The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.
Yes but the Nvidia NV-1 preceding the Vooodoo was much more impressive. Using NURBS you could display perfectly round objects. Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today.
It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangles the NV-1 was immediately dead.
> Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today.
Not really. Forward texture mapping simplifies texture access by making framebuffer access non-linear, reverse texture mapping has the opposite tradeoff. But that is assuming rectangular textures without UV mapping, like the Sega Saturn did; the moment you use UV mapping texture access will be non-linear no matter what. Besides that, forward texture mapping has serious difficulties the moment texture and screen sampling ratios don't match, which is pretty much always.
There is a reason why only the Saturn and the NV-1 used forward texture mapping, and the technology was abandoned afterwards.
Thank you! These things do pack in a ridiculous amount of functionality for what they do. Probably why they look so good but also why it took 30 years for a hardware re-implementation.
I had a Voodoo3, can't remember the model number anymore, but my friend who had a TNT2 would often comment about how much worse the 3dfx's 16bit color looked vs the TNT2's 32bit. I could never tell a difference.
Voodoo 16bit was nicely dithered. TNT 16bit was ugly while 32bit looked good by sacrificing ~30-50% of performance.
Nvidia was very smart to advertise 16 bit performance _and_ 32bit quality at the same time :)
3dfx were stupid not to include token 32bit output option on Avenger chip (voodoo3). Every voodoo chip since first one has performed blending calculations in full precision and only dropped to dithered 16bit output to save on framebuffer ram, but that ram saving was meaningless by the time 16MB V3 released.
I love the software look so much though! I never did like the blurring of textures :)
They're both beautiful in their own way, the darkness and glow in the hardware versions, some certain pixellated charm and roughness in the software version
It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangles the NV-1 was immediately dead.