Need for Speed 3 - 3DFX Voodoo 1 vs. Software Rendering

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ch0ppasuey@reddit

What is up with all these 90s and 3DFX comparison videos? Just curious, ELI5

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I didn't understand why people online would wax nostalgic about 3DFX and spend absurd sums of money on Voodoo cards on eBay when either a ATI Rage Pro or Nvidia Riva TNT 2 would basically play any game for far less money. So I got 3 generations of Voodoo cards and paired them with a CPU that could have plausibly been out when each respective card was out.

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berrmal64@reddit

Better than I'd have expected from a P1 tbh

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

I can't work out whether A) some mysterious force is stealing my P1's performance, or B) people online remember their P1 as performing better than it actually did. I might investigate further one day.

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Over-Percentage-1929@reddit

"mysterious force" you say?

Back in the day, the usual suspects were Norton, McAfee, Corel and Adobe .

Depending on how faithfully you recreated the era. :D

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

Corporate bloatware is totally a thing. My friend's childhood PC which somehow still has its original installation on it chugs in Windows 98 because it's so full of random BS tacked on by the manufacturer. But I applied a fresh install of Windows 98 SE to each of my 90's PCs and never added any non-gaming stuff to them.

So, I have no idea. I was even wondering if maybe my P1 could be thermal throttling. It has a passive heat stink what probably ancient thermal paste on it.

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EIsydeon@reddit

Have you tried windows 95 yet? The p1 was so slow that even installing the “internet enhancement pack” that came with IE 4.0 added a little slow down. Win98 takes tha another step further.

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

I haven't tried it yet, but I also haven't forgotten. Before I do that I want to try a fresh install on my friend's PII 400 MHz + ATI Rage Pro machine because it has so much OEM bloatware on it that it is sometimes even slower than my PI 200 MHz. Soldier of Fortune was a dumpster fire when I tried playing it on that machine.

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EIsydeon@reddit

I had a Pentium 2 at 333 and a celeron 300a at 450 before. They ran about equal. I had a rage xl pci at the time. It was only slightly faster than it was before the overclock. I now have a vaio laptop with essentially a rage xl agp and even overclocked I am better off software rendering in most games for speed. The original rage architecture was crap for speed

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Over-Percentage-1929@reddit

Another possibility is insufficient RAM or a 5400 rpm HDD.

If you have 64-128 MB RAM, you can also disable the swap file.

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mobcat_40@reddit

I remember it looking a lot better than this

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

In 1999 it did

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Nit3H8wk@reddit

I still remember my first real gpu a voodoo 3 2000 pci. AGP would have been nice but anything was better than software rendering for everything at that point.

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madmac_5@reddit

Fun fact; the Voodoo 3 didn't really take advantage of AGP, since it couldn't do AGP texturing and using AGP 2X didn't provide a noticeable speedup. So, you probably wouldn't have had much benefit from a Voodoo 3 AGP card aside from having an extra empty PCI slot for another device. Chances are pretty good that you got the PCI version because your PC didn't have an AGP slot and had on-board video on its motherboard, right? :)

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flexuslucent@reddit

isn't the reflective environment mapping on the car missing? Or did it came in NFS iv?

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madmac_5@reddit

There should be reflective surfaces on the cars in Glide or D3D mode, but it may not show up well when recording from the CRT. I know that when I do direct capture it's there when using any 3D accelerator card.

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MojaMonkey@reddit

This is crazy. I remember my geforce 3 ti200 struggling a bit with this game. I can't believe its playable on a voodoo 1 which I also had back then.

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canthearu_ack@reddit

Now I have to pull my IBM Aptiva out and play this.

(The Aptiva is a K6-350 with ATI graphics, but with an added 3dfx Voodoo 1 for some extra kick)

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noob-combo@reddit

The coloured lighting of the cop cars in the night levels... Glorious glide days

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

I wish I had experienced that because in this demonstration I went no farther than stage 1, and went I beat the game myself I did so in software mode on a much more powerful CPU. So while the game ran smoothly, it had no 3DFX visual pizazz.

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noob-combo@reddit

Letting the game just run on a screen with the coloured lights going wild after the cops had caught me is a core childhood memory

Quake 2's coloured lighting on glide was another one me and my brother were obsessed with lol

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ProCommonSense@reddit

3DFx had the best commercials.

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hamellr@reddit

I had a lady bring the kids computer in, insisting this game was glitching and freezing the entire computer.

I spent a couple of days playing this game to get it to glitch. It just would not. I called her up to let her know it was a “no charge” because I couldn’t find an issue, but she insisted I keep looking at it.

After literally a month, she finally came back to get it. I’m pretty sure it was taken away as a punishment at this point, because the game never created for me.

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

My siblings and I used to squabble over my whose turn it was to play my Nintendo 64 so one day my Dad got fed up and locked the N64 in a closet for months on end.

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