Man, I remember well of this old times! I remember the excitement that was to play Quake 2 and the original Tomb Raider for the first time with the Voodoo 1, when I played these games before only with the CPU (the software mode). I also got later the Voodoo 2 to play the Quake Arena (the Voodoo 1 has not enough power to play these game at 640x480), and, a few weeks later, I bought a second Voodoo 2, to play the same Quake Arena at 800X600, because the higher resolution was so nice to see! The problem was that the two Voodoo 2 weren't enough to play as 1024x768 (the image quality was fabulous on a 13/14"CRT monitor), so I sold the two Voodoo 2 and I bought the top graphics card from a new graphics card manufacturer that I didn't like much, because I suspect that they like money too much, a so-called Nvidia...

I remember playing Quake 2 as a little tyke at my friend's house. It scared the pants off of me but it was such a rush. That sense of exploration combined with fear of getting killed in the game. I think we played it on a Pentium 1 of some sorts, probably 166 MMX and a 1MB or 2MB S3 graphics card. It was just about the time that I really started getting interested in computers. Our own computer at home was still a 486 running DOS so 3D games in Windows was really something special because up until then we only had Wolfenstein 3D. Doom was a game for devil worshipers and Duke Nukem 3D had strippers and also devil things so they we're both off limits for the longest time.

What a blast from the past. I loved my Voodoo2 SLI back in the day. It made Quake 2 run like butter.

Ahh, these were exciting times! Great video, quite the trip down nostalgia lane. Edit: I think I still have two Voodoo 2 cards somewhere in my basement, but I don't remember if I still have my AMD K6-3 CPU and motherboard. You've inspired me to go on a hunt!

Man, you would have been a BALLER playing this at 1024x768 back in the day with that setup lol

Wow 3DNow! results were VERY impressive! (with Voodoo2) Thanks for sharing!

Even though it was a lot, its exactly what i was looking for with such great brief explanations. Thanks bruv

Pls Ive been looking for this for a long time and finally I found u!! You're literally a life saver. It kinda took a while to download but it still worked.

i had a K6-2 400Mhz PC with Voodoo2 + i740 for 2D back in the day! it was the first PC i built for my self. with 3Dnow! and 12MB Voodoo2 you could run at 1024x768 at near 60fps in Quake 2 which was insane at the time. 3Dnow! Quake 2 works with the Voodoo3 and 5 as well. the K6-2 overclocked pretty well too you could get to 500Mhz pretty reliably but need good cooling. this with a Voodoo2 and i740 + Sound Blaster Live! Value and 16MB of ram made for amazing budget gaming PC for its time.

Back in 1997 i had my first PC after Amiga. Pentium 166 MMX, Voodoo 2 and Soudblaster AWE64, miss those days, playing and games were much more fun than nowadays

Nice benchmarks! Always fun to see this. I remember that AMD K6-2 could even compete with early Pentium 3’s.

Very interesting results. I didn't know 3dnow had so much potential that I probably never experienced back in the day! Just bought a couple of K6-2 CPUs + motherboards so I look forward to seeing my own results.

I benchmarked Q2 countless times on my K62 and Voodoo 2. I remember averaging around 60fps at 800x600, matching my friend's Intel rig with the same 3D accelerator. 3DNow! did a lot of heavy lifting for this game.

Thanks for nice retrospective! That was warm, bulb time.

If only this information was this easy to search back in 1997 lol

Results with a stock Voodoo 1 are far different than with a few tweaks. Enabling options like Fast PCI Read and others can improve performance a lot ! I don't remember for Quake 2, but I managed to get about 40 fps with a Voodoo 1 and a 233 MMX. And Unreal was totally playable.

IIRC, 3Dfx only offered a "Mini-GL" and eventually offered a full OpenGL ICD for the lineup of Voodoo 2 and up. NVIDIA was somewhat famous for offering a full OpenGL ICD well before 3Dfx did.

Ah, the good days of PC gaming when it was actually affordable and progress was made year on year........ I remember playing unreal on my Voodoo2 and looking at the intro for the first time, jaw on the floor. I am still waiting to be as impressed with the graphics I I was then some 25 years later.

Great work! Thanks for the video!

Excellent and useful video!

