Update: I finally found Fatal Racing / Whiplash! Part 2 video is here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/d5-KhKuTy5yzpp8.html

This brings back memories. I wrote the back-end driver for the Argonaut titles on the Virge (used in Fx Fighter and Croc) - it my first job out of University back in the day when I joined Argonaut's technology team. It was really crazy back then with every video card needing a different customized back-end implementation - as I recall I had to do ATI Rage and some other cards as well. Later, after I left and formed my own company we also did the port of Tomb Raider for the Virge, although that was mostly done by a friend of mine. The Virge was an interesting card - it did pretty much everything right in terms of image quality features, but basically every effect you turned on halved the fillrate. Want perspective correct textures? Fillrate halves. Want depth buffering? Fillrate halves again. And so on. It was a real art trying to extract performance. When we did the port of Tomb Raider we were working from the version of the back end renderer of the engine that had been used for 3DFX's Voodoo graphics. One thing we didn't realize at the time was that it had been converted to use depth buffering, but the original engine version (software renderer) used a depth-sorting algorithm. If we had obtained that version from Eidos we probably could have got twice the frame rate, but we didn't realize that was an option in the engine at the time and just worked from what we got. I think we did use some of the Virge's more funky features though, like a pseudo-bilinear mode that only filtered in one direction but was faster. You had to calculate when you could use this instead of true bilinear filtering without losing too much image quality. Really fun times back then.

I don't think anyone could do any better than this at showcasing the ViRGE

A wild Neil appeared! 😃 Great video BTW!

Excellent work Rees, and very thorough indeed! I think you're right RE comparing it with software rendering on the 233MMX, at the time the ViRGE came out my PC was a Pentium 75 with no MMX and getting 3D performance like seen on the ViRGE in your video would have been pretty incredible by those days' standards.

I remember using the virge on "jedi knight - dark forces II" i think it was. I remember that in software mode at 320x200 the virge looked better, but was actually slower then 320x200 in software mode on my at the time k6-2 550. I remember it going down in history as a 3d de-accelerator haha. I even managed to upgrade the ram for it, i bought 4 chips at a market. Didn't make it any faster. That card is what ended up being my 2d partner card for my voodoo2 i bought when i got my pentium 3 450mhz katmai machine. I overclocked it to 600mhz, and that machine with its voodoo2 was my workhorse for a long time before i moved to a pentium 3 socket 370 1gig machine. After that, i jumped ships, and bought an athlon 1900+. That machine was a beast.

I remember the S3 virge DX, it was in my first PC I owned, a pentium 133MHz, it was a better dos gaming card when using software rendering with the vesa drivers installed. I then upgraded the system with a 200MHz MMX and a 3dfx voodoo 3 2000 which was a massive jump in performance.

That case is beautiful

You can really tell the amount of work involved in getting this video made. So many random patches and fixes to hunt down but well worth it. Great cover of what S3 acceleration could do!

It's worth noting that the S3 Virge and Trio made their way into almost every server made in the last 20 years and is still used in those platforms to this day.

That was the best Virge Game showcase of the entire KZfaq!! Thanks! Just subscribed keep the good work

Excellent video Rees. I bet you have a nice time playing all of this. Imagine how challenging is to test all these games on the same platform.

Nice showcase of games that made use of the S3 Virge. You got a lot more use out of it than I did mine 😃

Very interesting video :) it's nice to see something different to 3dfx accelerated stuff.

Very interesting list, I appreciate the effort that went into not only installing and running these games but recording them and discussing them. This has caused me to install some games on systems I haven't gotten around to comparing yet. Thank you.

Man this video this day become one year ! this the first time i see you channle ! oh man thank you so much for the heart feelings that come from the 80s :( thxxxxxxxxxxxx

I had one of these (2MB version) paired with a 3Dfx Voodoo. It was a good combo back then.

