A Mysterious 3DFX Voodoo Card

I dont get why ppl remove the brackets from the cards..

So with a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo "Rush", what you may opt to do, is to lower the in-game resolution to 512x384 wherever possible, and make sure you fetch the 3Dfx miniGL driver, the one that came bundled with Half-life isn't very good. Unreal will for sure support 512x384 , can't recall if Unreal Tournament supports that resolution. It's doesn't look much different from 640x480 honestly, but it performs way better at that resolution. Besides that, there are other "config tweaks" that can be done to both Unreal, Unreal Tournament , Half-life and any of the Quake games, that might squeeze a bit more performance out of the card without completely ruining the visual experience.

The card I had came with a 3D desktop environment Demo disc. I really enjoyed playing around and launching my desktop apps from that 3D environment.

I bought one of these back in 1998. Same brand and model. Playing GL Quake after installing the Glide Wrapper Open GL patch was shocking. It just looked amazing, even on that card. I was also able to play N64 games on the UltraHLE emulator and this was on a Pentium Pro 200 CPU, I believe. To be able to emulate an N64 on a CPU with a clock speed only double that of the MIPS RISC core in the N64 itself certainly illustrated just how much work the RCP in the N64 was doing and how much the Voodoo Rush board was able to offload from the CPU.

Thanks for the nice refresh of 3DFX. BTW, your voice reminded me a really splendid colleague from the past.

I had a 3Dfx Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 back in the day, together with my Matrox millennium card it was amazing at the time.

I have a Hercules branded voodoo rush. Haven't used it in years.

I had one briefly mid 1998. Underwhelmed by the experience I had it replaced after just a couple of days with an S3 ViRGE DX + Voodoo1 combo. Finally I was pleased with what I got. As for the remarks about the card’s performance I wouldn’t go as far as to say Half-Life was intended for 2nd gen 3dfx cards. The game was targeted for a release simultaneously with Quake II, so 1997, and only two months before the planned launch date they realised they need another year to expand and polish it. So I reckon it was optimised to run well on what was available at that time, meaning Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush, and not something from the future. Voodoo2 is 2-4 times more powerful than its predecessor so sure the game runs better on it but I bet it wasn’t their target in the development phase.

I played through the entirety of Half-Life on a Voodoo 1. Xen tanks hardcore at 512x384, can't imagine it on a Rush lol.

My circle of friends at the time were all about these graphics cards and we'd trade them around amongst us so we could all check them out. Had everything up to the Voodoo 3 AGP. I remember the Rush card I had was always pretty stable, but the same thing couldn't be said for the Banshee card my close friend had. It was never stable in my system, his, or any of our other friends computers. It would work, but it was very finicky.

Never got to have one back in the day, software rendering for me.

I had Voodoo Rush 6 MB (with Macronix chip) and Celeron 266 in 1998. While older games ran pretty good (althrough there were compatibility issues with some very early glide titles), the performance in very late 1998 3d games like HL or NFS3 was dissapointing. In theory you could lower resolution to 512x384, but this didn't work on my card. Also DOS gaming performance was quite slow when compared to S3 Virge. That was my only and last 3dfx card. A year later I replaced it with new shinny Riva TNT.

It runs much better than I expected, really good actually! The way people talk about it you'd think it was a potato.

I had one of these, I remember having a lot of driver problems and somehow splicing DLLs from different driver versions to make one driver that worked with all my games. I wasn't disappointed, I was super happy - going from software rendering to a Voodoo - any Voodoo, even this one - it's impossible to not be happy 😂

I remember 'upgrading' from a Diamond Virge to a Voodoo Rush when I had built a Cyrix based system. Horrid graphics card added to a horrid CPU. Need for Speed II always felt like it ran in mud. Even 2d Vesa compatability was worse compared to the Diamond card. I definitely would have been better off with a dedicated Voodoo1 card. I had put up with it until I eventually replaced the whole system with a celeron 300a and a TNT2.

Couldnt afford the Voodoo 2, had to wait for the banshee to come out myself. Still sick about getting rid of that card, would love to find another Monster Fusion PCI card at some point.

This exact card was my first 3D accelerator. Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo 6MB

I've heard there's a super-rare version of the Voodoo Rush that uses something different for the 2D chip - not the Alliance chip, not the Macronix chip, but something else - and the PCI bus collisions that slow down the other models just don't happen with this variant... but I've never seen a picture, just a story. I wanna say it's supposed to be a Cyrix 2D chip but I'm probably remembering that wrong cuz I don't know that Cyrix even made their own video chips.

I have a Voodoo 2 and a Voodoo 3 in a box in my closet but I don't have a system to put them in. Any suggestions on a cheap way to go about building one? I have some old hardware in storage but I'm too scared it's been sitting so long the components will have gone bad. 25 year old PSUs don't tend to do well.

Do you have a 3d printer? I recently designed and 3d printed a bracket for my Miro Hiscore 3D 2 card which has a similar port layout. It should work with your card too, or work with some slight adjustments