That scene where the lights turn off, combined with an SB Live! with EAX enabled *shivers*... That was a scary scene back then, and I'm sure it would still have the same effect to this day. I played Unreal on an 8MB Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, so it ran quite a bit smoother then on the Voodoo 1, and it was the first game to really convince me that 3D accelerators were worth the price.
Oh yes... my era ! i mean.. it was my dad computer but i played with him unreal and he also had Sound Blaster Live sound card with a 5.1 Cambridge Soundworks ... good sound quality and dayum... also Nvidia TnT Riva 2 while me had a Ati Rage 2 =P Also was in 1998 exactly same P2 400mhz as on the video XD
I was one of the only people I know who had an aureal A3D card and, I promise you, it was way ahead of EAX back then. Insanely good. Playing counter strike with headphones was like cheating.
I don't think younger people can appreciate just how much this game blew us all away.. It was UNREAL... I still have my voodoo rush that I first played this with but alas it is just hanging on a wall.
My 8MB stingray voodoo rush with TV out is what i played unreal on my 27" TV at the time, using my home theater system for sound, literally would blow people away, card is in a box somewhere around here too.
Still my favorite game, still work with Unreal Engine, and still have my Voodoo 3 2000 hanging in a shadowbox on my wall alongside the Diamond Monster 3D II ❤
I’ll never forget the moment I popped this and UT in with a Voodoo 2. My god… I wish they would remaster this. I would be head over heels. This game has a special place in my heart 💯
Back in the days, i used a PII 233 with 32MB RAM and a Diamond Monster Voodoo2 8MB. Unreal was such an impressive game at this time. Together with my Creative Soundblaster Live! and the Creative FPS 1000 sound System, i had a EAX enabled 4.1 system. So awesome! I gave away the PC, but i still have the voodoo2 card here :)
Those voodoo card's are few rare ones, that have positive price change over the times.. If you sell it when you are 100y old, buyer need's extra oxygen from bottle just by seeing it.
i have the 12mb version in my compaq, its a beast of a card even if it bottleneck my 180 overdrive mmx a little, still have the box and everything that came with it
I love that kind of comments, when people visit a retro hardware channel and start arguing about the sense. Somehow some guys don't understand, that it is all about fun, experiments and learning. If we'd talk only about sense of doing something, we wouldn't make such channels... and music, and art, and s.o. Nice project!
I remember my PC when I first bought this game. I had a 233mmx and a 4meg (non 3dfx) video card. The game was unplayable. I upgraded to a 3dfx Hercules Stingray with 8 meg of memory and the game was smooth as silk. I remember how amazing this game looked for the time and I really enjoyed the single player campaign.
Unreal was pretty darn awesome to see for the first time back in the day. I upgraded from a S3 Virge based video card (which was awesome for 2D games) to a Voodoo Banshee based one largely because of Unreal. I'm still playing a game by Digital Extremes daily these days, Warframe! Also, your results illustrate why the majority of Voodoo 1 cards were 4MB models even though there were some models that more than that available.
Oh.. This bring back great memories. I had discovered Unreal on the same config 3DFX with a Sony Trinitron and SbLive on a stereo+subwoofer system.. That was a true blast.
3dMark 2001 usee some parts of that demo in their test program and many other ones. I remember how intense fighting were going Assembly summer @ Fin. Ati Rad 8500 was fastest card at the time (in single gpu, in homePC). They must run it with some P4 because it could handle big clocks and internal bandwith. They even dropped cpus multiplyer and put more Hz to line that talks with cpus lanes -> NB -> Memory. Back then some better memory maybe had some effect's, todays those 'gaming rgb mem's are just sad :p My old 64 Gb all 6 stick's sitting in case without any led's. Ram activity led that memory card controls itself would be nice, but not whole bank flicking overall. Just some up corner one red or blue blinking when heavy reading and writing goes on. It could be done "easily"
Cyrix PR200 with 32Mb ram, running a Diamond Monster 3D back in the day. What most "modern" takes of this leave out is that a lot of us were running at 512x384 for better performance, not 640x480. On an LCD panel it looks terrible. On an old CRT it was very playable visually, plus you could hit 30 FPS in a lot of titles. Remember Doom and even DOS Quake in software mode all ran around 320x200 back then, so 512x384 was a step up.
The Unreal demo, what a memory. I remember my dad and uncle were benchmarking their cards to that demo back in the day to see which tweaks made a bigger difference.
Great mod and experiment. I was there when Unreal came and it was quite the nightmare to make it run without a Voodoo. My first proper 3D accelerator was a professional ELSA Gloria XXL, that was great for many things but definitely not for gaming. Things like that, I used to run it with the software render. I remember that I needed an overclocked Pentium II 350 to make it half decent. Some time later I got the first Geforce paired with a dual Pentium III 1Ghz and what a difference it made. Still, I remember that playing at 1600*900 with everything enabled was demanding even for the Geforce. Also, I rented the CD but it got all scratched when I crashed the car with all my friends inside and we rolled 7 times. The CD ended on the road and the car landed on top of it, but we still returned it the next day. Good times, lol.
Unreal was one of the very first games I played on my Voodoo1 card, the other being ff7. I don't remember the framerates being as low as shown here, but it was a *long* time ago. I do remember the Voodoo being *much* faster than the software renderer on my P/MMX-200, in addition to looking *so* much better.
