I'd just like to point out that the 5.22 drivers that were the beta drivers just got renamed to the official drivers due to 3dfx. Nvidia was rushed into releasing them and it pisses me off! In windows2000 with the detonator 2 drivers (5.22) if you select the TV out function, you have to reboot your pc. then when win2k starts back up (on your tv) if you want to view the desktop on your Monitor again, you have to reboot. THAT IS PLAIN STUPID! I mean come on, one of the best things about win2k is that it requires far less reboots than win9x. Come on Nvidia, get it right. I want to watch my DVD movies on my TV, but I don't want to have to reboot to do it...

why? because they believe in open source... i am not "stuck on linux" or whatever.. it just happens to be the OS i use. people were complaining that 3dfx didn't have banshee drivers for windows 2000... that is why i like them -- they have opensource drivers.. -- so i don't have to wait on them (like i do with nDiva) for binary only drivers that support only one version of an OS. i hope you know what this means.. and if you don't, then that is okay.

ctrl-alt-get linux :)

me too. My Voodoo 3 in Linux owns. 3dfx forever.

Still waiting on Windows 2000 drivers for my Monster Fusion. My next card is going to be nVidia.

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! they've been out for a LONG TIME... www.3dfxgamers.com goto drivers banshee for win2k sheesh man waht an idiot.. anyway 3dfx is lame go NVidia!

haha.. you sound like jeff k

I have seen two comparisons thus far between the new Geoforce 2 card and 3dfx Voodoo 5 5000 and the fps were about the same on both, perhaps 1 percent in Geoforce favor..

The fact is though that the Voodoo 5 5500 is selling for the same as Geoforce 2 here in sweden and that one should be a little bit faster than the geoforce card and it has better FSAA support so I don't see why everyone should run out and buy a Geoforce card.

The fact is also that 3dfx is the underdog now and who want a situation with only Nvidia calling all the shots ?

3Dfx put themselves in the position of underdog. They were top dog back in the Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 days, but they screwed it up by not advancing the hardware. They just reworked what they had, added more chips to the card, and called it a new product. Isn't the only difference between the Voodoo4, Voodoo5 5500, and Voodoo5 6000 the number of chips and amount of RAM? You know....Apple used to be on top once...

Apple on top? Never. They were always overpriced, hence they could never compete with PCs.

nVidia is number one right now, because they didn't try to shortchange the consumer with second rate hardware. 3dfx was ditched by consumers because they got tired of getting barely enough. Nonetheless, visual quality will always lag in the 3dfx products due to their market mentality that the consumers don't need high quality visuals and only want speed.

What would you rather have? A phong shaded cube rotating and bouncing around the screen at 100fps, or a Jurassic Park dinosaur fully textured and bump mapped at 32fps. I'd rather have the 32fps dino.

When I said on top once, I was referring back to the days when they were the only real personal computer system available. 3Dfx used to be the only consumer-level 3D accelerators available. Both have screwed up and put themselves in the position of underdogs.

Yea, I agree with him, they screwed up what they started. They had a chance to be bigger and better then, what they will probably ever be.

"back to the days when they were the only real personal computer system available"? Huh? PCs predated Macs by several years, and had a larger market share than Macs even back then.

Actually 3Dfx has concentrated on visual quality with the Voodoo5s. They added the T-buffer effects and hardware FSAA, as well as eventually adding 2k x 2k texture sizes and 32-bit color. According to many reviews I've seen on the Voodoo5 5500 and GeForce 2 GTS, the Voodoo5 5500 looks better and has a better FSAA implementation than the GeForce 2 GTS.

Yeah PCs did have most of the market share. I have some old IBM PCs with 8088s sitting in a closet somewhere.

Exactly the new Voodoo cards graphic output looks at least as good as the Geoforce does if not better and the claims I see here is more true of the old Voodoo 3 cards that really was only a beefed up Voodoo 2 with 2d.