I still remember it like yesterday. It was near the end of the year in 1998 and I happened to see part of an episode of CNET and they showed the Voodoo 2 card and how different the games looked on it. We got one for out Pentium 200MMX and also doubled the RAM to 64mb and Quake 2 looked so good. We played GL Quake for a while but went back to software Quake because the blood and gibs looked better at the lower rez but Quake 2 looked so good with the Voodoo 2 and GL. That Pentium 200MMX had a long hard life and I wore out two CRT monitors with it and Win95 became so bloated and glitchy. I was unable to finish Diablo 2 on it because it kept freezing up on Act 4.

Wow this brings back memories

I have a recollection of using the same trick, renaming the MiniGL DLL but putting it in the Windows System folder; it had a great effect on the OpenGL screensavers that were ported from NT, I think? Good times! Thanks for this trip down memory lane!

The K6-2 400 was a PC that I used for several years and I played Quake II a lot

I can tell you first hand these were the days, I remember going to comp usa and getting a VooDoo II to play Quake 2, so good, so expensive.

I was playing this on an AMD K6-2 300 and a Rova TNT graphics card. Must have been 1998...

QUAKE 2 will never die! We are still alive and kicking boyzzz! :))

Thank you so much bro. Sending virtual hugs. Worked like a charm ;-)

I still remember my 3Dfx Vodoo 3d acclerator card... played Unreal Tournament with it, mindblowing performance.

I played Quake 2 on a AMD k6 3Dfx 500mhz with a Voodoo 1. It was fast, and smooth, and very enjoyable experience.

Amusingly, 3DNow! Professional was supported all the way up to the "Construction" family of CPUs. It ws dropped in Ryzen, although I read that while the CPUs report that they don't support it, supposedly they will still work...?!

A friend of mine payed 3k for a pentium 2 and I built my K62-300 + S3-verge+Voodoo2 for $1200. He cried when mine out performed his in every game. Those where good times

When I first saw this game running on my mothers Compaq with AMD 3Dnow in Open GL it blew my mind since I was playing it with an ATI RAGE PRO in Software rendered

Nice channel! It's a travel to the past with nice memories... Keep it up!! Btw, it won't run Crysis.

"Better late than never". I'm playing The Saboteur and AC4:Black Flag on my shiny (not new) GTX 1080, finally. The Saboteur has to be seen at 4k. Ahead of it's time!

And I was playing quake 2 on software with pentinum 166MMX. Sadly amd drop 3dnow on ryzen cpus. For some reason the industry used more sse than 3dnow. The instructions do the same, but are different.

That was great game back in time.

Lol old times, k6 II 3D NOW, and a Voodoo Banshee, both were the first time I upgraded a PC, coming from a closed system Compaq Presario with a P166MMX, and no 3D acelerator, being a poor student and not knowing much about PC's at the time, the mobo I got for the K6 had no AGP slots, so my Banshee was a PCI one, Internet changed a lot of things

Wow, looks impressive! Thanks It would be great to test with AMD K6-3 + 2x Voodo 2 SLI :)

Man, we hit a lot of licks back in the day to get Voodoo 2's and K6's. The hustle was too real.

Quake 2 without RTX ? ))) Thanks for the video!

At some point I had Voodoo I and Cyrix mx266, and if I recall correctly, the Quake II was quite playable at this setup. But probably I'm wrong, because I didn't play Quake II a lot. What I can tell for sure, Unreal Tournament run great at this computer (and it looks not less demanding in resources, for me).

Great benchmarking work - it would be interesting to see a k6-3 in the mix or an athlon :) I only have an agp voodoo 3 so I can't quite test this 😅

Fab video. Back in the day, when K6s were that bit older and cheap, I put together a k62 550, with v2 sli. All those parts were dirt cheap at that point. But I couldn't get 3dnow working in SLI. Are you able to test that?

take away: Benchmark EVERYTHING! also, would like to see a banshee or sli v2's or v3,4,or5 with 3dNowextensions and maybe how different 3dnow extension versions do on the various levels of hardware. maybe the voodo1 can still benefit with an older version?