That's because the castle intro sequence is more demanding than the normal gameplay. When playing Unreal the FPS is a lot higher than in the castle intro sequence.
It also used to be that anything above 24-25 fps was considered pretty decent back in the days. I remember playing Quake II with the software renderer at 18 fps in my Pentium 120 and I was quite happy with it. Then i moved to a Pentium II 233 and frame rate at 800*600 was like 50 all the sudden, and I could no believe my eyes 😁 Unreal was no Quake though... much more demanding.
Excellent video. With 8 MB it looks like the performance improves a lot more with slower CPUs and less with faster ones. With the P200 MMX the performance improves by 9.1%, with the P2 333 mhz by 3.8% and with the P3 500 mhz by just 2.0%. But considering that the fastest CPU in 1997 was the P2 300 mhz at a price of 2000 $, allmost all Voodoo 1 cards were used with Pentium 1's and maybe 233 and 266 mhz P2's anyway.
You are right, it improves more on old pc because of the slow transfer speed on the pci bus on old pc . I test my Voodoo 1 6mb with some game it can run some games that with the 4mb are not playable at all.
I guess that in newer games with higher system requirements the performance improvements would be even bigger. For example in newer games that use the Unreal engine, like Unreal Tournament, Rune or Undying.
I don't know why those early accelerated games with their colored lighting and more vivid colors and beautiful sky boxes, why they are more fantastic and atmospheric than a lot of AAA games of today. Maybe nostalgia, but I see again the starting intro, the first feeling when you get out of the spaceship and you look at those cloudy skies with the blended planet and sun, and the first time you look down on the waterfall. It still gets me. It's why sometimes I'll find myself playing some of these old games instead of the more modern stuff. Also the music. Futuristic, from demoscene musicians. Music that today's gamers would call cringe, they prefer their orchestrated and hollywood like AAA music, or less memorable soundtracks, very boring just to cover the background.
I quess "no lights" is not about dynamic light in particular but about lightmaps. They require extra rendering step on 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics because it does not feature blending of multiple textures in a single pass like VooDoo 2 and later can do.
How much I love the gigantism of the late 90s shooters! Back when the conventions for a true 3D game were still not established and everybody just experimented...
Let's not forget that only very few could afford a Pentium2 rig combined with a Voodoo 3D accelerator card and a Soundblaster card from Creative Labs. PC's were not a device for almost everyone as they are today. I'm still keeping the CPU, the Soundblaster Live and the Voodoo2 12Mb from those times...
I wonder how that 4MB card with the 66Mhz memory chips would go with an 66Mhz 8MB memory upgrade, it's amazing what "just" 4Mhz can do for performance.
I was able to o\c my first card, a Diamond Stealth II from 40 Mhz to 72 Mhz with added heat sinks on the ram and a fan for the GPU. That's an 80% o\c. Done by editing an array in a text file. It was a beast! With 4 MB!
great video! a demo of tomb raider playing on a 3dfx voodoo at a computer show blew me away. i bought a matrox mystique 220 for 2d and a voodoo for 3d on the spot. went home and had a blast with the game. so when unreal came out i was ready. i also had a SB card and frankly playing that game in the dark was nerve wracking. what a great time we had, those of us who got to experience the rise of 3d games. of course we were amazed as each generation of game improved on the last, but nothing was as great as the beginning of hardware 3d. my voodoo was retired for a TnT2, then a 9600 Pro (i was always jealous of the 9700 Pro, the magazines talked about that card like it was the holy grail, couldnt afford it though). Now im older i make do with a 1050 since i mostly game on xbox but man those were the days.
Just increasing the TMU memory would have the same result except no 800x600 support. FBI memory only allows for higher resolutions. TMU memory upgrades allows for more resident textures, providing a potential speed improvement due to less texture loading. Newer games like Quake 3 will probably see more improvement because they were made for cards with more than 2 mb of texture ram.
I will test other games in the future - we shall see if newer games benefit more from extra video memory. I am just afraid that the Voodoo won't have enough power to drive those games.
I was chasing for great 3d accelerators at the time, all voodoos, all Verite 1k/2k, all nVidia Rivas, I tried them all. But those are quite long obsolete today. The only thing remains unparalleled in Unreal till today is its software renderer, the only one on earth that can easily confuse you at higher resolutions with hardware rendering. Unreal's software renderer is undoubtedly the GOAT.
And it's all down to one simple trick: dithering. A 2*2 ordered dither on the texture coordinates is an incredibly effective way of faking bilinear filtering.
Seeing the intro demo for the first time on my friends 'massive' 17" monitor, 3dfx Voodoo with AWE32 and big Creative speakers with a subwoofer was jaw dropping. ~£2500 PC in 1998 At this time I had a standard PC - 14" montor, 2mb onboard graphics, Soundblaster 16 and £10 Trust desktop speakers. A year or 2 later I saved up and got a Voodoo 2
Too bad 3dfx never released a Voodoo 1 with 60 mhz. That 20% extra power would have been really nice for the 1997-1998 games. As far as I know the fastest Voodoo 1 is the Diamond Monster that runs at 57.5 mhz.
