The 3dfx Glide/card thread.

About: 3dfx Interactive



The company's original product was the Voodoo Graphics, an add-in card that implemented hardware acceleration of 3D graphics. The hardware accelerated only 3D rendering, relying on the PC's current video card for 2D support. Despite this limitation, the Voodoo Graphics product and its follow-up, Voodoo2, were popular. It became standard for 3D games to offer support for the company's Glide API.

If you'd like to read more about the history of 3dfx and its ups and downs, then please follow the wikki link.

3dfx Wiki
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Glide is a 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. Although it originally started as a proprietary API, it was later open sourced by 3dfx. It was dedicated to rendering performance, supporting geometry and texture mapping primarily, in data formats identical to those used internally in their cards. Wide adoption of 3Dfx led to Glide being extensively used in the late 1990s, but further refinement of Microsoft's Direct3D and the appearance of full OpenGL implementations from other graphics card vendors, in addition to growing diversity in 3D hardware, eventually caused it to become superfluous

(UT glide driver)​

(UT, software vs 3dfx render)

and just basically the difference between software render and the 3dfx render example of Lara:

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Dont have a 3dfx card? No worries, you can still play...

Glide Wrappers

As with all things, however, time marched on and the Voodoo video cards themselves went the way of the dinosaur over 20 years ago. However, you don't need to dig an old Pentium 3 out of mothballs in order to play these classic titles - you simply need to make use of a glide wrapper, a neat little software program which translates the Glide 'calls' to today's Direct3D. In other words, the wrapper makes it so you don't need to have a Voodoo card to run the game.

nGlide

Zeus Software's nGlide wrapper boasts excellent game compatibility and supports Windows versions as far back as Windows XP.

http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide

dgVoodo

Emulates both Glide AND old versions of DirectX, allowing you to play nearly 20 years worth of games that we otherwise might not be able to. dgVoodoo2 is pretty awesome!

http://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2.html

There are other Glide wrappers, and i am sure you can find them, if you hunt for them. So games run better when using specific wrappers, but this is outside the scope of this thread.







Cards:


Boxes:



Voodoo2 boxes: (well some of em, there were sooo many variants!)



Drivers:





Games that showcase/use the Glide api:

Vogons Glide game link.

Dos https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=886

Windows https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=534&start=80

WARNING!!!

All Banshee, Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 AGP Cards are 2xAGP 3.3V only!
Do not use in modern 4x/8x AGP 1.5V only Motherboards!
Failure to comply can cause damage to both the Card and the Motherboard!
Consult your Motherboard manual for 2xAGP 3.3V support before use!

Only the retail 3dfx built Voodoo4 4500 AGP is 4xAGP 1.5V capable.
(the Powercolor Evilking Voodoo4 and the rare 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 "L" Shaped variants are confirmed to be 2xAGP 3.3V only)

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Please feel free to add additional info to this thread. It should be the goto thread for 3dfx cards/info.

(I'll update this when I get back from Madrid tomorrow arvo)

 

You mean like these?

 

I've been an 3Dfx/Nvidia fanboy since the beginning

 

Yep, I can still distinctly remember buying an Orchid Righteous 3D while on holidays in Sydney, and then having to wait the best part of two weeks till I got home to the Pilbara in WA to install it.
Was a long two weeks.

Finally installed it and loaded up the Descent 2 demo that came with the card, then sat back and was utterly amazed.

 

Oh yes. I remember Voodoo cards. Bought two of them at around $600 each so I could actually play Doom and Quake in 1024x768 interlaced!

The resolution was so high that I had the edge at LAN parties, able to pick other players in the distance so much more easily than the next guy who was playing only in 640x480 or 800x600!

 

Ahhh when you left NFSII:SE alone it played a demo of "3DFX mode" - damn I always wanted one but being a kid could not obtain.

 

my first 3D card was a Banshee, couldn't afford a Voodoo2 or SLI setup.
was also my last 3dfx card, went to a GeForce256 next.

 

Below are pictures of the only 3Dfx card I still own, a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP which I use in my Intel Tualatin P3 1.4GHz box alongside a Diamond Monster Sound MX300 PCI (Aureal Vortex 2).

Back in the day I had the following 3Dfx card progression:

1 x Diamond Monster 3D 3Dfx Voodoo1 4MB PCI
2 x Diamond Monster 3D II 3Dfx Voodoo2 12MB PCI (in SLI)
1 x 3Dfx Voodoo3 2000 AGP

...before going onto nVidia based cards. When I first got the Voodoo1 in 1997 shortly after GLQuake came out, that was absolutely "game changing" (literally).

 

Remember the click? Orchid were the ones with the mechanical relay.

 

Actually, I think I have a Voodoo3 2000 AGP too somewhere

 

Similar for me, except I was an Orchid fanboy, so Righteous 3D and then Righteous 3D II SLI. Man, they were the days.

It really was, wasn't it?

I think I do

 

I'm feeling left out so please pretend this is my voodoo collection.

 

Nice pics guys. My Introduction to 3dfx came much later than most of yours. Never heard of the voodoo/voodoo2 cards untill much much later. In 2000 I was driving King Air's in Tucson, USA and the guy who lived next door to me had a PC with a voodoo 3 in it. I'd been out of playing pc games since eob on my sister's 386, and was pretty much a console guy. I was utterly blown away by FS2K/and some rabbit shooting game. The next day, we went to a computer shop in downtown and bought myself the bits required to plug a new gaming pc together. I came home with a voodoo 3 2000 agp card, a ForteMedia sound card and a k3-500 (maybe it was a 550, can't put my finger on it)
I loved that PC. And I absolutely LOVED Unreal Tournament ...

I still have that voodoo card, and bought a V5 5500 agp while in Adelaide about 15 years ago for 50 bucks.
And lol then this week, I acquired 3 voodoo 2 cards.. lol 2 x12mb cards and one 8mb card

 

Here is my beastie! This is a mock up of the 1st ever computer i'd put together myself (mostly). Ahhh, I remember the days when I had a great job no wife no kids and lots of money. Ahhh yes, them were the days.
One voodoo2 is one I originally bought back in 98, and the other was given to me by a good friend for my voodoo2 sli quest, I'm so lucky

Thanks for posting the vogons links Vanne they look to be a great resources.

 

I remember giving my Voodoo 3 cards away. I remember when you could pick such cards up readily for around $40.00!

 

Different fans bester? your mod or previous owner? any idea what the header is on there for? I wish i had a Dvi one, i know mac ones were able to be flashed to PC with working dvi.

 

They are Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX fans, I installed them as the originals were shot. You can safely run the Noctua fans off the original fan headers as per this thread, however I am just running them off of the PSU.

I am not sure on the 26 pin header, will look. EDIT: Apparently it's a Video Feature Connector (VFC), some legacy standard.

 

Here are my Voodoo1's, both relatively recently acquired. The bottom one was a DOA (the classic "untested" listing, aka cactus and the seller knew it). It has some visible component cancer on the back and is probably fixable, by someone.

 

I have a few Voodoo's from 1 up to 3 - this one below is my favourite, a Compaq OEM Voodoo3 3500. I bought a couple of 'em when they were going cheap NOS from a seller in the U.S. - great image quality compared to the V1 and 2s I've tried and it's DOS compatibility is outstanding.

 

This was my neighbors graphics card, until one fateful day when his cat was inhaled by the whirlwind of fans running simultaneously and his walls were repainted a new shade of cat bits.


He never had to run a heater in his house, was always a comfortable temperature there