Brings back memories; so much nostalgia. I still remember clearly the first real graphics card (I think it was voodoo) I got and when I fired up TFC (which I'd played sans graphics card up to then), just staring at the water for a bit and being amazed by it. The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones; I remember being a little confused at first that everything looked worse. But of course it enabled all kinds of new and more immersive experiences. It was funny to experience... how it felt. To look both crappy and amazing at the same time; to be its own "thing" really.
I also enjoyed introducing people to it, and watching them look at it the first time. You could tell who would get hooked. Some people would play the game a minute or two and be like wow yeah this is pretty neat, and then go about their life. Others would kind of just stop and almost watch themselves, and almost invariably just start laughing. It was so pleasing to watch it melt people's minds the way it had mine.
Anyways, a special time. Really fun seeing these projects.
I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.
Voodoo 1-3 couldn’t render 32-bit color, so maybe you were noticing the lower bit depth?
3dfx did design some tricks into the video pipeline on Voodoo 2 and 3 cards that allowed for what they called 22-but color, and it definitely looked better than other 3D accelerator cards’ 16-bit modes - but it was still not as clean looking as true 32-bit color. (Interestingly, the filtering they did was applied after the framebuffer, so screen captures would only ever show the lower quality original.)
I desperately wanted a voodoo card (I was late to the pc party). I'd been playing lots of Goldeneye on the n64 and the gaming press had me convinced that real FPS shooters were on the pc not consoles. What a load of shite, I bought a voodoo 3 for my dad's pc, got quake 2 and was bitterly disappointed. Gameplay wise it was so limited compared to Goldeneye. The world was no were near as interactive. Recently I've seen gabe Newell talking about half life and the crowd bar hitting walls was their way of showing the player real world feedback. He's right, but that's nothing compared to the bullet holes in Goldeneye. To be fair, quake 3, unreal tournament 99 and Deus ex alone justified the voodoo card purchase, but it still felt like a let down.
'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.
It was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.
Yessss...I got a friend who went on vacation to the US to bring back a Voodoo (2,I think?). I played a lot of Quake 1 and I remember playing online and seeing the water transparency and my rivals underwater...good times.
I had a fair amount of shares of TDFX back in the day, rode it all the way to their bankruptcy. NVDA bought the scraps and left retail shareholders like me with nothing. In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...
Really nice background in the recent book The Nvidia Way. The gist of it was Jensen recognized that having the best chip once wasn’t enough.
The result: Nvidia organized around delivering something new every six months. This meant a new architecture followed by two improved derivatives over an approx 18 month period. That turned 3dfx’s development schedule into a trap.
Conclusion: disciplined execution above all else.
Its interesting how even I didn't realize how competitive he was...until after the market realized recently. Wish these books would come out a year earlier than they did. :/
I guess i'm not cut out for stock trading. I'm always arriving as the train is departing both in real life and on the market.
> Nvidia organized around delivering something new every six months
That explains the SUPERs that were released seemingly very quickly after the original models. Looks like the 5 series will miss out on that due to the ram shortages and prioritising their HBM server models.
As it turns out, neither is anyone else, even people who do it for a living. (If we constrain the definition of "stock trading" to mean researching and picking individual stocks.)
Thing is, in order to do that, you have to play the game, and if you do, you'll lose as well as win. Have the vast majority in index funds, but if you're desperate for a win, pick 100 stocks and put a dollar in each of them (by buying fractional shares), wait 6 months, and then simply ignore the losers.
I still remember playing Quake 2 to death in software then finally getting a 3dfx card (I want to say it was a Banshee?), loading up the game and my mind being blown by how much more immersive it was.
Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.
Core memory unlocked. I remember being in my dark bedroom with he glow of the CRT playing Quake 2 grapple CTF for hours and hours. Eventually I got a Voodoo 3 in all it's 16-bit color glory.
It's wild how hazy those memories are becoming. Getting old is weird.
Same. I spent an insane amount of my time practicing grappling in Quake2 Weapons Factory (and eventually WFA). I remember getting the Voodoo3 3000 seeing how amazing everything looked, and then immediately turning it all back off to get the highest FPS possible. Considering this was all over dial-up it's funny to think back on it now.
When I was a kid I told my parents I wanted to invest some of my money in NVDA after we had a school assignment to study a company. They laughed and gave me a speech about stock picking. What they said was actually good advice, but looking back it would have been a home run.
At the time stock trades were still expensive. I remember one of the obstacles was thinking that of the small amount of birthday money I had saved up, $20 was going to go into the purchase and another $20 would have to come out of the sale. Then they explained taxes to me.
None of it would have mattered if I had been able to buy and hold, but at the time I remember being sad that even doubling my money would result in $40 of fees plus taxes, eating most of the gains.
Me too. I lost all my money at the time betting on TDFX. I was salty as fuck against Nvidia for decades until I had no choice but to buy their GPU 10-ish years ago. Now I’m a stockholder. I only wish I chose properly 25 years ago…
> In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...
...they would still have fumbled it.
3dfx failed for a single reason: Failure to design for the future.
