I remember getting my first 3dFX card for Quake in 1996, it was such an amazing difference. We all had PCs for 'college', so we were at the birth of 3D PC Gaming. Such a difference to Wolfenstein just 4 years earlier.
I managed to convince my, then, wife hat I needed a pc for a course I was doing at college. he he. 30 years later it's now my job and my hobby. I never leave my pc...
I didn't get a 3DFX card until 1998, but Quake was the first game I played with it, and it absolutely blew my mind. So smooth! Tomb Raider 2 was also one of the first games I played with the card, and again it was just amazing how much better it was.
@@saitama3135 Mystique was great for 2D image quality and for the 3D games it supported, it worked very well. But it lacked bi-linear filtering. Didn't matter in many games, I think the Matrox version of Mechwarrior 2 was the best of them all, and MotoRacer ran great with a Mystique, but the card wasn't supported much or for long. VooDoo was better. I got a Mystique first, and then a VooDoo to run alongside it.
I remember my first Voodoo card. I'd come straight from PS1. Loaded up Half Life. Sat watching what I thought was a cut scene, then realised it was active and I could move around! The leap was huge.
A defining moment for games. The day 1 version of Tomb Raider was a flawed masterpiece. The Core Design team didn't have a great reputation for graphics and it showed. However there was no denying the gameplay was a step forward. Then it go 3Dfx support. My particular card was badged as an Orchid Righteous 3D but it used an early Voodoo chipset. Inside the box was a copy of Tomb Raider so with no particular expectations of anything special I installed it. I remember wondering if my save games would be recognised. I was about halfway in and I didn't fancy having to restart. I launched the game. The sludgy pixellated mess that used to be Lara was gone. Things were a lot smoother as well. Now you could actually interact with water and the backgrounds were free of smearing. I never did find out if my old saves worked.
My first video card was a voodoo banshee, and the very first game I remember running on it was Unreal 1, this was probably 1999. That intro, with the camera flying around a castle, in 1024x768, running at 60fps smoothly, was absolutely mesmerizing... It was a massive jump in quality.
From my memory, the guys at Epic took the effort to overly-optimize the software rendering so those without 3D acceleration in their systems could play the game thru software with a way more stable framerate and very nice details, for example the reflexions are rendered in both hardware and software. Also the sunsets in Unreal are mesmerizing, even to this day.
@@giertox8737 Voodoo Banshee allowed 1280 by 960 on my setup back then and could deliver playable framerates up to 1024 by 768. Unreal ran perfectly in 800 by 600 depending on the processor (Pentium II recommended) and with around 30 fps in 1024 by 768. It had 16 megs of VRAM. Maybe you are confusing it with Voodoo Rage? Voodoo Banshee was not that bad. Of course on average it was slightly slower than a Voodoo 2 12 MB due to the lacking second texturing unit and it needed patches for a lot of games to run fine (like Unreal). But it had 16 MB and was quite cheap and didn‘t rely on a high end CPU like Nvidias Riva TNT to run fast. And you didn‘t need a 2D video card which made it pretty cost-efficient in a gaming rig. I visited my first LAN party in the beginning of 1999 with a Voodoo Banshee and people where surprised how crisp and smooth Unreal was delivered because they had myths about the Banshee in their minds.
I had a P75 at the time, and had pretty awful preformance in software rendering as you'd imagine. When I dropped my 3DFX in.... WOW!! It was one of the big jaw drop moments you only get once in while. Absolutely stunning 30fps, no problem.
Didn't think the P75 would deliver 30fps. I remember how my friend bought the Voodoo card with money his dad gave him. I was quite jealous because he could play any game with good visuals and performance.
I had a top of the ranged Pentium 200, having had a terrible AMD-PR-133 (which was an AMD 686 100Mhz rip off) that was really bad at floating point (and therefore Quake). My performance was probably similar or worse to an Intel P75. So I went all out and got a £200 Pentium 200Mhz. I already had 60-90fps in Quake 1 in 320x200 with that CPU, depending on the map. So when I got a VooDoo and ran GLQuake, I actually lost FPS (but in a higher resolution with added eye candy). For deathmatch, I still used software 320x200. But for single player I'd run the Glide version. I think one of the reasons 3Dfx was so loved was because it did allow slower PC's, like the P75, P90, P120 etc - to eliminate that CPU bottleneck. Other 3D cards were tied much more closely to your CPU performance.
Tomb Raider is locked at software 30fps you didn't know that? was pointless to investigate further. I know our ego wants to be period correct as well but Voodoo1 was widely popular in 1997 where already was Pentium 2 available. V1 has short lifespan and soft support, your best bet to try memory mod is Quake1 and 2 and better cpu to give 3dfx some room. I would personally go with Pentium2 400-450, 128 sdram, Matrox millenium 1 or 2 and modded 8mb sst-1.
you should test the voodoo 8mb with unreal, halflife, quake2, turok, carmageddon 2 and see how it compares to the og 4mb. Especially with different cpus!
If you do not have the correct driver, which is written for 8MB usage, the difference is not really noticable (if you check the graphs, the drops of 4MB, 6MB or 8MB configuration are very similar). if you use AA, the more memory if beneficial for the performance.
I'd like to see a benchmark of SVGA software mode in Tombraider, going from the minimum required CPU (Pentium 60Mhz) to the first CPU capable of hitting that 30fps cap (probably a Pentium 2 350Mhz or so). That would be super interesting.
I will never forget being blown away by my first experience of Tomb Raider in 1998 on my 350 MHz Intel Pentium II with 32 MB SD RAM and 4MB Cirrus Logic 3D AGP Graphics Card. System Bus ran at 100 MHz on the Gigabyte Motherboard. And then I upgraded it with an extra 32 MB SDRAM and a Matrox Millennium G400 Graphics Card with 16 MB of Graphics Memory. And a Creative Sound Blaster Live! PCI Sound Card and the Quadrophonic Cambridge Audio FPS1000 Sound System. The Environmental Audio with the quality of the Subwoofer was as incredible as the 3D Graphics ! I thought the Resolution was higher than 640x480 VGA. Super VGA at 800x600 was fairly common at that point, and 1024x768 not a complete impossibility. I remember also having Tomb Raider 2 and Tomb Raider 3, but I never found the Puzzles and Level Design to be quite as good as the first game. Did the sequels add Higher Resolution Graphics ? And any extra Graphics Features such as Environment Bump Mapping that was built into the Matrox Millennium G400 ?
Tomb Raider was bought on day one by my friend from a reccomendation of mine because I'd read a review in PC Zone. We went to the video game shop and he bought a bunch of games, including TR. He had a Pentium 166MMX at the time, and even in software mode the game was visually impressive. Diving into the pool of water from 50m up was an insane gamer moment. We looked at the game in SVGA mode too but the framerate tanked to under 10fps. Later that year though, we both bought a Matrox Mystique and the game was fully playable in 640x480, so we ran through the game again. The following year with our 3Dfx VooDoo cards, through the first game and Tomb Raider 2. I always kept my Mystique as a 2D card, and for the Matrox version of Mechwarrior 2 which was by far the best version of that game back in the 90's. The Mystique Tomb Raider patch was also extremely well optimized and, even though it lacked the bilinear filtering of the VooDoo card, I often used the Matrox exe instead of the Glide version.
@@j.vonhogen9650 Dude its a video game! It's not REAL! And Lara can do it, as long as you held the key to make the dive animation, even though she still screams she enters the water like a graceful penguin.