This behavior might have something to do with the FSB. When a GPU runs out of memory it has to use system RAM in order to compensate. The Pentium 200MMX and PII 333Mhz have a slower 66Mhz bus which should impact performance in scenarios where the graphics card needs to access system RAM. It is possible that the 100Mhz bus of the PIIIs makes this operation almost painless.
i have a diamond monster 2 in my 1993 socket 5 pc with a 180mhz overdrive mmx cpu, runs this game very fine, its incredible what those gpus can do to an old pc
It might be possible to utilize the increased amount of VRAM, I suppose, if you write your own program or modify the existing program. It would seem those games don't, which isn't so surprising if this configuration didn't actually exist. The little improvement there is, might just be a few memory calls that can be skipped, possibly due to the difference between the 4MB and 6MB variants, and with a faster platform, the cost of accessing the memory is lessened.
I remeber the unintended horror of my childhood where we upgraded the graphics card to a Vodoo 3500 but Unreal froze every time in the menu screen after the upgrade. You flew around for a bit and then it freezes every time. Of course we had no clue back then about computers and eventually with a new motherboard it became playable (though I never played the campaign because I was too afraid as a kid :D ).
11:15 I would suggest checking through an IDE - M.2 SATA adapter, or using an A2 V30 SD card like the Kingston Canvas Go Plus. IOPS values should improve.
I really wish unreal would get a modern update the way quake and quake 2 have. Unreal was fantastic and I'll always remember playing it on my 3dfx card way back when computer gaming was just really getting exciting.
I remember when this game first came out. I was all set with a Monster 3DFX card, and although it wasn't the greatest thing ever, the game--Unreal v1--was BREATHTAKING. :) It's difficult to believe just how spoiled the most recent generations of people are regarding games and graphics. I literally witnessed games change from the 80's all the way up to when "Deus Ex" hit the scene. After that, almost nothing surprised me as graphics, frame rates, creativity, and immersion continued to improve. "Jedi Outcast"--launched in like 2003 I think--was brilliant. "No One Lives Forever 2"--on the Unity engine--was also absolutely stellar. :) Wow. #MEMORIES
Are these system scaling limitations possibly due to higher system memory performance on the newer test rigs? It seems to me that texture swapping for a game like this would be more dependent on system memory performance.
amazing video, is like is tailored for me , the game before i played unreal was duke nukem 3d, so you can imagine how pretty i thought this game was lol
I wonder what the results would be when running Unreal 2.26 (Gold) with its detailed textures.. However, Voodoo only supported textures of low resolution, up to 256x256, so perhaps the results would have been the same.
Pentium Ii 333mhz using two Voodoo2 cards in SLI mode, Unreal ran 60fps at 1024x768 perfectly with all graphic options set to max, and this was when PlayStation 1 was the No.1 console at the time ha!
I would do it, but I already created the memory boards. When removing the chips, I may end up with non-fitting boards. I got some broken Voodoos which will be perfect for a memory swap - provided they are fixable.
I wonder if Unreal Tournament is playable with the voodoo 1 and with the texture pack would make a difference having more texture memory. I also wonder if similar memory upgrade would be possible on a voodoo 2 because i remember i had red somewhere it would support up to 20 MB (not to be confused with the SLI on a single board cards with 16 or 24 MB), that would be even more interesting!
The reason you aren't getting much for having the extra video ram is either that you can load everything needed in a level into less than 4 already or the bottleneck is the processor it's self so extra ram isn't going to help much. The real performance gains for voodoo cards was with SLI anyway. I remember going from one to two voodoo 2 in my system and it was a MASSIVE gain. I out performed the voodoo 3 when it launched, though me and my friends tuned the computer forever. Pretty sure that was the first time I overclocked a card. we ended up rigging cpu cooling fans from a Pentium II to the main chips and powering them from a chassis fan header set to run full speed at all times because obviously temp sensing wasn't going to be available. Unreal is a bit over what a voodoo 1 is capable of really. To me unreal fits more in the voodoo 2 era. They launched within months of each other. This seems like trying to run cyberpunk 2077 on a nvidia GTX 1080. There was never a time when 20fps was considered acceptable gaming.
at this time, i bought a computer especialy to run unreal AND half life, it was a very big hardware with a p2-333 @350 + an video card ati all in wonder 128. i saw a visual revolution in game into this both title.
Looking into the tool-assisted speed run (TAS) software might be helpful. I'm sure PC software is available that would make it possible for creating perfectly repeatable runs for any game to use in benchmarks. This software simply records the inputs being made and replays them with frame-perfect timing.
I will try to overclock a few more Voodoo cards in the future - with memory rated at 66MHz. I doubt that I'll find a card to reach that frequency though.
Did you try upgrading the 3dfx Velocity 100 from 8 to 16 Mb? Aparently there exist 4-chip SGRAM Voodoo 3-s, and as the Velocity 100 is a Voodoo 3 with less RAM and 1 texture unit disabled in drivers, maybe there is a way to install the updated amount of ram and flash the relevant BIOS to the Velocity 100?
After getting great fps with Quake2 using a single 12mb Voodoo2, I couldn't deal with the framerate drop with Unreal. Had to get a second Voodoo2 for SLI before I was happy.