Hahahaha. I'm glad you can still remember the 3D card of s3 virge in 2021. It's so rare 2021 yeah. s3 virge gx2

My pentium ran terminal velocity and descent well with and without the virge. The only difference I could see on the virge on descent though was a slight blurring of textures up close lol.

I had a S3 Trio 64V+ (I think that it was) with 1M RAM on my Pentium 90 when I bought it. When I managed to upgrade the CPU to a Pentium 166 I got also some RAM for the system and for the video card. So I upgraded the card to the max 2M RAM and the computer to 32M. I ran Windows 95 at the time and with that card I finished Quake and played many many nights Starcraft.

17:49 The mw2 and mw3 (maybe also mw4?) games were just phenomenal. They don't make them like they used to. And btw, the 233 MMX can run MW2 at 480p in software faster than the Virge.

The S3 Virges were my gateway drug into upgrading PC's. I had the Virge 325 for a long while, then paired with a Voodoo1 up until the Amd k6-2 500Mhz, Then it was Amd Athlons and Nvidia all the way from then. Edit, I still have the exact Orchid Righteous from the day shown here, but alas It dosen't seem to work anymore. Also a huge Atari fan, Great Video!

Awesome stuff!

This was awesome and helped me know what the Diamond Stealth 2000 Pro (4MB version of Virge/Dx) can do in games given my retro PC has only PCI ports (no AGP.) The system has a Pentium III in it, so I’ll see if any of these games fair better in my system. Thanks again for the comprehensive coverage of the Virge/DX! 👍

Really REALLY enjoyed this video Rees. Great work! You've reminded me of many games I'd forgotten about too lol. Including Terminal Velocity and TOCA. My S3 Virge experience on my P200MMX was limited to: 1) Install S3 Virge 2) Try Tomb Raider 3 3) Remove S3 Virge and return to Supplier 4) Receive Creative Labs 3D Blaster (3DFX Banshee) and live happily ever after :D

Wow Rees, solid effort there with this video. Must have taken ages!!

These demos don't really hold up today but when these cards were brand new and the very first 3D accelerated games came to the PC it was mind blowing.

Good video.. I used the virge and stealth cards. The voodoo wasn't in my parents' price range . I made do with what I had. Then the dimond V550 , v770 viper tnt2 came out . And left the voodoo in 2nd place.

Great video, you displayed so many games man, that must have been quite the work load. This deep dive into s3d was very cool, first video I have seen detail their offering this much. Thanks for putting it out there.

Very nice video on the Virge, well done! I'm impressed you managed to get the s3d version of Destruction Derby - I couldnt find it for my Virge video. I'm also impressed you got Mechwarrior 2 to work.. my game just crashed in s3d mode!

Great video! Sadly I only played few games off that list. And all of them in pure DOS.

I had soooo many S3 ViRGe cards from a local electronics surplus store I used to dumpster dive every weekend that threw them out. I legit had an entire milk crate filled to the top that I had to stop taking them lol. No idea what they were doing and why they had so many to throw out but they worked great under Linux back in the 90's! EDIT: The majority I remember were specifically DX cards, usually between 1-4 megabytes.

This is a trip down memory lane. I had two S3 cards, back in the day. I can't remember which one was the first card I had but I think it might have been a Trio 3D. I also had a Voodoo and remember testing them against each other on Tomb Raider. No contest. 3DFX won. The second S3 card was the Savage 4. Bought mostly for it's 2D performance but when it came to Unreal Tournament. The only winner. on the S3 Metal engine with the compressed textures, of course. I may also be mis-remembering but possibly Severence: Blade of Darkness also ran quite well on it but this was a long time ago.