They had a hyperfocus on brute force rasterization and fill rate that became detrimental. They dropped the ball on 32-bit rendering because they thought having a higher fill rate was more important. They dropped the ball on implementing hardware transform because they considered that the CPU's job.
And then they blew up their own business model buying STB Systems and manufacture cards themselves, rather than selling chips to other manufacturers. That ended up being a gift to NVIDIA who adopted the opposite strategy of providing chips, reference designs, drivers, etc. and let a large number of board manufacturers compete to sell them.
And then there's the fact that NVIDIA was allowing themselves to create new architectures, while 3dfx was basically just saying "Let's make the same GPU, but with more texture units". By the time the Voodoo5 came out, NVIDIA was already on the GeForce 2.
3dfx lost because it kept optimizing for yesterday. NVIDIA understood where the industry was going and 3dfx didn't, and there's little reason to think AI would have gone any differently. If 3dfx had somehow survived another 20 years, I'd expect them to arrive at the AI boom with the world's fastest rasterizer.
86box is really fun, and the m4+ macs are great at running it. I've been working on a custom OS designed specifically for the pentium 2 core/isa (trying to write an high performance *nix for 1997-1999 for quake 1/2). 86box runs very faithfully to the real silicon p2s (and voodoo 3) I have without the nuisance of having to copy code over to it in development.
I've been maintaining an emulated Pentium Pro 200 MHz Windows 95 machine on 86Box for some time with all my favorite old software from childhood. It's great for nostalgia, and if friends come over they have fun showing their kids things like SkiFree, Jezzball, and Encarta 96. Still holds up great for kids.
Yep, I showed my little ones Odell Down Under in the browser at one point, they loved it. A certain amount of that old software I copied to .iso from my physical CD's, but not sure where I could grab something like Encarta 96. Legally.
Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.
IANAL and I have no idea where in the world you are, but downloading (as in with an http client) an ISO[1] is often treated rather dramatically very differently than distributing an ISO (as in a p2p torrent).
Alternatively: eBay. Encarta 96 CD-ROMs are available for about $20 in the US, delivered.
This is the second time on HN this week I've seen someone reference Stars! It was such a fun game to play back in the 90s. I've had a similar desire to have Codex decompile a pet 90s game of mine for further modification. Not sure how far one could get before Codex complains about reverse engineering software.
Codex had no problem developing a big plan for me, but I didn't ask it to proceed. Maybe you're right and it'd of got shy at some point along the way. Thanks for that other thread, I must've missed it. Definitely going to fire up Stars! this weekend one way or another.
Cinemania 97 was a big part of this era for me too, though it was far less widespread than Encarta. Fantastic resource for classic film, and into the 80s and 90s, though it was bit quirky watching it get further and further out of date, like the big 1999 films that defined my youth (The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, etc) all completely unknown to it of course.
Which makes some sense, I suppose. It was pretty expensive to use, which made it uncommon. These days, GPUs are so power hungry that'd you need a MASSIVE power supply to do it, unless you're SLI'ing low-end GPUs, which is kind of a waste. You're better off with a mid-grade GPU.
From a marketing perspective, yes, but technically there was a deeper issue with SLI (that intersects with the marketing issue): the GPUs don't have a lot of bandwidth between them so you have to be able to split work evenly across the cards without needing to copy work between them a lot.
3dfx did it spatially - each card rendered half the scanlines and then interleaved them - hence Scan Line Interleave (SLI). The problem is that this assumes all the work is going into pushing polygons onto the framebuffer. This assumption broke fairly shortly after 3dfx started doing this and it's an assumption that only makes sense for 3dfx's obsession with fill rate.
Nvidia wound up doing basically everything temporally: one GPU renders one frame, the next GPU renders the next. The reason for this is that "modern" (as in, 2004-era, so OpenGL 2.x / DX9) games do a lot of intermediate work that has to be available during final raster on both cards. They might render a bunch of depth buffers from various light positions to construct shadow maps. Or they might accumulate all raster operations into a bunch of color framebuffers and then compute lighting with the information in those buffers. Or you might just have a post-process gaussian blur that requires mixing pixels from across both GPUs.
Theoretically, none of this is a problem - you just send the pixels the other GPU needs. In practice even the fastest Nvidia SLI bridge only ran at something like 3.25GB/s and that's not even enough bandwidth to deliver a final 4K 120FPS image, much less transfer every intermediate result from every rendering step to both GPUs. The math gets worse when you start adding more GPUs. It's far easier to send a whole frame to each card, but this adds latency and stuttering[0] because you have to run the game two, three, or even FOUR frames ahead instead of just one.
That being said, there was a way to deliver multi-card rendering on Nvidia hardware, it's just that Nvidia had no interest in shipping Nvlink support in a consumer card because they wanted AI customers to pay more for it. So instead they washed their hands of it and made multi-card rendering an explicit API thing that nobody implements because <1% of people are going to spend $10k on a rig for slightly better framerates. AFAIK if you DO use multi-card rendering this way, you're doing all the synchronization across the main PCIe bus (which is actually more bandwidth than SLI ever had).