Thanks a lot for your cool Video! I always wondered how a V1 with more Memory are going to perform! I have a small question, maybe you can help me, i am usind 2x V2SLI and Unreal 227i, i searched the whole Advanced Options, but i can not manage to deactivate vsync, i always hung with max of 59fps. If i use the Voodoo 5 it is deactivated and go up to 100+, any idea? Thank you in advance, Daniel
I have not looked at patch 227i, but it could be that the option to disable vsync was removed. You could try to disable it by adding SSTV2_SWAPINTERVAL=0 into your AUTOEXEC.BAT (I have not tested this myself, but this should work for Direct3D - which I assume you are using).
that maxed out Dispersion Pistol at that encounter makes my brain hurt. i suspect thats not possible, but can not remember where first of the upgrades is - maybe it is somwhere on Vortex Rikers and i just forgotten, definitively would not have all 4 however.
I wonder how you benched the v1 on a 1000mhz p3, that cpu is too fast for the card and the cards displays al kinds of dispay errors (colored blocks,etc). Is it a calculated result?
I did not see any issues running the Voodoo on a PIII 1GHz. I am using the Windows 98 supplied Voodoo drivers (which glitch under 3DMark 99), but work without problems in Unreal 225f.
no dynamics light would be perfect for pro multiplayer games, unfortunately its not possible to use it online. only in single player (unreal tournament99)...we called it milky look..thats how all pro quake3 players played q3. yesterday i started new Unreal game, on unreal difficulty,its challenging even for me as former pro player..so cool
i remmember getting home from school and me and my bro and my dad firing unreal up for the first time and all 3 of us just kept watching this opening scene minds blown good memmorys "JEWBIDAR" :)
I have an authentic Unreal official CD is it worth anything? I never had a Voodoo when I played it but with a Pentium2 266mhz think 2mb ram. I then switched to original Halo which I also have the original disk and CD key. They worth anything?
hi how did you overcome the 3dfx driver glitch that ruins textures in d3d modes on cpus faster ~400mhz? although unreal is able to run in a free of this bug glide mode (in this case without any benefit from additional 4 megs of ram), 3dmark works in d3d only. what's the driver do you use?
With later reference drivers, 3DMark renders correctly on the faster PIIIs. The Windows 98 SE driver does glitch with those CPUs. Unreal however never had any glitches with the drivers coming with Windows. I was surprised as well. They were also a little bit faster compared to the latest reference drivers from 3Dfx.
That scene where the lights turn off, combined with an SB Live! with EAX enabled *shivers*... That was a scary scene back then, and I'm sure it would still have the same effect to this day. I played Unreal on an 8MB Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, so it ran quite a bit smoother then on the Voodoo 1, and it was the first game to really convince me that 3D accelerators were worth the price.
OMG, EAX 😍 I played Thief in '99 with EAX, on a CRT monitor, in the dark alone. Voodoo 2 as well. Best gaming experience of my life. I miss EAX. 😔
Oh yes... my era ! i mean.. it was my dad computer but i played with him unreal and he also had Sound Blaster Live sound card with a 5.1 Cambridge Soundworks ... good sound quality and dayum... also Nvidia TnT Riva 2 while me had a Ati Rage 2 =P Also was in 1998 exactly same P2 400mhz as on the video XD
Thief! Heart pounding while guards were trying to find me. Incredible experience.
I was one of the only people I know who had an aureal A3D card and, I promise you, it was way ahead of EAX back then. Insanely good. Playing counter strike with headphones was like cheating.
@@robjones8733 Thief? i rermmebr that! good game
I don't think younger people can appreciate just how much this game blew us all away.. It was UNREAL... I still have my voodoo rush that I first played this with but alas it is just hanging on a wall.
i lost my vodoo banshee :((
My 8MB stingray voodoo rush with TV out is what i played unreal on my 27" TV at the time, using my home theater system for sound, literally would blow people away, card is in a box somewhere around here too.
Still my favorite game, still work with Unreal Engine, and still have my Voodoo 3 2000 hanging in a shadowbox on my wall alongside the Diamond Monster 3D II ❤
great card, great ages
I’ll never forget the moment I popped this and UT in with a Voodoo 2.
My god…
I wish they would remaster this. I would be head over heels. This game has a special place in my heart 💯
They remastered this
@@SajtosNokedli No, Epic didn't remastered first Unreal.
@@Slawek361 Sorry, it was Quake 2
@@SajtosNokedli No problem man, yeah, Quake 2 was remastered recently :D
Back in the days, i used a PII 233 with 32MB RAM and a Diamond Monster Voodoo2 8MB. Unreal was such an impressive game at this time. Together with my Creative Soundblaster Live! and the Creative FPS 1000 sound System, i had a EAX enabled 4.1 system. So awesome!
I gave away the PC, but i still have the voodoo2 card here :)
Those voodoo card's are few rare ones, that have positive price change over the times.. If you sell it when you are 100y old, buyer need's extra oxygen from bottle just by seeing it.
I wish I still had my first PC. I think it was a PIII with a Riva TNT2. I had no sounds for a few months because I didn't know how to do it 😅
i have the 12mb version in my compaq, its a beast of a card even if it bottleneck my 180 overdrive mmx a little, still have the box and everything that came with it
I love that kind of comments, when people visit a retro hardware channel and start arguing about the sense. Somehow some guys don't understand, that it is all about fun, experiments and learning. If we'd talk only about sense of doing something, we wouldn't make such channels... and music, and art, and s.o.
Nice project!
Thank you Necroware!