@@TheVanillatech- Wait, what? This is just a video game?? This is not real?? No way!! I apologize for the misunderstanding, I really thought this was real footage of a real action hero diving into the water in a real underground temple complex. My mistake! It doesn't change anything though, since the height still looks 15m at most, not anywhere near your estimate of 50m, which was the point I was trying to make. Anyway, thanks for the penguin related info. It really helps! ;-)
@@j.vonhogen9650 When I was a kid, about 7 or 8, we went on vacation with another family. My mother had become friends with this other woman, and that meant she and her family, her husband and son, were invited along with us. I remember, in Malta, we went into Valetta one night and ended up at some carnival / fair. They had a huge VR machine that you went into, strapped youself inside, which had a giant screen and the whole thing moved around. It was a virtual reality rally drive, and it was very exciting. What happened was, that family we travelled with, well the husband and dad, he was a fucking moron. He was the kind of dude that NOBODY liked. He came into the machine with my brother and myself and, once strapped in, he started talking out loud to the other 11 or so people paying for the experience. He was criticizing EVERY LITTLE THING the driver was doing. "He's in the wrong gear! He changed too early! He shouldn't be turning like that! He's not a good driver! If he did that again his engine would blow!". On and on and on. In the end, we all wanted to hang him. Proper dick, you see? Same kinda dick that goes in search of hyperbolic comments regarding video games from yesteryear and argues with them. Don't be that dick. Dick.
@@TheVanillatech- Oh, I see what this is really about. You are not mad at me, you are mad at the father of that family who b@nged your mom during that vacation in Malta! It must have been really traumatizing for you to be in that same hotelroom every night pretending to be asleep! Really disturbing memories, I'm sure. Yuck! I'm not an expert, but you may want to try psychoanalytic therapy to overcome your Oedipus complex before you may hurt someone. You are obviously full of anger and anxiety, and I do feel sorry for your pain and suffering, but psychological projection won't help you deal with your past. Lara Croft is not your mom, and your mom's boyfriend has probably already moved on and doesn't even remember your mother and her emotionally neglected son. It's time to let it go and live your own life, as long as it lasts. Who knows, maybe you will figure out how to live a meaningful life without feeling rejected and without constantly thinking about those horrifying moments in that dark hotelroom in Malta. Just remember that you are amazing and unique! You can do anything if you just put your mind to it, like jumping from a 50m high cliff without any consequence whatsoever! I wish you all the best. P.S. You've signed your comment with "Dick", is that really your name, or is that just your Freudian way of fighting the demons of your past?
Dude, I was there back in the day. I was a teenager back then which was the prime age group to be for PC gaming in the late 90s. I had Voodoo Banshee with Cyrix 686. I remember antialiasing is like RTX mode on back in the day. It was one of those luxury graphical mode nobody bothered to turn on.
I played this game with software render until I got my first GPU which was a Riva 128 based STB Velocity 128 and soon after the card was obsolete and I bought my first Voodoo based card. This game was stunning and another game I wish people would review more of is Drakan Order of the Flame. That was a very amazing looking game on the voodoo cards at the time. I loved exploring and flying around on a dragon through the game.
I had a Pentium 200 (vanilla not MMX) and a Matrox Mystique. A few months into 1997 I bought a 3Dfx card but kept the Mystique as a 2D card, though the Matrox version of TR was amazing too - just without the bilinear filtering. Still remember thinking that the graphics of the Venice level on TR2 was the pinnacle of visuals, first time I saw it.
I do know what it feels like, because I was one of a few fortunate teens to have a Monster 3dfx Voodoo1. It was simply unbelievable from day 0. Most games and demos came from magazines at that time, I could test games like P.O.D., GLQuake, and a few more. Quake was a thing on its own, because I went from 20-25fps to almost 80fps. Again, at that time, 80fps at max resolution, on a CRT, it felt like it was an Arcade machine.
Back in 1997 - 1998, I didn't know what the purpose of have 8 MB of video memory was. I thought all you needed was enough space to have a framebuffer. Now, I have a AMD Radeon 6800 with 16 GB VRAM.
descent 1 and 2 would be a good test, maybe screamer 2/screamer rally, nfs2:se and moto racer. i get the feeling these are simple enough for the cpus to push well enough and let the extra memory matter... but i'm not sure if they go above 640x480. how about some overclocking with active cooling on the tmu and fbi? is that on the plans?
I already put some heatsinks on the Maxi Gamer3D. Will try some overclocking with active cooling and probably the games you've mentioned in future videos. Thanks for the suggestions!
I brought my Voodoo 2 card to play FF7 in the PC and noticed a big difference in speed and graphics. I believe the card was about $200 and that was a big purchase for me to save up. Now these days kids are paying $450+ for a single card and doing multi-gpu setups just to play games.
Multi-GPU is already a thing of the past if you aren't an overlocker trying to beat the scores of others in benchmarks. But yeah, GPU are crazy because Nvidia, but also AMD believe, they can still charge scalper and mining boom prices. Even though I could afford them, I don't upgrade out of principle. I still remember ordering two Monster 3D Voodoo 2 graphics cards with a friend and when I put mine in, I found out that it was defective. Had to RMA it and they send me a replacement, but in the end it was awesome. Well, my retro PC with Pentium 233MMX now has a Voodoo 2 inside and I was playing Tomb Raider under DOS with a Voodoo 2 patch.
Hey there! I totally agree that Tomb Raider was an awesome game for its time, but its configuration and benchmark capabilities are limited compared to Quake. Quake is an excellent choice for testing your mid-range computer, as it offers endless configuration options via its built-in console and configuration files. Plus, its benchmark feature is much more user-friendly!
Not to mention the fact that Tomb Raider was originally built on the Saturn Hardware, ported over to PS1, ported over to PC, so the assets are optimized for 2~4mb ram. Quake, while every level is less then 1.44mb, will have some interesting performance dynamics depending on ram size.
Sehr geile Videoserie. Mein erster PC war ein P2 400 mit einer Voodoo 2. Ich habe vorher Tomb Raider immer auf dem alten P1 133 von meinem Vater gespielt. Als ich dann das erste Mal Tomb Raider mit dem 3dfx Mod gesehen hab, sind mir fast die Augen raus gefallen 😵😄
I still play with my 166mmx with Matrox Mystique PCI and Diamond Monster 3dfx voodoo1 assembled between 1996 and 1997 especially to play Tomb Raider and Quake with the dedicated libraries.
My first computer as a kid was a Gateway with a Pentium 2 processor. I ended up getting a 3DFX Voodoo 2 (can't remember the mb...) and all my friends were floored at how much better Tomb Raider 2 looked on my Gateway compared to their PS1. Wish I still had it.
if I remember correctly, red baron II / 3d unlocked 800x600 if sufficient memory /sli was detected. I seem to remember reading about 1024/768 being possible on sli voodoo II on a later patch.
There's nothing quite like the evolution of graphics and gaming in the 90's and into the early 2000's. The closest wow-moment after that was Crysis. Then there's minor cool stuff like FEAR's lightning effects and stuff. But nothing quite like the old days.
I stood in line at Toys R Us for 3.5 to 4 hours to get my hands on a Tomb Raider box. The Hewlett Packard PC that I purchased at Sears for $1900 had 2mb of graphics memory, don't remember the CPU and memory but the game was awesome, pixelated or not. My next PC had MMX technology that really raised the steaks. These days I find myself looking for computer that does not run in today's society to run games that no one cares about,. LOL
What you really want to know is about the purpose of having more texture memory for Voodoo cards. At the time, people got Voodoo cards with more memory than 4 Mb (2Mb FB + 2 Mb TM) for only one reason; that is, to make it possible for the resolution 800x600+ with Z-buffer enabled (4 Mb Voodoo can do 800x600, but without Z-buffer). So at the time, games that ran with Z-buffer (GlQuake for example) can only do 640x480 with 4Mb Voodoo. The Voodoo itself didn't need much more texture memory for 640x480 mode (which is the only Glide mode Tomb Raider supports) so upgrading the amount of the TM wouldn't affect its performance much. You might only see a bit less frame rate drops here and there, but that's very unnoticeable.
I purchased a Creative Labs Voodoo2 3Dfx card for my Pentium 133 desktop in 1998, the things I remember playing the most were Star Wars Jedi Knight and the Nintendo 64 emulator UltraHLE.
1997 was when I had my first PC, had many since then, with forgotten configurations, but still remember the 1997 build. It was a Pentium MMX 200Mhz, 16MB RAM, S3Trio64 with 1MB VGA, SoundBlaster AWE64, 2.1GB Quantum Fireball HDD, all in a 430TX Intel Motherboard. Playing games was... Well... Not good. But then, when I bought a Riva TNT... Seemed like a new PC... Such an advancement in gaming!!
