3DFX sold out to STB back before the V3 hit. The problem with this is it slaughtered the OEM market. Being an owner of a Canopus Pure3DII, I was kind of disappointed by this because I'm not too impressed with STB's regular video cards let alone.

Besides, Canopus strapped 6MB onto the voodoo 1, which put them on the map in some form. This kind of insanity is what made the market interesting.

3DFX should have stayed a chip vendor, not turned into a card company. Give a creative mind the tools, and say 'have at it'. You could be amazed at the results.

Incorrect... #dfx did not sell out to STB. 3dfx bought STB... STB is now 3dfx. They did this so they could manufacture card with the chip set they created.

hey? why are you talking about such lame chips like VSA100 ?? when the glace3d (www.bitboys.fi) is realeased it will kick both 3dfx's and nvidia's a** !

Looks good, but reminds me of what happened to me afew of weeks ago:
I icq a friend asking if he knows of a good tv tuner+video card combo, since the Voodoo 3500 video capture resolution sucks big time. He Quickly responds with a "ASUS V6600"(link) with a new GeForce witch is the most powerfull Graphics card avalible!
So after looking at all the features I spend $244 and get it, Little did I know all the problems, problems with K6-2+3, problems restarting with Ali, and the card not working at all! under the ETEQ chipset(my favorite of them all).
I wouldn't rush out and get something totally new(agien) If so i would quickly test it out and return it if "unstaisfyed" as I am with my GeForce, but for now I will keep it (not in my main computer) as a tv capture card. depending on the prise of this Glace3D I might get it, but(depending on the prise and features between the two) I am leaning tord the VooDoo5 6000 as my next card.

Voodoo5 6000 will be quite expensive. It will also be one hell of a card.

yeh about $600 but it looks like it will be worth it...

No gaming video card is worth $600...

i have been playing around with my TNT2 ULTRA card and its smoking anything else that i can get my hands on(excluding the GeForce). the only cards that 3Dfx has made that i'm happy with are the Voodoo 2s. i still run games using the voodoo 2 in SLI mode whenever i get tired of running the TNT2. i say that the Voodoo 4-5 might be some competitions for the GeForce right now, but seeing how long its taking 3Dfz to release the cards puts them behind nVidia. i am very happy with the drivers that nVidia has put out, ever since the Rive 128.

That one word has haunted 3DFX for years. Creative outdoes the competition. Frame graphic data rate is a lot faster with Creative TNT2. Please........Voodoo can hit the road!!!!! There gonna need some magic to keep up with Creative.

Creative doesn't do s***. Hell, Creative has Voodoo2, Voodoo3, etc. cards out there.

you mean nVidia. nVidia makes the TNT(2) Chips. Creative makes cards with them on there, but they are DEFINATELY not the only ones, or even the best ones.

Personally, I think 3dfx cards are exellent, I just got a GeForce 256 with a tv tuner from ASUS and is sucks! I would estimate a 10% to maby 20% increase in perfomance, but the thing that hits me really hard is...
The drivers suck! (or maby just the card?) It is pritty much the same in openGL but on my desktop it takes 4-5 seconds litterally to refresh! it gets the text quickly but the icons dissapear(for the 5 seconds)! plus there only now kicking out win2k beta drivers while 3dfx has had beta's out for a wile and now has final drivers! Back to openGL and Quake3 the only thing I can do with the geforce is up the detail without geting choppy,
and its probably just the drivrs but has anyone noticed the limited usability(at least on win2k) sofar? doesnt work at all on ETEQ chipsets, and on my Ali Chipset mainboard the computer restarts when I enter opengl mode! Via on my Tyan works although the mainboard constently freezes in openGL and dvd with any video card, probably needs to be replaced. Yes U have tryed all versions of beta and hacked drivers, Geforce 256 and the ASUS ones, all the same result.
I think I am going to give the card to my little sister with her 233mhz.