I remember my PC when I first bought this game. I had a 233mmx and a 4meg (non 3dfx) video card. The game was unplayable. I upgraded to a 3dfx Hercules Stingray with 8 meg of memory and the game was smooth as silk. I remember how amazing this game looked for the time and I really enjoyed the single player campaign.
Unreal was pretty darn awesome to see for the first time back in the day. I upgraded from a S3 Virge based video card (which was awesome for 2D games) to a Voodoo Banshee based one largely because of Unreal. I'm still playing a game by Digital Extremes daily these days, Warframe!
Also, your results illustrate why the majority of Voodoo 1 cards were 4MB models even though there were some models that more than that available.
Those were the days.. i went from voodoo 1 to 2 for unreal back then.
And thumps up 4 warframe. The one f2p game i respect.. should fire it up again.
My oldest retro PC have on-board S3D Virge, and Voodoo 1 and 2.
Same! S3 Virge with voodoo card was my setup. Only my processor was a Cyrix200, which was the bottleneck for bad or lack of floating point.
Oh.. This bring back great memories. I had discovered Unreal on the same config 3DFX with a Sony Trinitron and SbLive on a stereo+subwoofer system.. That was a true blast.
I never get sick of that intro sequence and music. I could leave it on all day as background ambience!
3dMark 2001 usee some parts of that demo in their test program and many other ones. I remember how intense fighting were going Assembly summer @ Fin. Ati Rad 8500 was fastest card at the time (in single gpu, in homePC). They must run it with some P4 because it could handle big clocks and internal bandwith. They even dropped cpus multiplyer and put more Hz to line that talks with cpus lanes -> NB -> Memory.
Back then some better memory maybe had some effect's, todays those 'gaming rgb mem's are just sad :p
My old 64 Gb all 6 stick's sitting in case without any led's.
Ram activity led that memory card controls itself would be nice, but not whole bank flicking overall. Just some up corner one red or blue blinking when heavy reading and writing goes on.
It could be done "easily"
Soundtrack can be found I think on utube. I got a cd copy with the game.
Found it: ua-cam.com/play/PLmB0y8YAkHQrHOo7Echwqhn9abCtT534W.html@@robjones8733
Cyrix PR200 with 32Mb ram, running a Diamond Monster 3D back in the day. What most "modern" takes of this leave out is that a lot of us were running at 512x384 for better performance, not 640x480. On an LCD panel it looks terrible. On an old CRT it was very playable visually, plus you could hit 30 FPS in a lot of titles. Remember Doom and even DOS Quake in software mode all ran around 320x200 back then, so 512x384 was a step up.
The Unreal demo, what a memory. I remember my dad and uncle were benchmarking their cards to that demo back in the day to see which tweaks made a bigger difference.
Great mod and experiment. I was there when Unreal came and it was quite the nightmare to make it run without a Voodoo. My first proper 3D accelerator was a professional ELSA Gloria XXL, that was great for many things but definitely not for gaming. Things like that, I used to run it with the software render. I remember that I needed an overclocked Pentium II 350 to make it half decent. Some time later I got the first Geforce paired with a dual Pentium III 1Ghz and what a difference it made. Still, I remember that playing at 1600*900 with everything enabled was demanding even for the Geforce. Also, I rented the CD but it got all scratched when I crashed the car with all my friends inside and we rolled 7 times. The CD ended on the road and the car landed on top of it, but we still returned it the next day. Good times, lol.
Maybe you should have borrowed Gran Turismo instead of shooters.
I've had tons of Quantum3D Obsidian2 200SBi's boards before. Only 1 is left. I love it on my retro PC.
Unreal was one of the very first games I played on my Voodoo1 card, the other being ff7. I don't remember the framerates being as low as shown here, but it was a *long* time ago. I do remember the Voodoo being *much* faster than the software renderer on my P/MMX-200, in addition to looking *so* much better.
That's because the castle intro sequence is more demanding than the normal gameplay. When playing Unreal the FPS is a lot higher than in the castle intro sequence.
It also used to be that anything above 24-25 fps was considered pretty decent back in the days. I remember playing Quake II with the software renderer at 18 fps in my Pentium 120 and I was quite happy with it. Then i moved to a Pentium II 233 and frame rate at 800*600 was like 50 all the sudden, and I could no believe my eyes 😁 Unreal was no Quake though... much more demanding.
Great video. Bottom line: if there’s a chance of getting a 6 MB Voodoo then you’d be better off with extra TMU memory rather than extra FBI memory 😉
Excellent video. With 8 MB it looks like the performance improves a lot more with slower CPUs and less with faster ones. With the P200 MMX the performance improves by 9.1%, with the P2 333 mhz by 3.8% and with the P3 500 mhz by just 2.0%. But considering that the fastest CPU in 1997 was the P2 300 mhz at a price of 2000 $, allmost all Voodoo 1 cards were used with Pentium 1's and maybe 233 and 266 mhz P2's anyway.
You are right, it improves more on old pc because of the slow transfer speed on the pci bus on old pc . I test my Voodoo 1 6mb with some game it can run some games that with the 4mb are not playable at all.
what ever did you ever do with 8MB of GPU memory!
do you think it could handle crisis?
I guess that in newer games with higher system requirements the performance improvements would be even bigger. For example in newer games that use the Unreal engine, like Unreal Tournament, Rune or Undying.
