you to play the game at a 640 x 480 resolution at close to
30fps. You saw it and you wanted Voodoo in your life.
An even more impressive transformation awaited us
with id Software’s Quake. I first played Quake on a Pentium
133 laptop with 16MB of RAM, and the game was only just
playable at a 360 x 240 (or half SVGA). And when I say
playable, I mean the right side of 20fps.
Then 3Dfx released MiniGL, a cut-down version of
OpenGL designed to handle just the functions used in Quake- id responded with a port of the game, GLQuake, which
could take advantage of the MiniGL wrapper. The port had its
problems, including gloomy brightness levels, but the bilinear
filtered textures went from looking slightly rough to looking
awesome, and you could now run the game at 640 x 480 in
glorious 16-bit colour and still hit 30fps.
Serious PC gamers saw Quake running unaccelerated and
then accelerated, then voted with their wallets. Sure, the new
Pentium MMX CPUs released in 1997 could run the game at a
decent lick, but did it look as good as Voodoo? Not even close.
GLQuake sold 3Dfx cards, and a growing user base
boosted game support. True, 3Dfx had rivals. Videologic’s
PowerVR tech was affordable and efficient, but it also used
an unconventional tile-based rendering pipeline and needed
a faster CPU to get the best out of it. Rendition’s Verite
chipsets looked promising, but were too pricey and struggled
with their 2D performance.
3Dfx grew to become a kind of de facto standard just as
the next wave of 3D games started taking off. From Need for
Speed II SE to Myth: The Fallen Lords, Shogo: Armor Division
and Unreal, Voodoo Graphics made the best-looking games
of the era look even better and run at what seemed incredible
speeds. The PC was back on top as the most technologically
advanced gaming platform of the era.
3Dfx continued through a glorious period. Its 1997 Voodoo
Rush 2D/3D graphics chipset was admittedly a dud, suffering
from a lack of memory bandwidth and sync issues with the
on-board 2D graphics chip. However, 1998’s Voodoo 2 was a
worthy successor, arriving just a few months after another iD
showcase, Quake II.
This purple period wasn’t to last, as GLide fell out of favour
and ATi and Nvidia delivered high-performance all-in-one
graphics chips, but we owe 3Dfx a huge amount for bringing
3D power to the PC when it needed it most – and helping to
show the world the full potential of hardware-accelerated
3D graphics.
KILLER APPS
This was 3Dfx’s one problem at launch. The technology
itself was impressive, and the cards came with some decent
demos, including a slick 3D combat demo, Valley of Ra, which
featured amazing reflective surfaces and gouraud shaded
characters, and a stunning dolphin sim, Grand Bleu. Orchid and
Diamond took them around to show to eager PC journalists,
and jaws consistently hit the floor, but there still wasn’t a
killer app.
At this point, the early 2D/3D graphics cards all tended
to support the same games, and we’d got used to seeing
the likes of Descent 2, Actua Soccer, Terminal Velocity and
MechWarrior 2 with only mildly improved, filtered 3D textures
running at frame rates that barely climbed above what you
could get with a software renderer. The Voodoo 3D ran these
games faster at higher resolutions, but nobody was going to
pay £300 for that.
Luckily, 3Dfx soon had two absolute bangers. The first was
Tomb Raider. Lara Croft’s debut was already one of the most
stunning-looking games around on the Sega Saturn, Sony
PlayStation and PC, but the pixelated, low-resolution graphics
meant that you weren’t seeing it at its best.
However, just a few months after launch, the publisher,
Eidos, released a patch that allowed you to run Tomb Raider
under GLide. The effect was amazing, not only smoothing out
the blocky textures and adding transparent water, but allowingThe Orchid
Righteous 3D
was one of the
first Voodoo
boards to hit the
market, along with
Diamond’s mighty
Monster 3D
With its high-
res models and
reflective surfaces,
3Dfx’s lead tech
demo was a
jaw-dropper.
Nobody had seen
anything like this
outside of Sega’s
Virtua Fighter
arcade games