At that time, I had the voodoo 2 with a intel 200mhz with MMX. And later upgraded too 450mhz Intel

I had an Pentium MMX 233Mhz sent to me in 2000 with 16bit ISA and PCI (it was my 1st PC - even tho I had been a PC techician & programmer since 1986). I got given an SB AWE64 as a consolation prize at the 1st ever Quake 2 Nationals in South Africa. A year after 3DFX went bust (got sold to NVidia) I bought 2x Voodoo 5 5500 (64Mb, 2 from a lot of 5). I could not afford the Voodoo 6 6600 prototype I found (10k). It ran Quake 2 & Unreal at 1280x1024 (3x ex-lease Compaq SVGA) "butter smooth" (sorry I cant remember what FPS I was getting, maybe 120-ish, maybe 140-ish), like "competition" level smooth. NOTE Voodoo 1 and Banshee are _very_ different from Voodoo 2 (I think maybe the 1st series only has 16bit registers, and the later ones are 32bit). The Voodoo 5 is like a Voodoo 3 but with more memory, and newer (=faster) 3DFX GPU. You should try compare Voodoo 2 to Voodoo 3 with Quake 2 and Unreal, and see if 3DNow also makes a difference (it should, but to what degree).

I bought a Voodoo 1 specifically for this game. I had a AMD Duron 700 if I'm remembering that correctly. I played this game to death with many single player levels. I even dabbled in some map making. And when I discovered Machinima I made my own little movies. Watching Father Frags Best inspired me to make my own.

No RTX beats this awesome look

I remember playing this at my friends house when it came out, blew my mind on his dads pc. He was an engineer so he always seemed to have a super computer to my child brain.

Totally rocked this on a voodoo banshee back in the day.. was in one of the world's top clans.. still jam sometimes but I can't get anywhere near my old fph scores even at 240hz on a 49" ultrawide (though my fph is better now at 240hz then it was at 60hz)

Great review i always wonder in 1998 how to enable 3dnow! on my voodoo2, i got the patch from a cd magazine no internet access back then

Interesting. As far as I remember, Intel Pentium 133 or Intel Celeron 233 (no mmx) with voodoo 1 made a very playable Quake 2 in 640x480. As for Unreal and sin ... I had to select 512x384, because they were really power hungry. Maybe, it was related to the Intel processors? Or my memory? :D (in my head, not in my machine)

I have a Voodoo 1, 2 , 3 PCI and 3 AGP. I have the Voodoo 3 PCI inside a Pentium 133 with 48mb ram and can actually play vanilla Half-Life using glide. It is sick how well these cards can perform when their potential is fully utilized

If you can get your hands on the 3DFX Voodoo 3 card, I believe that you would be surprised by the resulting benchmarks.

Is there any data on how software mode impacted CPU performance compared to having hardware acceleration? I am asking because I used to run this game well on software mode on a Pentium MMX 233MHz but I don't know how the performance would be with a graphics card back in the day.

Do the 3D now instructions works with a Banshee? I have one in a K6-2 500Mhz system, only manage to push 47 fps @ 640*480 and 37 fps @ 800x600 with 3D Now GL render. No difference than OpenGL so i'm confused...

My Configuration in this time - Pentium 200/16mb ram/S3virge/3DFX voodoo2 x2inSLI/monitor 1024x800/some video-tuner with hardware unlocker for C+/ sound Yamaha 7xx

Those were the days. Today you play online with Xbox or PS whatever. No comparison. You built a machine, tweaked it, then game on. Although, I was not privileged enough to own a 3DFX. I had an S3.

My Pentium ii 450mhz, 256MB RAM, and riva TNT2Ultra with 32MB of Ram ran Quake 2 at 120. 😆 IIRC back then a fast cpu for high FPS mattered for Q2 because the games frame rate determined the speed of the packets sent to the host multiplayer server.

When I saw the title of the video I thought: how much can 3DNow bring to this? Thank you for the schooling!

Ahhh I was a Matrox guy back then, Mystique with a M3D. Did go to a Banshee after that though.

Great follow up video. Still believe should have been a nice in-between. Voodoo2 and overclocking your cpu. I used to get 249mhz out of Pentium 200s and 290 out of 233s. And that's not even k6-2's. Have a K6-2 266AFR at 375mhz (5.5x 66fsb) in my ECS socket 7 machine. About to toss in a 500AFX and do 6x 83fsb for 494 (2x multi = 6x). Nothing fancy, 430TX chipset. My s3 Trio3d 4mb or mach32/64 PCI cards should hopefully not go nutty with the high PCI speed. Luckily ISA is locked. From what I've read they should be ok provided i don't use any other PCI cards other then a network card (modern realtek). Most regular socket 7 boards can do 83fsb or at min 75fsb. Anywho I chose wisely. 👍 I've owned a few Voodoo 1's and sold all them as fast as possible. Overpriced. Kept all my VooDoo 2 and 3's though.