[0] Which, funnily enough, is the same problem with DLSS Framegen. Nvidia really, really likes building things that make the FPS number go up without actually delivering a better experience.
> [0] Which, funnily enough, is the same problem with DLSS Framegen. Nvidia really, really likes building things that make the FPS number go up without actually delivering a better experience.
I'd dispute that last part. At the very least, it depends on the game.
Cyberpunk 2077 with 4x frame gen is wonderful. With all the detail settings cranked to the max, it's a gorgeous game, but at that level, it even brings a 5090 to its knees. In 4K, without MFG, I often only get ~40 fps. With 4x frame gen, I get around 140 fps which is a significant improvement to the experience, and I don't even notice the artifacts unless I'm looking REALLY hard for them.
On the other hand, MS Flight Sim 2024 with 4x frame gen looks great unless I enable labels on landmarks and other aircraft. During camera angle changes, they get very noticeably distorted. The cockpit looks fine, though.
I love it! The great 2026 benchmark is a native Turok (I vividly remember that 30fps low poly iguana looking as real as Jurassic Park in my childhood), Unreal and Q3A.
This is especially true on a CRT. People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.
Even the prior two games had an extremely tasteful use of textures and geometry that just felt right and realistic enough to not break immersion despite the hardware limitations. This era of gaming rightfully and correctly recognized that any form of "realism" is ultimately an impression rather than an objective truth.
Gran Turismo 3 was where I first started experiencing the "uncanny valley" of graphics. The game looked and felt incredible... so incredible that the lack of damage felt like an immersion-breaker in a way I hadn't experienced before.
> People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.
I remember going to an electronics store with my friend. I couldn't figure out why they had a broadcast football game playing on a 15 inch LCD display up front. I assumed it was a game but then watched it for a few cuts and was so certain it was live footage...
Yep, I remember playing everything without a 3D card and then being completely blown away when I got my Voodoo2 and all the pixelation and jerkiness was suddenly gone. I left the little "3DFX" splash screen enabled for a while there just because I was so enamored with the whole experience.
Wait, if single core performance matters, could it be that the MacBook Neo could be a good machine for 86Box? I assume thermal throttling could be a limitation but in theory it should be as fast as an M3 for single core performance.
Author of the article/site here, I have a MacBook neo I could test 86box on with this same build. But practically speaking yes, it has reasonable ST perf and my guess would be it's competitive with the best x86 chips available today for this workload.
How's the idle temperature though? In my experience, emulating these, while they may perform well, runs Macs incredibly hot, like, uncomfortably hot to the point of being reported as nearly triple digits according to MacThrottle.
It ran VisualBoyAdvance pretty well! I haven't tried Project64 but I think the emulated Voodoo3 should support Jabos D3D6/7 backend with older versions. Was quite thrilled today to see my article blow up so if there's anything you'd want me to test I have mostly a free weekend.
Total blast from the past. I remember I bought my Voodoo 1. It was the Diamond 3DFX card. I bought it in 1995 and it was amazing. GL was so optimized. For gl quake. Back then Windows, Direct 3D was just slow. But then later Nvidia started to come out with more capable gpus such as TNT and they eventually took over the gaming market.
No modern hypervisors emulate a Voodoo 3D card. The upcoming 86Box release will probably have Riva 128 and ATI Rage 128 emulation as well.
Using an accurate emulation of such a device means you can use the drivers that existed back then that games back then were QA'd on.
Most modern hypervisors aren't built with Windows 98 in mind, either - it's not really what they're for, and a modern Mac can't run an x86 hypervisor anyway.
> CPU timing, chipset behaviour, ISA and PCI buses, graphics chipsets, sound devices, and disk controllers all matter to getting period software to behave properly.
86Box has been around for 10 years and it'ss a fork of an even older emulator called PCem which started in 2007. 86Box is an amazing cross-platform project if you want to emulate an entire computer (up to Pentium III era) as acurately as possible.
Oh my got, the floppy disk drive sound, is so accurate, I am in full nostalgia mode. Off on to ebay to buy a real PS2! haha. The pain, the pain of ISA Cards etc. ALthough no physical cuts!
Or a Rosetta-based emulator (like Parallels). But 86Box is going to be very bad there.
While they claim "accuracy" as one of the goals for 86Box, I believe accuracy is overrated in PC emus (you don't really need that much accuracy due to the variety of PC clones, and emus are not that accurate anyway). For me the biggest point for using 86Box over other PC emulators/virtualizers is the large selection of virtual hardware available to emulate, not performance.
86Box is just accurate enough to run the original unmodified firmware. It does not emulate cache and RAM behavior, so you won't get performance-related accuracy. You are likely to succeed in Spectre-like attacks against an emulated 386, which shouldn't be possible on a real thing.
If you don't care and just want to go faster on a modern x86 CPU, you can replace the CPU emulation part of 86Box with a hypervisor. I tried running a Socket 7 motherboard firmware on Linux's KVM - given the chipset emulation is correct, it works: it amusingly identifies an AMD Zen5 running at 3GHz as "Unknown-S CPU at M60MHz" and boots to a DOS prompt.
