Back in the day I remember that this forum was visited a bit more often. Nowadays, the only posts are the ones concerning V5 6k. Did we really say all that was to be said about 3dfx?

I wonder, if the 13 years since the dusk of 3dfx took its toll. Is it finally getting 'dead-and-buried '? 

Let me put it like this - even though I don't collect 3Dfx cards anymore...

And yes, many of the forums are not as active as they once were...

I'll still be active on the forums even after I own no 3Dfx cards at all.

3Dfx was a milestone in PC Graphics. Without them we wouldn't have ANY of the 3D accelerator card we have today (imagine a world without ATI/AMD and nVidia!).

They pioneered the tech and everyone else followed...they just couldn't keep up with the market trends unfortunately...and here we are!

FalconFly wrote on 01.03.13 at 18:36:11:


It is sad that the days of reliable hardware, true innovations and having to make an effort to get the most out of your hardware are gone. Being 17, I don't know where is the fun at with the current gen of hw and sw. Back then, you guys had to squeeze every fps possible out of GLquake with SST variables if you wanted to run your game the best, now it's just cards with auto OC and fancy control panels and Woohala! If you aren't satisfied with your frame rates now, just bang bang thrash it and buy another card!

Changes seemed to be much more innovative back then, and  hardware quality was better.

It's been a while since I've posted anything but I think what FalconFly said pretty much sums it up for everyone. Since the time of 3dfx, the industry has moved on for better or for worse and what we've got now is a throw away mentality for anything PC related. As Falcon mentioned, if it's not fast enough, just get a faster one. There isn't tweeking of the hardware or software anymore.

One problem that i see that has helped make the industry into what it is today; consoles. Developers may like them because they have a set hardware baseline to work with for the next 5+ years but for the pc side... there's no development that's pushing the hardware anymore. Anything that's in a PC will generally do circles around what a console can do hardware and that's for a middle ground system but the money to develop anything is stemming from console game sales with the PC as a side note.

Sure, there are resolution packs for some games that you can download to add additional graphics value (Dragon Age comes to mind for this- a 1 gig additional download). You can pump up Farcry 3 even and make it look it sweet but I really think that if consoles were out of the picture and gaming companies were strictly looking at the pc for all their gaming needs, like they were back in the mid to late 90's, we could possibly be seeing some truly amazing things. It won't happen now, there's just to much money at stake.

Falcon also hit on a key point; time. I'm married now, have three kids (one of my own and two from marriage) and my taste in things have changed. My time and money are now put towards the kids events, like Roller Derby and soccer, compared to any of my hobbies at the moment. This also leads into what Subhuman said about age.

The two oldest ones haven't gamed on anything other than a console until I showed them what playing Ghost Recon was like in co-op mode on the pc. The 16 yr old loves that, we just finished Rainbow Six Vegas II in co-op mode and he's starting to slow down a little bit more and start working with tactics instead of just running in, getting shot, dieing, re-spawning and doing it again (sometimes with me shooting him myself because of how annoyed I am with him doing that  ).

He's never heard of Win 3.1, never used Win 95 or 98, barely used Win 2k, and XP and Win 7 have only been used for Facebook, the web, and email until now. I'm willing to bet that most kids these days are pretty much the same. Unless they have someone in the house or know someone who's playing around with pc's, they don't know any of the background that brought them to the point they see with the hardware that the consoles use, nor do they care too.

I hope to one day spend a weekend, if the kid shows more interest in it, and build a 98 box with all of the spare parts I have. Show him what it used to be like with Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and UT. Get some Decent in there as well maybe and show him a whole different side of games.

This has been an awesome run and I will continue to visit the site as often as I can. See if anything is going on at all but unfortunately for me, things have changed to the point where I can't put as much time or effort into building my gaming rigs like I used to. This 6 core monster that I have now was bought with the idea that I wouldn't be buying or building a new one for a good 4/5/6 years with maybe a vid card update sometime down the road. It's just kind of the way things are for us here at my house now which in a some ways, kind of bites. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world but I do miss the old days sometimes. I'm hoping that with the hardware requirements of the 720, being a quadcore, 16 gigs of ram and whatever vid card it's using, that there will be an initial push for some decent looking, good games that push the pc's in what is needed for the ports that will eventually come. This may help in getting the kid more interested in the PC side of things, who knows.

I didn't mean to write all of this but looking back over the years, some really good and fun years, the current crop of gamers and future generations have/ are missing out on what gaming was really about for a lot of people back then. It was both hardware and software and what made it work. It was about one upping your best friend because he just got the new video card that you wanted or because he got a new processor that sometimes doubled the speed of it. Getting another 32/64/128 megs of ram in order to get dual channel working.

Anyway, later guys, have a good one and take care.

Jand