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The 3dfx Voodoo1

by fafner on 4/5/19, 12:12 AM with 238 comments

  • by djmips on 4/5/19, 3:40 AM

    I was the lead and pretty much only programmer for the Canopus Pure3D. Ours had 12 RAM chips for 6 MB of memory. 2 MB extra Woo hoo! We also featured a Chrontel chip for composite and S-Video output. I wrote our DirectX driver (performance enhancements) and other sundry software for the Pure3D (pictured) and Pure3D II. Pretty cool to think back on those days.

  • by rayiner on 4/5/19, 1:15 AM

    It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3.

    What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then.

  • by tmountain on 4/5/19, 12:49 AM

    Blast from the past. I have extremely fond memories of moving into my first apartment in 1999 and having friends come over to play Quake on the “voodoo box”. I had three PCs, a 10BASE-T LAN, and one machine that had been upgraded to a 3dfx card. We would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to play on the 3dfx box and spend many an all nighter playing till the sun came up. Those were the days...

  • by guai888 on 4/5/19, 4:25 PM

    This brings back the memory. I was working for a tiny company in Taiwan at that time. We had been producing VGA cards for a while at that time. An IC distributor brought us a demo board of Voodoo 3D (V1) card. I ran the demo and told my boss that it was the best 3D graphic that I have ever seen. My boss just decided to run with it. Back in those days, VGA card vendor standard practice was to modify the reference in two way. 1. Modify the layout so it can accommodate many different memory chips. If your board can use cheaper memory chip, you will have better profit ( often mean chip which did meet standard memory testing, but still usable with some effort in layout and hardware design) 2. Modify the driver so you have a better benchmark score.

    Since we were a tiny company with not many resources so we decided to just manufacture the reference design. This decision enables us to be the first one in Taiwan to ship the product. I cold call 50 companies in Europe. I did not have much success at first since distributors in Europe were not convinced that 3D card can sell. Internet was slow back then, we were still using dialup modem and sending video capture was not an option. I finally got a break when I called the 42nd company on the list: Guillemot (France). Guillemot got their start in PC gaming sound card so they were already interested in the 3D card. Guillemot was talking to Orchid Technology but they need a lower price than what Orchid can offer. Since all other Taiwanese makers were still evaluating or in the development process, we got the business because our price is US$50 lower than Orchid and able to ship right away.

  • by BuckRogers on 4/5/19, 1:54 AM

    Being 14 years old and getting to experience and see it evolve first-hand with a Commodore (at home), the Apple II (at school) and 286, 386, 486 and Pentium era with a Diamond Multimedia 3dfx Voodoo card was amazing. People who missed it either being busy with other things in life or weren't born yet, believe me, as a technologist being there from the beginning of the home computer market till about 2000 was amazing.

    One thing I'm very thankful for in life. It hasn't been the same since around the turn of the century, the magic and mystery is not like it was with PCs or game consoles in decades prior. The advancements were just leaps and bounds every few years.

    It sparked your imagination more than things today, because creativity for some reason reduced without technical limitations. Today, within any reasonable definition, an artist's vision can be fulfilled. There's really nothing left for the end user to imagine or fill in the gaps (think Zork).

    Not to be crass but this is a relatable example for many I'm sure- it's no different than finding a Playboy magazine back then, as opposed to extreme, explicit hardcore websites today. There's no mystery at all there, and it's not really an upgrade from your imagination being used at least a little bit.

    I've actually rediscovered books because most media today (as in movies and sitcoms, not THAT sort of media) is so poor quality. It's really all about the writing, and I struggle to find games and films that are at the 20th century or prior quality level. Books can be exquisite entertainment, and leave plenty for your imagination to run free with. Which for me, is what it's all about. That's the joyful part to entertainment, or at least a part of it that I find critical.

  • by samlittlewood on 4/5/19, 1:15 PM

    I was working on 3D rendering and games around this time - pretty much all the PC cards were burdened with terrible CPU->GPU interfaces. The handshaking, setup calculations and register wrangling was such that below a certain triangle size, it would have been quicker for the CPU to just draw the pixels itself. Some cards (Um, Oak?) required per-scanline setup.

    I got one of these cards - confirmed it was indeed hella fast (even for large meshes of small triangles), and then dropped into SoftICE a few times, winding up at this code:

    https://github.com/sezero/glide/blob/glide-devel-sezero/glid...

    My thoughts were - "Wow, somebody gets it!" - Very tight triangle setup, and a simple PCI register layout that means that the setup code just writes the gradients out to a block - the last write pushes the triangle into the huge on-card FIFO.

    That performance, along with the simplicity of glide, made it a a no-brainer to drop all other card support and focus on that exclusively.

