I have one question: wasn't the 3dfx a graphics postprocessor? I thought it didn't render the image in higher quality, but it did postprocessing only... Never had opportunity to have voodoo, but later, when got a decent NVIDIA, I played Need for Speed 2, which had demo videos "rendered in 3dfx" with snow etc, and my graphics was crispy and no-snowy. I tried to look up why my NVIDIA does not have those effects, and I learned that they were overlayed over the original image only by 3dfx voodoo...
The Voodoo was a 3D-only accelerator. It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so you needed another basic video card which plugged into the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. When an accelerated game was launched, the Voodoo took over and replaced the 2D card’s output completely.
That’s probably why you remember it being a post-processor. It didn’t apply effects to the 2D signal, but it needed it for all non-accelerated programs.
3dfx also supported more blending modes than most competing cards at the time. That could be why the snow effect didn’t work on your card.
I was playing around with building retro game VMs with qemu and pci passthrough awhile back and dusted off my old canopus pure 3d to try out with a pci to pcie adapter board. It was kind of amusing you'd have the windows desktop running in virt-manager and when you fired up unreal tournament the desktop would just freeze and only then would the card actually output anything.
No it’s definitely a 3D renderer. Glide was a competitor to OpenGL and Direct3D that was proprietary to 3dfx. Don’t remember why the quality was higher.
Yeah, the earliest models are literally 3D only as discussed in the article, they have separate pass through cable for your existing 2D graphics because even just making a flat 2D window isn't viable directly, Glide really wants to render only textured triangles which is fine for Quake but no good for Windows.
I had one of those 3D-only cards on my first computer. I didn't know about the passthrough and got pretty annoyed that my games sucked and never worked with the hardware 3D stack. I don't know if they didn't document it correctly, or if I just missed it. But when some support person finally told me, I was so pumped. I spent a while manually moving the cable to the 3D card when playing a game, until I finally got a passthrough cable.