I don't see anything revolutionary in the new Geoforce card either more like what Voodoo 3 was over Voodoo 2. More Ram and fater CPU and so on nothing to get too excited about..

Wow - you must be young if you think the Mac is as far back as Apple goes - I was playing text based adventure games on a IIE 20 years ago - back then, Apples ruled and PC drooled.

Hi all

What they refering to bak then is that.. Back in 8088 or 80286 era,
P.C. was not as popular as a Apple. The OS running in p.c. those days still using text based command (MS-DOS v2, 3, 4, 5) whereas Apple started to use GUI based OS. Those days, Apple are popular due to it is good in Graphics processing and Multimedia development and also powerful. P.C. was use as word processor, dbase, lotus 123 and some lousy 320x200 resolution games.

Along the time, Apple and P.C. were starting to evolve but somehow P.C. evolve faster than Mac. Mac still popular as Graphics and Multimedia development. P.C. start to get popular for the CPU processing and hugh range of s/w.

Because P. C. is starting to get popular also cheaper, (U can assembler your own P.C. and customize your P.C. internal parts also)
More and more s/w, gamer and hardware started to develop/produce items for P. C. (Blame it on the Apple for not releasing the license for manufacture Machintosh computer and s/w)

Computer games start to evolve from text, to 320x200 res to higher and higher res with more colors and finally into 3D enviroment. When VL bus and PCI started to exist, game developer start to develop games in 3D also.

More and more hiRes games and 3D games were developed (pushing the hardware limitation envelop) causing the h/w developer to come out more powerful hardware. (Therefore we have Trio64, VirGE, Rendition an so on)

When 3dFx releases Voodoo 1, the Quake 2 game looks impressive. At that time, no body can beat Voodoo for the speed and CPU independence.

U can say it is due to 3DFx fault to to improve it from 16bits colors to 24bits or higher. Games like Quake 2 or Unreal started to support 24 bits already causing hardware developer to come out more powerful graphics card. Therefore they developed AGP to push the bandwidth and memory limitation. A lot of graphics developer started to develop and produce 24 bits color capable graphics card. (ATI, Matrox, S3 and so on) 3DFx start to release Voodoo2 and so on but it is STILL limited to 16 bits color. People start to look on other manufactorer like ATI or Matrox.

NVidia start to develop riva 128 but it is not as fast as Voodoo 2 or the rest. When they release TNT1, it became instant popular for the speed and 24 bits supported. Again, Voodoo 2 or 3 still using 16 bits!!!

Not untill now that the 3Dfx start to realise that 24 bit or higher is more important than speed that they start to develop a 24 bit GPU but I feel that they are way too late.

I haven't see Voodoo 4 or 5 in actio yet so I have no comment whether they are better or not.

Hornet

Hi all
Sorry for some typo and missing word mistake. The major mistake is
U can say it is due to 3DFx fault NOT TO improve it from 16bits colors
to 24bits or higher. Games like Quake 2 or Unreal started to support 24 bits already causing hardware developer to come out more and more powerful graphics card. Therefore they developed AGP to push the bandwidth and memory limitation. A lot of graphics developer started to develop and produce 24 bits color capable graphics card. (ATI, Matrox, S3 and so on) 3DFx start to release Voodoo2 and so on but it is STILL limited to 16 bits color. People start to look on other manufactorer like ATI or Matrox.

Hi all
Sorry for some typo and missing word mistake. The major mistake is
U can say it is due to 3DFx fault NOT TO improve it from 16bits colors
to 24bits or higher. Games like Quake 2 or Unreal started to support 24 bits already causing hardware developer to come out more and more powerful graphics card. Therefore they developed AGP to push the bandwidth and memory limitation. A lot of graphics developer started to develop and produce 24 bits color capable graphics card. (ATI, Matrox, S3 and so on) 3DFx start to release Voodoo2 and so on but it is STILL limited to 16 bits color. People start to look on other manufactorer like ATI or Matrox.

