this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Damn I’m old. I had at least two of those cards
I thought I was old, but I've only even heard of the 3dfx 😳
I must be ancient then. I recognized, and I think used, all of those cards/chips.
Some personally. Some at work. At work I used to maintain and MS-DOS / early Windows graphics program. I had to test the program’s compatibility with a stack of graphics cards.
I'm still angry at nvidia for buying their remains, and not doing anything useful with it.
3dfx had multi GPU support back then, it took quite a while afterwards until somebody else tried that.
I've been using (or, in some cases, trying to use) that when it was brand new. Kernel side was relatively easy - but there was a lot of compiling custom versions of XFree86 trying to get acceleration working properly.
On the one hand a bit sad to see that kind of history I've experienced myself go - on the other hand, it's probably been a decade since I've last used something without KMS, and the ease of use of modern KMS drivers is way ahead of all the older stuff.
I've had a system in the late 90s with a 3dfx voodoo card. Also had a laptop with a SIS card from the early 2000 era.
The voodoo card was THE card to have it it's day (mine was an older second hand system though). The SIS card... for some reason they decided that standard VESA mode probing wasn't a thing they supported and would hardware crash when that API was used. I eventually got it working in Linux after patching xfree86 to not attempt probing when loading the VESA driver.
I think I remember running into that as well but for whatever reason I couldn't get accelerated-x working with the opengl libraries I was using for school. Likely the issue was just a lack of understanding on my part as I don't think I had a good grasp of the Linux library loader until well after I graduated.