Voodoo2 12mb on pass-thru Matrox Mystique 2mb and Diamond Monster 2. Oh boy. Matrix shipped with Scorched Planet and Mechwarrior Enhanced 3DFX. Remember getting the very first 3DFX patches for games like Tomb Raider, Carmageddon, EF2000,Longbow Gold/2, Jane’s F-15,EAW (to name a few) and Morrowind. Truly the birth of gaming. I still have my voodoo 3, TI 4600, Matrox Mystique, diamond monster, voodoo2 12mb and AWE32 sound card! I even have my old (upgraded lol) Win 98/DOS 6.22 dual boot himem.sys etc pc. A proper custom built pc back in 95. Cost something like £2,406 U.K.
2:20 Meanwhile the advert shows a stick of 16 MB for 100 USD. 3:54 Prebuilts were marked up pretty high or would always be bundled with extra stuff you didn't really need. It seems like custom building a PC was much cheaper as a Pentium 133 equipped mobo (I think it's equipped?) was 338 USD and 16 MB of RAM would cost somewhere in the 150 USD range by the later part of 1996. I suspect that a whole PC, without the monitor, would probably cost about 1k USD. *Edit* OK, so I kind of managed to piece together a Pentium 133 PC with 16 MB of RAM, 2 GB HDD and an ATI Rage II from prices I managed to find online. I got to just under 1k USD. If you were upgrading from, say, 486SX PC for Doom, chances are you could recycle the sound card, speakers, floppy drive, PSU, mouse, keyboard and monitor. With a CD ROM drive it would add up to around 1.2k USD. And the RAM was actually among the cheapest parts. For 100 bucks more you could upgrade it to 32 MB of RAM. Something I imagine would really help out with snappiness. Overall it was a better performing PC than what the prebuilts could offer. Also fun fact: Tomb Raider with a Voodoo card was optimized so well that even a 486 could run it at a decent framerate, so long as it's one of those faster 486 systems. I imagine that a 486DX2-66 would even run it at least as good as a Pentium 133 would in software mode at 640x480. jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm jcmit.net/diskprice.htm www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cd-rom-prices-plummeting/ www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/3d-rage-ii.c873
In my time. I had voodoo1 , voodoo2 sli , voodoo banshee ,voodoo3 on motherboard and later voodoo3 3500 . After that its end . I stap over to matrox g400. Later a lot of test gpu gehad . Rage furry maxx Ati radeon ddr. Nvidia geforce 3 Ati 8500pro 275/275mhz model Ati 9500pro @ 9700pro bios. Nvidia fx 5800ultra Nvidia 8800le @ hack to a gs core . Ati 2900xtx crossfire Nvidia 7900gt sli . And than it stop I stap over to a console a Xbox 360 . I was done with pc games. Today i use Xbox serie s Laptop with rtx 2060 Desktop with vega 56 .(now stolen by my brother) And a junk pc for the famile with ati r380 .
The voice acting of that game just savagely killing all the voice acting in 2022. I mean 💯%🔥👹🔥. Even Horizon Zero Dawn's voice acting is bad compared to this.
Too bad now progress stopped at 5GHz. I barely touched that 486 era, but still there was some progress from 500MHz up to 2GHz and further. 3d video card was too expensive for me, so I did not have one until later times. I remember playing half-life in software mode in 320x240 or so. So Lara in low mode is looks normal to me. = ) Now to play some modern game you need expensive hardware, no back compatibility now. But good news, you can play old games. = ) And 4K displays solve old graphics zooming artifacts. I loved my CRT monitor for that I can zoom old games with no trouble. And later used old flat TV with low resolution to play 1024x768 games. Now on 4K display any resolution looks decent. Also good news it that PCem works nice on modern hardware. So may be I will also try Lara on 3dfx. = )
I guess those early glide games won't benefit much from more vram as they were made with software mode, sub-100-MHz CPUs on 8-16mb system ram and 1mb 2D vga cards in mind and got the 3D accelerator compatibility patched in afterwards, while just 1-2 years later, 3D games would be developed with a "3D accelerators first" mindset, with the software rendering mode put in as more of a "fallback" ... I bet NFS 3, Quake 2 and Unreal will see bigger gains from adding more texture ram ...
This game was THE PC benchmark back in the day. If you could play 800x600 3d hardware accelerated you had a l337 system. The play station port was an abomination.
Im no expert... But I would think that if the game programmers didnt expect, nor program the game to be able to utilize that extra amount of Ram... then it might not even be utilized. Also, one thing I learned about older PC hardware... is that a LOT of the pcs performance was GREATLY effected by Software Emulation issues. For example.. if you bought a cheap Modem... there were several things that were emulated via Software, rather than the Cards hardware, itself. The more expensive cards, used 100% (or near it) hardware, and so the entire PCs processing power would be VASTLY boosted, when swapping out a software based card with a 100% hardware based card. Furthermore... some motherboards were VASTLY superior to others, "speed-wise". Some used more layers, better chips, and overall better circuit designs.. and you could get a serious jump in performance, over some cheaper motherboards. Some of these boards might have had their own software based "emulation" drivers, as well. Also... I would try using a REAL soundblaster card over the Generics. Again, Soundblaster was quality hardware... where as generics may in fact have some software emulated features, that seriously eat up memory and processor workloads. My friend had a PC with a processor that was a step behind mine, and his system beat the pants off of mine, in performance, due to him using all hardware based Cards, and a superior motherboard. Interesting enough... I also was getting into Emulation at the time... and I had ordered this special card called the Lightning 4, or something like that. It was an all hardware based card, that had 4 Gameport inputs. It boasted some of the highest levels of performance... and so.. I believe I had disabled the gameport on my soundcard in the device manager... and installed the L4 card. I was GOBSMACKED at how much faster my PC was operating! Turned out... that most gameports are also largely software based, and the constantly running software was eating away CPU performance (even when I was not even using it). Meanwhile the L4 was 100% hardware based... and didnt require constantly running software, to do its job. At that time, there was little in the way of good keyboard-based Encoders... so the L4 was a good potential option. It was pretty expensive, however... and, I believe the company may have stopped selling them shortly after my purchase. Then, due to upgrades of my PC... and I believe that card being an older ISA card... I chose to abandon it, and waited for better keyboard+gamepad encoder boards to be sold. So... Disable any and all chips that you dont need.. such as "on-board" Modems, and On-Board sound chips. Put in 100% hardware based cards. Disable many of the special software based add-ons. Etc.. and watch as your Performance boosts dramatically, on this older PC hardware. You could easily Double your standard performance this way.
To think we went from 8MB to 24gigs on a 3090-4090... But I was shocked with the difference between the two different cards. Tomb raider was the first true 3d game I ever played and boy did I play it, over and over again. Resident evil 1 I played so much I could complete it in 45 mins.
Nostalgy...My first pc had a p200 with mmx in it. I proudly overclocked it to 233mhz later on. My schoolfriends told me that no one needs such a insane compute power.
First time I played tomb raider was on my first pc. Pentium 233 Mmx with 32 MB of ram, s3 virge 2d only card with 4mb of VRAM and sound blaster 16. Everything on 3.2 GB hd played on a 15 " crt monitor. Good old times. Always wanted a vodoo or later a vodoo 2 3d card, but my parents never let me buy it.
I still remember running this game on my first ever PC in 1999. It's a low cost PC and has no dedicated graphic card. This game could run on it (Celeron CPU), but with reduced resolution hence tiny windows on a big screen of 14 inch. Now that I have a laptop with iGPU screaming at 1 teraflops in battery saving mode, how many of this game instances can be run at the same time simultaneously? Wow...
it was, and nvidia would never be this gigantic gaphic company, if they should'nt buyed the Voodoo technology and 3dfx itself ... sidefact: 3dfx was also a chip Inventor/Producer vor medical devices 😎
my uncle's 3dfx setup was always smooth..that was until my family bought an eMonster eMachine that had we TNT2. Remember it waa pretty crazy playing Giant Citizen Kabuto for tbe first time and you could actually see far away.