Kind of proving why accuracy is not really that important for the PC world. Most era firmware would have tried to run on as much variety of machines possible.
Which motherboard did you have those in? I had a dual socket 370 EPoX board, but I never put a second CPU in it.
Also, sounds like I should work on upstreaming my Rage Fury 128 emulation...and the EPoX SMP emulation...(the perils of too much ADHD and too few tokens)
I don’t really remember what motherboard I had. It definitely didn’t have dual sockets because the first PIII (Katmai) were Slot A devices. I even ran the utility to turn off the controversial unique serial number. I remember having all sorts of trouble after I replaced a processor because it turned out they had different steppings. I complained and made a pain of myself and eventually they replaced the existing unit with an equal stepping. Again, I can’t remember all the details.
Dual processor machines back then were rather exotic. I was coming from a period on BeOS (“one processor per person is not enough!”) and I’ve never really been able to endure non-SMP machines since 1995. It’s common now of course. I had 512 MB of RAM and a pair of 9.4 (?) SCSI disks connected in RAID-0: I liked to live dangerously back in the day. It ended in tears a few times but I also had a 2GB Iomega Jaz drive for backups… yeah… eventually I switched to DVD-R… yeah… there’s holes in my records.
Very cool! Never tried BeOS back in the day. I heard good things though.
Amazing times. I actually upgraded to that from a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 which had dual Pentium Pro 180s in it. Ran NT and occasionally FreeBSD. Cost me a small fortune at the time. Backups here were to a SCSI DLT (can't remember capacity) that was chucked in the trash at work. All it needed was a minor repair.
I highly recommend you give Haiku a spin… the remake 25 years in the making and counting (which is several multiples the actual duration of the system it is “inspired by”, but that’s the nature of emulators and reproductions, isn’t it?). At any rate, it really gives the look and feel of the system as it was back then. The design is somehow peak late nineties distilled down into a powerful concentrate. (Make sure you click and hold shift to move the yellow tabs on the windows around.)
Windows 2000 was some kind of brief apex. I was a beta tester and I saw it mature from ‘NT5’ into what it eventually became. It was too rapidly supplanted by Windows XP. It deserves to be remembered.
I vividly remember the agony of not having an AGP port on my motherboard and being forced to buy Voodoo 3-2000 (PCI). It was not as good as the Voodoo 3-3000, which was AGP, but finally I was able to play Quake2 with 3d acceleration. Good memories.
Brings back memories; so much nostalgia. I still remember clearly the first real graphics card (I think it was voodoo) I got and when I fired up TFC (which I'd played sans graphics card up to then), just staring at the water for a bit and being amazed by it. The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones; I remember being a little confused at first that everything looked worse. But of course it enabled all kinds of new and more immersive experiences. It was funny to experience... how it felt. To look both crappy and amazing at the same time; to be its own "thing" really.
I also enjoyed introducing people to it, and watching them look at it the first time. You could tell who would get hooked. Some people would play the game a minute or two and be like wow yeah this is pretty neat, and then go about their life. Others would kind of just stop and almost watch themselves, and almost invariably just start laughing. It was so pleasing to watch it melt people's minds the way it had mine.
Anyways, a special time. Really fun seeing these projects.
I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.
Voodoo 1-3 couldn’t render 32-bit color, so maybe you were noticing the lower bit depth?
3dfx did design some tricks into the video pipeline on Voodoo 2 and 3 cards that allowed for what they called 22-but color, and it definitely looked better than other 3D accelerator cards’ 16-bit modes - but it was still not as clean looking as true 32-bit color. (Interestingly, the filtering they did was applied after the framebuffer, so screen captures would only ever show the lower quality original.)
I desperately wanted a voodoo card (I was late to the pc party). I'd been playing lots of Goldeneye on the n64 and the gaming press had me convinced that real FPS shooters were on the pc not consoles. What a load of shite, I bought a voodoo 3 for my dad's pc, got quake 2 and was bitterly disappointed. Gameplay wise it was so limited compared to Goldeneye. The world was no were near as interactive. Recently I've seen gabe Newell talking about half life and the crowd bar hitting walls was their way of showing the player real world feedback. He's right, but that's nothing compared to the bullet holes in Goldeneye. To be fair, quake 3, unreal tournament 99 and Deus ex alone justified the voodoo card purchase, but it still felt like a let down.
'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.
It was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.
> The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones
Duke3D -> Quake (software rendered of course) definitely fit that description
Yessss...I got a friend who went on vacation to the US to bring back a Voodoo (2,I think?). I played a lot of Quake 1 and I remember playing online and seeing the water transparency and my rivals underwater...good times.
WTF is TFC?
Probably Team Fortress Classic. Hi to all nade and rocket jumping fans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_Classic
I had a fair amount of shares of TDFX back in the day, rode it all the way to their bankruptcy. NVDA bought the scraps and left retail shareholders like me with nothing. In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...
