Thursday, December 13th 2018
3DFX's Canceled Rampage GPU Pictured, Put Through the Paces in 3D Mark 2001
3DFX is a well-known name for most in our community, I'd wager (I don't have the data to back me up on that, but bare with me). The company is one of the highest-profile defunct companies that vied for a place in the desktop, high-performance GPU space back in the day, and brought its guns bearing on NVIDIA and then ATI. The Rampage was the last GPU ever developed by the company, and looked to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce3. That never saw the light of day, though, with the company shutting its doors before development became viable for market release.
DSOGaming has some images of some of the Rampage GPUs that survived 3DFX's closure, though, and the graphics card is shown running Max Payne, Unreal Tournament & 3DMark 2001. For those of you that ever had a 3DFX graphics card, these should bring you right down memory lane. Enjoy.
Source:
DSOGaming
DSOGaming has some images of some of the Rampage GPUs that survived 3DFX's closure, though, and the graphics card is shown running Max Payne, Unreal Tournament & 3DMark 2001. For those of you that ever had a 3DFX graphics card, these should bring you right down memory lane. Enjoy.
49 Comments on 3DFX's Canceled Rampage GPU Pictured, Put Through the Paces in 3D Mark 2001
I regret selling my Voodoo2 black magic edition
It sucked only having 800x600 .
Everything perfect even with a crap CPU. I had a AMD k6 300 plus a voodoo 2 it was great.
3dfx just worked with very low cpu over heads
Went to a TNT2 m64 then my CPU would get threashed. I could run some things at 1152*864 others at 1024 sx 768 and some at 640x480...
then upgraded again.
Probbly the most fun I had pc gamming was with a voodoo2 ..
I think it was 1999 all these D3D and 3dfx patches came out for older games so I replayed loads of stuff in 3d.
If 3dfx wasn't going to catch up in the Direct3D, they were dead anyway. Glide and MiniGL only went this far and were already starting to be a problem in Voodoo2 age, and was a real problem with Banshee and Voodoo3. It did not help that TNT was very competitive to Voodoo2 and even more so to Banshee.
Glide was the lower-level api. That was a large part of why Voodoos did so well for as long as they did.G200 was perfectly capable of hardware accelerated mode. Slower than Voodoo2/TNT but still.
TNT was about as fast as Voodoo2 and a little faster than Banshee. Initally D3D was very much in D3D court but that didn't last once 3dfx took things seriously.Voodoo was really the one with impact. Voodoo2 was more of the same, just better/faster.
TNT was from an underdog at the time and came with much better OpenGL and Direct3D support, as well as 32-bit support (slow as it was). Being 2D/3D in one card did not hurt either, Banshee came almost half a year later and was a bit slower.
techreport.com/review/2515/nvidia-geforce3-graphics-processor/10
Cool to see. Proberly sold for approx 10 to 15k since it's VERY VERY VERY rare.
About AGP, well, I have the HD 3850.
From PCI is merely 33Mb of bandwidth.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port#Compatibility
But there's no way that it could be that slow, even in PCI mode. Even a damn TNT2 M64 gets a higher score, found this from google: hwbot.org/submission/878796_da_syntax_3dmark2001_se_riva_tnt2_m64_1434_marks
Spectre 2000 AGP 64MB 128Bit DDR 1x 3dfx VSA-200 Rampage 2000 Rasterizer + 1x 3dfx Sage T&L Geometry Unit
Spectre 3000 AGP 128MB 256Bit DDR (2x 64MB 128Bit DDR) 2x 3dfx VSA-200 Rampage 2000 Rasterizers + 1x 3dfx Sage T&L Geometry Unit
More info here at GDonovan's site:
www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/rampage.htm
And more here:
www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/rampage_2012.htm
Hope this helps :)