in 1997 when I was using a Packard Bell (Cry) Pentium 233 MMX I was looking at 3D cards and thought about the savage after my bad experience with the Mystique, but the Savage did not excite me. I waited until mid 1998 and got a 16MB Voodoo Banshee and wow, that was an awesome match for the 233 MMX; especially as it only had one PCI slot available, so it was a simple case of disable the onboard graphics and let the Banshee do its thing. So please do a Banshee video for old memories sake :-)

this was interesting, also learned what ViRGE means 😅

I feel the moniker "graphics decelerator" was well deserved, at least for your typical 1995 PCs. At the time I had a DX4-120 and Diamond Stealth3D 2000, and on that system I never came close to any noticeable performance gain. I got a Voodoo 1 upon release in 1996 and I never looked at the Virge's 3D support again, although I kept it in the system until i upgraded to a Pentium 2. I still have both that original Voodoo 1 and Stealth 3d, but not a period correct system to put it in, unfortunately.

RM monitor!! I remember banks of the these CRTs in secondary school, trip down memory lane!

Thank you great video!!!!

Terminal velocity looked amazing back in the day. Loved it.

Awesome insight and a couple of surprises in the form of games I didn’t know.

Yesss. Terminal Velocity. Basically, a game that lured me in to gamedev.

A comparison between S3D, 3dfx, Rage, MGA-Mystique on very early 3D would be nice.

Man mechwarrior takes me back, absolutely loved those games when I was 12 when mwII came out

My first brand new PC I am sure had some kind of S3 graphics inside it (alongside a Cyrix M2 233mhz). I only realised this playing X wing vs Tie fighter and noticed a 3d graphics option, ticked that and suddenly everything looked a little bit better!

The Neil Thomas voice over was hilarious!

Good video pal

That is interesting. I had this card in one of my computers, and I actually did not know it is a 3D capable card. I always assumed it is decent 2D card with 2D accelration, but did not know (or tried) any 3D, probably because of the API not many games were compatible. I was not into gaming anyway at that time. I got it pretty late, maybe 1998, and year later was using Riva TNT2 anyway, so no big loss. TNT2 was really nice, played a lot of Quake 1-3, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, and few period games. Still as a 2D card Virge was decent, could got decent resolution, and with some trouble also worked on Linux with Xorg (it worked poorly in VESA mode, not supporting scrolling or high res at all), with good 2D acceleration.

I remember playing Descent 2 on an S3 Virge card and being extremely impressed. When he's got such a powerful CPU, the software render works great. On an older CPU, the S3 not only gives a great frame rate, but also really nice looking (for the time) texture filtering.

I had S3 Virge. First alone, and then as 2d card for 3DFX Voodoo

New sub, love your videos!

The Voodoo is famous, not infamous ... now the ViRGE, the _ViRGE_ is infamous.

Cool to see you used my dump of the original release of Croc.

@8:57 Hehe, "Loooooser!!!" :D Games was much motivating this time :D

20:32 "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

I spent many hours playing TOCA 2 on the PS1, this looks good on PC!

Have a 4MB Virge GX2 AGP in my "1997" K6 233 MMX / 6MB Voodoo Graphics, downloading the Descent II Inifinite Abyss ISO now, had totally missed that. Can't wait to gie it a go and compare to my Voodoo card :D Great Video as usual, and a GREAT job on the list on your website. S3D version of Screamer is hilarious, worse performance than software and super blurry.

Nice video. Back in the days, I really wanted to like the Virge as it would have been a cheap 3D option for others than my main PC. But I couldn't. The D3D support was just too bad.

X-Wing vs. TIE FIghter and Balance of Power ran fairly well on the S3 with 4 megs, in a K6-233. No complains the only artifact in the frames was a black box in the background of every explosion but it was 100% playable. Good video tho, I think this video card was missunderstood by most people.

Battle Race is nothing all that special, but I do know that the lead programmer on it, Martin Hoffesommer, actually went to work for S3 off the back of his work with them for the game (it was a pack in with certain S3 Virge cards, and the developer Soft-Enterprises made a small bit of money off each bundle sold), to help on their S3 Texture Compression system. His codework even made it as far as Valve, which I discovered through a google search and turning up a database concerning the 2003 Valve leak files. Not sure exactly what Valve used the code for, though.

