This is cool, just on general principle. Upgrades of obsolete hardware for no reason other than the thrill of hacking? I'm a fan.
However, as somebody who had a 6MB Voodoo (Pure3D from Canopus) back in the day I can tell you -- that extra memory is just about useless.
Found this article with some benchmarks. The initial batch of 3dfx games didn't target the extra memory of the 6MB cards, because they were a niche within a niche already. Some later titles apparently benefitted a bit, about 4% on average:
...although, unlike the author of the article, I'm not entirely sure it was due to the extra texture memory? IIRC some 3dfx Voodoo cards were clocked a bit higher than others by default? I know the Canopus Pure3D could be overclocked in software:
Same goes today, unless you're doing other things than just gaming. But top of the line cards come with 24GB VRAM, most games never come close to using that much VRAM.
Today the extra VRAM gets you a degree of futureproofing.
Theoretically the extra VRAM on a 3Dfx Voodoo did that as well. But in reality not really. 3D accelerators were blossoming so quickly that old cards were obsoleted, fast.
Probably even more relevantly, games didn't have as many tweakable graphics options. Today's games are multiplatform and built to run on a wide variety of spec'd devices, from PS4/XBOne era hardware up to superpowered gaming PCs. If I've got an older card with lots of memory running a newer game I can keep everything else at medium and bump texture quality to high. Games in 1997 generally weren't really built quite that flexibly.
That is, reportedly, beginning to change. I've been seeing reports of TLOU PC port choking on cards with 10gb of vram, only getting decent once you crest 12gb.
It may take until the _next_ console generation for 24gb cards to get well and truly utilized, but the 12gb seen on Nvidia's current midrange cards may quickly feel anemic.
> I've been seeing reports of TLOU PC port choking on cards with 10gb of vram, only getting decent once you crest 12gb.
That seems more because devs didn't do a good job in porting a 10 year old game (released in 2013) that ran perfectly fine on a PS3, which only had 256MB of system RAM and 256MB of VRAM. The PC TLOU port is not advancing the state-of-the-art in graphics, it should not be seen as a sign of the new normal.
TLOU Part I != TLOU (2013). It's a complete remake from the ground up built off of TLOU Part II engine enhancements. Your point still stands that it's a bad port as it runs on the PS5 just fine and shouldn't be choking decently spec'd PCs.
I believe what's being spoken about is the PC port of the recently released TLOU remake, which is native to the PS5 and designed to leverage its hardware fully. It's still a bad port, but not so bad that it's a 10 year old game struggling to run on a current generation PC.
Various sources seems to claim that the minimum VRAM requirement for Hogwarts Legacy is 4GB and recommended being 8GB. Seems to still be far away from 24GB.
I could totally imagine a big map game having 50gb+ of textures, and demand loading them. If you have more VRAM, there will be less SSD reading/writing as textures are loaded and unloaded when you move about the map.
UE4 onwards has this interesting mechanism where it slows movement as you move through a zone that triggers asset loading. It removes loading screens by imposing a movement speed penalty to give it time to pre-load assets.
The pitfall is that if you're short on VRAM you can feel like you're moving through treacle near doors you don't even intend to open! All at 60fps...
GPUs are going to have SSDs or NAND soon, aren't they? "Non-volatile persistent texture storage" branded as "TextureFlash" or "GameNOW!!" or something like that.
I don't know a single person who had a 6MB 3Dfx Voodoo card back in the day, I know plenty of people with a 24GB VRAM card today. I don't think they (6MB 3Dfx) were even obtainable in my country at the time without special contacts. So by any measure, those cards were not really regular gamer level cards either.
They were defini6tely uncommon but 6MB Voodoos were only a little bit more than regular 4MB cards here in the USA. ~$350 instead of ~$300 I think.
I knew approximately 6 or 7 people with 3D graphics cards back then. And 2 of us had the 6MB Voodoo cards.
But then again it was just a very different time in 1997. Video games were already 20+ years old in the mainstream at that point. But the idea of buying a special "3D graphics card" for your PC was still pretty new. So if you were "crazy" enough to do that in the first place then spending another $50 on the "best" card was a fairly common decision.
3Dfx is just plain cool. It was one of the bigger leaps of the era. Back then there was a little cross over from car culture (mods/hot rodding) too which helped fuel some of the industry. This was almost like throwing a 4 barrel carb and high rise cam shaft into a 5.7L Chevy, not very expensive and mind blowing difference of performance from stock.
I consider it one of the everything changed moments. I played Quake a lot more than I probably should have. When I got my 3dfx voodoo daughter card, computer games pretty much changed overnight.
Nice. I recently saw a somewhat similar video: "8MB Voodoo 1 enables higher resolutions in Quake?" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4rIDNDQUpU. Fun stuff to watch. When I started gaming Voodoo no longer existed, so I appreciate all of this historic info.
I also started gaming after voodoo had left the scene but I remember buying two 3dfx voodoo 2 cards for SLI way past their prime to play Diablo II in glide mode (for niceness and 1024x786 res and retro-brag-points). Fun times with cheap old hardware.
I had a 16mb Voodoo 3 2000 back in the day which seemed like magic to me. It was tremendous; and paired with a single core 500mhz Pentium 3 it did what I remember in my head as 240 fps at native 4K on my 17" 1280x1024 CRT of the time without breaking a sweat.
...
I know. But I remember it like that, and that's what matters okay!?
Oh boy I was so into these in the early 2000 or earlier I think. Been so long. Ok wow lot of wasted hours being anti social during high school...
This article brought back memories of total regret in certain parts of my younger life. I wasted countless nights , endless hours. When I should of instead have been out parties and observing + inspecting as many female bodies, not just any female bodies but only the bodies that fit certain criterias such as they are my age or older and they fully consent actually almost desiring and demanding that I inspect their bodies. Last but not least 100 lbs and size 24 jeans waist. Maybe I wouldn't need to set these limts perhaps back in high school most fit within this limit as this was back in the 90s and people were generally thinner.
You have to understand back then being able to upgrade the memory or to overclock, essentially trying to max out the performance of your hardware, pushing it to the limit, was like the thing to do. Ok to start the frame buffer memory on a Voodoo graphics card was relatively simple. The card had a slot for a single 1MB or 2MB DRAM chip, and adding a larger chip would increase the frame buffer memory. However, upgrading the texture memory was more complicated.
The texture memory on the Voodoo graphics cards was actually stored on a separate card called a texture expansion card (TEC). The TEC connected to the Voodoo card via a ribbon cable and added an additional 2MB of texture memory.
What made the Voodoo memory upgrade interesting was that it required a fair amount of technical knowledge and skill. Upgrading the frame buffer memory was relatively easy, but upgrading the TEC required soldering and programming skills. It was not a easy task like I thought I had mad skills back then haha.
But think 3dfx was ruthless against modding like they won't try to answer any questions if it was touched
However, as somebody who had a 6MB Voodoo (Pure3D from Canopus) back in the day I can tell you -- that extra memory is just about useless.
Found this article with some benchmarks. The initial batch of 3dfx games didn't target the extra memory of the 6MB cards, because they were a niche within a niche already. Some later titles apparently benefitted a bit, about 4% on average:
https://vintage3d.org/3dfx1.php
...although, unlike the author of the article, I'm not entirely sure it was due to the extra texture memory? IIRC some 3dfx Voodoo cards were clocked a bit higher than others by default? I know the Canopus Pure3D could be overclocked in software:
http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/overclocking.htm