Really nice background in the recent book The Nvidia Way. The gist of it was Jensen recognized that having the best chip once wasn’t enough.
The result: Nvidia organized around delivering something new every six months. This meant a new architecture followed by two improved derivatives over an approx 18 month period. That turned 3dfx’s development schedule into a trap.
Conclusion: disciplined execution above all else.
Its interesting how even I didn't realize how competitive he was...until after the market realized recently. Wish these books would come out a year earlier than they did. :/
I guess i'm not cut out for stock trading. I'm always arriving as the train is departing both in real life and on the market.
> Nvidia organized around delivering something new every six months
That explains the SUPERs that were released seemingly very quickly after the original models. Looks like the 5 series will miss out on that due to the ram shortages and prioritising their HBM server models.
> I guess i'm not cut out for stock trading.
As it turns out, neither is anyone else, even people who do it for a living. (If we constrain the definition of "stock trading" to mean researching and picking individual stocks.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
Yes good point. A lot of it is gambling. Still, would be nice to have a win once in a while.
Thing is, in order to do that, you have to play the game, and if you do, you'll lose as well as win. Have the vast majority in index funds, but if you're desperate for a win, pick 100 stocks and put a dollar in each of them (by buying fractional shares), wait 6 months, and then simply ignore the losers.
I still remember playing Quake 2 to death in software then finally getting a 3dfx card (I want to say it was a Banshee?), loading up the game and my mind being blown by how much more immersive it was.
Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.
Core memory unlocked. I remember being in my dark bedroom with he glow of the CRT playing Quake 2 grapple CTF for hours and hours. Eventually I got a Voodoo 3 in all it's 16-bit color glory.
It's wild how hazy those memories are becoming. Getting old is weird.
Played a huge amount of Quake Grapple on my Voodoo 2 12MB over a 28.8 modem back in high school.
That brings back some memories.
Same. I spent an insane amount of my time practicing grappling in Quake2 Weapons Factory (and eventually WFA). I remember getting the Voodoo3 3000 seeing how amazing everything looked, and then immediately turning it all back off to get the highest FPS possible. Considering this was all over dial-up it's funny to think back on it now.
Oh my god....q2ctf was the absolute best. I still fire it up on LAN parties here from time to time.
I wanted a 3DFX card so bad when I was 10yo.
And then I wanted a GeForce so bad. But I only got £10 a week from my paper round.
If I’d invested just one week of my paper round in Nvidia shares though, it would be worth over £10 million today.
When I was a kid I told my parents I wanted to invest some of my money in NVDA after we had a school assignment to study a company. They laughed and gave me a speech about stock picking. What they said was actually good advice, but looking back it would have been a home run.
At the time stock trades were still expensive. I remember one of the obstacles was thinking that of the small amount of birthday money I had saved up, $20 was going to go into the purchase and another $20 would have to come out of the sale. Then they explained taxes to me.
None of it would have mattered if I had been able to buy and hold, but at the time I remember being sad that even doubling my money would result in $40 of fees plus taxes, eating most of the gains.
More like 2 years of your £10 a week paper round for that £10m return.
And also never sold any of it between then and now.
Me too. I lost all my money at the time betting on TDFX. I was salty as fuck against Nvidia for decades until I had no choice but to buy their GPU 10-ish years ago. Now I’m a stockholder. I only wish I chose properly 25 years ago…
> In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...
...they would still have fumbled it.
3dfx failed for a single reason: Failure to design for the future.
They had a hyperfocus on brute force rasterization and fill rate that became detrimental. They dropped the ball on 32-bit rendering because they thought having a higher fill rate was more important. They dropped the ball on implementing hardware transform because they considered that the CPU's job.
And then they blew up their own business model buying STB Systems and manufacture cards themselves, rather than selling chips to other manufacturers. That ended up being a gift to NVIDIA who adopted the opposite strategy of providing chips, reference designs, drivers, etc. and let a large number of board manufacturers compete to sell them.
And then there's the fact that NVIDIA was allowing themselves to create new architectures, while 3dfx was basically just saying "Let's make the same GPU, but with more texture units". By the time the Voodoo5 came out, NVIDIA was already on the GeForce 2.
3dfx lost because it kept optimizing for yesterday. NVIDIA understood where the industry was going and 3dfx didn't, and there's little reason to think AI would have gone any differently. If 3dfx had somehow survived another 20 years, I'd expect them to arrive at the AI boom with the world's fastest rasterizer.
I remember watching those promos of need for speed 2 SE running on a 3DFX and feeling like a peasant for not having one.
Rampage!
https://www.slideserve.com/hedy-gilmore/3dfx-rampage
When they say cycle accurate what do they mean? I thought even emulating a super nes in software at cycle accurate levels took a lot of compute?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-...
86box is really fun, and the m4+ macs are great at running it. I've been working on a custom OS designed specifically for the pentium 2 core/isa (trying to write an high performance *nix for 1997-1999 for quake 1/2). 86box runs very faithfully to the real silicon p2s (and voodoo 3) I have without the nuisance of having to copy code over to it in development.