  • by docker_up on 4/5/19, 3:43 AM

    When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era.

    I bought thousands of dollars in stock in the company. I lost it all because unfortunately nVidia ate their lunch because they marketed themselves better. They had full 32-bit color vs 3dfx who had the superior technology but only had 16 or 24 bit color. 3DFX spent a lot of time trying to explain why it didn't matter but in the end it did. It mattered to the gamers at the time, and they basically died and I lost a huge amount of money that took years to pay off. It took me a long time to move over to nVidia because of my hurt ego but they were the superior technology in the long run.

  • by LeonM on 4/5/19, 8:17 AM

    Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof!

    I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable.

    I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn't very useful back then, so there was no easy way to compare prices.

    I didn't have a computer of my own yet (I must have been 14 years old or so), so I bought it for our 'family' computer, an IBM P166. I remember getting up super early to put the card in before my dad would wake up. He would certainly have freaked out if he saw that I opened up the expensive computer to put it some gaming thing.

    Good times.

  • by CoryOndrejka on 4/5/19, 2:53 PM

    Oh, memories. We built a custom arcade board based on SLI Voodoo1, mips r5k, and custom jpeg decompression in hardware to do Magic the Gathering: Armageddon. https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss We wanted to run at highrez (640x480 vga) at 60hz with tons of animating sprites on screen and realized nothing had the fill rate we needed. Rather than changing the game design, we kept looking and met the 3Dfx team when they had barely taped out the Voodoo1. We gambled that SLI would work and started designing the hardware and adapting the game to an early alpha of Glide. We prototyped on SLI cards running on Windows NT and pentium pros. In parallel, Atari Ganes built Voodoo1-based hardware to replace Zoid. Mace and War shipped on that hardware.

  • by tom_ on 4/5/19, 1:17 AM

    My claim to fame is that the only Voodoo card I've ever owned was a Voodoo 5 6000.

    I picked it up in the early 2000s during a pre-closure clearout at my then-employer, a UK video games developer. The sheer size of the thing made me LOL, that and the number of fans and the additional power connector. Then I noticed it was a 3dfx - oh, hey! I could play that Glide-based motorbike game, that I remembered enjoying at a friend's house a few years previously.

    The game wasn't as good as I remembered. I threw the card away.

  • by Zenst on 4/5/19, 1:35 AM

    My flatmate owned a Voodoo2, was impressive though the market soon caught up and and when the following year I did get myself a 3500, after a month I sold it and got a Matrox G400Max as it did the 3D level I needed (more so the less demanding games of the time). But more so, the colour gamut was so much sharper and stood out on a CRT of the time.

    I was curious so I had a dig on the specs to relive the decision of the time and can see the Matrox did 32bit colour whilst the 3500 was 24bit. Not seen any comparisons in performance but I certainly had no complaints and was happier with the G400Max on many levels (2nd monitor - no problem).

    [EDIT ADD] This looks worth a watch for nostalgia circa 1999 graphics cards and compares the G400MAX, 3DFX 3500 and the TNT2 Ultra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4LvoGQ2lgI

  • by AdmiralAsshat on 4/5/19, 1:35 PM

  • by kken on 4/5/19, 1:39 AM

    Nice article. I would be interested in learning more about the rendering pipeline. Is anybody aware of a more detailed description? Or an online datasheet?

    Btw - already EDO DRAM favours reading entire memory blocks/lines. My suspicion is that the trick in increausing memory bandwidth is not only based on interleaving, but also on block transfers with on-chip caching. Especially critical for texture reads.

    The Voodoo is a nice example of how much execution matters. They were not the only ones to follow this path back then, but by only concentrating on the core functionality they managed to beat all others to the market without compromise. (Compare to S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, Nvidia NV1, Tseng, NEC and many others)

  • by rasz on 4/5/19, 2:47 AM

    Loving those early 3d hardware retrospections. Some corrections:

    >they started they own company

    typo

    >EOM'es only leverage on the cards they produced was the RAM they selected (EDO vs DRAM), the color of the resin and the physical layout of the chips. Pretty much everything else was standardized.

    - EDO is DRAM, EDO vs FPM? I didnt know that, always assumed every V1 shipped with EDO, just like every card on your pictures is EDO.

    - video signal switching was also up to the vendor (relay/mux)

    - and one of the cards has TV encoder section with TV out, pretty neat selling point

    >It is not specified if the bus used address multiplexing or if the data and address lines were shared. Drawing it non-multiplex and non-shared makes things easier to understand.

