Excellent video 😌

My first 3D accelerator ever and the only 3Dfx card i owned back in the day : the allmighty Gainward Dragon 4000 16Mb AGP. Paired with a AMD K6-2 300Mhz CPU was my gaming machine from 98 to 2000. It was such a pleasure to play games like FIFA99, Unreal, Quake 2, Half-Life, Shogo and many, many other gems from the period. Great card in my opinion!

The Banshee had fantastic 2D output for the time, when I later switched to a GeForce 256 there was a noticeable downgrade in 2D image quality in terms of sharpness and stability

This is one of my favorite GPU's for a DOS gaming PC. The great 2D engine and Glide support make it fantastic for this era. The Voodoo3 is much of the same with better 3D performance.

Lets not forget that there were many Banshee cards sold with higher frequencies. For example the Gigabyte GA630 runs with 110/130 mhz instead of the standard 100/100 mhz, being 15-20% faster than the standard version. The Monster Fusion Banshee run with 105/120 mhz, being also much faster than the standard version.

I enjoyed every second of it.

I'm loving the music choice for the montage

I just got my first 3dfx card 2 days ago, and it happens to be a 16mb Voodoo Banshee PCI! What splendid timing for this video! Also, I love the classy garden footage of the cards. Very relaxing.

Cool to see a new video from you man. I bought a Banshee back in the day for my HP Pavilion K6-2 and was pretty happy with it for about a year, not bad considering how fast things were moving back then

Love your videos! It get's me right in the nostalgia! Keep it up!

The video is a piece of art!

In 1998 just two things was important for me to buy Banshee. 1)It was 3Dfx. 2)It had huge 16MB VRAM. Back in a days that was enough to make a choice:)

My favorite graphics card of all time

the intro with Voodoo Banshee in the bushes is pure gold (and that music) take five 🍻

I am emulating the Banshee in PCEM so this was very enlightening. Thanks, Excellent job!

A much beloved card for its time. It was the only card I could afford back then, one which filled a very needed cab until my Voodoo 3

I was an engineer from 3dfx. (And yes the AGP as all the functions that was turned off). Avenger turned it on. Sad that it was a loss at that point, but there was a level bus power problem.

God. The music and glamour shots are perfect

Very nicely put together, with lovely b-roll. I'll waltz myself down to the lab with the music of the opening sequence in my head to try and get the last piece of footage I need.

very nice video ! All effort you put in worth it ! Really like the jazzy retro computer 90' thingy... Thanks for this time capsule

Woo. been waiting for this one. :D very well done.

Well put together video love looking back at the older tech

Welcome back!

Awesome videos man!

The first look of this Graphics Card in 1998 got when my tech magazine reviewed it. And I believe it as top line gfx of time, if not exceptional ofcourse

Your Content is absolutely lovely. Greetings from Austria!

The production quality of this channel is top notch

A friend had a Voodoo Banshee back in the day and it performed awesome to us. We never got the hate. Great video!

Well I don't know about other people but I upgraded a Matrox G200 with a 3D Blaster Banshee back in the day and I couldn't be happier. In fact I just got another for a retro build I'm putting together.

I bought a banshee back in the day and it was a fantastic card. Handled anything I threw at it and was a very capable and compatible little guy.

In the late 90's, the Voodoo Banshee was an absolute game-changer that provided a significant upgrade from graphics cards like S3. It could effortlessly handle most 3Dfx games, eliminating the need for multiple graphics cards to handle 2D and 3D graphics separately. This was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time, as gamers could now enjoy superior graphics performance with just one card.

Great video, thanks for telling us the Banshee story \o/

My first 3D card. A proper 2D and 3D card that best every other card at the time but ignorance of many who loves to criticize because they had Riva TNT with crappy 2D and awful directX who had to compete with glide. People who had much more expensive voodoo 2 also with their 2 tmu loved to criticize. Banshee brought voodoo experiences to the mass.

I owned a banshee back in the day and enjoyed it. It was a budget friendly alternative that hit a sweet spot for me...

U r a legend ❤ .. u deserve millions of views

Great video I like the presentation. A great and affordable vga in my oppinion. I had the Voodoo 3 16MB AGP back in the day with a P3 450MHz and after that the GeForce 256. Great times :-) and the music is gorgeous.

Nice to see these old cards which were unaffordable at the time, had to use onboard SiS graphics like SiS 5598 & SiS 651 for a long time until I was finally able to buy an used Geforce 4 440MX in 2006

Awesome video! Thank you so much!

I loved my Voodoo Banshee :) I had a Skywell Magic Twinpower, I have 3 in my collection now including a boxed version of the Maxi Gamer Phoenix PCI like the one shown in your video :) Great to see all the Banshee love haha :)

Amazing video!

i sure like the exposed circuitry and components vs. todays mother boards and cards that are all covered up, kinda like car engines from back in the day compared to todays modern cars with a big plastic cover on the engine.