Corrected title: My Childhood Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
I've been maintaining an emulated Pentium Pro 200 MHz Windows 95 machine on 86Box for some time with all my favorite old software from childhood. It's great for nostalgia, and if friends come over they have fun showing their kids things like SkiFree, Jezzball, and Encarta 96. Still holds up great for kids.
Yep, I showed my little ones Odell Down Under in the browser at one point, they loved it. A certain amount of that old software I copied to .iso from my physical CD's, but not sure where I could grab something like Encarta 96. Legally.
Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.
IANAL and I have no idea where in the world you are, but downloading (as in with an http client) an ISO[1] is often treated rather dramatically very differently than distributing an ISO (as in a p2p torrent).
Alternatively: eBay. Encarta 96 CD-ROMs are available for about $20 in the US, delivered.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/ENCAR96ENCY
This is the second time on HN this week I've seen someone reference Stars! It was such a fun game to play back in the 90s. I've had a similar desire to have Codex decompile a pet 90s game of mine for further modification. Not sure how far one could get before Codex complains about reverse engineering software.
EDIT: Here's the other Stars! thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755378
Codex had no problem developing a big plan for me, but I didn't ask it to proceed. Maybe you're right and it'd of got shy at some point along the way. Thanks for that other thread, I must've missed it. Definitely going to fire up Stars! this weekend one way or another.
Many of those ISOs end up on archive.org if you dig around.
Memories of the ISO mounting program I had; so nice for all the disks to live on the server and just be mounted when needed.
Cinemania 97 was a big part of this era for me too, though it was far less widespread than Encarta. Fantastic resource for classic film, and into the 80s and 90s, though it was bit quirky watching it get further and further out of date, like the big 1999 films that defined my youth (The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, etc) all completely unknown to it of course.
Yes that was also packaged with my Gateway 2000
I think part of the reason it holds up still is things had to be designed for newcomers at the time, since people largely were.
You had me at Winamp
Emulated llama whipping, what an era we live in
But can it emulate having two voodoo II's and a desk fan pointed at it?
TIL you could SLI Vodoo 2's, and 3dfx invented it. Very cool. (It's different from the nvidia SLI, same acronym, different tech.)
I think Nvidia bought the patent.
There’s a direct historical line from Voodoo2 SLI to today’s Infiniband GPU links and making AI possible.
> I think Nvidia bought the patent.
And has since killed it for desktop gaming CPUs.
Which makes some sense, I suppose. It was pretty expensive to use, which made it uncommon. These days, GPUs are so power hungry that'd you need a MASSIVE power supply to do it, unless you're SLI'ing low-end GPUs, which is kind of a waste. You're better off with a mid-grade GPU.
From a marketing perspective, yes, but technically there was a deeper issue with SLI (that intersects with the marketing issue): the GPUs don't have a lot of bandwidth between them so you have to be able to split work evenly across the cards without needing to copy work between them a lot.
3dfx did it spatially - each card rendered half the scanlines and then interleaved them - hence Scan Line Interleave (SLI). The problem is that this assumes all the work is going into pushing polygons onto the framebuffer. This assumption broke fairly shortly after 3dfx started doing this and it's an assumption that only makes sense for 3dfx's obsession with fill rate.
Nvidia wound up doing basically everything temporally: one GPU renders one frame, the next GPU renders the next. The reason for this is that "modern" (as in, 2004-era, so OpenGL 2.x / DX9) games do a lot of intermediate work that has to be available during final raster on both cards. They might render a bunch of depth buffers from various light positions to construct shadow maps. Or they might accumulate all raster operations into a bunch of color framebuffers and then compute lighting with the information in those buffers. Or you might just have a post-process gaussian blur that requires mixing pixels from across both GPUs.
Theoretically, none of this is a problem - you just send the pixels the other GPU needs. In practice even the fastest Nvidia SLI bridge only ran at something like 3.25GB/s and that's not even enough bandwidth to deliver a final 4K 120FPS image, much less transfer every intermediate result from every rendering step to both GPUs. The math gets worse when you start adding more GPUs. It's far easier to send a whole frame to each card, but this adds latency and stuttering[0] because you have to run the game two, three, or even FOUR frames ahead instead of just one.
That being said, there was a way to deliver multi-card rendering on Nvidia hardware, it's just that Nvidia had no interest in shipping Nvlink support in a consumer card because they wanted AI customers to pay more for it. So instead they washed their hands of it and made multi-card rendering an explicit API thing that nobody implements because <1% of people are going to spend $10k on a rig for slightly better framerates. AFAIK if you DO use multi-card rendering this way, you're doing all the synchronization across the main PCIe bus (which is actually more bandwidth than SLI ever had).
[0] Which, funnily enough, is the same problem with DLSS Framegen. Nvidia really, really likes building things that make the FPS number go up without actually delivering a better experience.
> [0] Which, funnily enough, is the same problem with DLSS Framegen. Nvidia really, really likes building things that make the FPS number go up without actually delivering a better experience.
I'd dispute that last part. At the very least, it depends on the game.