I remember magazines back then confirming what you mentioned here... hardware mode would look a little prettier, but run slower than software rendering. S3 Virge even began some pretty 3D modes that others would adopt for their own cards. :)

This feels like one of those "don't meet your heroes" type of reviews

This is my whole childhood but mine was all shareware because we were poor.

youtube removed my like on the video so i've readded it :) keep up the great work

My first PC actually had an S3 Virge DX. I later upgraded it with a 3dfx voodoo 2 and even later got one more to run SLI on it. But I did try a couple of games in the S3 virge mode. And since at the time when I tried them I already had the 3dfx I didn't really find them very impressive. I was quite impressed later with their texture compression for their Savage 2000 cards though...

I would like to see a video on the NEC released PowerVR and PowerVR2 PCI boards that were just an add in cards, and I think used video overlay or maybe just calculated the 3D geometry and texture stuff and fed data to the videocard via some frame buffer or something. I think that it might actually be the first conventional implementation of a GPU.

Ahhhhh man, I *love* Mechwarrior 2. I remember trying to run the demo an a 66MHz 486-DX2 Intel Overdrive with no 3D accelerator...and it did *not* go well. Eventually managed to get to play it, and some years later Mechwarrior 3 came out and a cousin had it, I played it, absolutely adored it, and went home to try and run it on my own system which had some glorious onboard graphics and 24mb of RAM (game wanted 32 as a minimum)...which also did *not* go well and I was sad. Eventually, thankfully, I got to play that, too. MW3 is probably by far my favourite MW game and it's both a shame it's picky as hell and a pain in the ass to get running on a modern system or a Win 98/2000/ME if you're mad/XP virtual machine. Then again it is a wonderful excuse to build a system to run it on haha The interlaced video between the menu options in the transitions for Battle Race is godawful on the eyes!

I used this GFX cards on some systems I built in those days, you could add ram to it via those slots. had that with AWE32 - Intel BX chipset era good chipset.

27:04 Congratulations For S3 VIRGE

S3 ViRGE graphics decselerator yes !!!! Often seen , much more speed on softwarerendering .... but the S3 ViRGE was a cool chip for cardbuilder, the virge has the same pinout as the normal S3 chip.

watching this for a few min i thought that case looked very familiar, ive got pretty much the same exact one with a JCC sticker in the square and a grey toggle switch

Awesome review and retrospective! But what about S3 Virge GX2? ;)

S3 Virge could have been OK with options to override Bilinear filtering to OFF in drivers.And then add support for alpha blending and it's quite a nice cheap card.

I had one of these GPUs back then. I bought it together with my Pentium 200MHz machine ... all the good stuff back then. Except, the GPU wasn't good. The drivers were not good. Game support was not good. Etc. I am not sure about the timeline back then, but I upgraded to a Voodoo Banshee when that was available and it really was a huge upgrade that brought new life to my PC.

I tried running Longbow 2 on a virgeDX. It run in slow motion, no matter the Grfx settings. BTW funny thing, I remember playing some of these games and they run fine. I was a kid though, and I can't recall what my dad had bought.

MDK ran so much better with S3D(AMD K5 P90). In terms of picture quality, but also much faster.

I've got S3 Virge on my home server mainly for console output. I'd love to see side-by-side benchmark of S3 Virge/DX vs S3 Trio3D though

The README.RTF file included with the 2000 PC port of Metal Gear Solid makes mention of the S3 ViRGE GX chipset used in the ViRGE/GX and ViRGE/VX. I have yet to try it out with my original S3 ViRGE. I also know that the S3 ViRGE is *technically* supported by Direct3D, but in the two games I tried it had serious issues. Sonic R had a majority of the screen appearing black due to issues with alpha, and Half-Life displayed without any textures.

So this video is actually a massive apology for being slightly factually inaccruate on a video you have now delisted? That's why I subscribe. Well that and the sarcasm... and mostly the sarcasm actually.