A lot of people confuse the banshee to the actually hated on rush. Banshee was the shit up until u played multi textured games. So underrated. Pretty much for the try hard 3dfx fan on a budget.

Love me some Banshee. It was my first 3d accelerator and paired with a 233mmx. Diamond Monster Fusion. 👍

Great video! I'm glad that you mentioned the technology link, where the Banshee acted as a stepping stone between the original architecture and the later cards. While it's not as interesting from a marketing perspective, it's a crucial step for R&D that most people don't think about, and it also provides valuable feedback to tweak the architecture in later releases (which 3dfx did do - much of what they learned from the Banshee was modified and integrated into the VSA-100, which is clear from the die shots). By the way, the 2D engine being 128-bit was another way to say that it could do 4 pixel per cycle raster operations (which were far simpler than 3D). But the operations done were highly specialized to cover all of the niche cases needed by CAD programs like AutoCAD. None of that stuff is done in hardware anymore though, which makes it seems even more cryptic. A slight nitpick, the TMUs operated in passes consisting of multiple clock cycles, where the throughput was 1 per cycle. So the Voodoo 2 could apply two textures in a single pass, at a rate of one pixel per cycle that contained two textures. The actual pipeline depth was variable due to the FIFOs, but it was likely on the order of 60-100 cycles per pixel (for comparison, I believe the Geforce256 had a depth of 220 cycles, and modern GPUs are thousands of cycles).

The interesting history, the ridiculous yet beautiful B-roll... I love it.

Had a Voodoo Banshee back then. Never regretted the buy.

I feel like most of the people saying the Banshee was disliked likely were not around at the time the card was actually out. The Banshee was very popular for budget builds. I owned one at the time and I knew several others that did. An SLI Voodoo 2 setup was beyond the reach of most teenagers in 1998. Sure journalists that got video cards for free bagged on it. Also most of the forum complainers were likely just kids that were fanboying. Also the whole argument about poor driver support I don’t recall being an issue in the time. It ran every game I wanted to play. I am glad you pointed out games like Quake 3. It was really amazing at the time to play that game and UT99 on such a humble graphics card. Great video.

I really enjoy the Banshee. It is in my opinion the perfect card for a build targeting games up to 1998 (it looses too much steam in anything newer). I personally treat it as a Voodoo 1+, something that the Rush should have been in the first place. Great image quality, great compatibility, doesnt cause problems with early AGP systems, the late drivers just work. Perfect card for SS7 systems. Very convinient package that ships everything one needs for Win95 gaming in a single card.

Great video as always! It's definitely a card that gets passes up too often. Solid for any retro machine of the era and this summed it up great. Nice creativity with the shots and music!

Great video !

Great choice of music 👍👍

I loved the Banshee so much, I bought one a few days ago in a fit of nostalgia.

love the into cinematography and soundtrack lmao

I remember how I got the card for christmas in like 99 and paired it with my Pentium 3 500 and I freaking loved it. Finally I was able to play the 3Dfx only games and they ran wonderful.

Excelente video, que le hace justicia la la Banshee, aún tengo mí digamos monster 3d fusion, saludos y continúa haciendo videos de calidad

I love my Banshee. It was a great replacement for my Stealth ii. I even convinced a friend or two to purchase one. Much loved by me. I had the lovely Phoenix model.

My first GPU, loved that thing

Just found your channel. Love these trips down memory lane. I got my first computer about 2001, it was my dad's old computer had a Pentium III 900mhz, 128mb ram, Geforce4 Ti 4200 128mb graphics card. Loved playing Hellbender and Fury 3 with the Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick. Had the Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Sim City 2000, Sim Farm. Had a game called Ice and Fire that was really cool would love to play again. I got my dad's old PC cause he upgraded to a Pentium 4, 512mb ram, Radeon 9800xt 256mb. I remember staying up late the day we got a 10/100 switch and figuring out how to share files with each other....lol

Great video.

I acknowledge your geode.

Banshee is a cool card. I wrote it off at first but its a great card for mid 90s gaming.

I had a blast playing on my first Pentium II 350 and Banshee PC. NFS Porshe Unleashed, Monster Truck Madness, Tomb Raider... Fun times.

Loved the music sequence! Here's the song name for anyone that's interested: It Had To Be Moonglow (feat. Neil Richardson Orchestra & Singers)

I picked up a random beige box for a few bucks recently. It had one of the worst motherboards ever made, one of the PC Chips “BXpro” ones that over reports the FSB and crashes if you try to run it at the advertised 100MHz. Expectations weren’t high as I removed the AGP card to find out what it was, so my eyeballs nearly fell out when from within the dust and cat hair the sacred inscription “3dfx” rose up. The mystery trashbox had a Banshee in it🙂 Now I’m a convert. Love ‘em. Great to see more pixelpipes👍 really enjoyed the calming montages.