Cyberpunk 2077 with 4x frame gen is wonderful. With all the detail settings cranked to the max, it's a gorgeous game, but at that level, it even brings a 5090 to its knees. In 4K, without MFG, I often only get ~40 fps. With 4x frame gen, I get around 140 fps which is a significant improvement to the experience, and I don't even notice the artifacts unless I'm looking REALLY hard for them.
On the other hand, MS Flight Sim 2024 with 4x frame gen looks great unless I enable labels on landmarks and other aircraft. During camera angle changes, they get very noticeably distorted. The cockpit looks fine, though.
I love it! The great 2026 benchmark is a native Turok (I vividly remember that 30fps low poly iguana looking as real as Jurassic Park in my childhood), Unreal and Q3A.
I had that with GTA3: seemed photorealistic at the time.
A bunch of PS2 cards had this effect on me. Fifa 2001, Gran Turismo 3, etc.
Gran Turismo 3 still looks photo realistic!
This is especially true on a CRT. People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.
Even the prior two games had an extremely tasteful use of textures and geometry that just felt right and realistic enough to not break immersion despite the hardware limitations. This era of gaming rightfully and correctly recognized that any form of "realism" is ultimately an impression rather than an objective truth.
Gran Turismo 3 was where I first started experiencing the "uncanny valley" of graphics. The game looked and felt incredible... so incredible that the lack of damage felt like an immersion-breaker in a way I hadn't experienced before.
> People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.
I remember going to an electronics store with my friend. I couldn't figure out why they had a broadcast football game playing on a 15 inch LCD display up front. I assumed it was a game but then watched it for a few cuts and was so certain it was live footage...
It was a madden game on PS2 in demo mode.
Going from software rendering to hardware acceleration back then was good times.
Quake II & IIIa
Tribes & Tribes II
Half-Life, TFC, Counter-Strike
Morrowind
Unreal
Those moments will never return...
Yep, I remember playing everything without a 3D card and then being completely blown away when I got my Voodoo2 and all the pixelation and jerkiness was suddenly gone. I left the little "3DFX" splash screen enabled for a while there just because I was so enamored with the whole experience.
Wait, if single core performance matters, could it be that the MacBook Neo could be a good machine for 86Box? I assume thermal throttling could be a limitation but in theory it should be as fast as an M3 for single core performance.
Author of the article/site here, I have a MacBook neo I could test 86box on with this same build. But practically speaking yes, it has reasonable ST perf and my guess would be it's competitive with the best x86 chips available today for this workload.
It gives me chills when I see the 3dMark 2000 benchmark visuals. I thought it is pure magic when I first saw it. What was a time to be alive!.
Yeah, I still remember the first time I ran glxgears on accelerated hardware and I could not believe my eyes
How's the idle temperature though? In my experience, emulating these, while they may perform well, runs Macs incredibly hot, like, uncomfortably hot to the point of being reported as nearly triple digits according to MacThrottle.
I vaguely remember running a PlayStation emulator (bleem?) on my Pentium III 1Ghz processor.
Once the Mac mini M8 is released, will we be able to emulate a Pentium III which runs PlayStation emulation?
It ran VisualBoyAdvance pretty well! I haven't tried Project64 but I think the emulated Voodoo3 should support Jabos D3D6/7 backend with older versions. Was quite thrilled today to see my article blow up so if there's anything you'd want me to test I have mostly a free weekend.
Total blast from the past. I remember I bought my Voodoo 1. It was the Diamond 3DFX card. I bought it in 1995 and it was amazing. GL was so optimized. For gl quake. Back then Windows, Direct 3D was just slow. But then later Nvidia started to come out with more capable gpus such as TNT and they eventually took over the gaming market.
Glide works, yeah, but check your 86Box dynarec setting first. I had Unreal crawling on an M2 until I realized I was still on the interpreter core.
Why is this better than running Windows 98 on a guest VM (non-emulated) on modern x86 hardware?
Surely a modern hypervisor should be able to emulate a retro Voodoo 3D card.
No modern hypervisors emulate a Voodoo 3D card. The upcoming 86Box release will probably have Riva 128 and ATI Rage 128 emulation as well.
Using an accurate emulation of such a device means you can use the drivers that existed back then that games back then were QA'd on.
Most modern hypervisors aren't built with Windows 98 in mind, either - it's not really what they're for, and a modern Mac can't run an x86 hypervisor anyway.
Second sentence in the article:
> CPU timing, chipset behaviour, ISA and PCI buses, graphics chipsets, sound devices, and disk controllers all matter to getting period software to behave properly.
Because that requires x86 hardware which some people no longer have.
I have not followed up x86 emulation recently, but is it a new project? or a port of bochs for Mac?
86Box has been around for 10 years and it'ss a fork of an even older emulator called PCem which started in 2007. 86Box is an amazing cross-platform project if you want to emulate an entire computer (up to Pentium III era) as acurately as possible.
Ah, those specs will run Need for Speed II smoothly!
NSX !
This is what computers are for.
