if only it bloody worked in Win2k!!)

Is there a realistic chance of getting a connector cable for the SLI setup these days ?

Since I might get a second V2 from a friend, which I could pair up with the one in my olg gaming machine for some 1024x768 Glide goodness.

On that note: Does FS2 retail work in 1024x768 resolution with SLI Voodoos ?

[CP5670]

yeah, two V2s should support 1024x768 in pretty much everything. As for the SLI cable, it's actually nothing more than a very short floppy cable. If you can read the language, there are instructions to turn a split floppy cable into an SLI cable here: http://forum.3dfx.cz/viewtopic.php?p=7349#7349

[Col. Fishguts]

yeah, two V2s should support 1024x768 in pretty much everything. As for the SLI cable, it's actually nothing more than a very short floppy cable. If you can read the language, there are instructions to turn a split floppy cable into an SLI cable here: http://forum.3dfx.cz/viewtopic.php?p=7349#7349

That's most awesome, thanks muchly. It even has english commentaries, but the pics alone would do the job.

[Cyker]

....I can still dual-boot to Win98, and even use Glide if I need to (Yup, that Voodoo2 SLI is still hooked up Now if only it bloody worked in Win2k!!)

Is there a realistic chance of getting a connector cable for the SLI setup these days ?

Since I might get a second V2 from a friend, which I could pair up with the one in my olg gaming machine for some 1024x768 Glide goodness.

On that note: Does FS2 retail work in 1024x768 resolution with SLI Voodoos ?

Mmm... well both my Voodoo2's came with the SLI cable (I now have 2 ), but as above it's easy to fab one from an old floppy cable

And yes, FS2 does work in 1024x768
And I have to say, retail works a lot better than SCP at the moment on Voodoo2's... I'm not sure if it's the TnL or other fancy stuff but current SCP *really* doesn't like my Voodoo2 setup...

(Come to think of it, it may be because I'm using 2 different cards; An Orchid Righteous 3D 2 and a Creative Labs 3D Blaster 2 in conjunction with some hacked drivers to let me do that
If you can get two cards that are the same, it might be better for you...)