Banshee was my first 3D-card. Liked it a lot.

I had the K6-2 300Mhz with my first 3dfx card being the voodoo2. I had a STB velocity 3d before that with a riva3d chipset sporting 4mb of vram. The velocity started loosing signal because the connector on the back was bad so my buddy sat there and watched me use a battery, speaker, and a soldering iron to ring out the wires and soldered the passthru dongle right to the STB card. He was amazed it worked first try. He said I was gonna be working for NASA. I ended up at Walmart and he works as an electrical engineer designing top secret circuits for Boeing. I was sharing the PC with my dad at the time and one day it started having some issues and he took it in to the computer shop to have it repaired. The owner told my dad that I had a fire hazard sitting there and had removed the riva128 and replaced that and the voodoo2 with a S3 virge dx card instead. Told my dad, I need to buy a nintendo instead because computers weren't designed for games.

Great video! I couldn't agree more. The Banshee deserves a lot more love. It was many firsts for 3dfx and the 2D core was excellent. I find that the loss in image quality through the V1/V2s passthrough setup can be quite significant - especially at higher resolutions. I never owned one back in the day (went from a Voodoo straight to a Voodoo 3 3000) but I really like the Ensoniq model I have now. It's a great card.

I had a Banshee way back and I loved it, let me play games my old GPU would not. I knew it was not as fast as the others but I could afford it and it let me play games which is all that mattered to me.

Very good video.

I have nothing but fond memories for my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee. Unreal, unreal tournament, GLQuake, quake three Arena, King pin. Winamp with the amp can visualizer. So many good memories. And all the games were guaranteed to be screamers for performance on the Banshee if you could run them in glide.

In the late 90s I had a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 2 card. One of my best friends had a Voodoo Banshee. I remember it feeling really crippled when playing the same games, but thinking back it was probably because we were running the same games in 1024x758 whereas my Voodoo 2 topped out at 800x600. I bought a Voodoo 3 like the day they came out after seeing all of the hype. I stuck with that until upgrading to a Geforce 2 a year or two later.

The banshee was my 3rd gpu ever and to go from a 1megabyte pci ATI to the banshee on agp and 16 megabytes was huge. From 800x600 to 1024x768 was wow factor. I wish I still had it.my fourth gpu was a radeon 9600xt which I still have.

Thanks!

I had a VOODOO 1 attached to a Matrox Mystique (For those who don't know, the VOODOO 1 didn't offer any 2d output. It had a passthrough port for that)... Then I upgraded to the Creative 3d Blaster Banshee (a Voodoo Banshee from Creative Labs) and I LOVED IT!!! It was fast, worked with all my older games, the only downfall I had was the early drivers were junk for Windows98. But this was fixed around 1999 and with internet it was easy to update. It worked GREAT after and I still have it. I don't use it in my retro machine, as I have a 64mb VooDoo 5 that I can use for that. I still love playing Quake 1 with the KQP (Killer Quake Patch) and using my 3dFx Card which just makes it look GREAT!!! I play multiplayer with friends on my local network using my old Pentium 3- 1.3Ghz with 256mb Ram, 128gb SSD and Voodoo5... Runs fast and looks great!!!

i had a trident 1mb VLB, and when upgrading my computer jumped from that to a voodoo banshee (1998) ... i loved that card. never had any issues with it. my next upgrade was to a geforce 2 32mb (2000) ...

Nice video! I think you should've mentioned though that the Banshee in contrast to the Voodoo2 also had the new 22 bit color filter rendering to improve 16 bit 3D game rendering image quality. I really liked the Banshee. Decided to have it as the graphics solution in the PC we ordered for Christmas 1998 which was based on 440BX and PII 350. What I hated about it though was that the cockpit view in NFSIII would not work with it which was a huge letdown since I was absolutey adoring the cockpits when I played that game prior on a friend's V2 equipped PII 300. It was the Creative 3D Blaster Banshee AGP which was passively cooled. The cooler got really hot, but the card still works today. I even ran it overclocked from mid-99 onwards. I can't remember if the chip or memory or both were overclocked, but I remember it being 112 MHz which was funny since that was also the frequency I had set the FSB to. It was nice that the Banshee ran stable despite being overclocked itself and on an overclocked AGP bus. To improve cooling I only added a front case intake fan to the system prior to overclocking it.

Ah yes, the woes of the K6-2 platform! Sorry to hear it was a pain in the ass, but I'm really glad to see this video. I really had no impression of the Banshee before seeing this, so I feel better-informed. I've never actually come across one in real life, though, and, with a Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 2s in SLI, I can't see myself ever needing one. Given how hard such cards are to acquire, it's nice to know there's a worth option for machines of that era.

my first 3d card was a Banshee, loved that card

I went with a Matrox G400. Dualhead in 1999 on 2x 17" Viewsonic monitors was amazing. Better 2D, as well. And I got good framerates in Descent 3 and Quake 3 Arena. :D

I absolutely fu*king loved my Creative Banshee 😍 Hopefully, one day, I can get another.