If 3Dfx thinks that putting four heatsinks and a power supply for the Voodoo 5 will make it look powerful, well they better think it over! It increases the price by A LOT! And what if people don't have such a large case and the card would bump the harddrive? It's plain rediculous! nVidia's GeForce 256 and GeForce 2 GTS both are smaller, only have one heatsink, and are way more powerful! Who needs that bad T-Buffer technology they've been spending countless hours on? The motion blur in fact makes your games look laggy! It's just a replication of polygons with different levels of translucency. If nVidia were to make motion blur, it would be per-pixel translucency lavels. Blah, 3Dfx is screwing everything up!

Is it just me, or is the s*** slingning less interesting these days now nVidia is a teflon coated Microsoft buddy?

You are an idiot if I ever saw one.

yup Agent31 is an idiot, perhaps the biggest idiot. This moron can't keep his hatred of Microsoft away from a business partner of MS even if that business partner produced the best product for the consumer in specific industries.

As I see it, 3dfx made a few tactical mistakes that made them the underdog as it seems.
First, they didn't sell their chipset to vendors anymore.
They should have notice that selling your chip makes OTHER companies "advertise" your product.
On the "Voodoo 2 days", Moster3D,Pure3D and many others did their best to promote ... 3dfx.
Well, this prettly much explains itself, now, the OTHER mistake was to release voodoo4/5 together.
One should know that gamer would want to get the best product at a given time, which makes the v4 a total loss from the beginning.
So, people would look at the price of the best voodoo5 which was about one trillion bucks if I recall ;-)
Not to mention that when they released the v5, they were already talked about the "next thing" they will release - which makes people go: "I'll wait and in the meantime I might get myself a nice GeForce"
Can they bail out of it? - Yes. (by using their brains correctly)
Will they? - Doesn't seem like it for now.

3dfx can say anything they want but users just not buy their product

As a previous voodoo 3 owner, i have seen what it can do, i have also seen the Voodoo 5 and GeForce256 & GeForce 2 GTS, I must say though the Geforce will last much longer with it's T&L Lighting, for the next Generation of games and possibly the generation after that. The only thing wrong with the Geforce at the moment is the FSAA which newer drivers will hopefully fix, all i can say is 3dfx are going Down in a big way, and they dont seemed worried

Yea, this article reminds me of something I wanted to do... go out an buy a new Video card, my TNT is getting outdated... GeForce? GeForce2?.. just say no to 3Dfx

3dfx is still doing business eh? With who?

hehe

Themselves! LOL =)
I'll bet the developers are so lame they pay to buy the product they created themselves hehe.

ouch

hehe

Interestingly, NVIDIA did officially release the 5.22 drivers today (or yesterday), featuring FSAA. So this voids 3dfx's argument.

Interestingly enough, Nvidia only seemed to actually release "official" drivers when this argument from 3dfx came out - before they were only classed as beta, leaked, or whatever else you wished to call them except official.

Obviously. But they were probably going to release them anyway in the coming days/weeks (5.22 has been available in beta for weeks now). The 3dfx argument just accelerated their schedule.

Indeed. The main thing I disliked about Nvidia was their total lack of "official" driver support. The official drivers were months old, and the only alternatives were unsupported "leaked" drivers...But, as you say, the 3dfx comments accelerated their intention to release them as official. Bout time to..

I agree. But in my experience, Nvidia's "leaked" drivers are usually more stable than other manufacturers' "official" drivers even. So I'm not complaining...

Unoffical or not, at least we have access to new drivers quite often. It takes forever for 3Dfx to get some out. And their trick with the Voodoo2 and Win2K makes them look pretty bad.

They are, aren't they :) - I remember downloading some Voodoo 3 drivers when I had it, and actually experienced a "major" slow-down with those - never gone back a driver revision before then, or since...the Nvidia ones have always worked perfectly, EXCEPT for having to mess about turning off texture compression, makes my Q3 games look ugly.