- Friday, 9 January 2009
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3dfx drivers updated
EVERYONE GETS A little nostalgic around the holidays and the folks down at 3DFX Zone are no exception, coming out with a new video driver to support Voodoo3 and a host of other newer cards on Windows 2000 and XP 32 & 64-bit Operating Systems.
For those reluctant to throw their Voodoo cards into the dustbin of history, and even more reluctant to use Vista, this new driver is something of a ghost of Christmas past, spreading nostalgic cheer to one and all.
The updated driver package for 3dfx accelerators is based on a unified architecture, so it will work for a plethora of 3dfx GPUs including the Voodoo3 2000, Voodoo3 3000 and Voodoo3 3500 cards.
It will also work for all 3dfx VSA-100 products; Voodoo4 4500, Voodoo5 5500 and Voodoo5 6000 cards. µ
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Voodoo cards are ancient. Who would even need these drivers.
Ta for that... Only a couple of days ago I wanted to twin monitor an old machine, and rummaging in the box of spares found the required PCI graphics cards (a 3dfx), only to find a complete lack of XP drivers for it on the intarwibble! One more day and the bin men would have had it... I hope I can wash the food out of the fan.
nice to see this on the inquirer.. hope they get some promotion what these guys do its awesome.. 3dfx didnt even had xp drivers and this ones support that and vista.. and loads of games
this is almost cool... I have a voodoo 5 in a bin in my basement, but I'm afraid it will stay in that bin for years to come.
Ah the memories, playing Red Baron 3D with Glide on my old Voodoo 3000, later I had a 5500. Then NVidia strangled all support for this noble family of cards. I dragged my feet upgrading; when I did, it wasn't going to be NVidia, it was an ATI 9700. How many Voodoo users were left with a bad taste in their mouths when the green team took over. I don't know if it were hostile or amiable takeover, it just felt all wrong.
While Xorg under BSD and Linux may not have the best support for newer cards, they somewhat make up for it via their continued support for legacy cards. The latest Xorg 7.4 release still supports the older Voodoo cards, among many others. When my Geforce 8600 PCIe fried last month, I thought I was going to be in trouble since I didn't have any other PCIe cards. Most of my spares were older AGP cards. Luckily, after some digging, I found an old Diamond FireGL PCI card. System booted up fine. Logged into FreeBSD as root, added the xf86-video-glint package, generated a new xorg.conf file, and was in business, all in less than two minutes. When I rebooted in Windows XP, the device manager didn't recognize the card. So VGA only for me. I know that Microsoft is a profit driven company, and there isn't enough profit in these old peripherals to justify the personnel to keep the drivers up-to-date for XP and Vista, but one really has to wonder how much effort it would take to do so. The Xorg folks sure don't seem to have a problem doing the same.
they might as well come up with a new service pack for the now retired windows 3.1 while they're at it.
replying to Raedwulf, It was a hostile take over, Nvidia sued 3dfx for patent infringement, 3dfx counter sued as they did own them and it was Nvidia that was out of line, it was a hostile take over as 3dfx had much better technology. Ended up being money that killed 3D, Nvidia had millions in lawyers and paid off the one exec of 3D to give up. All so they could own something they never released, they killed their competition not with a better product but with evil. It was sad for the industry and still is.
What a tragic waste of life and talent! Just let it go guys...let it go!