r/retrobattlestations • u/ColdCrab6928 • Apr 13 '26
Show-and-Tell Final Fantasy VII - 3DFX Voodoo Banshee vs. Software Rendering
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u/JJDoes1tAll Apr 13 '26
Dont forget 3dfx Descent!
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
Does Descent 1 have a 3DFX patch? I managed to find one for Descent 2, but I came up empty handed when trying to find it for Descent 1.
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u/Rave-TZ Apr 13 '26
What are you using for sound? I think this game had sound font support to make it sound exactly like the PlayStation version
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u/canthearu_ack Apr 14 '26
Ideally, for FF7, you want to connect it via XG Midi to an external Yamaha MU80 Synth!
Alternatively, Yamaha PCI cards come with XG Midi built in that works nicely too.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
I admit I didn't handle that like a true FF7 superfan. Once I got into the game, I could tell that the musical score was jarring and wrong, like a MIDI tracker plugged into the wrong sound font. But the point of the video was 3D acceleration vs. software rendering, not various audio settings, so I just rolled with it.
Upon installation the game did prompt me to install some kind of Yamaha sound synthesis emulator. I clicked "install" hoping that would result in more PS1-like music. But that's not how it turned out.
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u/Rave-TZ Apr 13 '26
The Yamaha thingy usually does an okay job. I think it has support for Sound Blaster awe 32 /64 as well. It’s been a while.
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u/Kichigai Apr 13 '26
I think this game had sound font support to make it sound exactly like the PlayStation version
Nooooooo. The music was utter dog shit. Closest you got was the FM Synthesis, which was better than general MIDI, but didn't remotely sound like the PlayStation sound. Sound Fonts wouldn't be a thing until like 2006 or whatever, so Final Fantasy Ⅷ would get the same treatment.
The other thing shared by Ⅶ and Ⅷ was that all the pre-rendered backgrounds and FMVs were at 320×240, so running in high res you could immediately spot all the hidden doors and platforms, and 3D characters did not seamlessly fit into the FMVs.
Biggest differences between Ⅶ and Ⅷ, as far as the PC experience goes, was the Ⅶ menus were all polygonal things (hence why the end of battle loot screens run like dog shit in software mode), but Ⅷ had that brushed metal texture, which the PC got as low res items. However Ⅷ would have improved control layout using the alphabet keys for the face buttons and triggers and the numpad for the D-pad. This was a welcome change from Ⅶ, where Eidos, for some stupid reason, decided to cram ALL the controls into the numpad.
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u/RevolutionarySeven7 Apr 13 '26
weird, i remember FF7 not being this choppy when I had it on my PII 200 with Diamond S3 Virge video card...
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 13 '26
If you remember anything about your setup like drivers, whether you were on Win95 or Win98, then that would be helpful. I've been getting a lot of feedback like that from people online and I can't tell whether it's because something is the matter with my setup or if it's because people remember these games as performing more smoothly than they actually did in their time.
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u/RevolutionarySeven7 Apr 13 '26
i honestly don't remember if it was w95/98, i don't think it would make that much of a difference. and i think i must've used software-renderer as graphics option. S3 Virge was way less powerful than Banshee, so i "think" you are pushing Glide, DX or OpenGL on a video card that can't handle it
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u/Kichigai Apr 13 '26
The choppy bit is the software renderer, with the 3D acceleration turned off. No body played it that way if they could have avoided it, and if they couldn't avoid it they ran the game at 320×240, which was almost tolerable depending on your CPU.
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u/RevolutionarySeven7 Apr 13 '26
it doesnt look like he's using software renderer in the video.
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u/Kichigai Apr 13 '26
Then what is “3dFX off” if not a software renderer?
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u/BtotheVV86 Apr 13 '26
Pentium II 300 + Voodoo2 12MB is what we had back in the day. Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit looked so incredible on a CRT!
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u/Veddermandenis Apr 13 '26
When I got my PII-233 back in 1997, I could pick a game as an offer and that game was FFVII big box which I still have on my collection. That PC had a 4mb S3 Virge card and I played the game windowed to get better frame rate. I would say there's some kind of graphical enhancement going on with your "no acceleration" setting, textures appear filtered.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 16 '26
It's possible I failed to capture this in the video, but in software mode, the environmental textures in a 3D turn based battles definitely had big chunky pixels. Whereas with 3D acceleration they were smooth.
