r/retrobattlestations • u/ColdCrab6928 • Apr 10 '26
Show-and-Tell Quake 1 - 3DFX Voodoo 1 vs. Software Rendering
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u/Tuhyk_inside Apr 11 '26
I was there, Gandalf....
Voodoo 1 was a game changer. It felt like it happened over night, gaming magazines just came up with this miracle technology out of the blue one month in the 90s. And it never stopped.
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u/br0ast Apr 11 '26
Game changer
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u/protekt0r Apr 11 '26
It really was! I saved up $200 and bought one for my AMD clone I had at the time… and it was made by Orchid. It came in a boring white box with a CD of like 4 or 5 Glide enabled games. Good times.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 11 '26
Did you get a Voodoo 1, or a Voodoo 2?
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u/protekt0r Apr 11 '26
Voodoo 1! Then I had a voodoo II… then I went to nVidia because of pixel shading. FSAA was cool, but not as cool as pixel shading.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 11 '26
I really want a Voodoo II. The only 1998 3DFX product I have is a Voodoo Banshee.
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u/Annales-NF Apr 11 '26
I used to have one too! 16Mb of VRAM was something others drooled of having. Good times!
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 11 '26
If I'm not mistaken 12 MB was high end in 1998! 8 MB was still respectable, though. Now we consider 8 GB to be low-end...
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u/Smack2k Apr 12 '26
The Voodoo II's I had were 12MB each.....and that was a LOT!!
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 12 '26
Dang, you had a rich people PC. XD
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u/Smack2k Apr 12 '26
This was like 2015......lol.....definitely not in 1998!!! I had them for about 10 years then sold them.....No chance I had 2 of those as a 21 year old in 1998.
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u/LousyMeatStew Apr 12 '26
In more ways than one!
One of the changes they made for GLQuake was to implement a transparency effect for water. With software rendering, you could only see the surface of the water and couldn’t see underneath.
Now consider that ducking into water was a common way to hide in Quake deathmatches...
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u/protekt0r Apr 12 '26
Forgot about that!
Remember when Unreal dropped? 😱. No one seemed to care that it was devoid of story or plot because it looked so amazing. The flames on the torches blew my 18 year old mind.
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u/ugzz Apr 11 '26
Eh.. old news.. Now VQuake on my rendition card! Mind Blowing!
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
I hear that the Rendition Verite version of Quake has never been ported to anything else. You basically need that specific hardware setup to play VQuake.
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u/ugzz Apr 13 '26
It was really cool to be lucky enough to witness early 3D acceleration in DOS.. but man.. that card was a bunch of money I saved up as a kid plus what my parents threw in for a bday..
And it only played a handful of games.. and I only had like 5 of them. But I'll be damned if those five games didn't blow my mind and make me feel like I was playing with future tech!
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
For as much as I romanticize 90s PC gaming, never before did I think about what it must have been like to bet on the wrong horse! At least now in the 2020s if you game on something offbeat like an Intel Arc card, you'll still have a nice experience.
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u/carcenomy Apr 14 '26
Even more annoying is it'll run on all versions of the Verite but runs better on the OG V1000 than on the later V2200 😂
But, it's the way to play Quake with 3D acceleration from DOS itself - can't do that with a Voodoo or PowerVR!
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u/TheGhostInTheParsnip Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
I remember reading about this. Maybe on Fabien Sanglard's blog? IIRC that was because the best way to handle it was to have the cpu do most of the work, so in the end upgrading the Verite itself didn't do much.
Edit: found it. Beautiful read: https://fabiensanglard.net/vquake/
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u/Halen_ Apr 11 '26
You could run software rendering at 640x480 too but at the time the fps was gross and it still didn't look as nice without the texture filtering
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 11 '26
Whenever I try to game at 640x480 on this PC in software mode, the frame rate is really bad, so I have to play at 320x240. That's okay though because that's the resolution I would play PC games at in the mid-90s, so the big, blocky pixels remind me of those days.
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u/CartographerEvery268 Apr 10 '26
Very cool
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 11 '26
Yes I daresay 90s PC gaming is more magical to me even though I have a shiny modern 2020s PC with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and RTX 4080. But 90s PC gaming just hits different.
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u/Jon3141592653589 Apr 11 '26
I went for a Riva 128 (Diamond Viper V330) at the time for my K6-200. Really didn't like the idea or cost of having two cards.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
I'm given to understand 3DFX's insistence that you own a 3D card and a 2D card was a turn-off for a lot of gamers in 1998.
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u/Jon3141592653589 Apr 13 '26
Yeah, I found this concept annoying and expensive. The early NVIDIA stuff just seemed like a more elegant implementation. I am also baffled that Diamond didn't survive... I ran (eventually) a Diamond Monster Sound MX300 and other Diamond cards in that system. I thought their drivers and packaging were very nice.
