OSNews

The source code for the drivers was leaked shortly after 3Dfx was bought out.

Maybe, but the specs were opened too. 3dfx released some pdfs with docs, and made quite a big deal about them opening up that info. The Open Source community loved it.

Of course then they died off. Bummer.

The SST-1 and Voodoo3 programmers manuals are both openly available. They're actually extremely good pieces of documentation. Unlike most of Intel's specification sheets, they're not just simple register descriptions. 3dfx's documentation describes the general theory of operation of the graphics chip, describes how to do specific tasks, and provides both detailed register descriptions and implementation notes.

You can find the Voodoo 3 specs here: http://v3tv.sourceforge.net/download/voodoo3_spec.pdf

All this talk about 3dfx is openness is absurd - why can't you guys accept the fact that the drivers were leaked?

j/k

What do you mean its absurd? I posted a link to the doc in this thread!

Is he not your friend anymore, do you know if he is 3dfs hardcore now? 5-6 years ago doesn't count for today.

I had an 166 MHz pc 6-7 years ago and i it was hardcore for me, but not today.

Does anyone have any experience in how well they're supported in Linux?

Generally very good, I have Voodoo3 2000 AGP card in my 2 x AthlonXP 2000 FreeBSD box. Works very good with X11 drivers.

Edited 2007-03-08 00:11

"Generally very good, I have Voodoo3 2000 AGP card in my 2 x AthlonXP 2000 FreeBSD box. Works very good with X11 drivers. "

Can confirm this. Along with a 500 MHz Intel CPU, the Voodoo3 (without fan!) was my first run of RTCW, glquake and lsdldoom some years. On FreeBSD 4 with XFree86 drivers. Fine hardware. Well supported and very silent. :-)

No...its true. We really do.
LOL
-nX

I don't have one of theses cards to test... but, IIRC, Vista can only handle ONE graphic card drive. That means you can use several ATi or nVidia video cards, but you can't have mixed card in your setup.

That probably falls in the same case for your only 3dfx card used in your second monitor...

Not sure, but one of reasons to this limitation (by design) may be the content security using HDCP and because Aero.

Are you sure about that? It just sounds a little odd to not be able to use mixed video cards in my setup...It worked fine under all other verisons of windows...Anyways, i was wondering if it will work under vista with these new drivers from the community.

Thanks

GeForce was not a combo of any of 3dfx's designs. Undoubtedly 3dfx stuff went into NVIDIA's later designs, but that was post GeForce.

The Inquirer refers to nvidia as graphzilla
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx

Does anyone know if any opensource hardware projects are based around the released 3dfx designs?

I was always under the impression that NVidia bought 3dfx and the first GeForce was based on a hybrid combo of the Rage and Voodoo chipset.

Do you mean Riva? Rage was/is a GPU from ATI.

That's the one. My mistake.

The first time nVidia 'admitted' that they were using 3dfx tech in their cards was the GeForce FX line (you remember the FX5800 dust buster?) There was a video presentation that showed the 'fx' from the 3dfx logo combining with 'GeForce'.

As it turns out, though, if I remember correctly, nVidia had been using 3dfx 2D intellectual property in at least the GeForce 4. I think the FX series was just supposed to be the first 'collaborative' release between the two sets of engineers.

I think the author was attempting some wordplay and meant nVidia when he wrote Graphzilla...

3DFX took a different approach to producing cards. It was a sad day when 3DFX died, in the same way it was sad when the last PPC Mac was replaced. Sure the new stuff is better, but it's boring having everything just x86.

what was/is so special about these cards?

I think it was a combination of two things, GLIDE and Image quality. Glide provided a low-level API for game developer so that they could squeeze the max performance out of the chips. As far as image quality, they were definitely one of the best. I think only Matrox beat them as far as 2D quality, but for 3D they were the king.

Actually, by the time the TNT came out, 3dfx was behind in image quality. The "3dfx look" that was a revolution with the Voodoo 1 was by the time of the Voodoo 3 dismissed as overly filtered and washed-out. They were behind NVIDIA in offering advanced filtering modes and graphics effects, and totally dropped the ball on 32-bit rendering.

3dfx was a pioneer in the 3D add-on card business. And they were a fun company -- they had commercials talking about how their chips could perform so many operations a second and how this could be used to save lives... and instead they play games.

Plus, the Voodoo 2 cards were the first cards to be end-user expandable in terms of parallel...ity (I guess? haha). It's where SLI originally came from: Scan Line Interleave -- the two cards would render every other scanline, thus improving performance by allowing each card to render 'half' the screen. The Voodoo 5 5500 expanded on this idea in a single card (being two processors on one card), with the would-have-been follow up, the Voodoo 5 6000 having 4 processors. (There are some V5 6k's out there, but most have a problem of some sort).

As touched on by one of the above posters, their Image Quality (IQ) is /still/ considered some of the best by some people. Their method of Anti-Aliasing was absolutely amazing. The Rotated Grid SuperSampling method employed by them had some of the most amazing 4xFSAA available. That being said, it was also /incredibly/ memory and computationally expensive, so running Counter-Strike (original) at 1024x768 w/ 4xFSAA is... playable, but not amazing, performance-wise.

Really, they were just a cool company. It's hard to say why their cards were so cool.

Rampage would've been great. There's a lot of good information about it out there, most notably on Rashly's 3dfx page: http://www.rashly3dfx.com/products/rampage.html.

Somewhere there is even a Rampage in the hands of a collector (probably Italy). I think they found some drivers for it and fired it up.

I'm currently running Vista 64bit with unsigned, beta drivers by nVidia. I also have unsigned, beta drivers for my Creative sound card. I don't think signed drivers are a must as my system would not be running.

If you think about it, nobody will pay to have beta drivers signed. Think of the outcry by hardware vendors if they could not get the general population to test they're drivers. MS would very soon be dealing with allot of pressure.

I don't think these drivers are for 64-bit Vista -- I think it's 64-bit XP.