Oh my got, the floppy disk drive sound, is so accurate, I am in full nostalgia mode. Off on to ebay to buy a real PS2! haha. The pain, the pain of ISA Cards etc. ALthough no physical cuts!
I thought 86Box only emulated binaries, so I was a little confused on how it designates CPU speed and architecture. Good to know though...
That's Box86 [not a joke].
Thanks, you saved me a lot of time.
PII at 600mhz would’ve been an impressive overclock back in the day
Is this written by an LLM? It reads like it.
Emulated Voodoo 3? Does that mean I can run games using Glide?
I'd play Messiah[1] - such a hidden gem
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(video_game)
Available on Gog. Works fine on modern hardware last time I tried.
From my experience, the game crashed sometimes on Windows 7 (on old HP ProBook)
Yes, you can.
I would be interested to see a performance comparison with qemu and softgpu (https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu).
Or a Rosetta-based emulator (like Parallels). But 86Box is going to be very bad there.
While they claim "accuracy" as one of the goals for 86Box, I believe accuracy is overrated in PC emus (you don't really need that much accuracy due to the variety of PC clones, and emus are not that accurate anyway). For me the biggest point for using 86Box over other PC emulators/virtualizers is the large selection of virtual hardware available to emulate, not performance.
86Box is just accurate enough to run the original unmodified firmware. It does not emulate cache and RAM behavior, so you won't get performance-related accuracy. You are likely to succeed in Spectre-like attacks against an emulated 386, which shouldn't be possible on a real thing.
If you don't care and just want to go faster on a modern x86 CPU, you can replace the CPU emulation part of 86Box with a hypervisor. I tried running a Socket 7 motherboard firmware on Linux's KVM - given the chipset emulation is correct, it works: it amusingly identifies an AMD Zen5 running at 3GHz as "Unknown-S CPU at M60MHz" and boots to a DOS prompt.
Kind of proving why accuracy is not really that important for the PC world. Most era firmware would have tried to run on as much variety of machines possible.
Computers got better, true
But those were much cooler than the ones today
Now I want to emulate my dual PIII-450 with an ATI Rage Fury 128 running Windows 2000.
Which motherboard did you have those in? I had a dual socket 370 EPoX board, but I never put a second CPU in it.
Also, sounds like I should work on upstreaming my Rage Fury 128 emulation...and the EPoX SMP emulation...(the perils of too much ADHD and too few tokens)
I don’t really remember what motherboard I had. It definitely didn’t have dual sockets because the first PIII (Katmai) were Slot A devices. I even ran the utility to turn off the controversial unique serial number. I remember having all sorts of trouble after I replaced a processor because it turned out they had different steppings. I complained and made a pain of myself and eventually they replaced the existing unit with an equal stepping. Again, I can’t remember all the details.
Heh I had one of those back in the day with an Intel made L440GX+ and SCSI disks. One of my favourite machines.
Dual processor machines back then were rather exotic. I was coming from a period on BeOS (“one processor per person is not enough!”) and I’ve never really been able to endure non-SMP machines since 1995. It’s common now of course. I had 512 MB of RAM and a pair of 9.4 (?) SCSI disks connected in RAID-0: I liked to live dangerously back in the day. It ended in tears a few times but I also had a 2GB Iomega Jaz drive for backups… yeah… eventually I switched to DVD-R… yeah… there’s holes in my records.
Very cool! Never tried BeOS back in the day. I heard good things though.
Amazing times. I actually upgraded to that from a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 which had dual Pentium Pro 180s in it. Ran NT and occasionally FreeBSD. Cost me a small fortune at the time. Backups here were to a SCSI DLT (can't remember capacity) that was chucked in the trash at work. All it needed was a minor repair.
I highly recommend you give Haiku a spin… the remake 25 years in the making and counting (which is several multiples the actual duration of the system it is “inspired by”, but that’s the nature of emulators and reproductions, isn’t it?). At any rate, it really gives the look and feel of the system as it was back then. The design is somehow peak late nineties distilled down into a powerful concentrate. (Make sure you click and hold shift to move the yellow tabs on the windows around.)
I miss Windows 2000. Win32 was such a good time in desktop computing.
Windows 2000 was some kind of brief apex. I was a beta tester and I saw it mature from ‘NT5’ into what it eventually became. It was too rapidly supplanted by Windows XP. It deserves to be remembered.
I vividly remember the agony of not having an AGP port on my motherboard and being forced to buy Voodoo 3-2000 (PCI). It was not as good as the Voodoo 3-3000, which was AGP, but finally I was able to play Quake2 with 3d acceleration. Good memories.
But can it run Crysis? :-D
It can run Doom for sure.
Hardly, given that the hardware predates the game.
I think most games are written to run on hardware that predates them.
Are we sure that's true for Crysis
Kind of, while chronological true, that misses the hardware configuration that the games expect to be available as means to execute their binary code.
A dual CPU board with a late 1GHZ Pentium III and a good video card might run it at lowest settings.
That isn't the hardware being discussed here.
Quake party!!!!
Cool now do it reverse. How does an M6 perform on a pentium II?