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youtube.com - Best Buy employee, Danielle Kelly, sings her way into holiday campaign.
145 Comments
- jasdf, on 05/19/2009, -1/+89Am I the only one thinks about the insane amount of math that my GPU is doing while playing a game?
- Wreckage, on 05/19/2009, -0/+72What a depressing look at all the money I spent.
- Spadgezilla, on 05/18/2009, -0/+64What a truly nostalgic ride that was.
- silverbullet126, on 05/19/2009, -0/+62Long live 3DFX :)
- kanojo1969, on 05/19/2009, -1/+52I remember when Quake first came out, and the rumours that it supported 3d acceleration. The only card I could find in my country was some thing made by leadtek in taiwan, it said it did 3d acceleration but in reality it did nothing. It cost me about $500 too.
But I was obsessed so I ended up importing a Voodoo 1 card from the US, which ended up coting about a grand after freight etc. I was abt disappointed because I was expecting to get real close to a wall and see the texture in full resolution, nobody knew anything about how 3D worked. but the sheer smoothness of the framerate was astounding.
Anyway all my friends thought I was full of *****, when I said I had this card that produced super smooth graphics in quake but one by one they visited my house and left astonished. Soon they were available locally and everyone I knew bought one.
Some people wanted to be different so they bought a matrox or a rendition, and none of them were as good for Quake as the voodoo.
And quake was the only game in town. Soon we were all playing quakeworld with voodoo cards getting insane framerates and resolutions like 50fps @ 800x600. Then they announced the voodoo 2. And the original SLI which back then meant 'scan-line interleaving'.
I walked out of the electronics store the day of release with 2 V2 cards and about $1500 less in my bank account. but holy ***** they were fast. I was cranking out quakeworld timedemos at 200fps and I bought my first 20" monitor so I could run it at 1600x1200. The monitor, again, was almost $2000. LCDs hadn't even been released yet, at any price.
Those V2 cards were insane, with two of them, I had gone nuts and got the high-end ones with TWELVE ***** MEGABYTES of RAM!!!! that was when PC Ram was about $50 per megabyte, I think my PC only had 32 megs.
And that's when it all started, visting sCary's shuga shack, and then the original Voodoo Extreme site with Billy whatshisname.
Reading Carmack's daily posts about tech stuff, a decade before the word 'blog' was first uttered. Queueing up for hours at id's ftp site when the latest quakelworld build was dropped.
Waiting for my 28k modem to download the leaked Q2 build several months early, downloading all 30 megs of it took 2 days.
I really miss those days, damn near every week there was some incredible new driver, or demo, or hardware announcement.
The only thing more astonishing than how far we've come is how long ago that was. 1996 was when I bought my first Voodoo card. - 12 years ago. - Lorddias, on 05/19/2009, -1/+39Is it just me or does it seem pointless to write an article about graphics cards and well.. not include any in game graphics? I know I could imagine it but seeing what these pushed in their era would be quite nice seeing how graphics cards came along.
- bphm42, on 05/19/2009, -0/+34Loud fan.
- hoveringsocks, on 05/19/2009, -0/+28Reminds me of when I had a Rendition 2100, Voodoo 2, and Matrox m3D in my gaming rig all at once so I could play all the accelerated games regardless of what API it was written for. Nostalgic ride indeed.
- wiggles, on 05/19/2009, -0/+22The article missed a major selling point for the add-on Voodoo boards. Many a crappy Packard Bell POS could be turned into a Quake powerhouse with the addition of a PCI card. Kids whose parents were sold a line of ***** by the sales guys at CompUSA could pick one of these puppies up and be right up there with guys who knew what they were doing when building their PC's.
- bbhill, on 06/16/2009, -1/+18Why was the Geforce FX 5800 a dustbuster?
- Falldog, on 05/19/2009, -2/+19Sort of related, http://www.imgdump.info/img-doom-three-full-7552.h ...