I had the rush as my first 3d card, then the banshee and I was thrilled to have it, wasn’t at all disappointed with it. But it did start the thirst of the upgrade over the next 20 years !

Never had a Banshee. But i remember i really wished i had one since i read about it in PC magazines of the era.

great vid!! i purchased that exact same one.. Maxi Gamer Phoenix from Guillemot I believe when I was a kid, and it came with a few games also. I payed a little less than a $100 USD after rebate and i was quite happy with it... until I got a GeForce 3 which blew the doors off it

Oh yeah, it was really a pretty excellent choice with a budget concern, back in 1998 I used K6-2+voodoo banshee, this combination gave me pretty good performance, still miss it to this day!!

loved my banshee agp card back in the day.. got me through many great games.. will always remain a cherished purchase.. although i migrated to nvidia after the banshee.

I burned the bus from my mainboard with the heat emanated from that video card! God damn!

I had a Quantum 3D Banshee and I loved it. I had it running alongside my Pentium 166MMX and then when I upgraded to an AMD Duron 700, it went into that until I upgraded to an Nvidia MX 400.

I loved mine!

Unloved? This was my first proper 3D accelerator (had an S3 Virge prior) and it was a massive step up for people like me - it's true it didn't perform as well in certain games/scenes due to the lack of a second texturing unit, but the faster clock speed meant it performed admirably in a lot of titles. I remember grabbing my PC Gamer demo discs and trying all the games I previously couldn't play because they required 3D acceleration.

I loved the Banshee. My first and only 3DFX card back then. A great buy.

Loving it , Thanks. wonderful editting as well, though net time I would opt for a similar music piece but without the annoying ticks a record has. Well done otherwise.

It was my first 3dfx card and i actually like it. But... even if i still have it, i generally play more with a Voodoo2 SLI. I don't know why. Maybe the look of having 3 PCI slots used for graphics... I will definitely re-visit this card ! And nice cinematic intro ! This video should be supported by Florida's tourism Office (is that peaceful lake full of alligators ?)

I had a Banshee, offered the best value for me at the time as I was on a tight college budget. Good times.

I played Half life and Unreal for the first time on a Banshee. It was the bees knees in my book.

Great video, as always! The Voodoo Banshee is actually more similar to the Voodoo 3 than it is to the Voodoo 2 (in fact, Banshee was the code name that 3dfx used internally for Voodoo 3). All in all, I love the PCI Banshee, it's a very good card for Pentium MMX builds and I own three of them (though, in some instances, even the Pentium MMX is bottlenecked by the Banshee - and that's at low resolutions like 640 x 480). On the other hand, the AGP Banshee is a card that I don't even want to have in my collection, its performance is extremely bad and there are much better AGP alternatives out there for a fraction of the Banshee's price (I don't even understand why the AGP Banshee is so expensive nowadays).

This was my first PC upgrade in 1998/1999, and lord what a difference made it back then! I played Incoming and Pod racer many hours with it. I had the PCI Version from Creative labs. But i soon found out after 2 years it became obsolete very fast... And my K6-2 300mhz aswell.. i still own the card!

Would be nice to see a benchmark video with the best cards from 1998: Tnt1 vs Voodoo2 vs Banshee

some banshee cards overclocked extremely well, too. I had a diamond version that did 166mhz without breaking a sweat. Wish I still had the card, would be fun to do some volt mods and see how far it could really go.

I actually sold both of my Voodoo2 12MB cards recently because I had decided the Ensonique Banshee I have is "good enough" Voodoo for me in my PII 450MHz rig. The 2D video quality through the loopback cable on the V2 sucked. So, while 3D games were great I had to deal with a sub-par Windows desktop. Games are not the only thing I use this computer for so the poor visual was a deal breaker. The Banshee 2D quality is superb...extremely crisp. Games (to my eyes) look just fine and the lack of the second texture unit really does not bother me at all. And, it is natively supported in BeOS 5 which was another plus for me at least. This machine also functions as a BeBox. So yeah, I really love this card. It is overall a fantastic 2D and 3D card and worthy of owning.

I have that exact model of the AGP one. Not a bad card at all, Just not as good as it cood have been. Sound familiar? (Voodoo Rush, Ahem) Been a while, good to see another video on this channel again. I have this Card installed into a old early socket 462. With an Athlon Thunderbird 600MHz, 64GB SSD (M.2 to PATA adapter), 512MB DDR SDRAM, Soundblaster Live and Windows 98SE. Good pairing using a speed patched driver.