Ok look at it this way, the way the companies see it. This is the first release of the GeForce, "first" there will be many after it, there is actually already a second release, with the DDR memory. The Companies will capitalize off of there product as much as possible. so therefore they will break it off to the public in small pieces. Getting them more money, for longer periods of time. In turn giving them more time to develop there next release what ever it may be. As for your problem with the Geforce. I can tell you now to trash the ALI chipset board, as for they are truely crap. I had one and a Voodoo2 board and it would only peak out at 38 fps. I eventually tracked it down to the Motherboard, got a new one and was instantly getting up to 80fps. after i saw the bench, I busted the ALI in half and out the window it went. I would suggest u do the same with yours. for thats all there worth.

As you can see I am quite savy with computers, but any of my opinions I may say are from pure expierience. Also, if you dont want that Geforce, I'll be more than happy to take it off your hands, I'll even pay for shipping!

first of all im pretty sure youre system is a amd k6-2 ou 3
runnig the ali chipset and you should have known that 3dfx graphics are the best for that kind of configuration
conclusion BYE a g** d*** Athlon ou a PIII and get informed before saying nonsense OK? test your geforce card on an k7 ou pIII and let us know what happened CYA
(ali chipset for the amds [k6 series] always ad probs runnig tnt based cards and I suppose the same applies for the geforce) learned something dude ? sorry for my english

I don't know about the rest of you... newbys, but you aren't looking at the big picture. 3dfx set the 3d standards of today with the release of the Voodoo. If it wern't for them the 3d gameing revolution may have never happened. Much like Creatives sb16... one of the first sound cards ever... they are under fire because a new chip manufacturer is looking to take over ther role as king of the montain. Have you ever noticed that EVERY new 3d card that is released is benchmarked aginst a Voodoo card right of the bat? As far as the Voodoo3 as a product, I love it, and I am not just saying that. I have both a TNT & TNT2, they are also great cards that in some ways (opengl) kill the Voodoos. Again 3dfx set the standard, the TNTs have great opengl support but as far as driver support for alternate OSs they lack. A voodoo card is every bit a 3d monster under almost every OS, linux, OS2, NT, 2000, 9x, MacOS, Unix, BeOS, etc thanks to the portablitiy of glide. You get any other card away from a Windows machine and it is just a video card. In conclusion... long live the king!

Will it do 3D in a window?
Will it's OpenGL be worth bothering with?
If its fill rate and pixel rate are so high will there be a 3D Studio Max Heidi driver for it?

Anybody?

Yes it will run in windows...
And OpenGl drivers has priority over Glide, so Voodoo 4-5 shouldn't have any problems with OpenGl games...
I dont know about Heidi support, but I sure hope they can come up with a solution. The 32 chip card has to have it... :-)

Toke

I didn't quite get your answer to the window question... Do you mean the OS? Sorry my english isn't so good.

I heard from a 3DFX press release a while ago that the VSA-100 was just another extension to the original voodoo core. If this is the case then I can't see any point in it. For my own personal uses I need 32bit opengl in a window and previous voodoo just can't provide it.

You min 32-bit color depth ? V4&5 will have that - better late than never ;-)

Windowed OpenGL? That's a driver, not hardwade question question. I hope they finally finish their OpenGL. It's rwally hight time for that.

JP.

I must say that nVidia are extremely good for driver support. I have an 'old' TNT1 and I can still download updated drivers every so often. 3Dfx lovers will probably be jumping around in their jocks saying 'thats cos nvidia are constantly fixing bad drivers' or something to that effect.

You can't compare Nvidias drivers vs. 3dfx because Nvidia has one driver for all their TNTx based cards. Its basicly the same chips they have used for a couple of years. This is good for us hungry users who want drivers... :-)
3DFX is another story. The chips are one many boards the same, but since fx. V3 3500 has build in tv-tuner and such, they have to make other drivers to that card.
When TNT based cards has extra features the drivers to support them is made by the card makers, like Asus...