Kinda impressive seeing the virge crank out 3d at 1024x768

I remember my stepdad buying the S3 in computer fair and popping in the memory upgrade chips, without them you could have 1024x768 or 65k colours, not both..!

The real strength of the Virge is as a 2D card for DOS, it uses the Trio64 core that is very compatible with for example Commander Keen or Jazz Jackrabbit. Matrox cards gave problems on these games. So paired with a Voodoo you have great ms-dos compatibility and performance and great 3d, and the Virges are extremely cheap.

Thank you, that was a very interesting interesting video. My first PC was a AMD K6 233 with a S3 Virge, so pretty close to what you are running. It was nice to see that I didn't miss out on anything back in the days, since the game I played wasn't accelerated. But I would probably have tried to get hold of Tomb Raider if I had known. By the way how does running Quake in software compare to Virge accelerated Quake?

I have the diamond stealth version of this card expanded to 4mb and actually if I want to play Descent II on 640x480 in DOS my machine benefits from the graphics "accelerator" I believe due to the fact I only have a pentium 133. If my chip was faster I imagine software would run better.

I had one of these in a pentium 200 mmx Packard bell. Was built into the motherboard. Didn't have a clue what it could do at the time... Which wasn't much to be fair lol.

It's interesting that Nintendo would eventually purchase the rights to the S3 texture compression technology, in use since the Wii

Destruction Derby run in 1024*768? Wow!

I ended up resigning myself to software mode. Visuals werent as nice, but it was nearly always a better experience. I did enjoy the card though. Was fun to develop for and in controlled conditions (ie. not gaming, or at best games designed around the hardware) is could pull off surprisingly decent results.

I recall seeing a magazine ad for the Virge back in the day, with Virtua Fighter being showcased as a compatible title. Weirdly enough, I can't find any references to it online, so I'm not sure if the Virge-compatible version really made it to market. I was completely in awe of Virtua Fighter, so the ad made me salivate over the Virge. Good thing I didn't have the money, I guess. ;)

I had a Pentium 233 machine w/S3 virge too.. quite the upgrade from a 486 66mhz

There's an HP OEM Whiplash CD on Ebay now.

@36:00 POD MMX sticker was a scam. Intel paid game studios up to $1mil in bribes per title claiming benefits. POD uses MMX for _one_ sound filtering effect, zero speed benefits. Confirmed (the sum per endorsement) by Intels developer relations group co-lead from that time frame. Problem with Virge was it needed >100MHz Pentium to actually run "3D acceleration" at a decent speed, but ~100MHz was the break even speed to run 320x200 games faster in software rendering mode.

The ViRGE would not show a wider performance margin on a slower CPU. All of the 3D triangle math setup calculations are done by the CPU in the library. *At minimum 27 registers need to be written per triangle.* The manual claims rightly so, that up to 43 register writes may be needed to fully specify the rendering of one single 3D triangle. These being fixed-point delta and edge start values of varying whole number and fractions, this is lots of painfully slow division instructions. Being so software bound, a slower CPU is going to experience less "acceleration" which may seem counterintuitive. Jumbo-sized triangles of a few hundred pixels across that finally get the DDA accumulators stepping in stride fare the best.

Yesssss

Twisted Metal 2 did run well on that too :-)

If I good remeber there was also a version of NHL which was running with S3.

Makes me wonder if the VIA Chrome9 (based on S3's Savage3D gpu IP) could run this graphics api.

Good, all those games up for download on your site with cracks? I will need to check it later, on phone atm.

There were so many variants of the card it was a mess, back in the day.

My S3 has a jack connection, what for? no audio devices seem to be found. I've ordered a Soundblaster anyway, but that's on my mind....why the audio jack?

S3 was on the virge of greatness, but could never be part of the big trio. And thus true to their name, the company became smaller.. smaller.. smaller. Also WhiteDragon sounds suspiciously not german there! :D