Why should it make a difference? There was no automatic memory vram usage like we have it today. If you were willing to store a texture, you had to do it by hand. Just adding more vram will only gain the fps if the memory can be used by the game code and is even needed. Nowadays libraries are more flexible but less efficient. You add more vram or take some out and the memory management decides the rest. Textures were loaded into vram on a more game level base, with just using them afterwards. Reading/writing textures to the vram by the CPU would easily cause the game to stutter, caused by the missing concurrency. Even things like texture "streaming", what is a kind of memory management, wasn't even visible on the horizon. Completely different times back in the day. More coding and thinking about efficient usage, compared to the copy/paste/click graphics work we have nowadays.
Tomb Raider 2 with a Voodoo 2 for me. I used PS1 and Saturn before that as PC was just for point and click adv games until then for me. Don't know about dollar prices not from the colonies.
I remeber my first family PC being a Intel 2 450, and I didnt tell my dad I spent my childhood paycheck on a Savage 4 GPU because he would have never let me open it up and tinker with such an expensive electronic he purchased, so I waited til he left on a business trip and slipped that bad boy in and played UT Tornement in all its CRT glory. I to this day remember waking up and my buddy was playing UT for way to long looking so tired lol, man those were the days.
As I recall, I had the Macintosh version of the original Tomb Raider, and ran it on a fairly low-end Performa. It worked okay, I guess. Still have the game, but the mac is long gone.
If there's one thing that I find intensely irritating about "retro inspired" games these days it's that the devs act as if the developers from this era were going for a specific stylistic choice, these were peak graphics of the time. The whole "hey look we can ironically enjoy flat textures etc cause it's so retro and nostalgic" thing is played out IMO and somewhat tiresome. OG Tomb Raider was stunning in it's day, very, very impressive.
I wish i knew that computers played games and was more powerful and looked so much better then consoles back in the 1990s. I remember my mom asking me at sears do you want this computer set. It was 2500 and was a pentium 2 i think. I said no and she said would this help you for school and home work. I said no cause i thought having a pc would give me more home work to do lol. But if i knew gaming was a thing on pcs back then i would of said yes!!! I didnt find out that pc gaming was a thing till 2000. The last console i got was the sega dreamcast. Once i got my own pc for gaming i became a member of the pc master race!!!
Tomb raider was the game that me realise that pc's were being controlled by the games software. I was very upset when windows went to XP because a few of my games, which had all the graphics needed required an upgrade of the pc in one way or another. It became obvious to me that the games of the future will require more and more memory etc and boy was I right! for hardly any visual or gameplay advantage! These day you can use virtual reality stuff which requires enormous amounts of capable hardware, for pc gamers the entire saga is a scam, meaning that to play the games of today you need MICROSOFT windows that will support the software you shove into your pc and there isn't yet any competitors to make the gaming world a better place for entertainment! It wouldn't be so bad but most of the programming for games is under microsoft influence. The most annoying thing is microsoft windows is not backwards compatible meaning that a LOT of the old games don't work on their newer versions of windows which is a crime in my humble opinion!
I realy wanted to play this game. But i give up after few hours. Controls just so bad, that you need big amount of time to do simle things, like jumping, or climbing. Main mechanics in game = problem.
even bone stock looks a hell of a lot better than the PSX ports. took me quite a while to FIND the original in a PSX port, and before I got much time in game, the consoles themselves went :P meanwhile, I'm getting called out for using hardware only a couple generations behind :P
oh man this brings back memories of when i was playing Half life and Quake 2 with software rendering and my jaw dropping when i plugged in my Voodoo 3.
Do you tried these games in top of the range (back then) hardware??...... like a Intel SE440BX-2 (last Intel board with ISA AKA SB16)... some Pentium III 500 or 650MHz in it of course..... and a AGP Riva TNT or TNT2???..... you will never look back 👌 🫵 👍
Whoa! What a surprise! Game that made with strict limit of texture memory in mind and highly optimized is using limited texture memory and highly optimized! What a science is that?
I remember those times. Back then this graphics was "WOW" but now i feel pain in my eyes, seriously. I cant look at it and intro was really painfull. This game is a milestone but It is not playable in now days. Both graphics and fisics of the game is painfull. When my children saw it they were stunned and started to appriecate modern games
Why would it be different though? If the game is designed to use up to 2MB of textures and to be played at specific resolutions that use less than 2MB of framebuffer, there is no point in increasing the memory. If you find a game without such restrictions, however, some changes might be observed. You already mentioned higher resolutions with more FBI memory, and with 4MB of TMU you might be able to use higher res textures, or play more complex levels in UnrealTournament with more textures needed than the stock Voodoo can handle. There may exist a native Glide game that will swap textures in and out of TMU less (i.e. run faster) if it detects more memory, but I've yet to see one.
I remember playing the demo on my Pentium 166 with 24MB ram and no 3d acceleration lol I was a broke 15 year old at the time and couldn't convince my dad to buy a 3d accelerator lol
7:52 Oh how I miss triangle boobs lady. ROFL I remember playing this on an old Dell Insiron clamshell cased PC. You know the one, the one that Everybody's mom had?
I belive i only played the demo back then on a Pentium 1 with 75mhz with software rendering, i for sure did not know, what an graphics card was but i did not care and had fun.
![[UA] NAVI проти G2 Esports | Blast Premier Fall Final](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QWlIm4FGESQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I remember getting my first 3dFX card for Quake in 1996, it was such an amazing difference. We all had PCs for 'college', so we were at the birth of 3D PC Gaming. Such a difference to Wolfenstein just 4 years earlier.
I managed to convince my, then, wife hat I needed a pc for a course I was doing at college. he he. 30 years later it's now my job and my hobby. I never leave my pc...
@@GB_Rusty heroic and relatable
I didn't get a 3DFX card until 1998, but Quake was the first game I played with it, and it absolutely blew my mind. So smooth! Tomb Raider 2 was also one of the first games I played with the card, and again it was just amazing how much better it was.
I got mine for Schleichfahrt (Archimedian Dynasties) an Battle Isle Incubation.
Miss those days..
Q2 on a voodoo3 banshee was awesome compared to software.. now we have q2rtx lol
3DFX was ahead of their time. What an amazing piece of engineering wonder. I loved my Voodoo 2 card. Good memories playing games with it.
Matrox Mystique was the best. I remember my pentium 200mmx with matrox.
@@saitama3135 Mystique was great for 2D image quality and for the 3D games it supported, it worked very well. But it lacked bi-linear filtering. Didn't matter in many games, I think the Matrox version of Mechwarrior 2 was the best of them all, and MotoRacer ran great with a Mystique, but the card wasn't supported much or for long. VooDoo was better. I got a Mystique first, and then a VooDoo to run alongside it.
Yeah it was a great time voodoo 2 💪🏻
I remember my first Voodoo card. I'd come straight from PS1. Loaded up Half Life. Sat watching what I thought was a cut scene, then realised it was active and I could move around! The leap was huge.
I love hearing stories from console peasants that finally had a moment of clarity...
A defining moment for games. The day 1 version of Tomb Raider was a flawed masterpiece. The Core Design team didn't have a great reputation for graphics and it showed. However there was no denying the gameplay was a step forward. Then it go 3Dfx support. My particular card was badged as an Orchid Righteous 3D but it used an early Voodoo chipset. Inside the box was a copy of Tomb Raider so with no particular expectations of anything special I installed it. I remember wondering if my save games would be recognised. I was about halfway in and I didn't fancy having to restart. I launched the game. The sludgy pixellated mess that used to be Lara was gone. Things were a lot smoother as well. Now you could actually interact with water and the backgrounds were free of smearing. I never did find out if my old saves worked.
My first video card was a voodoo banshee, and the very first game I remember running on it was Unreal 1, this was probably 1999. That intro, with the camera flying around a castle, in 1024x768, running at 60fps smoothly, was absolutely mesmerizing... It was a massive jump in quality.
From my memory, the guys at Epic took the effort to overly-optimize the software rendering so those without 3D acceleration in their systems could play the game thru software with a way more stable framerate and very nice details, for example the reflexions are rendered in both hardware and software.