Toke

Perhaps you could try actually reading about the technology at the website, like anyone with a brain would do. One of the first things I do before flaming a new piece of hardware or software, is actually go and learn about it. Then I'm not talking out of my ass. By the way, the Voodoo 4 has the new chip, and the Voodoo 5 has 2 of them, with twice the VRAM. And it all looks very promising. And saying that Nvidia sucks because 3DFX doesn't, or vice-versa, is more than a little childish. Sorry about the rant, but I'm exposed to stupidity every day, and I can only take so much.

umm, i already did, is kinda why one of those posts down there confused me about not believing it cuz it wasn't on 3dfx's site.
so hope you not talking to me suckah
hehe

Yeah the V5 does have 2 processers that are SLId. But this does come at a price. I believe the V5 will ahve a 64 meg and 128 meg versin, with the 64 meg version only utilizes 32 meg for textures,a dn the 128 meg version ony utilizes 64 meg of ram. Why is this you may ask? Becuase of the fact that they are SLId. I'm guessing that the 2 processers are a pipeline... i could be wrong on the pipeline, but each processer gets anice equal sum of ram.

is this the same old junk the keep putting out? Low quality visuals and high frame rates? Or have they tried to do this round with high quality visuals and high framerates?

3dfx, you guys are viewed as the S3 Virge of the 3d accelerator maket since Voodoo2. Hope these new versions show that you are in it for the consumer and not just your bottom line.

left out a y and an r i think

hehe

Their new graphics chips, from the hype, seem to be a bit better than the GeForce 256, but with a bunch of them, they should steal the show. It's a technology in it's early stages (this implementation is), but come summer, this product should mature into something dangerous. Maybe T-buffer'll be slow, nobody's making you use it...

If the drivers don't support SMP then this is just another piece of beefed-up piece of crap. The Voodoo 3 3000 is the last 3dfx card I will buy as long as they fail to support SMP. GeForce 256 is in da house.

geforces dont support dual monitor - so atm if you want decent gfx hardware you can either have smp (geforce) or dual monitor (v3)

why do neither cater for the full market, im sure it wouldnt have been too much hassle for either of them.

Yeah, I hear all that!

The article says that they will be available to purchase this spring. Maybe better wording would be that they were shown off today at the CeBit convention.

Voodoo 4 and 5 are to support T-Buffer right? From all I've seen so far, T-Buffer makes it look like you're playing on a really slow and lagged system (eg, motion blur). I've even seen videos. It's not cool at ALL!

T-buffer will be available only in Voodoo5 (not 4). Anyway, you will have the option to turn it off, the company promises.

JP.

Oh well, thats the end of support for Voodoo 3 cards then...

(Voodoo2 owner)

I would've heard something on the bigger sites as well as 3dfx's site. I just talked to one of their PR managers today and they said it was undetermined.

This has to be BS... They haven't even demonstrated the cards yet... Some of the major sites has to comfirm this before I believe!

Toke

Voodoo 4 and 5 cards have beend demo'ed in Denmark and German expos already.

they have demonstrated the card at the cebit behind the scene, you can read the article here http://www.heise.de/news...er/data/gs-26.02.00-000/
the results are very poor ;-)

I would've heard something on the bigger sites as well as 3dfx's site. I just talked to one of their PR managers today and they said it was undetermined.

3dfx "had" there spot in the sun. Nvidia is where its at. I'll admin the Voodoo2 was a kickass card, it revolutionized 3d gaming. If 3dfx wants there spot in the sun back, there gonna have to do better than implementing T&L & pumping up the RAM on there cards. Thats why Nvidia is better, they actually took there time and developed a kick a** card with "new" technology. DOWN WITH 3DFX.

dont you hate biast and ignorant people?

I remember the time when it was Nvidia fans who called 3dfx fans "biased". :-)

Anyway the benches are here to show that the new 3DFX cards lag behind the latest graphics cards like the Geforce256.
I think it is great time for 3DFX to try to develop new technologies and architectures instead of adding more and more of the same chips on the cards along with memory.
Hmmm and also to begin thinking 32 bits ...
If, as it has already been said, 3DFX was innovative and interesting in the beginning with their 3DFX and 3DFX 2 cards, they relied upon their past reputation and basked in sun. Even when you reflect on their SLI architecture you cannot but come to the conclusion that everything was late-coming even though the technology was implemented in DirectX 6 ...

Matrox always has good innovations ( cf bump mapping ) but when their products are released it is far too late and their cards are completely overcome by their competitors.