    You are addressing 512 kB, but datapath is 16 bit/2 Byte wide, so we only need 18 bit address bus. As for multiplexing thats not how DRAM addressing works IRL (understandable misconception/simplification for non EEs). Row/Column address lines are multiplexed, meaning we are down to 9 address pins +OE/WE. Comes down to ~110 pins assuming full 4 way interleaving. Seems doable with >200pin ASICs.

    >21-bit address generates two 20-bit where the least significant bit is discarded to read/write two consecutive pixels.

    still too many bits, 2MB at 4 byte granularity is 19 overall, 18 per 1MB bank

    >TMU was able to perform per-fragment w-divide

    This was a HUGE deal at the time, and achieved by doing serious low level optimizations/tricks (lookup tables/approximation if I remember Oral Panel correctly). 3dfx engineers were big fans of good enough hacks vs slow but correct way of doing things. Another one was color dithering, too bad you didnt mention "24-bit color dithering to native 16-bit RGB buffer using 4x4 or 2x2 ordered dither matrix" - this is the reason straight ram dump screenshots from Voodoo1 dont really look the same as on directly connected monitor. 3dfx called it ~22bit color, it was noticably better than Nvidias pure 16bit.

    Btw afaik Quake pushed somewhere between 500-1000 polygons per frame, earlier games like Actua Soccer rarely went up to 500 with fatal consequences of single digit framerate on S3 Virge. You might enjoy Profiling Of 3 Games Running On The S3 ViRGE Chip http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~bjohanso/index-virge-study...

  • by p0rkbelly on 4/5/19, 4:37 AM

    Playing Unreal and coming out of the spaceship at 800x600 on my voodoo2 and 400mhz Pentium II (I was spoiled and got the !2MB version!!!) was still one of the greatest gaming moments of my life

  • by rasz on 4/5/19, 1:07 AM

    Computer history museum 3dfx Oral History Panel is fantastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU

  • by 3dfxiter on 4/5/19, 12:57 AM

    They forgot to mention at the end of the article that 3dfx filed for bankruptcy as they literally became "drunk on their success." Everybody started showing up to work intoxicated. Some investors got left out in the cold.

  • by kbenson on 4/5/19, 4:01 AM

    The Voodoo2 was my first 3D video (addon) card. I was working tech support at the local ISP, and a failure on a circuit caused all authentication to fail for dialup customers for a few hours. They called in every off-duty support person they could get to come in and along with the scheduled staff we all (~20 of us) took 3-4 hours answering calls telling many of our 20k customers that yes, we had a major problem, no, we couldn't help them at that time, and hopefully it would be fixed within a couple hours.

    To thank the support staff, the management/owner offered the choice of a Voodoo2 card or a DVD player (~$200 each IIRC) to every support rep that helped with the load that day. I ended up working for that company three separate times in different positions, leaving for college and coming back, and working for a relative's company for a while and returning again later. It's the wonderful people there and actions like that which keep that company in a special place in my heart. (For those wondering, it's Sonic.net, now Sonic.com, or just Sonic maybe. I'm not sure the official branding, and I have years of history with it being Sonic.net)

  • by pault on 4/5/19, 12:48 AM

    I remember the first time someone told me about a card that you could put in your computer that would make quake run faster. It sounded so strange and exotic. Then I saw the screen caps with all their anti aliased glory and was devastated that I could never afford it on a movie theater clerk's salary.

  • by vgoh1 on 4/5/19, 12:03 PM

    I collect vintage electronics, mostly computers and gaming consoles. The Voodoo cards are considered quite collectable because of their GLIDE API. There is a decent stack of games that will ONLY run on Voodoo cards, or will only support Voodoo natively, which matters to a lot of collectors. Back then, a good eye could sometimes identify a card just by looking at the game. For one, for a brief period, games were only made to run on specific cards, so you could narrow it down just by what game is playing. Also, the artifacts would give them each a different look. Some were grainy, washed out, etc. The Voodoo 1 cards would stand out by the artifact that I can only describe as what looked like faint artificial scan lines.

    They are really special cards, and two of my vintage computers were built around a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, meaning, I started with the cards, and knew I had to build a PC to run them optimally.

  • by Nr7 on 4/5/19, 6:57 AM

    I remember the first time I saw that you could walk right up to a wall in a game and the texture didn't become a mess of giant pixels. Sure, it was a mess of blurry pixels instead but still it seemed like (voodoo) magic to young me.

  • by itgoon on 4/5/19, 12:41 AM

    The Voodoo was, very literally, a game-changer. The difference in quality between Quake and GLQuake was astounding.

    Just a few seconds of gameplay was enough to get someone to make the purchase.

  • by dev_dull on 4/5/19, 12:41 AM

    Fabien can you tell me how your website is generated? It’s very readable.