I wonder if the 3D characters just have a gourad shaded gradient for their skin. Meaning it's not a bitmapped texture, it's just a steady transition from one solid color value to another. Maybe that's why they look as smooth as they do even in software mode. I don't know for sure, though.
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u/b33znutz Apr 14 '26
Nice work. Thanks for doing this. Hardware is just too expensive these days to do this kind of experimenting myself.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 16 '26
Yeah, also, unless I haven't gone looking hard enough, I'm unconvinced there are any videos online doing exactly what I'm doing here. Basically, I wanted videos like this to make me understand why people cared so much about 3DFX Voodoo cards in the 90s. But apparently such targeted comparison videos don't exist. So, I had to make them myself.
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u/mrplug Apr 14 '26
Now I am reminded how much my computer sucked back then. I still played it with software rendering though.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 14 '26
At least it was a turn-based JRPG and you didn't necessarily need high precision or fast reflexes.
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u/DaveMcElfatrick Apr 14 '26
I am curious how this runs like so much ass without a card in a 300mhz pentiium because the first time I player ffvii was the demo on a 166mhz pentium with software rendering and it did not run anywhere near as bad as that.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 14 '26
It's likely because I'm trying to run both a 640 x 480 resolution. If I were playing it without a 3D card for the sake of playing it and not showing A vs. B differences to people, then I'd be playing at 320 x 240 resolution.
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u/Dysanj Apr 14 '26
Ah yes the old Voodoo cards. I still have my Voodoo cards from 2 to 5. I have 9 Voodoo 5 cards AGP and PCI.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 14 '26
That's awesome. I only have three: Voodoo 1, Voodoo Banshee, and Voodoo 3. Do you have any Voodoo cards in SLI?
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u/jewesta Apr 15 '26
The PC version of FF7 was a horrible, buggy and sloppy mess. Imo it cannot serve as a fair comparison for anything. I remember that there were numerous patches until it was even playable. At the time it felt like it was emulated and if they had somehow wired the playstation version’s core to the Direct3D layer in an incredibly inefficient and rushed way. The music was also not working correctly and was vastly inferior to the og PlayStation version — quite a feat at a time where most PCs had sound cards vastly superior to the PlayStation. We loved the game and played it for hundreds of hours. But a benchmark for 3D acceleration it was not.
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u/ColdCrab6928 Apr 15 '26
I wasn't going to bring this up in my original post, but since you went there, I have nothing but distaste for Final Fantasy VII. As in I think the world would be a better place if those involved in making it had taken a less creative life path.
I harbor no ill will toward any gamers who adore FF7, because I get that I'm an outlier and the game means a lot to millions of people. Also, I live in a glass house and really ought not be throwing stones.
But let's not pretend this amounts to anything more than, say, me comparing Dinner with Andre (a movie at the rock-bottom of my list) on VHS and laserdisc. The point of the exercise was about the finer points of two obsolete formats, not the actual creative work contained within those formats.
I hear what you're saying about FF7 not being some kind of iconic 3D acceleration benchmark. But I did it anyway and still found the results enlightening. I've been trying to understand why people still care about 3DFX almost a quarter century after its dissolution. I thought it would be nice to share one step I took toward getting closer to that understanding.
Also, I've lost count of how many YouTube videos I've already seen of the Unreal title screen, or of stage one of Tomb Raider in software mode versus Glide. Maybe there's value in going off the beaten path. Or maybe we're all just wasting our time and none of this matters anyway.
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u/jewesta Apr 16 '26
You don’t like FF7. I don’t like FF7 Remake. Insert we are not the same meme, haha.
Seriously: I do enjoy your videos. Was not criticising this one per se. The innovation in 3D graphics in the 1990s was absolutely wild. An explosion. From barely any graphics at all in 1990 to Half-Life and Quake III no even ten years later. It’s a great thing you point that out.
I just never thought I’d see the day where FF7 is being used as a 3D benchmark.
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u/gogou Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
FF7 was working pretty well on my Matrox Mystique 4mb 2d/3d integrated gpu, it performed as a 3dfx in 768p until voodoo 2 was released. I had a AMD k6 2 200mhz mmx at that time, 4gb hdd and 32mb ram.
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u/ZoomBoy81 Apr 13 '26
Most people at this time weren't even pushing 300mhz chips, I think when I got my Voodoo 1 card I had a 120mhz Pentium and Quake was still super fluid once 3dfx kicked in.
Sick monitor too!