Bunch of Nvidia vs ATI threads, Where are 3Dfx fans in these days?

[nRollo]

but at the time it introduced an even more important feature, FSAA.

Of course, it was largely UNUSABLE due to the PATHETIC framerates, but yes it was the best FSAA of the time. You were better off turning up the resolution to reduce jaggies, to some extent, you still are.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Instigator
One thing I loved about 3dfx is they had the best drivers period. Not 1 time did I ever run into any issues with games on their drivers. I wish that could be said for Nvidia and ATI.

Depends on what you wanted.

Their OpenGL drivers were horrible compared to nVidia's.
As long as games kept to Glide 3Dfx cards ruled, but move over to Direct3D and it evened out a bit, then to OpenGL, and nVidia began kicking ass all over the place.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Instigator
One thing I loved about 3dfx is they had the best drivers period. Not 1 time did I ever run into any issues with games on their drivers. I wish that could be said for Nvidia and ATI.

Depends on what you wanted.

Their OpenGL drivers were horrible compared to nVidia's.
As long as games kept to Glide 3Dfx cards ruled, but move over to Direct3D and it evened out a bit, then to OpenGL, and nVidia began kicking ass all over the place.

my voodoo5 was helped alot in open gl with the addition of wicked gl, not sure what wicked gl really is but i think it is an open gl wrapper that translates it into glide. but like i said, i am not sure.

 

[Marvelous]

I?ve had voodoo banshee, voodoo 3, then radeon then switched back to voodoo5 then back to radeon vivo. Voodoo 5 needed more speed. 3dfx cards ran like a dream. Their 22bit filtered 16bit quality was outstanding. It could almost pass for 32bit. 16bit mathced with their FSAA, just couldn't be beat. Their cards also didn?t dip low and then high like Nvidia or ATI does. Instead their cards just seemed smoother. Their FSAA was top notch. Only ATI can match them now with their 6x FSAA.

3dfx made a huge mistake with voodoo 5. They used crappy SDR when competition was using DDR with 4 pipes. 3dfx should of used 4pipes like the rest of the pack. Instead they used 2 pipes with 2 tmu. They should of never made the voodoo 5 6000. Instead just charge $299 for voodoo 4 with 4pipes with ddr which would be competive to geforce ddr not the GTS. Then lastly have voodoo 5 with 4 pipes using ddr and charge $499. Even geforce 3 wouldn?t be able to touch it. That would equate to 8pipes and what 664memory speed (166x4). Voodoo 5 would still be kicking some arse if they did that. They just went too conservative imo. Voodoo 4 was nothing more than a voodoo 3 with 32bit support. I don?t know why they did this? They went so hard with the voodoo 2 but then so soft with the voodoo 5. 3dfx had the technology they just didn?t use it.

And all those little kids with their geforce 2 saying yeah my card is better because T&L. Well look at your T&L now. It?s useless in current games since it doesn?t have pixel shaders. All T&L did was give you extra fps at lower resolutions. But people just ate it up.

3dmark=suck

Such a useless benchmark to make people upgrade their vid-cards.

 

[Jeff7181]

Pretty hard to be a fan of a company that no longer exists. I would imagine a lot of them went toward ATI because ATI is now the under dog, just as 3Dfx was back in the day. And I would imagine some went toward nVidia because nVidia bought out 3Dfx.

 

[Lonyo]

ATi may be the underdog in terms fo sales, but not so much in terms of decency of products.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Marvelous
Instead just charge $299 for voodoo 4 with 4pipes with ddr which would be competive to geforce ddr not the GTS. Then lastly have voodoo 5 with 4 pipes using ddr and charge $499. Even geforce 3 wouldn?t be able to touch it.

The VSA-100, which was the chip on the voodoo4/5 products did not support DDR, they could not use it if they wanted to. a later revison called VSA-101 aka Daytona, would have offered DDR but at half the bus width, sdr 128-bit versus ddr 64 bit, also daytona was built on a .18 process instead of napalm's (vsa-100) .25 process. The daytona would have been able to hit 200mhz easily without active cooling. as for the voodoo4 competing with the geforceddr, the voodoo4 was the equivalent of a tnt2 ultra chip. that is the reason they had to put 2 on their in order to compete. Now, if they woulda have the voodoo5 6000 working when it was announced and mature drivers for it were written, it would have taken down the geforce 3. but the boards that 3dfx showed off when they displayed the card were decoys that did not even work. they did not have a working one for a while after they announced it. and you people think that amd and them are bad about product announcements when they dont have the chip.

ATi may be the underdog in terms fo sales, but not so much in terms of decency of products.

What about decency of drivers? hehehehe, could not resist

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: Rollo

but at the time it introduced an even more important feature, FSAA.

Of course, it was largely UNUSABLE due to the PATHETIC framerates, but yes it was the best FSAA of the time. You were better off turning up the resolution to reduce jaggies, to some extent, you still are.