when I built my first pc to replace the pre built one from London Drugs my dad got I took 4 computers my uncle was replacing and took them all apart, and used the best parts to build as best a computer as I could. It had AMD k6, with 2 Voodoo2's in sli. First PC game I ever got that was not freeware or a demo was QUAKE 2. I miss those times few years later I got into the quake 3 alpha test (had 2 or 3 maps) and my dad got me a Voodoo 3 3000. I am so glad I got that ghx card, as when I downloaded the doom 3 alpha 2 years before the game came out, it was actually able to run it at a very playable frame rate. I would show my friends that doom 3 alpha, and NO ONE could believe it was actual gameplay I remember my friends laughing at me for thinking the screenshots where GAMEPLAY, saying "thats a cutscene, NO WAY those graphics are of actual game play" and I was like "nah bro, I got that game already running on my PC.. that is actual gameplay ghx..." I really really miss being able to wow people back then. Seeing the look on peoples faces as that Doom 3 alpha loaded up and they actually got to play it, and you can see the thought in there head "OMG this is what computer graphics are going to look like soon!" was sick. Made me feel like a computer god for being able to give them that experience.

I wondered why the Q II was so slow on my P166MMX + 16MB Ram + Voodoo I and looked so awful even compared to the Q I, while the Carmageddon 2 had a clear advantage over the Carmageddon 1 under the same conditions. Therefore, I just ran through all the maps with noclip and forgot this crooked lagodrome.

I still remember when i got a voodoo 5 5500 and was the envy of all my friends XD

I would've loved to have 7fps in Unreal when it came out :P It was more like 1 frame per three seconds.

I took a look at that list of banned games in Germany. And it's shockingly large. And most of them are staples of gaming that everyone has to play.

I remember it so well: My brother bought a Voodoo card just to be able to play Quake 2 with acceleration. It was worth it, baby!

I started playing q2 with some terrible onboard in software. I later bought a tnt & my jaw hit the floor when I changed to opengl. Great times.

Excellent video, you however have one very important historical detail backwards, which is literally a point and reason which forced 3D accelerator industry to stop making very expensive if novel but ultimately useless toys and start making someting that can actually be used as very powerful tools with universal standardized non-vendor specific API all manufacturers comply with. That is, when Quake was released it wasn't so much 3Dfx Voodoo _owners_ problem or a problem specific to just 3Dfx cards that there was no 3d accel version of the game availble, it was in-fact _every_ consumer grade 3D accelerator _manufacturers_ problem. Why? Well, because John Carmack had done one 3D accelerated version of Quake supporting Rendition Verite 1000 cards using Verite's proprietary RRedline API for DOS, and nearly burnt himself out emotionally and cognitively due to all the chip and API specific optimization he had to do and basically re-do the heavy lifting he'd already done to once for the engines DOS software renderer, which he would now have to do again for every single manufacturer and specific chip they've released that has sufficient market share and in particular for every chip in a generation capable enough the manufacturers provides support for in their API. And then optimize this to every chip version and variant... Yeah, that would mean redoing everything he just went through twice for Software and vQuake at least several dozen times before Quake has any sort of widespread 3D accelerator support for major cards out there. And future development of his engine and its features would be on the mercy of these penny pinching assholes, who do not even bother implementing half the features their chips actually are capable of in their own APIs as he had realized when working with Verites hardware R&D guys on optimizing the vQuake release for the most common Verite 1000 cards made. He was pissed. And if you're a 3D accelerator hardware manufacturer for the PC game industry, you shouldn't probably fuck with the guy who just released the first full 3D game engine for licensing to other game developers and broke sales records with the first game using it... Carmack issued an ultimatum to the entire gaming 3D accelerator manufacturing industry. They have a choice of either supporting the entire OpenGL 1.1 API specification. Or, their products will not be supported by any iD tech engine or game in the future. This lead to all sorts of infantile squealing from corporate executives who have the emotional maturity of a petulent adolescent canine with a crack habit, that this was impossible and that they couldn't do even half of the things this requires from their hardware in theory... To which he replied that, he already has fucked around with their stuff and the proprietary APIs enough to know the cards do support around half the set of a serviceable partial set of the OGL APIs key features and effects, their bullshit APIs just do not and that you're R&D departments engineers have been wondering why they even bother to make the silicon when nobody is using most of it anyway. Have been wondering as to why the driver and software development teams are sitting with thumbs up their asses for the past couple of years now...