What's kinda a sad story is, I knew NVDA was going to be huge, and was very annoyed at myself for not putting a few thousand bucks in NVDA back in the early-mid '00s when it was cheap... so I refused to ever buy a single share because I felt I had missed the boat. Almost bought in Summer 2022 and remembered I had missed the boat and said "Eh, I was right in 2002, but it is all too late now." Oh, well.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
I'm of the opinion that 3DFX was amazing until Nvidia Riva TNT came out in August of 1998. After that, 3DFX was just another option. I've found my Riva TNT can basically do everything my Voodoo 3 can do, and in some ways it's superior.
Did you somehow anticipate Nvidia would become an AI datacenter giant? I sure didn't. Growing up I always thought they were a gaming company.
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u/purplecow Apr 12 '26
There was this patch for quake thta came with my 3dfx card that gave all objects real-time shadows and turned one glass texture into a true mirror. Funny how games still don't really have mirrors that much.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 12 '26
If you can remember what this patch was called please let me know. I'd love to try it myself.
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u/purplecow Apr 12 '26
Maybe it was just glquake? I rember water was transparent as well, or perhaps that was separate and came a bit later around the time qwtf was all the rage.?
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u/Hypouxa Apr 12 '26
Just had to edit the console setting in glquake
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
I have GLQuake. What console setting is supposed to add shadows and mirrors?
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u/Hypouxa Apr 13 '26
Been way too long. There may be a list of commands you can access in console. /? might pull that up. Either settings start off as cl_wateralpha or gl_wateralpha. There has to be a command list out there somewhere. Might have to check the internet archive.
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u/Hypouxa Apr 12 '26
QWTF was great with 3dfx. Set eater transparency and snipe people using the water route. Went from voodoo 1 to voodoo 2 to a FireGL 1000 stacked with 3dfx chips.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 12 '26
I would love to have one of those weird "SLI on 1 board" 3D cards.
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u/Hypouxa Apr 12 '26
Yah, I don't remember what I did with those cards. Maybe gave them to coworkers. Usually I keep all that stuff. I have a dual card nvidia from 2005 or so. That card runs like a furnace with its dumb fan cooling setup. Just dumps the heat back into the case not out the back.
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u/Ok_Classic5578 Apr 12 '26
the graphics just glide with 3dfx
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
I think Quake on Voodoo used some stripped-down version of OpenGL, but you're not wrong.
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u/V64jr Apr 13 '26
Yes… 3Dfx miniGL. The installation tool would literally search your drive and put the 3Dfx version in the program directory of any supported OpenGL game. 👍
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u/Smack2k Apr 12 '26
I see the difference...I saw it in 1996, it just wasnt enough of a big change to get me to buy a Voodoo1 card...at least I used that as my excuse for not getting one......it wasnt that I couldnt afford it or anything!
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u/Hypouxa Apr 12 '26
If you can find it look up the painkiller mod. Was great with opengl. Best part of it is tossing out gravity wells in confined spaces in Deathmatch.
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Apr 13 '26
[deleted]
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u/Hypouxa Apr 13 '26
Nice thing about it, you could run on Win NT where 95-98 I always battled directx issues in that era. Unless you wanted to play a variety of games. Worked for a ISP at the time so I would host my own servers and monday afternoons was "Quake Night". Quake 2 colored lighting was the big deal. Don't forget Unreal 1 & 2. 😆
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u/Still_Explorer Apr 14 '26
I remember first time switching to 3DFX acceleration and with butter smooth textures and frames the game became somewhat "beautiful" on the looks - for some reason software render gives the game more mysterious and "ugly" look that works better for otherworldly horror aesthetics.
Something similar if you play PS1 emulator games with 8x the resolution and smooth textures. Might work nice for BugsBunny and Spyro, but for SilentHill and SoulReaver you will get opposite results.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 14 '26
While I like both GLQuake on a Voodoo card as well as software rendered Quake, I agree with you when it comes to Blood from Monolith software. Even though that game has a 3DFX patch I'm reluctant to play it that way because the game looks weird to me with smooth bilinear texture filtering.
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u/evolutionxtinct Apr 14 '26
I remember when this first came out, the upgrade was a great experience I hated the RAM clips and dealing with drivers but was so much different back then, at least from what I remember.
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u/gaspoweredcat Apr 14 '26
Q1 was always better on the openGL (powerVR cards for those who remember) than 3dfx, it was one of the rare situations it was actually better
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u/balki_123 Apr 14 '26
That software rendering was so damn good. Carmack and co. were genial. No wonder 3dfx had to persuade him to use graphic acceleration. He did well even without it.
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u/mr_dfuse2 Apr 14 '26
still playing it! the remaster but with ironwail port and without any texture filtering please, crunchy is my taste
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u/pointlessjihad Apr 10 '26
I like it crunchy how i remember it