Unuseable? Hardly, I used it in all my games. It wasn't until this last year, especially due to certain games requiring HW TnL that I was unable to use FSAA on my Voodoo5 5500.

Have(Did) you ever have one?

 

[FearoftheNight]

Sorry. THis is before my time. Will someone plz tell me what Glide is??????????????

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: FearoftheNight
Sorry. THis is before my time. Will someone plz tell me what Glide is??????????????

GLIDE was 3dfx's proprietary API (just like OpenGL, DirectX) that ran on just voodoo archetecture. It is older than Directx and for a time was the best. For voodoo owners it was the best way to run a game but it required the game to be written for it. the best glide games made were UT and Deus Ex to name a few. It is dead now, but is open to the public, they say it is the easiest to use.

 

[nRollo]

Have(Did) you ever have one?

I had a V5, on a AthlonXP 1600+, and it was a fun card but no speed demon. Even with FSAA off it was pretty slow. When you turned on FSAA and started lopping off huge amounts of fps, it was pretty worthless for modern shooter games.

I believe Glide was a modified version of Open GL that 3dfx tuned for their chips.

 

[screw3d]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
What about decency of drivers? hehehehe, could not resist

Look what kinda crap is nVidia pulling for the nForce2 drivers (yeah I know this have got nothing to do with the current topic)

 

[mudkiller]

diamond monster 3d + quakegl = whoA! i remember seeing the ad in some computer game magazine and thinking WHOA! i still have the monster 3d somewhere...

 

[Instigator]

Depends on what you wanted.

Their OpenGL drivers were horrible compared to nVidia's.
As long as games kept to Glide 3Dfx cards ruled, but move over to Direct3D and it evened out a bit, then to OpenGL, and nVidia began kicking ass all over the place.

3dfx was around when glide was still being used ALOT (i.e. in new games). So, the only way you could play glide based games on a Nvidia card was to use glide wrappers, which ran like crap. With 3dfx I had no problems playing all 3 (OpenGL, D3D, and Glide). I never ran into any Glide, OpenGL, or D3D drivers problems with any of my Voodoo cards. Now if only that could be said by Nvidia and ATI. I still run into to issues with their drivers. 3dfx had the best drivers period.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: Instigator

Depends on what you wanted.

Their OpenGL drivers were horrible compared to nVidia's.
As long as games kept to Glide 3Dfx cards ruled, but move over to Direct3D and it evened out a bit, then to OpenGL, and nVidia began kicking ass all over the place.

3dfx was around when glide was still being used ALOT (i.e. in new games). So, the only way you could play glide based games on a Nvidia card was to use glide wrappers, which ran like crap. With 3dfx I had no problems playing all 3 (OpenGL, D3D, and Glide). I never ran into any Glide, OpenGL, or D3D drivers problems with any of my Voodoo cards. Now if only that could be said by Nvidia and ATI. I still run into to issues with their drivers. 3dfx had the best drivers period.

amen!

 

[bluemax]

Originally posted by: Rollo

Have(Did) you ever have one?

I had a V5, on a AthlonXP 1600+, and it was a fun card but no speed demon. Even with FSAA off it was pretty slow. When you turned on FSAA and started lopping off huge amounts of fps, it was pretty worthless for modern shooter games.

Well, since the XP1600+ has only been around for what, a year? I'd say you missed the Voodoo heyday LONG before you ever got your Voodoo5. Being only about as fast as a GTS-V, no, it's not going to be a screaming performer TODAY. Three years ago (or more) it was quite the speed machine, and 2x or 4x FSAA was awesome, ESPECIALLY since there were quite a few games that would run in Glide but were hard-coded to 640x480. 4X FSAA really helped those games look good. (I'm thinking of Wing Commander Prophecy.... man I'd like to get that game again. The gold edition with the extra missions.)

 

[Matt84]

My first 3D card was a 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics - still got it and still in service for glide games.

My last 3Dfx card was a GF4 Ti4600 - There's a bit of 3DFx in everything

 

[MercenaryForHire]

I still have my twin Voodoo2 SLI set.

Say what you like about 3dfx, but at least they don't cheat at 3DMark!

- M4H

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
I still have my twin Voodoo2 SLI set.

Say what you like about 3dfx, but at least they don't cheat at 3DMark!

- M4H

Never did well at it either.

 

[gururu]

ahhh, 3 years later and 3dfx is still alive...in our hearts. The geforce line never appealed to me because none of the cards were revolutionary. so i never bought one. nvidia has always seemed to lack ability for innovation. they kind of muscled there way into the industry until they were dominant. i was never impressed. ati did some incredible things with th r300 core and so I had to buy a 9700pro. alas, i am excited about 3dgaming again. from a V5 to a 9700 and I don't feel like I ever missed a beat.

 

[bluemax]

Where's hardware anyways?
******* CONFIRMED!!!!!!! ********