I used to play Unreal at first on my P120 overclocked to 133 with a Voodoo 1 that a friend gave me and I quickly realised I needed a new computer. :D
I don't know why those early accelerated games with their colored lighting and more vivid colors and beautiful sky boxes, why they are more fantastic and atmospheric than a lot of AAA games of today. Maybe nostalgia, but I see again the starting intro, the first feeling when you get out of the spaceship and you look at those cloudy skies with the blended planet and sun, and the first time you look down on the waterfall. It still gets me. It's why sometimes I'll find myself playing some of these old games instead of the more modern stuff.
Also the music. Futuristic, from demoscene musicians. Music that today's gamers would call cringe, they prefer their orchestrated and hollywood like AAA music, or less memorable soundtracks, very boring just to cover the background.
This was by far the best time ever. I loved my childhood so much.
Excellent video, thank you sir.
I wish you all best
Never had the 8mb model but played Unreal with a 12mb v2 and it was great.
"it is not about being good. It's about sending a message!"
I quess "no lights" is not about dynamic light in particular but about lightmaps. They require extra rendering step on 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics because it does not feature blending of multiple textures in a single pass like VooDoo 2 and later can do.
How much I love the gigantism of the late 90s shooters! Back when the conventions for a true 3D game were still not established and everybody just experimented...
The intro alone is enough to bring memories of even other games from around that time, like hitman and vampire the masquerade
Let's not forget that only very few could afford a Pentium2 rig combined with a Voodoo 3D accelerator card and a Soundblaster card from Creative Labs.
PC's were not a device for almost everyone as they are today.
I'm still keeping the CPU, the Soundblaster Live and the Voodoo2 12Mb from those times...
I wonder how that 4MB card with the 66Mhz memory chips would go with an 66Mhz 8MB memory upgrade, it's amazing what "just" 4Mhz can do for performance.
4 MB
I was able to o\c my first card, a Diamond Stealth II from 40 Mhz to 72 Mhz with added heat sinks on the ram and a fan for the GPU. That's an 80% o\c. Done by editing an array in a text file. It was a beast! With 4 MB!
I still have my Orchid 3DFX Voodo 1 + 2 cards. Probably the biggest WOW factors in 1990's besides Dreamcast, AMIGA and 3DO.
great video! a demo of tomb raider playing on a 3dfx voodoo at a computer show blew me away. i bought a matrox mystique 220 for 2d and a voodoo for 3d on the spot. went home and had a blast with the game. so when unreal came out i was ready. i also had a SB card and frankly playing that game in the dark was nerve wracking. what a great time we had, those of us who got to experience the rise of 3d games.
of course we were amazed as each generation of game improved on the last, but nothing was as great as the beginning of hardware 3d.
my voodoo was retired for a TnT2, then a 9600 Pro (i was always jealous of the 9700 Pro, the magazines talked about that card like it was the holy grail, couldnt afford it though). Now im older i make do with a 1050 since i mostly game on xbox but man those were the days.
Just increasing the TMU memory would have the same result except no 800x600 support. FBI memory only allows for higher resolutions. TMU memory upgrades allows for more resident textures, providing a potential speed improvement due to less texture loading. Newer games like Quake 3 will probably see more improvement because they were made for cards with more than 2 mb of texture ram.
I will test other games in the future - we shall see if newer games benefit more from extra video memory. I am just afraid that the Voodoo won't have enough power to drive those games.
@@bitsundbolts Yeah for sure. Even Unreal is close to the limits of a Voodoo 1 so newer games will not be a fun experience to play.
I was chasing for great 3d accelerators at the time, all voodoos, all Verite 1k/2k, all nVidia Rivas, I tried them all. But those are quite long obsolete today. The only thing remains unparalleled in Unreal till today is its software renderer, the only one on earth that can easily confuse you at higher resolutions with hardware rendering. Unreal's software renderer is undoubtedly the GOAT.
And it's all down to one simple trick: dithering. A 2*2 ordered dither on the texture coordinates is an incredibly effective way of faking bilinear filtering.
Will never forget my first 3D accelerated walk in Unreal
Seeing the intro demo for the first time on my friends 'massive' 17" monitor, 3dfx Voodoo with AWE32 and big Creative speakers with a subwoofer was jaw dropping. ~£2500 PC in 1998
At this time I had a standard PC - 14" montor, 2mb onboard graphics, Soundblaster 16 and £10 Trust desktop speakers. A year or 2 later I saved up and got a Voodoo 2
Really cool-that corridor scene is like night & day difference literally. 8MB gives you bragging rights at least.
Too bad 3dfx never released a Voodoo 1 with 60 mhz. That 20% extra power would have been really nice for the 1997-1998 games. As far as I know the fastest Voodoo 1 is the Diamond Monster that runs at 57.5 mhz.
Love the old hardware.
This behavior might have something to do with the FSB. When a GPU runs out of memory it has to use system RAM in order to compensate. The Pentium 200MMX and PII 333Mhz have a slower 66Mhz bus which should impact performance in scenarios where the graphics card needs to access system RAM. It is possible that the 100Mhz bus of the PIIIs makes this operation almost painless.
yes,i used a 83Mhz bus speed at a 200mmx (208mhz)..it was also a little push on a monster 3d-2
Wow! This is absolutely unreal!
i have a diamond monster 2 in my 1993 socket 5 pc with a 180mhz overdrive mmx cpu, runs this game very fine, its incredible what those gpus can do to an old pc
It might be possible to utilize the increased amount of VRAM, I suppose, if you write your own program or modify the existing program. It would seem those games don't, which isn't so surprising if this configuration didn't actually exist. The little improvement there is, might just be a few memory calls that can be skipped, possibly due to the difference between the 4MB and 6MB variants, and with a faster platform, the cost of accessing the memory is lessened.
two Diamond Monster II in SLI mode and some good memories...that's Unreal for me.
