Ok, 3dfx users still use our cards; Drivers for the most part still continue to be updated and things are great. After looking for some cheap 3dfx stuff on ebay and seeing a ton of old S3 cards out there, I'm just wondering if in some small basements somewhere there's not people secretly going "Dude!! remember the good old days when the stealth cards rocked!?!?!?"   I know some people look at us weird with "Who's 3DFX?" (My fiance' does), but just a thought.  


Then there's always the question of "Why do people call them parkways and driveways, driveways when you park in a driveway and drive in a parkway." " and why do people call rootbeer floats, rootbeer floats when it's the ice cream that floats?"    

heh well S3 Cards Rock in my holy opinion

still have my big favour:

Diamond Multimedia VIPER II Z200 AGP x4 32MB
Featuring:

S3 SAVAGE 2000 GPU the first T&L based GPU only the GeForce 256 was the first to make use of it.
32MB 128Bit SDRAM
Single Pass Quad Texture Engine
Hardware intregated S3TC
S3 MeTaL API
Master Engine Unit
S3TL the Original Transfrom & Lighting from S3 it's self, as most people don't think hehe

It's drivers were somewhat buggy in the beginning but I bought the later model which was bundeled with good , stable and fast drivers with T&L function available

The VIPER II was my main VGA the Glide part were the Skywell Magic 3D II PLuS! 24 MB SLI set.

this was built in my good ole Pentium!!!/E 650 Mhz machine and really it rocked, it even PWNed GeForce 256 SDR/DDR cards in Quake 3 arena @ 1600 x 1200 x 32 reso's with S3TC and no bleachy skies , it was also the first card to beat the 256 in many cases espeacially at higher reso's

Anywyas the 256 was better with most D3D apps, it's drivers were better true there. Only the 2D of the Viper 2 was exellent, it's S3 MeTaL API was great looked very nice in Unreal Tournament Game Of The Year Edition 1999 there you could whitness the power of this thing leaving all cards behind it the S2 Savage 2000 chip was exellent with it's own API other cards that used OpenGL and Direct3D were all behind it heh.

But UT GOTYE 1999 was also one of very few that supported S3 MeTaL API, which actually made it's first Entrance on the Savage 4 chipset, and S3TC came first on the Savage 3D

Anyways I have lot's of good memories with the ViperII Z200 and there fore I still have it here fully boxed, well only missing the game FreeStyle didn't like that much back then heh, so gave it to an old friend of mine back then haha oh well.

But for nowadays I prefer ATi all the way thier Radeon cards have exellent drivers and are far more detailed than the drivers I have seen with some GeForce 6 series cards, there are so many more things to utilize with them, and I must say the my X1900XTX + X1950 XTX CrossFire Edition CrossFire Setup really rocks 8)

I've had a small number of S3 Cards in use.

Basically the hardware had some potential, but the Driver Teams never managed or cared to bring it there (wrong priorities, not unlike later attempts like SiS with the XGI Xabre).

The only exception probably being the few hand-optimized Games (e.g. Mechwarrior II) that often shipped with Hardware.

Performance-wise, the cards were quickly superseeded, only better Drivers could have gotten them a lasting name.

I think their existing reputation came from the sheer tons of Cards built for OEM's and found in millions of Retail Computers. At their respective time, unfortunately only used to fulfill checkmark features (which were of little use).

Overall, S3 was an excellent plan & delivery for OEM's, but not for Gamers.
The price for that mistake was its final vanishing from the Desktop market and a vastly diminished reputation.

IMHO, their neck was broken when their Savage2000 Design was found flawed beyond fixing after going full production (what kind of QA did they have there?).

well I agree the Savage 2000 was kinda beta like when it was released that's why I waited till the refeshed ones came out with the new drivers to enable S3TL and that looked very nice, i mean S3TL was allready in the hardware only S3 never made a driver to utilise that function, T&L was designed by S3 but NV was the first to make use of it and yeps S3 was kinda slow on the driver side.

But the Savage 2000 gives exellent 2D and now I use it in UT GOTYE 1999 with S3 MeTaL's API looks very nice, best S3TC I've seen in that game hehe, with drivers from Q4 2000 :X haha oh well better late than never right

3dfx Glide still has the most colorfull effects great bloom effects and softing of the colours needed in a game, perfect 3D for it's day and it still looks amazing even nowadays, just to play Glide games brings you back in time , in the time when real games emerged

Crikey! Voodoo's Rule!

there were more games with that engine that did take use of it, forgot about the names though heh.

Deus eX did if I could recall, and OpenGL games looked far better than on any other card of it's time with exellent texture compression and no corrupted orsay bleachy skies, it was in high reso with all eyecandy on faster than a GeForce 256, it was one of the best cards of it's time when combined with the perfect driver & OS setup

The Anti S3 lads think different ofcourse which is mostly ALOC

lolz well the game UT is nothing comparable to Deus Ex hehe but yeah the engine is frankly the same.

Uhm I used Win98SE and some T&L driver I got from Dandata, an Australian Hardware site, I should have that driver laying around here somewhere