I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.
replyVoodoo 1-3 couldn’t render 32-bit color, so maybe you were noticing the lower bit depth?
reply3dfx did design some tricks into the video pipeline on Voodoo 2 and 3 cards that allowed for what they called 22-but color, and it definitely looked better than other 3D accelerator cards’ 16-bit modes - but it was still not as clean looking as true 32-bit color. (Interestingly, the filtering they did was applied after the framebuffer, so screen captures would only ever show the lower quality original.)
I desperately wanted a voodoo card (I was late to the pc party). I'd been playing lots of Goldeneye on the n64 and the gaming press had me convinced that real FPS shooters were on the pc not consoles. What a load of shite, I bought a voodoo 3 for my dad's pc, got quake 2 and was bitterly disappointed. Gameplay wise it was so limited compared to Goldeneye. The world was no were near as interactive. Recently I've seen gabe Newell talking about half life and the crowd bar hitting walls was their way of showing the player real world feedback. He's right, but that's nothing compared to the bullet holes in Goldeneye. To be fair, quake 3, unreal tournament 99 and Deus ex alone justified the voodoo card purchase, but it still felt like a let down.
reply'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.
replyIt was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.
> The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones
replyDuke3D -> Quake (software rendered of course) definitely fit that description
Yessss...I got a friend who went on vacation to the US to bring back a Voodoo (2,I think?). I played a lot of Quake 1 and I remember playing online and seeing the water transparency and my rivals underwater...good times.
replyWTF is TFC?
replyProbably Team Fortress Classic. Hi to all nade and rocket jumping fans.
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