3DFX's Canceled Rampage GPU Pictured, Put Through the Paces in 3D Mark 2001

[cdawall]

Oh man I need to dig through my scores of old. I don't rmemeber ever having a card that scored that low on 3dmark01

 

[cyneater]

Dam Nvidia.

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.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

aaagh... good memories

I know right? Good times.

 

[blobster21]

Where is @Robert B when you need him ?

 

[londiste]

It's sad to think that if 3DFX had poured their R+D money into this instead of buying STB and re-developing their voodoo3 into the VSA100, 3DFX could have still been around today. The rampage was shaping up to be a fantastic card of the time. I dont know if 3DFX could have ever caught up in the DirectX space, but perhaps their support of glide could have brought DX12 style lower level API access more then a decade earlier then we ended up getting it.

Wasn't Rampage pretty much ready? 3dfx went down because of bad business decisions and technology was not going to solve that.

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.

Hm... I remember the TNT being ALMOST as good as the dual Voodoo II's... In D3D.
I could only afford a single TNT card at the time it was released. Huge upgrade from my Matrox G200, Half-life was like a dream--moving up from software mode!

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.

After all those years, I still think VooDoo2 was THE BEST video card ever released in history based on the impact it had on the Gaming comunity. I remember switching from Quake 1 400x300 VGA to 800x600 SVGA with GlQuake, and the impact was shocking! Games like NFS 2, Drakan, Unreal, Quake 1 and 2, Star Wars, etc, etc, were the real treat on my Voodoo2. Never had so much satisfaction as a gamer ever in my entire life.
Good memories.

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.

 

[ShurikN]

That score of 450 looks incredibly low

https://techreport.com/review/2515/nvidia-geforce3-graphics-processor/10

 

[thunder-93]

ah ... fond memories of my Obsidian X-24 Voodoo2, single card SLI, with built in TV-out!!

 

[DaC]

After all those years, I still think VooDoo2 was THE BEST video card ever released in history based on the impact it had on the Gaming comunity. I remember switching from Quake 1 400x300 VGA to 800x600 SVGA with GlQuake, and the impact was shocking! Games like NFS 2, Drakan, Unreal, Quake 1 and 2, Star Wars, etc, etc, were the real treat on my Voodoo2. Never had so much satisfaction as a gamer ever in my entire life.
Good memories.

Agreed! I remember buying my Voodo 2 8mb, and the graphics quality change and speed was incredible, made everything seems like a brand new game. Quake 2 with mirror reflections, JSF with lens flare, and many other improvements running so smoooooth.

 

[phill]

Awesome Surprised they never used an AGP motherboard as well

 

[[XC] Oj101]

That score of 450 looks incredibly low

https://techreport.com/review/2515/nvidia-geforce3-graphics-processor/10

That was covered in the comments at the source. There are no properly working drivers for the card, and the owner of the card is lacking the documentation to develop his own.

 

[BackSlash]

Mmm good old AGP times.......

 

[Jism]

If this guy gets the drivers somehow fixed, we would finally know if the Rampage was indeed that what was promissed. A competitor against the Geforce 3 series. But i doubt it to be honest. This product if faster could have saved 3DFX by hoaling in investors. There's a great chance that the card might flaw. But untill the raw performance is'nt yet really extracted we will not know.

Cool to see. Proberly sold for approx 10 to 15k since it's VERY VERY VERY rare.

 

[Ruru]

Is the power connector useless, since there wasn't a cable connected?

About AGP, well, I have the HD 3850.

 

[Jism]

Is it me or is there a PCI to AGP bridge in between all screenshots?

From PCI is merely 33Mb of bandwidth.

 

[Ruru]

Is it me or is there a PCI to AGP bridge in between all screenshots?

From PCI is merely 33Mb of bandwidth.

133MB/sec, not 33MB. Maybe you confused it with PCI's 33MHz clock..? Now I also saw it when you mentioned it.

 

[Jism]

Yeah if they tested that with a conversion module, then it defenitly needs work on several fronts. That PCI is 100% a limiting factor, even a Geforce 2 MX on PCI feels very very slow as i remember back then.

 

[Ruru]

Yeah if they tested that with a conversion module, then it defenitly needs work on several fronts. That PCI is 100% a limiting factor, even a Geforce 2 MX on PCI feels very very slow as i remember back then.

I had a FX 5200 PCI as a backup card, and like a normal FX 5200 wasn't slow enough.. GF 2 MX400 wiped the floor with it.

 

[[XC] Oj101]

Is it me or is there a PCI to AGP bridge in between all screenshots?

From PCI is merely 33Mb of bandwidth.

Different versions of AGP ran at different voltages. I'm guessing it has to do with that.

 

[Ruru]

Different versions of AGP ran at different voltages. I'm guessing it has to do with that.

Yeah, I was also confused about those back in the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port#Compatibility

 

[Jism]

Yeah but it's still a PCI port in between. So it's not running on AGP speeds.

 

[Ruru]

Could there have been some compatibility issues when using it straight in AGP, dunno..

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: http://hwbot.org/submission/878796_da_syntax_3dmark2001_se_riva_tnt2_m64_1434_marks

 

[kanecvr]

It's actually a hybrid pc, running on a super 7 AMD K6-II+ 550MHz with an ISA sound card with opl2 fm synthesis chip and a pci one. It has the unique ability to disable the L1 cache and make it a slow 386 in terms of performance, or disable L2 and L3 and lake it perform like a 486. So I dual boot to real DOS 6.22 for those special old games with CPU speed scaling issues, or those taking advantage of opl2 chip and at the same time I can boot to windows 98se and enjoy any dx6-7 game until 2001 (xp era) or enjoy at it's full glory some glide API game on the voodoos. All that in just one pc. It's as versatile as it gets, and you know better than me how fast things were progressing back thenb and what incompatibilities they had between each generation. I'm born in 1990 after all
Later Pentium II and above couldn't simulate the speed of a 486 by disabling caches, so you either get a 286 or a super fast Pentium. That's an issue on speed ensitive games of the past.

I have a similar setup - K6-III @ 550Mhz, 256MB of SDRAM on a Aopen AX59-Pro super 7 atx board. I'm using a geforce 2 GTS paired with two voodoo 2 cards from creative and a Guillemot Maxi Gamer 64 + Roland Sound Canvas (SC-55 MKII).

 

[Mr.Scott]

Could there have been some compatibility issues when using it straight in AGP, dunno..

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: http://hwbot.org/submission/878796_da_syntax_3dmark2001_se_riva_tnt2_m64_1434_marks

 

[Jose Jeswin]

Were there any SPECTRE cards made?...Rampage + Sage T&L processor?...

 

[Deleted member 190205]

the card pictured is a Spectre 1000 AGP 32MB Rev.A1 4700, the cards that had sage would of gotten these names:

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:

TDG-3dfx-Rampage

And more here:

TDG-3dfx-Rampage 2012

Hope this helps