Early 3D Accelerated Gaming In Windows 98 – Voodoo2 On Quake & Half-life (with a bit of RTX Quake 2)

#3Dfx #Voodoo2 #Windows98 #PCem

Early 3D Accelerated Gaming On Windows 98 (PCEm v17) – Voodoo2 in Quake & Half-life with a bit of RTX Quake 2 thrown in to see the difference with the latest 3D accelerated graphics techniques used with this old game.

A bit of history:
Before 3D Graphics accelerators became common place consoles like the PlayStation and Nintendo64 offered a superior 3D graphics experience. This quickly changed with the introduction of 3D hardware acceleration on PC graphics-cards for use with Windows9x and Linux.

3Dfx was a major player in the upcoming 3D Graphics card and they made huge impact with their ADD-ON 3D graphics card range Voodoo1/2. Other manufacturers combined 2D and 3D acceleration in a single graphics card. 3Dfx followed suit with all in one solutions. The most famous one I used myself was the Voodoo3 3000 graphics card. After that over the years it was Nvidia TNT and many Nvidia cards, interchanged with Radeon (later AMD) GPUs.

Limitations of the YouTube video platform in regards to retro-gaming:
The Voodoo2 used dithering to simulate more than 16bit colours – the PlayStation 1 and 2 use a similar technique to simulate more colours on screen. This pixelated dither effect probably will be destroyed by YouTube’s codecs giving my video the once over for playback on the platform – that’s despite me providing the footage at a high bitrate in 4K resolution. We’ll see if YouTube is able to provide a little hint of this dithering or that it is mostly a smeary graphics mess. Voodoo Graphics are best observed on a CRT in person.

UPDATE: Sept 18, it is best to view the video at 1440 or 4K to get a glimpse at the original dithering of the Voodoo2. Apart from that the YouTube encoding algorithm really doesn’t know what to make of this video.

Thanks for watching – LactobacillusPrime

Credits: Audio track used from the YouTube Audio Library “Rich in the 80s” by DivKid

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