Also the sunsets in Unreal are mesmerizing, even to this day.
Amen brother same here
A Voodoo Banshee would not run that at 60fps, maybe a Voodoo 3 with a PIII ;)
Probably Voodoo 3, Banshee max Glide resolution was 800x600 in 16 bit color.
@@giertox8737 Voodoo Banshee allowed 1280 by 960 on my setup back then and could deliver playable framerates up to 1024 by 768.
Unreal ran perfectly in 800 by 600 depending on the processor (Pentium II recommended) and with around 30 fps in 1024 by 768.
It had 16 megs of VRAM. Maybe you are confusing it with Voodoo Rage?
Voodoo Banshee was not that bad. Of course on average it was slightly slower than a Voodoo 2 12 MB due to the lacking second texturing unit and it needed patches for a lot of games to run fine (like Unreal). But it had 16 MB and was quite cheap and didn‘t rely on a high end CPU like Nvidias Riva TNT to run fast. And you didn‘t need a 2D video card which made it pretty cost-efficient in a gaming rig.
I visited my first LAN party in the beginning of 1999 with a Voodoo Banshee and people where surprised how crisp and smooth Unreal was delivered because they had myths about the Banshee in their minds.
I had a P75 at the time, and had pretty awful preformance in software rendering as you'd imagine. When I dropped my 3DFX in.... WOW!! It was one of the big jaw drop moments you only get once in while. Absolutely stunning 30fps, no problem.
Didn't think the P75 would deliver 30fps. I remember how my friend bought the Voodoo card with money his dad gave him. I was quite jealous because he could play any game with good visuals and performance.
No way would a Pentium75 do 30fps.
@@thefonzkiss with a 3DFX board, yes. Only at 640x480 mind.
I had a top of the ranged Pentium 200, having had a terrible AMD-PR-133 (which was an AMD 686 100Mhz rip off) that was really bad at floating point (and therefore Quake). My performance was probably similar or worse to an Intel P75. So I went all out and got a £200 Pentium 200Mhz. I already had 60-90fps in Quake 1 in 320x200 with that CPU, depending on the map. So when I got a VooDoo and ran GLQuake, I actually lost FPS (but in a higher resolution with added eye candy). For deathmatch, I still used software 320x200. But for single player I'd run the Glide version.
I think one of the reasons 3Dfx was so loved was because it did allow slower PC's, like the P75, P90, P120 etc - to eliminate that CPU bottleneck. Other 3D cards were tied much more closely to your CPU performance.
Tomb Raider is locked at software 30fps you didn't know that? was pointless to investigate further. I know our ego wants to be period correct as well but Voodoo1 was widely popular in 1997 where already was Pentium 2 available. V1 has short lifespan and soft support, your best bet to try memory mod is Quake1 and 2 and better cpu to give 3dfx some room. I would personally go with Pentium2 400-450, 128 sdram, Matrox millenium 1 or 2 and modded 8mb sst-1.
I will look at Quake1 and 2 in a future video.
@@bitsundbolts Lovely! I really like your channel ❤
you should test the voodoo 8mb with unreal, halflife, quake2, turok, carmageddon 2 and see how it compares to the og 4mb. Especially with different cpus!
Yeah and take tombraider 2 ans 3 with it. It is not supporting 3dfx but it does higher resolutions, so more mem should enable Z - Buffer on 800x600
If you do not have the correct driver, which is written for 8MB usage, the difference is not really noticable (if you check the graphs, the drops of 4MB, 6MB or 8MB configuration are very similar). if you use AA, the more memory if beneficial for the performance.
Playing Tomb Raider 2 with a 3dfx voodoo 2 on an aging P133Mhz computer was great! It looked amazing for the time! Same with FF7 on PC!
I'd like to see a benchmark of SVGA software mode in Tombraider, going from the minimum required CPU (Pentium 60Mhz) to the first CPU capable of hitting that 30fps cap (probably a Pentium 2 350Mhz or so). That would be super interesting.
The game that brought me to the PS1 - love it, I really do wish they would do a decent remaster of this series on current hardware.
I will never forget being blown away by my first experience of Tomb Raider in 1998 on my 350 MHz Intel Pentium II with 32 MB SD RAM and 4MB Cirrus Logic 3D AGP Graphics Card. System Bus ran at 100 MHz on the Gigabyte Motherboard. And then I upgraded it with an extra 32 MB SDRAM and a Matrox Millennium G400 Graphics Card with 16 MB of Graphics Memory. And a Creative Sound Blaster Live! PCI Sound Card and the Quadrophonic Cambridge Audio FPS1000 Sound System. The Environmental Audio with the quality of the Subwoofer was as incredible as the 3D Graphics ! I thought the Resolution was higher than 640x480 VGA. Super VGA at 800x600 was fairly common at that point, and 1024x768 not a complete impossibility. I remember also having Tomb Raider 2 and Tomb Raider 3, but I never found the Puzzles and Level Design to be quite as good as the first game. Did the sequels add Higher Resolution Graphics ? And any extra Graphics Features such as Environment Bump Mapping that was built into the Matrox Millennium G400 ?
Tomb Raider was bought on day one by my friend from a reccomendation of mine because I'd read a review in PC Zone. We went to the video game shop and he bought a bunch of games, including TR. He had a Pentium 166MMX at the time, and even in software mode the game was visually impressive. Diving into the pool of water from 50m up was an insane gamer moment. We looked at the game in SVGA mode too but the framerate tanked to under 10fps. Later that year though, we both bought a Matrox Mystique and the game was fully playable in 640x480, so we ran through the game again. The following year with our 3Dfx VooDoo cards, through the first game and Tomb Raider 2.
I always kept my Mystique as a 2D card, and for the Matrox version of Mechwarrior 2 which was by far the best version of that game back in the 90's. The Mystique Tomb Raider patch was also extremely well optimized and, even though it lacked the bilinear filtering of the VooDoo card, I often used the Matrox exe instead of the Glide version.
Diving from 50m up? Didn't you mean 15m? 50m would break your bones on impact with the watersurface.
@@j.vonhogen9650 Dude its a video game! It's not REAL! And Lara can do it, as long as you held the key to make the dive animation, even though she still screams she enters the water like a graceful penguin.
@@TheVanillatech- Wait, what? This is just a video game?? This is not real?? No way!! I apologize for the misunderstanding, I really thought this was real footage of a real action hero diving into the water in a real underground temple complex. My mistake!
It doesn't change anything though, since the height still looks 15m at most, not anywhere near your estimate of 50m, which was the point I was trying to make.
Anyway, thanks for the penguin related info. It really helps! ;-)
@@j.vonhogen9650 When I was a kid, about 7 or 8, we went on vacation with another family. My mother had become friends with this other woman, and that meant she and her family, her husband and son, were invited along with us. I remember, in Malta, we went into Valetta one night and ended up at some carnival / fair. They had a huge VR machine that you went into, strapped youself inside, which had a giant screen and the whole thing moved around. It was a virtual reality rally drive, and it was very exciting.
What happened was, that family we travelled with, well the husband and dad, he was a fucking moron. He was the kind of dude that NOBODY liked. He came into the machine with my brother and myself and, once strapped in, he started talking out loud to the other 11 or so people paying for the experience. He was criticizing EVERY LITTLE THING the driver was doing. "He's in the wrong gear! He changed too early! He shouldn't be turning like that! He's not a good driver! If he did that again his engine would blow!". On and on and on. In the end, we all wanted to hang him. Proper dick, you see?
Same kinda dick that goes in search of hyperbolic comments regarding video games from yesteryear and argues with them.
Don't be that dick.
Dick.
@@TheVanillatech- Oh, I see what this is really about. You are not mad at me, you are mad at the father of that family who b@nged your mom during that vacation in Malta! It must have been really traumatizing for you to be in that same hotelroom every night pretending to be asleep! Really disturbing memories, I'm sure. Yuck!
I'm not an expert, but you may want to try psychoanalytic therapy to overcome your Oedipus complex before you may hurt someone. You are obviously full of anger and anxiety, and I do feel sorry for your pain and suffering, but psychological projection won't help you deal with your past. Lara Croft is not your mom, and your mom's boyfriend has probably already moved on and doesn't even remember your mother and her emotionally neglected son.