- cosmicr, on 05/19/2009, -0/+15Fun Fact: The FX5800's two-slot cooling solution drew heavy criticism over its excessive noise. It was so loud, many likened it to a dustbuster, and it didn't help that it looked a little bit like one.
- AmazingSteve, on 05/19/2009, -0/+143DFX had BEST ads ever!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmaYH1F6kho
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmaYH1F6kho
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o72T8qQr7GE&NR= ... - deweyhewson, on 05/19/2009, -0/+13"Like the original Voodoo, the Voodoo2 once again required a separate 2D videocard for non-3D gaming, only this time the image quality was improved, particularly at higher resolutions (1024x768) where the Voodoo1 struggled."
Actually, the original Voodoo1 didn't just "struggle" at 1024x768, it couldn't even render 1024x768; it maxed out at 640x480.
That being said, I remember fondly the days of buying my Orchid Righteous 3D (Voodoo1 card) and switching Quake 2 over to OpenGL from software mode. I was simply blown away. I mean, today we "ooh" and "awe" at graphics in games like Crysis, but it's more or less just more advanced 3D rendering, as beautiful as it is. But switching from software rendering to hardware accelerated rendering back in the mid-90s was like going from a black and white set to HD.
Fond memories for this geek. - SourBreastMilk, on 05/19/2009, -0/+13I remember playing Diablo and Asheron's Call on my ***** Gateway with a Voodoo 3DFX, with dial up. =(
- CivicTV, on 08/14/2009, -0/+13I think that was the purpose of the question.
- Maddenman2000, on 05/19/2009, -0/+11Life is too short to go through 10 pages, therefore man made a print version: http://www.maximumpc.com/print/6338
- computrius, on 05/19/2009, -3/+13If you have to ask that you never had one :)
- Gloony, on 05/19/2009, -0/+10There is no conclusion, Son - the story's still being told.
Sure the characters have changed 'n all, but the heartfelt, blindin'ly fast mathematical executions that those cards started more 'n a decade ago live on to this verrah day.
God bless yer GPU, boy, they'll sacrifice the magic genie smoke for ya jus' ta keep ya happy.
/western - Inflammo, on 05/19/2009, -0/+9I had a 3DFX VooDoo! I think it was like 32MB. I bought it so I could play the Phantom Menace PC game...
- nmanguy, on 05/19/2009, -0/+9What? You'd prefer a solid 40,000 pixel scroll?
- howcansheslap, on 05/19/2009, -0/+98800GTX = Best graphics card I ever owned or maybe I just think that because its not becoming obsolete as my older cards tended to do when newer more demanding OS's and games.
- lordzelo, on 05/19/2009, -0/+8You bring back some good memories. Me and my Voodoo... Late nights playing Team Fortress... Oh yes, those were the days you could hide in the shadows. Gaming just isn't the same. Things were so much more amazing back then.
- UselessTrivia, on 05/19/2009, -3/+11Yeah...really awesome history. We went from cards that were monumental shifts in power and possibility every couple of years to minor updates with massively diminishing returns on a six-month planned obsolescence cycle.
And don't even get me started on the counter-intuitive naming and numbering systems. The 5100 is less powerful than the 5000? But only if it's the GX model and not the FX model.
The graphics chip companies are destroying PC gaming hand-in-hand with the developers that are enabling them by blindly pursuing graphical fidelity as the end-all-be-all selling point for every mainstream title.
Let the graphics stagnate for a couple of years and focus on gameplay and tools that help us build game worlds quicker and cheaper. - Gloony, on 05/19/2009, -0/+8To be fair there's a lot of article in this piece and it was worth it.
- AmazingSteve, on 05/19/2009, -0/+7No kidding. Man, I've owned A LOT of video cards over the years.
- invar9, on 05/19/2009, -0/+7I still have my dual 12 MB voodoo 2's, 16 MB Riva TNT, all running through the creative DRX2 MPEG 2 decoder card.