I think a general brainstorming and deep reflection has to be made on graphics cards and the 3D market. To the benefit of the consumers AND the manufacturers.

Waiting comments and reactions from everyone.

Sincerely yours.

yea, i agree, ignorant people do suck. Although I am not one of those people. I have had a Voodoo2, and work on computers all day long. I do it for a living. And I get plenty of computers coming through with V3's. Not to mention half of my friends have V3's. I've played games on them and am no where's near impressed with them. Thing is, I only know one person who still has a V3, all others have gotten GeForce's, (an Nvidia card). Point is, I know damn well what Im talking about, the question is, do you?

. "Thing is, I only know one person who still has a V3, "
hahaha the person he referes to is me!!
thing is my V3 3000 was the frist 3d accelerater card i ever bought. And i am fine with it. sure it's not the fastest or best but it works for me. but ive seen my freidns Ge-force's and are sold on them.

3dfx only sucks becasue their drivers don't support SMP.

smp?
what do you mean by smp?
it dont matter what card you have, they will run on multi proc systems....

Symmetrical Multiprocessing. I know that the card works under a multi-processor system, however, I'm disappointed that 3dfx hasn't released the supported SMP video drivers for Q3. Without those drivers I can't use the "r_smp 1" command to enable the SMP support for Q3. Q3 needs the SMP enabled video card drivers to work correctly. At least Nvidia knows something about decent driver support.

3dfx hasn't released any benchmarks yet. What they are demoing is first silicon and drivers aren't close to being done. If you are comparing a V3 to a GeForce you are an idiot because they are totally different generation cards, so of course the GeForce will win!

-brian, celeron_64@msn.com

CeBIT Highlights 10:26 AM (your time) Dave "Octane" Morrison (14)

Finally! I've been waiting to get first reports from CeBit and FastGraphics happens to be the first one in. Being FastGraphics they talked with all the IHV's about their next gen stuff, including 3dfx. They got a chance to check out the VSA-100 in _very_ early silicon clocked at 100Mhz. Not the most promising of reports, but hopefully 3dfx can do some serious bug fixes before launch. Here's a snip:
Like the Mac version of SW Racer, Quake III was also using full-scene anti aliasing. Head to head was a GeForce card, so 3dfx showed us the difference between Voodoo 5 with anti aliasing and GeForce without it. Unfortunately the GeForce card was running at 32 bits, whereas the Voodoo 5 was only at 16 (it crashed at 32), but the image quality differences were quite substation. When we forget about the anti aliasing, it's clear that the colors on the GeForce were much brighter, and the texture detail also seemed better. I'm not drawing any conclusions just yet, but from what I've seen so far I think that 3dfx will still not be at the same level as the competition when it comes to pure image quality. We'll have to wait and see though.

Lets hope they can get 32-bit color up to par. Check out the full CeBIT report right here.

This came from www.voodooextreme.com

crashed at 32 bit I rest my case

3dfx is not so bad dude
what is important is if youre having fun playing your q3 ou UT
on lower systems 3dfx kicks nvidias a** big but i admit that i prefer nvidia because the geforce realy is fantastic 3dfx was the intel of 3d graphics but they got sloopy and got passed by nvidia kind of like the athlon is kicking PIII in the but but remenber its not over until the fat lady sings

Geez you guys are so ****ing lame, you act like kids
buy what ever card suits you and stop making all these stupid comparisons who really gives a **** if your d*** is 2cm shorter than mine or fords are better than chevs common grow up all these cards are of great quality so buy what suits U and be happy
All the cards are getting better all the time so thats good for us end users
my 2 cents :)

hear hear
well its hard to stop pimpley teenages fight over name calling

hey a smart one for a change thats what I said, everything as its ups and downs the important thing is playing and having fun, and not worrying if yer pal as a better one than yours, because at the end their the ones who will fill the pockets nvidia ,3dfx etc....

as suprising as it may sound, some people really like to argue. It makes you think about what you are talking about, so next time dont jump to flame someone. Talk back to them on there own level, give em the facts. People like me live for it.