this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
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I was there, 3000 years ago.
My shelves still feature two 12MB Voodoo 2 in nostalgic reminder of the good old times.
I, painfully, had to buy my friend a Voodoo 2 card while I had a crappy Riva 128 because I owed him money. He then proceeded to show me how awesome GLQuake was and I couldn't run it.
Don't worry, you can buy a Voodoo 2 today for the price of about a 3070 or something :''(.
(and yes, mine are my retirement plan ... no, not financially, for gaming, bcs soon having 12/24MB of vram will be far beyond the reach of normal pleb)
2 Voodoo 2s? Well hey: now you can run Doom 3. https://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/index.php?topic=1462
Yes, I knew about that & was as amazed back then as I am now (also you don't need SLI for Doom 3 iirc).
I'm gutted, I tried to add heatsinks to the RAM in mine and I fried it.
I wish I kept my old boxes/hardware now. At least I still have my old consoles /boxes I guess
I'm still slightly mad that my parents got me an 8 MB Voodoo 2 instead of 12 MB. And I couldn't even formulate my frustration because I didn't quite understand VRAM yet.
Still, Unreal never looked better.
Omg Unreal is epic, those marble corridors still look legit today.
With two Voodoos you could run it in 1024×768.
Big SLI energy.
Big SLI energy,
smol ATA floppy data cable.
Nice, I didn't keep them.
But did you use wicked3d glasses? 😁
No, but I did buy (and still have) a GeForce 3 that came with 3D glasses (proper stereoscopic active glasses).
ASUS V8200 Deluxe, good oc.
Dang, I was happy 25 years ago.
Nice! Did that work with all games too? (in general, not perfectly)
Yes, it was api & driver level iirc (you adjusted the "difference between the eyes"/two different fov points), basically anything polygonal 3D worked I think.
But your PC also needed to produce twice the fps (for each eye a separate set ... so if your monitor could do 120Hz (I had a Samsung 959NF) & your card could do 120fps you got 60 frames per eye), ... so there was a limited number of games that had a playable fps even with a top pc (with home-made water loop!).
And this is "3D effect within the physical monitor" (unlike VR goggles that fake the 3D perception from close to your eyeballs) & most games dont really have 3D objects displayed close to you, eg in fps like Quake 2 the gun was noticeably 3D, but the rest (correctly) much less simply bcs of the fov/the distance.
Also CRTs weren't extremely bright & the glasses (with the LCDs "open") were still kinda dim so it was like playing with uncomfortable sunglasses.
Fun as a gimmick, still remember it fondly.
Yeah, the shutter hz/fps halving. I was on the 60 -> 30 route I think, which was still bearable to me, at least at that time.
But all in all until now I accepted that "3D" output will always be niche for a lot of reasons. But it pops up every 10 years or so.