  • by jugg1es on 4/5/19, 3:12 AM

    I still remember getting my first 3dfx card. Mowed lawns all summer to save up to get a Voodoo.

  • by ben7799 on 4/5/19, 2:51 PM

    Fond memories of these cards for me.

    I bought one my junior year of college as a CS major. I had some good internships and that year I had some money. Instead of a car I had built a Pentium MMX 200Mhz box with Diamond Stealth card & 16MB ram. Pretty hot machine among my friends at that time... when the Voodoo 1 became available I was able to get one and it's performance was mind blowing at the time, even though I had access to SGI machines and such on campus that had way more impressive demos on them.

    My senior year of college I took an Open GL course and did a bunch of my projects in linux with the Voodoo 3D drivers. Cool stuff. Played a lot of quake too, I remember writing a program to render the quake characters on my own as one of my projects. The data model formats were open source IIRC so it wasn't too hard to read in the data. Very cool since we didn't have any good 3D tools to build our own models.

    I remember playing AH-64 Longbow or something on it too.. some of the flight sims were amazing at that point right before flight sim popularity tanked at the same time the remaining programs got unbelievably complex.

    Voodoo was kind of a pain the neck in day to day usage. In 1999 I built a new machine and went to an NVIDIA Riva TNT and then later that year got a GeForce 256 when those came out.

    Kind of the end of my heyday of PC gaming.. the combination of working on computers all day + games at the time still requiring a lot of debugging to get them to work well wore me out.

  • by cmroanirgo on 4/8/19, 12:43 PM

    I worked with all of the cards mentioned in the article. It was a pretty sweet time, where the card manufacturers would happily send out a reference card.

    Some things the article did seem to miss out on:

    - You could have two Voodoo's in your PC for extra throughput (I can't remember the numbers). I seem to recall there was a ribbon cable between the two boards...

    - The reason 3dfx ultimately failed was due to hefty lawsuits ongoing with NVidia about IP theft and headhunting the 3dfx staff.

    During this time there was a mailing list (can't remember it's name) that existed and a lot of game devs operated in it, mainly around DirectX (v1 onwwards), but it was in existence much before that. All the card manufacturers were on it that I recall. One day John Carmack posted a comment (I'm paraphrasing somewhat) how rubbish DirectX and Direct3D was. A month or so later glquake was available.

    I think it was about 12-18months later Unreal (the game... before the engine) was announced as a demo on this list and we all thought: Awesome -- who the * are these guys!?

    I'd like to say 'Good times' were had, but seriously, I burnt out due to the insansely fast changing pace of 3D dev during those times.

  • by pselbert on 4/5/19, 12:53 AM

    I recall purchasing two of these in the late 90s for relatively little money. Both cards could work in conjunction and it radically changed how games looked—really amazing how much of a difference it made. I can distinctly recall the difference in crispness, and how disappointing it was that didn’t apply to everything I used or played (3DS Max, CAD, etc).

    They were the first thing I ever sold on eBay, sometime around 1999.

  • by blt on 4/5/19, 1:24 AM

    My first 3D accelerator was a Voodoo2, first used on Quake 2. The cast light from the moving rocket on the floor is unforgettable.

  • by jersully72 on 4/5/19, 1:04 AM

    I have a box of 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in storage. No SLI cables but you can make them out of floppy ribbon cables.

    What should I do with them?

  • by jonplackett on 4/5/19, 12:31 PM

    I wanted a 3DFX card so bad in 1998 but I'd already convinced my dad to pay extra for a Matrox Mystique 3D card (which didn't support openGL) and he just couldn't get his head around why i now also needed another 3D card add-on. Even seeing the names of all those cards brings back so many memories.

  • by ct520 on 4/5/19, 3:26 AM

    Ahh man I remember GL quake dropping and before the voodoo, or Riva 128 I had the ... Matrox Mystique 4mb!!! Was amazed and also sorely dissatisfied. Thus began the video card race/upgrade journey.

    Voodoo, Riva 128, tnt, voodoo2, lol don’t forget that power VR, what an amazing time to live

  • by chongli on 4/5/19, 1:16 AM

    Wow, the lack of gamma correction in the Voodoo1 screenshot completely ruins the mood of the game.

  • by biesnecker on 4/5/19, 1:22 AM

    Such good memories. I spent all of my first few high school job paychecks on a Diamond Monster 3D. In retrospect, adult me says I should have bought $AAPL, but 16-year old me is still pretty sure it was the right decision.

  • by mpalfrey on 4/5/19, 8:26 AM

    I had a Voodoo Banshee (combined 2d/3d card). It wasn't as good as a V2 but was OK for me back in the day.