I have played doom and blood bath with pentium 133 back then when i'm still in elementary school

Another excellent video. Quake 2 is much less CPU dependent than Unreal. Even with a slow CPU and a Voodoo 2 it runs with high fps. Unreal being very CPU dependent needs at least a P2 350 mhz and a Voodoo 2 or Banshee to run properly.

Magic Mini gl driver for K6-2 patch 3.20

I always thought 3dnow! Was just a gimmick, boy was I wrong...

3.20 is the latest official quake 2 patch

Good times. My first real gaming PC build was back in 1998 thanks to that holographic Unreal display box at Costco. I HAD to have it. So I put together an AMD build which was a 350mhz K6-2 on an Asus P5A motherboard and a Voodoo 2 2000 GPU. To say I was addicted would be an understatement. I played the keys off my keyboard lol. It's still true today that game developers can neuter a game by not implementing code that is beneficial to one brand or another. Nvidia used this dirty tactic over the decades to great effect.

Runs sick on a 2080ti 😂 What I'd have given for my current PC back in 1998

on Program inside the screen.

I remember this. 3dnow! mode patch for q2. Glide got outdated real quick. The athlon really blew the k6 series out of the water

I wouldn't run a Voodoo 1 higher than 512x384. Got to have that butter smooth frame rate

After seeing this video I tried the same thing, but my results are a bit different: Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-III 450 2x Voodoo2 in SLI: 37,1 FPS 3Dfx OpenGL Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-III 450 2x Voodoo2 in SLI: 46,6 FPS 3DNow! 3DfxGL Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-III 450 2x Voodoo2 in SLI: 22,7 FPS 3DNow! OpenGL I also redid the test om my AMD K6-2+ 550 system: Quake II 1024x768 AMD K6-2+ 550 Voodoo 3 3000 65,5 FPS 3DNow! OpenGL De 3DNow! 3DfxGL doesn't work with a Voodoo 3 I used patch 3.20 and I also installed MESAFX 6.2 Have you got any idea's why I can't get a higher result? I also never new that this version existed, but I'm glad I now it know. Quake II play's a lot smoother than before (from 37,1 --> 46,6 FPS, just with a patch :-) So thank you for this upload!

This is so weird to hear. I played the original Q2 here in Germany back in the 90s soon after release. I wasn't even aware it was banned here. Edit: just found out it was sold in shops here for a short time before being banned.

3dfx voodoo 3 3000 agp, was the first video card that I bought with my own money...

Играл в Q2 еще на своем (Pentium 200) и S3 ViRGE (позже поставил и Voodoo 2 от Inno Vision). Кстати, понятитие miniGL и породил Q2 - это минимальный набор функций API OpenGL нужный для работы этой игры...

i had no idea. i played it firstimy uncle house i was 13

Interesting tests, I need to try them on my numerous processors and Voodoo 3000. BTW, I'm the 666th like for this video 😈

That's my old system

I you whant to make a beast machine with 3dnow . Wel this are the cpu serie that have it . 3DNow!: K6-2/K6-3 series 3DNow! Enhanced (ook wel genoemd 3DNow!+): K6-2+/K6-3+ series, Athlon (Classic/Thunderbird), Duron (Thunderbird core) 3DNow! Professional: AthlonXP, Duron (Morgan Core) 3DNow! = 21 Multimedia instructies (ook wel "FPU MMX") 3DNow! Enhanced = 3DNow! uitgebreid met 24 extra Multimedia instructies 3DNow! Professional = 3DNow! Enhanced + SSE.

The good ol days of GPU, when NVIDIA cartel was not the bully it is today.

why is all the video capture so choppy and tearing? also I bet you this game runs at over 200 FPS on my 2080ti and my 3090. LOL

Funy how idTech has *always* been mostly unbothered about what CPU you use

Now go Voodoo2 SLI with that rig running 1024*768.

I have an rtx2060super and the rtx version still can bring it to its knees

Always got me how much better software looked than using hardware. Almost a shame to use opengl. It looks beautiful in software.

You were never able to get your hands on quake 2? Been in the budget bin for ages a couple years after release ;) Edit: I see, 🇩🇪

Man I miss the old Windows UI. Always try to find something similar when I use Linux. All the beveled edges made it feel a little more physical than modern uber-minimal stuff, without going overboard. Also, it's so funny to me that people ever thought those blurry filtered textures looked better

I shudder to think where we would be right now graphically if Nvidia hadn't bought 3Dfx and buried glide.

We got quake 2 easy throw not so legal copy's 😂

Thanks for the seizures.