- nmanguy, on 05/19/2009, -0/+7Love the FX 5800 picture. I got one for free, and used it quite a bit (2004 to mid 2007). It could churn out Oblivion at a continuous 15 fps, until I got the "Oldblivion" fix for it.
It was louf, it was slow, it was hot, it used up lots of power, but dammit all it was better than integrated, or having to buy a new one. - noisymime, on 05/19/2009, -0/+7Scan Line Interleave is the REAL SLI. 2 cards, each does half the work. Makes sense to me.
Kids these days would laugh at you if you told them about 'real' SLI - inactive, on 05/19/2009, -0/+7the nvidia 5xxx series was crap, i had an ati 9700 instead.
- compgeek, on 05/19/2009, -0/+6yet another amazing article from maximum pc
- lucutus, on 05/19/2009, -0/+6Still have three Voodoo 3 3500 with TV cards. Wish I could find a good motherboard with AGP 1 support!
- thunderdonkey, on 05/19/2009, -0/+6That just about brought a tear to my eye... 1995 through 2002 were some incredible years in the realm of PC gaming.
The tear was really due to the thought of how much money I spent owning just about every damn card covered there. Jesus... - computrius, on 05/19/2009, -0/+6Voodoo 3 was my first 3d graphics card (though it was a bit old by the time I got it, but still damn good.). It was the best day of my life when I could turn red faction up to full settings. I was never disappointed with that card.
- inactive, on 05/19/2009, -2/+8Radeon 4870 FTW
- solid12345, on 05/19/2009, -1/+7And it only took Adobe 15+ years to implement GPU support into Photoshop...
- getoffmybridge, on 05/19/2009, -0/+6Guess they couldn't find a Cirrus Logic 5426
- m3xican, on 05/19/2009, -5/+11yes
- jamesgott, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5I said that last night after leaving your mom's house.
- inactive, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5for once it was the right thing to do. Look at the size of content on each page. It would take way too much scrolling if put on one page.
- ZestyNinja, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5Dugg because the same thing happened to me.
- lordzelo, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5Yeah, I remember when I got a Riva TNT 2 and turned on OpenGL for Quake 2... Colored lighting... It had freaking colored lighting. I shat myself that day. I'd never seen anything more beautiful on a computer.
I haven't seen jumps like that in gaming for a long time. To go from the standard white lighing of Quake 1 to accelerated colored lighting in Quake 2, it was amazing. - ban1d0, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5I own the old version of the 260, I believe the new version GTX 260 Core 216 is well worth it, not only it's a little faster, it has better temperatures and energy consumption, it's probably the best price-perfomance card you can buy today after the recent price cuts with the GTX 275 release.
My GTX 260 on a Q6600@3GHz with 4GB DDR2 runs games like GTA 4 and Crysis Warhed considerably smooth at 1680 x 1050 with high settings and anti-aliasing on, averaging maybe between 40 to 50fps on GTA 4 and 30 to 40fps on Crysis Warhead.
Although today it may be considered a mid-end card, the GTX 260 was a high-end single gpu a little less than a year ago. - cosmicr, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5the article just stops, with no conclusion?
- wiggles, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5Still got my SLI Voodoo 2's in a box, waiting for their resurrection.
- inactive, on 05/19/2009, -0/+5Same here :)
+ 2 sound cards so I could play mp3's and games at the same time (no software mixing back then).
+ 1 scsi card = All PCI slots full.
Ahhhhh memories. - moo2u2, on 05/19/2009, -0/+4Totally agree! Used to have two watercooled in SLI. I still miss them :(
- nurbsenvi, on 05/19/2009, -0/+4Radeon 9700 series = legend.
- sexybobo, on 05/19/2009, -0/+4holy crap that is louder then most servers.
- diggit83, on 05/19/2009, -0/+4It was a reminder of how pissed I was after buying a voodoo5, then having no ***** support for it a week later =(
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