I used to be quite into collecting classic old PC components. I think I might have a couple of working voodoo 5 5500's kicking around in a box as well as some other classic 3dfx stuff (voodoo2 I think)
However, to say that a retro card like this is the only way to do old games isn't so true. People continue to post up glide wrapper variants for retro gaming. I've even seen glide wrappers for Win 10.
Last game I used with a glide wrapper was a replay I did of I-War quite a few years ago. That used to be an epic game. It was well worth revisiting.
You beat me to it, although I’m way late to the party. I remember preordering a Diamond Monster 3D, just for Quake. I didn’t care what else ran on the M3D, I wanted all those gorgeous textures and anti-aliasing that 3Dfx provided for Quake. It was sublime.
I‘m also surprised by how many seem to know so little about these 3D accelerators? These cards were heavily reliant on OpenGL, which is still very much in use. 3Dfx made it very easy to leverage OpenGL via their GLide API. It worked so well that a cool dude wrote a GLide wrapper to allow any game dependent on GLide to run via a wrapper on any card that supports OpenGL. He’s apparently taken it a step further and written a “universal” wrapper for Windows 10.
There’s nothing preventing anyone with a PC with a empty PCI slot from leveraging a 3dfx card? All this talk of overwhelming complexity and low likelihood of success is simply nonsense. Voodoo 3 was the first product where 3Dfx integrated both 2D and 3D processors onto a single card. Even though it had a single PCB, it still used separate discrete processors for 2D and 3D. Anything before Voodoo 3 was strictly a 3D accelerator with a passthrough. You’d launch the game, Voodoo would detect the API, pause pass through, your screen would go dark, then the game would present with all those gorgeous 3D effects from the Voodoo. After the game, the screen resyncs and graphics are handed back to 2D card for desktop use.
The reason so many people spent $600 in today’s money for a “part-time” 3D-only accelerator card, in addition to a 2D graphics card, was because of the insanely dramatic improvement in made on 3D games. The improvement these cards provided wasn’t just night and day, it was a quantum leap in 3D performance. We could finally game at or near 60 fps with 3D effects enabled! The debate before Voodoo wasn’t whether a card could do 4K60 vs 4K120, it was whether a card could support anything greater than SVGA (800x600).
Even at those pathetic resolutions, Quake (the first true 3D game engine) was glorious to play, especially at LAN parties (Google it). Because so many games and mods that followed Quake were based on the Quake engine, ALL of them ran great on Voodoo. The Voodoo cards spoiled us because we assumed that each new video card would offer the same dramatic improvement in image quality and rendering that we saw on our original Voodoo cards. Alas, nothing came close to that first massive jump from basic 2D cards to the Voodoo cards. The increase in 3D performance I saw with Voodoo is what inspired me to continue building expensive gaming rigs over the past 25 years. Some we’re absolute beasts, while others were disappointing, but I never stopped learning. I assumed setting IRQs and COM ports might be useless today, until I started tinkering with Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
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