I remeber the unintended horror of my childhood where we upgraded the graphics card to a Vodoo 3500 but Unreal froze every time in the menu screen after the upgrade. You flew around for a bit and then it freezes every time. Of course we had no clue back then about computers and eventually with a new motherboard it became playable (though I never played the campaign because I was too afraid as a kid :D ).
Man, I've had a 3dfx voodoo graph and a diamond sound card, good times also
I still have my Helios 3DFX Voodoo 2 - 12 MB "what an amzing experience!"
I had two Voodoo cards back in the 90's. Hardware acceleration started a PC gaming golden age, and Unreal was one of the best.
11:15 I would suggest checking through an IDE - M.2 SATA adapter, or using an A2 V30 SD card like the Kingston Canvas Go Plus. IOPS values should improve.
so glad we had a voodoo 3 to play this game!
I really wish unreal would get a modern update the way quake and quake 2 have. Unreal was fantastic and I'll always remember playing it on my 3dfx card way back when computer gaming was just really getting exciting.
yes, please do show that repair video, i love repair videos and u r very good at repairing :)
I remember when this game first came out. I was all set with a Monster 3DFX card, and although it wasn't the greatest thing ever, the game--Unreal v1--was BREATHTAKING. :) It's difficult to believe just how spoiled the most recent generations of people are regarding games and graphics. I literally witnessed games change from the 80's all the way up to when "Deus Ex" hit the scene. After that, almost nothing surprised me as graphics, frame rates, creativity, and immersion continued to improve. "Jedi Outcast"--launched in like 2003 I think--was brilliant. "No One Lives Forever 2"--on the Unity engine--was also absolutely stellar. :) Wow. #MEMORIES
Next: V2 with 24MB on an single Board or take two for a modded V2 48MB SLI Setup? 😅 What would be the max. resolution? Over 1024x768?
Are these system scaling limitations possibly due to higher system memory performance on the newer test rigs? It seems to me that texture swapping for a game like this would be more dependent on system memory performance.
amazing video, is like is tailored for me , the game before i played unreal was duke nukem 3d, so you can imagine how pretty i thought this game was lol
I wonder what the results would be when running Unreal 2.26 (Gold) with its detailed textures.. However, Voodoo only supported textures of low resolution, up to 256x256, so perhaps the results would have been the same.
This game tops my list of classic PC games that need a remaster, perhaps a current gen remake.
This is a game that would make an awesome reboot
Back to the 90`s :)) But today we use our virtual machine to emulate and play this :))
when the game was released i played it on Cyrix MII PR 266 with 32MB Ram and S3 Trio 3D on software rendererer at 512x384 px :) sweet times
Great. More voodoo demos please
Good objective presentation!
my first pc was a compaq pentium mmx 200mhz, voodoo 2 and 32 megs of ram. those were the days.
Unreal - my first love
And still is 😊
Pentium Ii 333mhz using two Voodoo2 cards in SLI mode, Unreal ran 60fps at 1024x768 perfectly with all graphic options set to max, and this was when PlayStation 1 was the No.1 console at the time ha!
Nice, I was expecting you to rip out the slow ram and replace it though :D
I would do it, but I already created the memory boards. When removing the chips, I may end up with non-fitting boards. I got some broken Voodoos which will be perfect for a memory swap - provided they are fixable.
I really love your videos!!!
I wonder if Unreal Tournament is playable with the voodoo 1 and with the texture pack would make a difference having more texture memory.
I also wonder if similar memory upgrade would be possible on a voodoo 2 because i remember i had red somewhere it would support up to 20 MB (not to be confused with the SLI on a single board cards with 16 or 24 MB), that would be even more interesting!
The reason you aren't getting much for having the extra video ram is either that you can load everything needed in a level into less than 4 already or the bottleneck is the processor it's self so extra ram isn't going to help much.
The real performance gains for voodoo cards was with SLI anyway. I remember going from one to two voodoo 2 in my system and it was a MASSIVE gain. I out performed the voodoo 3 when it launched, though me and my friends tuned the computer forever. Pretty sure that was the first time I overclocked a card. we ended up rigging cpu cooling fans from a Pentium II to the main chips and powering them from a chassis fan header set to run full speed at all times because obviously temp sensing wasn't going to be available.
Unreal is a bit over what a voodoo 1 is capable of really. To me unreal fits more in the voodoo 2 era. They launched within months of each other. This seems like trying to run cyberpunk 2077 on a nvidia GTX 1080. There was never a time when 20fps was considered acceptable gaming.
at this time, i bought a computer especialy to run unreal AND half life, it was a very big hardware with a p2-333 @350 + an video card ati all in wonder 128. i saw a visual revolution in game into this both title.
20 fps... man... and I remember it was a top high end experience lol. It was super smooth for me in my memory lol
a Vmod on SST1 would be cool! With a Boost DC/DC converter on VCC on the QFP.