It's time to let it go and live your own life, as long as it lasts. Who knows, maybe you will figure out how to live a meaningful life without feeling rejected and without constantly thinking about those horrifying moments in that dark hotelroom in Malta.
Just remember that you are amazing and unique! You can do anything if you just put your mind to it, like jumping from a 50m high cliff without any consequence whatsoever! I wish you all the best.
P.S. You've signed your comment with "Dick", is that really your name, or is that just your Freudian way of fighting the demons of your past?
Dude, I was there back in the day. I was a teenager back then which was the prime age group to be for PC gaming in the late 90s. I had Voodoo Banshee with Cyrix 686. I remember antialiasing is like RTX mode on back in the day. It was one of those luxury graphical mode nobody bothered to turn on.
I played this game with software render until I got my first GPU which was a Riva 128 based STB Velocity 128 and soon after the card was obsolete and I bought my first Voodoo based card. This game was stunning and another game I wish people would review more of is Drakan Order of the Flame. That was a very amazing looking game on the voodoo cards at the time. I loved exploring and flying around on a dragon through the game.
Drakan was pretty cool at the time
i had Pentium 120Mhz cpu it good for its time. ran a Voodoo Rush in it
Excellent video, like! Most probably it will make a difference with increased memory in newer games with higher system requirements from 1997-1998.
You're from Franconia, Germany, right?
That accent sounds very familiar!
Correct!
I still have my Voodoo 1 and 2 cards. Tomb Raider, Fatal Racing and Carmageddon were my favorite 3DDFX games early on.
Pentium 90 overclocked to 120 and voodoo 1 was how I played the first Tomb Raider. The memories...
I guess I was spot on the ;)
I had a Pentium 200 (vanilla not MMX) and a Matrox Mystique. A few months into 1997 I bought a 3Dfx card but kept the Mystique as a 2D card, though the Matrox version of TR was amazing too - just without the bilinear filtering. Still remember thinking that the graphics of the Venice level on TR2 was the pinnacle of visuals, first time I saw it.
I do know what it feels like, because I was one of a few fortunate teens to have a Monster 3dfx Voodoo1. It was simply unbelievable from day 0. Most games and demos came from magazines at that time, I could test games like P.O.D., GLQuake, and a few more. Quake was a thing on its own, because I went from 20-25fps to almost 80fps. Again, at that time, 80fps at max resolution, on a CRT, it felt like it was an Arcade machine.
It almost feels like cheating playing Tomb Raider like this in 1996 lol
The PS1 version did have its own unique charms though
This game blew my mind on PS1
Back in 1997 - 1998, I didn't know what the purpose of have 8 MB of video memory was. I thought all you needed was enough space to have a framebuffer.
Now, I have a AMD Radeon 6800 with 16 GB VRAM.
I still have this game on CD. It runs on Arch Linux amazingly well.
still got goosebumps when i listen to the first secs of the intro theme
this game was my first experiences with my 3dfx card :)
About 80% of this video is irrelevant nonsense.
Nice. I live near Lara croft way in Derby UK.
Pointless because the game was designed to be played on CRT. It looks completely different on modern systems.
I remember there was a way to put higher resolution F1 or F2 in game and it went to 1280x1024 or something like that
descent 1 and 2 would be a good test, maybe screamer 2/screamer rally, nfs2:se and moto racer. i get the feeling these are simple enough for the cpus to push well enough and let the extra memory matter... but i'm not sure if they go above 640x480. how about some overclocking with active cooling on the tmu and fbi? is that on the plans?
I already put some heatsinks on the Maxi Gamer3D. Will try some overclocking with active cooling and probably the games you've mentioned in future videos. Thanks for the suggestions!
This was the first game I ever saw running on a Voodoo. Even my dad was amazed.
Tomb Raider had everything, the puzzles, the guns, the music, the graphics, the levels and in 3d.
I brought my Voodoo 2 card to play FF7 in the PC and noticed a big difference in speed and graphics. I believe the card was about $200 and that was a big purchase for me to save up. Now these days kids are paying $450+ for a single card and doing multi-gpu setups just to play games.
Multi-GPU is already a thing of the past if you aren't an overlocker trying to beat the scores of others in benchmarks. But yeah, GPU are crazy because Nvidia, but also AMD believe, they can still charge scalper and mining boom prices. Even though I could afford them, I don't upgrade out of principle.
I still remember ordering two Monster 3D Voodoo 2 graphics cards with a friend and when I put mine in, I found out that it was defective. Had to RMA it and they send me a replacement, but in the end it was awesome.
Well, my retro PC with Pentium 233MMX now has a Voodoo 2 inside and I was playing Tomb Raider under DOS with a Voodoo 2 patch.
Hey there! I totally agree that Tomb Raider was an awesome game for its time, but its configuration and benchmark capabilities are limited compared to Quake. Quake is an excellent choice for testing your mid-range computer, as it offers endless configuration options via its built-in console and configuration files. Plus, its benchmark feature is much more user-friendly!
Not to mention the fact that Tomb Raider was originally built on the Saturn Hardware, ported over to PS1, ported over to PC, so the assets are optimized for 2~4mb ram.
Quake, while every level is less then 1.44mb, will have some interesting performance dynamics depending on ram size.
Sehr geile Videoserie. Mein erster PC war ein P2 400 mit einer Voodoo 2. Ich habe vorher Tomb Raider immer auf dem alten P1 133 von meinem Vater gespielt. Als ich dann das erste Mal Tomb Raider mit dem 3dfx Mod gesehen hab, sind mir fast die Augen raus gefallen 😵😄
I still play with my 166mmx with Matrox Mystique PCI and Diamond Monster 3dfx voodoo1 assembled between 1996 and 1997 especially to play Tomb Raider and Quake with the dedicated libraries.
My first computer as a kid was a Gateway with a Pentium 2 processor. I ended up getting a 3DFX Voodoo 2 (can't remember the mb...) and all my friends were floored at how much better Tomb Raider 2 looked on my Gateway compared to their PS1. Wish I still had it.
if I remember correctly, red baron II / 3d unlocked 800x600 if sufficient memory /sli was detected. I seem to remember reading about 1024/768 being possible on sli voodoo II on a later patch.
There's nothing quite like the evolution of graphics and gaming in the 90's and into the early 2000's.
The closest wow-moment after that was Crysis. Then there's minor cool stuff like FEAR's lightning effects and stuff.
But nothing quite like the old days.
I stood in line at Toys R Us for 3.5 to 4 hours to get my hands on a Tomb Raider box. The Hewlett Packard PC that I purchased at Sears for $1900 had 2mb of graphics memory, don't remember the CPU and memory but the game was awesome, pixelated or not. My next PC had MMX technology that really raised the steaks. These days I find myself looking for computer that does not run in today's society to run games that no one cares about,. LOL
Not going to lie, I was checking steam for the first Tomb Raider. Getting my original copy out of storage would be a hassle.
The change from 2D games to polygon 3D was amazing and the change from polygon3d to glide or 3dfx was equally as amazing.
What you really want to know is about the purpose of having more texture memory for Voodoo cards. At the time, people got Voodoo cards with more memory than 4 Mb (2Mb FB + 2 Mb TM) for only one reason; that is, to make it possible for the resolution 800x600+ with Z-buffer enabled (4 Mb Voodoo can do 800x600, but without Z-buffer). So at the time, games that ran with Z-buffer (GlQuake for example) can only do 640x480 with 4Mb Voodoo. The Voodoo itself didn't need much more texture memory for 640x480 mode (which is the only Glide mode Tomb Raider supports) so upgrading the amount of the TM wouldn't affect its performance much. You might only see a bit less frame rate drops here and there, but that's very unnoticeable.
very Interesting is ,..that the Game Patch for 3dfx was VERY Smal ....
I purchased a Creative Labs Voodoo2 3Dfx card for my Pentium 133 desktop in 1998, the things I remember playing the most were Star Wars Jedi Knight and the Nintendo 64 emulator UltraHLE.
i've played NFS Porsche on a Compaq with Vodoo 8Mb, great memories man, great times....