    I then moved to NVidia predominantly (TNT2 Ultra), although I did pick up a cheap V5 5500 which I ran for a bit.

    Like other's have said, it was a fun time to be involved with PC gaming. Unfortunately life has got in the way since, although I do spend time on Vogons looking at old systems and wondering if I should build a couple of retro machines!

  • by sprash on 4/5/19, 7:10 AM

    The main reason for the success of 3dfx were drivers that let you talk to bare metal hardware registers instead of dozens of GL abstraction layers. The simplicity of it all is very impressive. This is something programmers absoluteley love. Hence many games supported it and it was very easy to write drivers. Maybe it is time to reimplenent the glide interface in an FPGA ang make a super powered Voodoo card.

  • by kabdib on 4/5/19, 5:00 AM

    A cow-orker of mine mentioned this card a few months before it was actually released. "Transparent water," he would say, wistfully. I wasn't convinced it would be that interesting.

    We both bought cards. I was convinced.

    I really wish I'd gotten back into game programming then (I was doing mostly systems stuff, boring things like storage and operating systems). It would have been a lot of fun.

  • by dfischer on 4/5/19, 3:53 AM

    I remember being obsessed with graphics cards back in the day. My first graphics card i knew of was a 3dfx voodoo. I loaded it up to play Everquest. I vaguely remember going all the way up to a gforce 3 or so trying to get my games running smooth. Because of games I learned what every component in my system did and eventually started coding too. I miss those days :).

  • by ChrisRR on 4/5/19, 7:58 AM

    Another great article. I read absolutely everything Fabien writes. His Doom and Wolfenstein books make for great reading too.

  • by mrbill on 4/5/19, 10:26 PM

    I was one of the poor folks who could only afford the Matrox m3d (aka PowerVR PCX2), which shuffled video data to and from the 3d accelerator over the PCI bus, and was therefore slow as crud.. but, I had GL Quake!

    http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php

  • by pgt on 4/5/19, 8:42 AM

    The 3dfx Voodoo1 was the first hardware I bought with my own money to put in my 200Mhz AMD K6 machine, which I kept cool with two industrial fans. I paid R450 (~$30) for my Voodoo1 and have fond memories of multiplayer Half-Life 1 and Alien vs. Predator (AVP1) with friends.

  • by danmaz74 on 4/5/19, 10:37 AM

    I couldn't afford a Voodoo at the time, but I was so fascinated that I bought a S3 Virge, which really underwhelmed me.

    Then Nnvidia came along, and I remember wishing I had money to invest on it early on. Wished I could go back and do it :D

  • by pjmlp on 4/5/19, 9:10 AM

    I was quite sad to exchange my newly bought 3dfx card by a NVidia TNT one due to PCI connection issues on my motherboard, specially since I was looking forward to play with Glide.

  • by manav on 4/5/19, 3:33 AM

    I remember the Voodoo 2 SLI. I know it stands for something slightly different now but at least its a small remnant of that past.

    I wonder if nvidia actually got much ip out of the acquisition.

  • by saluki on 4/5/19, 3:35 AM

    How about the Voodoo3 with the giant blue dongle?

  • by davesque on 4/5/19, 1:22 AM

    I had a Diamond Voodoo card. When I first fired it up on GLQuake, it absolutely blew my 16 year old mind.

  • by jordache on 4/5/19, 2:12 AM

    how about an article on the 3dlabs glint 500tx? I lusted for one of those to run my 3d software...

  • by Exuma on 4/7/19, 4:22 PM

    I used to draw the 3dfx logo all over my trapper keeper using white out. Good old 90s days

  • by jaequery on 4/5/19, 6:42 AM

    Someone start a Quake hackernews LAN party! Gosh I miss the Rocket Arena / TF days!

  • by shereadsthenews on 4/5/19, 1:40 AM

    Maybe it was the voodoo 2, but I seem to recall that 3dfx cards could render into a chroma-keyed window, not just full screens. In any case the main problem with them was they made your 2D desktop look like junk for the 99% of the time you were not playing Quake, due to the extra analog-digital-analog conversion.

  • by almost_usual on 4/5/19, 1:49 AM

    I haven’t thought about my Voodoo card in a long time, good memories

  • by alvalentini on 4/5/19, 1:21 PM

    Oh dear. Little tear streaming down my face.

  • by Lapsa on 4/5/19, 3:23 AM

    Oh the nostalgia... Had one.

  • by sureaboutthis on 4/5/19, 10:59 AM

    I want to say I still have this in my basement in a box. I also want to say I have this in my old workstation computer and it still works, sitting in my basement.