I'm happy that YT knows: i LOVE Unreal! 😂
I wonder what the frame pacing looks like. Does the 8 Meg make it smoother and more consistent?
Looking into the tool-assisted speed run (TAS) software might be helpful. I'm sure PC software is available that would make it possible for creating perfectly repeatable runs for any game to use in benchmarks. This software simply records the inputs being made and replays them with frame-perfect timing.
Unreal can do demos with an addon I think. 227 comes with it.
@@xan1242 Oh, cool. I was recommending a general solution for any game, but good to know.
I wish Nightdive will move this to the KEX Engine and release Unreal Remastered with classic flyby and main menu
PCI bus throughput could be a factor too?
What would be the maximum overclock of Voodoo 1 chip if there is no graphics memory frequency limit?
I will try to overclock a few more Voodoo cards in the future - with memory rated at 66MHz. I doubt that I'll find a card to reach that frequency though.
Nice! Keep it going! 👍😉
I'd love to see you getting the best ram you can find and trying to break the 60MHz limit.
Did you try upgrading the 3dfx Velocity 100 from 8 to 16 Mb? Aparently there exist 4-chip SGRAM Voodoo 3-s, and as the Velocity 100 is a Voodoo 3 with less RAM and 1 texture unit disabled in drivers, maybe there is a way to install the updated amount of ram and flash the relevant BIOS to the Velocity 100?
I do not have a Velocity 100. But I have heard what you described before. Not sure about the ram upgrade, but definitely unlocking the texture unit.
After getting great fps with Quake2 using a single 12mb Voodoo2, I couldn't deal with the framerate drop with Unreal. Had to get a second Voodoo2 for SLI before I was happy.
11:44 how much memory did you have installed on these machines? There was probably a lot of disk caching going on.
128MB for P200, 256MB for PII and PIII
disable dynamic lightning is standard in The Sunspire!
Did you try 512x384? That is how I played most of my games on my Voodoo 1 back then.
Thanks a lot for your cool Video! I always wondered how a V1 with more Memory are going to perform!
I have a small question, maybe you can help me, i am usind 2x V2SLI and Unreal 227i, i searched the whole Advanced Options, but i can not manage to deactivate vsync, i always hung with max of 59fps. If i use the Voodoo 5 it is deactivated and go up to 100+, any idea?
Thank you in advance, Daniel
I have not looked at patch 227i, but it could be that the option to disable vsync was removed. You could try to disable it by adding SSTV2_SWAPINTERVAL=0 into your AUTOEXEC.BAT (I have not tested this myself, but this should work for Direct3D - which I assume you are using).
good video mate.
that maxed out Dispersion Pistol at that encounter makes my brain hurt.
i suspect thats not possible, but can not remember where first of the upgrades is - maybe it is somwhere on Vortex Rikers and i just forgotten, definitively would not have all 4 however.
Nah, I cheated :)
Unreal was released in a era where Voodoo2 SLI was rocking.
Yay Slot 1!!!
I wonder how you benched the v1 on a 1000mhz p3, that cpu is too fast for the card and the cards displays al kinds of dispay errors (colored blocks,etc). Is it a calculated result?
I did not see any issues running the Voodoo on a PIII 1GHz. I am using the Windows 98 supplied Voodoo drivers (which glitch under 3DMark 99), but work without problems in Unreal 225f.
no dynamics light would be perfect for pro multiplayer games, unfortunately its not possible to use it online. only in single player (unreal tournament99)...we called it milky look..thats how all pro quake3 players played q3. yesterday i started new Unreal game, on unreal difficulty,its challenging even for me as former pro player..so cool
Can you double stack the add on ram cards for say 12mb of ram?
i remmember getting home from school and me and my bro and my dad firing unreal up for the first time and all 3 of us just kept watching this opening scene minds blown good memmorys "JEWBIDAR" :)
Dang it, for Unreal you should have done one system with an AMD K6-2 with 3DNow, missed opportunity.
I have an authentic Unreal official CD is it worth anything? I never had a Voodoo when I played it but with a Pentium2 266mhz think 2mb ram. I then switched to original Halo which I also have the original disk and CD key. They worth anything?
Nice!
hi
how did you overcome the 3dfx driver glitch that ruins textures in d3d modes on cpus faster ~400mhz?
although unreal is able to run in a free of this bug glide mode (in this case without any benefit from additional 4 megs of ram), 3dmark works in d3d only.
what's the driver do you use?
I used the driver coming with Windows 98. It does glitch on both PIII CPUs.
It's strange that it worked at all becasuse w98 integrated driver for voodoo graphics seems to me a dummy plug.
With later reference drivers, 3DMark renders correctly on the faster PIIIs. The Windows 98 SE driver does glitch with those CPUs. Unreal however never had any glitches with the drivers coming with Windows. I was surprised as well. They were also a little bit faster compared to the latest reference drivers from 3Dfx.
I still have a voodoo5 5500, I just need to find a motherboard with AGPx1/x2 so I can use it again. I'd love to make a retro PC build.
Nice! Good luck with your search and I hope you'll find a good board!
Who didn't try to run Unreal with P133 + 32mb ram + S3 Virge 4mb doesn't know what life is!!
about my config and then I got a Banshee and its was a new world
It was not a dynamic lighting. Dynamic lightmaps.