1997 was when I had my first PC, had many since then, with forgotten configurations, but still remember the 1997 build. It was a Pentium MMX 200Mhz, 16MB RAM, S3Trio64 with 1MB VGA, SoundBlaster AWE64, 2.1GB Quantum Fireball HDD, all in a 430TX Intel Motherboard. Playing games was... Well... Not good. But then, when I bought a Riva TNT... Seemed like a new PC... Such an advancement in gaming!!
you think you are playing video games the reality is you are playing Graphics cards or Graphics cards is playing you.
Voodoo2 12mb on pass-thru Matrox Mystique 2mb and Diamond Monster 2. Oh boy. Matrix shipped with Scorched Planet and Mechwarrior Enhanced 3DFX. Remember getting the very first 3DFX patches for games like Tomb Raider, Carmageddon, EF2000,Longbow Gold/2, Jane’s F-15,EAW (to name a few) and Morrowind. Truly the birth of gaming. I still have my voodoo 3, TI 4600, Matrox Mystique, diamond monster, voodoo2 12mb and AWE32 sound card! I even have my old (upgraded lol) Win 98/DOS 6.22 dual boot himem.sys etc pc. A proper custom built pc back in 95. Cost something like £2,406 U.K.
2:20 Meanwhile the advert shows a stick of 16 MB for 100 USD.
3:54 Prebuilts were marked up pretty high or would always be bundled with extra stuff you didn't really need. It seems like custom building a PC was much cheaper as a Pentium 133 equipped mobo (I think it's equipped?) was 338 USD and 16 MB of RAM would cost somewhere in the 150 USD range by the later part of 1996. I suspect that a whole PC, without the monitor, would probably cost about 1k USD.
*Edit* OK, so I kind of managed to piece together a Pentium 133 PC with 16 MB of RAM, 2 GB HDD and an ATI Rage II from prices I managed to find online. I got to just under 1k USD.
If you were upgrading from, say, 486SX PC for Doom, chances are you could recycle the sound card, speakers, floppy drive, PSU, mouse, keyboard and monitor. With a CD ROM drive it would add up to around 1.2k USD. And the RAM was actually among the cheapest parts. For 100 bucks more you could upgrade it to 32 MB of RAM. Something I imagine would really help out with snappiness. Overall it was a better performing PC than what the prebuilts could offer.
Also fun fact: Tomb Raider with a Voodoo card was optimized so well that even a 486 could run it at a decent framerate, so long as it's one of those faster 486 systems. I imagine that a 486DX2-66 would even run it at least as good as a Pentium 133 would in software mode at 640x480.
jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm
jcmit.net/diskprice.htm
www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/cd-rom-prices-plummeting/
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/3d-rage-ii.c873
In my time.
I had voodoo1 , voodoo2 sli , voodoo banshee ,voodoo3 on motherboard and later voodoo3 3500 .
After that its end .
I stap over to matrox g400.
Later a lot of test gpu gehad .
Rage furry maxx
Ati radeon ddr.
Nvidia geforce 3
Ati 8500pro 275/275mhz model
Ati 9500pro @ 9700pro bios.
Nvidia fx 5800ultra
Nvidia 8800le @ hack to a gs core .
Ati 2900xtx crossfire
Nvidia 7900gt sli .
And than it stop
I stap over to a console a Xbox 360 .
I was done with pc games.
Today i use Xbox serie s
Laptop with rtx 2060
Desktop with vega 56 .(now stolen by my brother)
And a junk pc for the famile with ati r380 .
The voice acting of that game just savagely killing all the voice acting in 2022. I mean 💯%🔥👹🔥. Even Horizon Zero Dawn's voice acting is bad compared to this.
I still remember it vividly. Lord knows how I saved up for that card. I'm sure I was broke at the time.
Too bad now progress stopped at 5GHz. I barely touched that 486 era, but still there was some progress from 500MHz up to 2GHz and further. 3d video card was too expensive for me, so I did not have one until later times. I remember playing half-life in software mode in 320x240 or so. So Lara in low mode is looks normal to me. = )
Now to play some modern game you need expensive hardware, no back compatibility now. But good news, you can play old games. = ) And 4K displays solve old graphics zooming artifacts. I loved my CRT monitor for that I can zoom old games with no trouble. And later used old flat TV with low resolution to play 1024x768 games. Now on 4K display any resolution looks decent.
Also good news it that PCem works nice on modern hardware. So may be I will also try Lara on 3dfx. = )
I guess those early glide games won't benefit much from more vram as they were made with software mode, sub-100-MHz CPUs on 8-16mb system ram and 1mb 2D vga cards in mind and got the 3D accelerator compatibility patched in afterwards, while just 1-2 years later, 3D games would be developed with a "3D accelerators first" mindset, with the software rendering mode put in as more of a "fallback" ...
I bet NFS 3, Quake 2 and Unreal will see bigger gains from adding more texture ram ...
This game was THE PC benchmark back in the day. If you could play 800x600 3d hardware accelerated you had a l337 system. The play station port was an abomination.
Im no expert... But I would think that if the game programmers didnt expect, nor program the game to be able to utilize that extra amount of Ram... then it might not even be utilized. Also, one thing I learned about older PC hardware... is that a LOT of the pcs performance was GREATLY effected by Software Emulation issues. For example.. if you bought a cheap Modem... there were several things that were emulated via Software, rather than the Cards hardware, itself. The more expensive cards, used 100% (or near it) hardware, and so the entire PCs processing power would be VASTLY boosted, when swapping out a software based card with a 100% hardware based card.
Furthermore... some motherboards were VASTLY superior to others, "speed-wise". Some used more layers, better chips, and overall better circuit designs.. and you could get a serious jump in performance, over some cheaper motherboards. Some of these boards might have had their own software based "emulation" drivers, as well.
Also... I would try using a REAL soundblaster card over the Generics. Again, Soundblaster was quality hardware... where as generics may in fact have some software emulated features, that seriously eat up memory and processor workloads.
My friend had a PC with a processor that was a step behind mine, and his system beat the pants off of mine, in performance, due to him using all hardware based Cards, and a superior motherboard.
Interesting enough... I also was getting into Emulation at the time... and I had ordered this special card called the Lightning 4, or something like that. It was an all hardware based card, that had 4 Gameport inputs. It boasted some of the highest levels of performance... and so.. I believe I had disabled the gameport on my soundcard in the device manager... and installed the L4 card. I was GOBSMACKED at how much faster my PC was operating! Turned out... that most gameports are also largely software based, and the constantly running software was eating away CPU performance (even when I was not even using it). Meanwhile the L4 was 100% hardware based... and didnt require constantly running software, to do its job.
At that time, there was little in the way of good keyboard-based Encoders... so the L4 was a good potential option. It was pretty expensive, however... and, I believe the company may have stopped selling them shortly after my purchase. Then, due to upgrades of my PC... and I believe that card being an older ISA card... I chose to abandon it, and waited for better keyboard+gamepad encoder boards to be sold.
So... Disable any and all chips that you dont need.. such as "on-board" Modems, and On-Board sound chips. Put in 100% hardware based cards. Disable many of the special software based add-ons. Etc.. and watch as your Performance boosts dramatically, on this older PC hardware. You could easily Double your standard performance this way.
To think we went from 8MB to 24gigs on a 3090-4090... But I was shocked with the difference between the two different cards.
Tomb raider was the first true 3d game I ever played and boy did I play it, over and over again. Resident evil 1 I played so much I could complete it in 45 mins.
Nostalgy...My first pc had a p200 with mmx in it. I proudly overclocked it to 233mhz later on. My schoolfriends told me that no one needs such a insane compute power.
First time I played tomb raider was on my first pc. Pentium 233 Mmx with 32 MB of ram, s3 virge 2d only card with 4mb of VRAM and sound blaster 16. Everything on 3.2 GB hd played on a 15 " crt monitor. Good old times. Always wanted a vodoo or later a vodoo 2 3d card, but my parents never let me buy it.
Why not try out Hitman: Codename 47 as well? Doesn't have a frame cap, and was right in the same period of hardware *edit: similar, not same
I still remember running this game on my first ever PC in 1999. It's a low cost PC and has no dedicated graphic card. This game could run on it (Celeron CPU), but with reduced resolution hence tiny windows on a big screen of 14 inch.
Now that I have a laptop with iGPU screaming at 1 teraflops in battery saving mode, how many of this game instances can be run at the same time simultaneously? Wow...
it was, and nvidia would never be this gigantic gaphic company, if they should'nt buyed the Voodoo technology and 3dfx itself ... sidefact: 3dfx was also a chip Inventor/Producer vor medical devices 😎
Good times. Had a 166mmx@208 with a dynamite 128. Just about as good as it got until the v1 was released. Still miss playing Motoracer on my v1
my uncle's 3dfx setup was always smooth..that was until my family bought an eMonster eMachine that had we TNT2. Remember it waa pretty crazy playing Giant Citizen Kabuto for tbe first time and you could actually see far away.
Try Moto Racer 2! I recall being able to run it at 800x600 with my 6MB Canapus Pure 3D, though the performance left something to be desired :)
Why should it make a difference? There was no automatic memory vram usage like we have it today. If you were willing to store a texture, you had to do it by hand. Just adding more vram will only gain the fps if the memory can be used by the game code and is even needed.
Nowadays libraries are more flexible but less efficient. You add more vram or take some out and the memory management decides the rest.
Textures were loaded into vram on a more game level base, with just using them afterwards. Reading/writing textures to the vram by the CPU would easily cause the game to stutter, caused by the missing concurrency.
Even things like texture "streaming", what is a kind of memory management, wasn't even visible on the horizon.
Completely different times back in the day. More coding and thinking about efficient usage, compared to the copy/paste/click graphics work we have nowadays.
I had the same Graphics card. Did you also happen to play Carmageddon on it? It was sooo beautiful (IBM Captiva P200 MMX) KEKW
At the time I upgraded to a pentium II 233Mhz (about 400 dollars, that hurt lol) just to play Tomb Raider comfortably. What a great time that was.
U should check performance 4, 6 and 8 with and without mipmapping and AA.
Tomb Raider 2 with a Voodoo 2 for me. I used PS1 and Saturn before that as PC was just for point and click adv games until then for me. Don't know about dollar prices not from the colonies.
I remeber my first family PC being a Intel 2 450, and I didnt tell my dad I spent my childhood paycheck on a Savage 4 GPU because he would have never let me open it up and tinker with such an expensive electronic he purchased, so I waited til he left on a business trip and slipped that bad boy in and played UT Tornement in all its CRT glory. I to this day remember waking up and my buddy was playing UT for way to long looking so tired lol, man those were the days.
My first machine K6 266mhz 16mb ram S3 virge 2mb + Voodoo2 8mb was a rocket for this game in oct98 😂😂😅😊😊
Can we get a big-budget Tomb Raider movie where Lara Croft actually has big jugs? Hollywood needs to get back to its roots. Sex sells haha 😄
Had a 3000 with an OC'd 486 DX4-120. Most benchmarks picked it up as a P90.
As I recall, I had the Macintosh version of the original Tomb Raider, and ran it on a fairly low-end Performa. It worked okay, I guess. Still have the game, but the mac is long gone.
If there's one thing that I find intensely irritating about "retro inspired" games these days it's that the devs act as if the developers from this era were going for a specific stylistic choice, these were peak graphics of the time. The whole "hey look we can ironically enjoy flat textures etc cause it's so retro and nostalgic" thing is played out IMO and somewhat tiresome. OG Tomb Raider was stunning in it's day, very, very impressive.
I wish i knew that computers played games and was more powerful and looked so much better then consoles back in the 1990s. I remember my mom asking me at sears do you want this computer set. It was 2500 and was a pentium 2 i think. I said no and she said would this help you for school and home work. I said no cause i thought having a pc would give me more home work to do lol. But if i knew gaming was a thing on pcs back then i would of said yes!!! I didnt find out that pc gaming was a thing till 2000. The last console i got was the sega dreamcast. Once i got my own pc for gaming i became a member of the pc master race!!!
I always chuckle a bit when modern PC gamers say that anything under 120 fps is unplayable.
Do you know if the 320x200 res option ran too fast/caused screen tearing at 70hz (line doubled for VGA)?
Tomb raider was the game that me realise that pc's were being controlled by the games software. I was very upset when windows went to XP because a few of my games, which had all the graphics needed required an upgrade of the pc in one way or another. It became obvious to me that the games of the future will require more and more memory etc and boy was I right! for hardly any visual or gameplay advantage! These day you can use virtual reality stuff which requires enormous amounts of capable hardware, for pc gamers the entire saga is a scam, meaning that to play the games of today you need MICROSOFT windows that will support the software you shove into your pc and there isn't yet any competitors to make the gaming world a better place for entertainment! It wouldn't be so bad but most of the programming for games is under microsoft influence. The most annoying thing is microsoft windows is not backwards compatible meaning that a LOT of the old games don't work on their newer versions of windows which is a crime in my humble opinion!
Matrox Mistique was the best
I realy wanted to play this game. But i give up after few hours. Controls just so bad, that you need big amount of time to do simle things, like jumping, or climbing. Main mechanics in game = problem.
even bone stock looks a hell of a lot better than the PSX ports. took me quite a while to FIND the original in a PSX port, and before I got much time in game, the consoles themselves went :P meanwhile, I'm getting called out for using hardware only a couple generations behind :P
First game I played with a 3dfx card was GTA... I wish I'd kept the original CD :(
There are more DOS games that uses 3dfx glide graphics for example destruction derby and nascar racing and maybe indicar racing
oh man this brings back memories of when i was playing Half life and Quake 2 with software rendering and my jaw dropping when i plugged in my Voodoo 3.
Do you tried these games in top of the range (back then) hardware??...... like a Intel SE440BX-2 (last Intel board with ISA AKA SB16)... some Pentium III 500 or 650MHz in it of course..... and a AGP Riva TNT or TNT2???..... you will never look back 👌 🫵 👍
Whoa! What a surprise!
Game that made with strict limit of texture memory in mind and highly optimized is using limited texture memory and highly optimized!
What a science is that?
I remember those times. Back then this graphics was "WOW" but now i feel pain in my eyes, seriously. I cant look at it and intro was really painfull. This game is a milestone but It is not playable in now days. Both graphics and fisics of the game is painfull. When my children saw it they were stunned and started to appriecate modern games
Thanks for this nice video!
Where did I put my Tomb Raider CD again?...
3dfx is now owned by nvidia, so technically you can still buy 3dfx cards in modern day, they are just called RTX
Why would it be different though? If the game is designed to use up to 2MB of textures and to be played at specific resolutions that use less than 2MB of framebuffer, there is no point in increasing the memory. If you find a game without such restrictions, however, some changes might be observed. You already mentioned higher resolutions with more FBI memory, and with 4MB of TMU you might be able to use higher res textures, or play more complex levels in UnrealTournament with more textures needed than the stock Voodoo can handle. There may exist a native Glide game that will swap textures in and out of TMU less (i.e. run faster) if it detects more memory, but I've yet to see one.
I remember playing the demo on my Pentium 166 with 24MB ram and no 3d acceleration lol I was a broke 15 year old at the time and couldn't convince my dad to buy a 3d accelerator lol
Dang, I wish I still had my Voodoo 3. Not to USE it, but simply because it's a piece of history.
7:52 Oh how I miss triangle boobs lady. ROFL I remember playing this on an old Dell Insiron clamshell cased PC. You know the one, the one that Everybody's mom had?
It's quite amazing how much uglier bilinear filtering is for low resolution with low resolution textures than just straight nearest neighbor.
I belive i only played the demo back then on a Pentium 1 with 75mhz with software rendering, i for sure did not know, what an graphics card was but i did not care and had fun.
Adjusting the clock and memory speed on the 3dfx card would more than likely had more results.
You're making videos about my old trash! Whats next? Tomb raider on a hp ipaq!