NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra vs 3Dfx Voodoo3 3500 | Card Battles

By popular vote, here is the next Card Battles episode featuring NVIDIA's TNT2 Ultra, and 3Dfx's Voodoo3 3500 from the year 1999!

Platform specs:
Athlon XP-M 2400+ @ 2.4GHz
512MB PC3200 @ 266MHz
Asus A7S333 (SiS 745)
Aureal Vortex 2
Western Digital WD800 80GB HDD
Windows 98SE Unofficial SP3

Drivers:
NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra - Forceware 45.23
3Dfx Voodoo3 3500 - v1.07.00

0:00 Intro
0:45 History
2:27 Specs and Info
7:36 Benchmarks
10:25 Conclusion

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[ClassicTrialsChannel]

When 3DFX came out it was a revelation. i had the 1st voodoo card in 96ish and couldn't belive how good it was. i then move on too the voodoo 2 12mb in sli. that was another big jump. i still have my two diamond voodoo 2 cards, both 12mb. there boxed and still in my spareroom.

[joeyvdm]

Loved it! Another terrific Pixel Pipes episode. And oh boy, the member berries are strong with this one. I still have both GPUs, and it was a tremendous era to be an enthusiast!

Thanks for the vid Nathan, another great one.

[Wowzers]

This is a really well thought out review of a really special time in a lot of people's lives. Thank you for doing such a good job.

[StokedMatty]

This channel is so awesome. Having such a specialised dive into this tech is so so so enjoyable. Thank you for this video, I remember 99 extremely well as I had just got into PC building and this era was so ferocious!

[GraveUypo]

yours is the best channel on 90's tech by such a long shot.

[Stratotankr]

1999 was a very exciting year. I moved jobwise to a new city and bought an ATI Rage128 to upgrade my Rage pro + Voodoo2 Rig. Voodoo3 was very expensive back then. Love your vids!

[SebastianBugiu]

Great job! I remember how I only had a 2MB video card back then and I was looking up to these 2.... Great memories! Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

[vana]

I have that 3DFx Compaq variant, the only 3DFx card I managed to get during my youth days (getting a new one was just to expansive) . Glad I still have it and an PC from the era, to get a quick retro gaming session on the weekends :)

[Storm_.]

Two things I would like to add: there was a 3rd player in this battle of 1999 and that was the Matrox G400 MAXX. The Matrox actually would often beat the TNT2 in Direct3D titles but was let down by poor OpenGL performance. In general the D3D king was the Matrox card, OpenGL was V3 3500 and the best 'all-rounder' was the TNT2 Ultra. Also it wasn't that people didn't care for 32bit colour, they absolutely did! But it was too much of a performance hit on the TNT2 or G400 for it to be viably used in-game.

[Darth]

i really enjoy when you release new videos keep it up buddy you deserve way more subs than you have

[manuelink]

Glide > Direct3D
3DFx gone, but never forgotten!

Great video!

[framebuffer.]

Very nice video, I remember these battles in "first person", I was on 3dfx "side" with my Voodoo3 2000 (which I still have and still works!)

[cackoocacho]

Went through a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, and that was it for me with 3DFx. Switched to the TNT 2 next, as colour depth and texture "were" important to me. Then, the GeForce 2 after that, until going over to ATI for a couple of cards.

One of my good friends got the Voodoo 3 3500, and he had nothing but problems with it. I certainly don't regret having gotten my TNT 2 back in those days. It was the right time to dump 3DFx. 16-bit rendering was already archaic.

[aidan]

My father once worked for 3Dfx and tells tales to this day

[georgiaguardian]

We must have been born the same era and was enthusiastic about these cards at the time! I bought 256, TNT, TNT2, and Almost all high end cards following these for the following 10-15 years!

[scorpian]

The late 90's was an insane time for computers and 3D graphics in general. It was really special being a kid at the time and reading through PC magazines dreaming of owning a 3dfx card.

Well 20+ years later, I now own most of the popular 3dfx cards 🤣

[azazelleblack]

This represents my experience from the day. I had a very fast AMD K6-III CPU that was overclocked to 508 MHz (113 * 4.5), with low-latency SDRAM, and a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 card that I attached a relatively large CPU cooler to, hehe. It would run 190 Mhz, faster even than the 3500's clock! My friend's Pentium II 400 Mhz system, when upgraded with a TNT 2 Ultra, was still far behind the performance of my machine in a lot of games. He felt like the tech websites must have been paid off, as he had the impression that his machine would be much faster! (*´▽｀*)

The 256x256 texture limitation really wasn't a problem back then. 256x256 was still larger than most textures in most games (e.g. Half-Life, Quake III), and the real limitation was the fact that textures had to be sized in powers of 2 on 3dfx. Some games would bug out if you didn't run them in a special 3dfx mode, even if they didn't have Glide support. And while the "22-bit" thing was basically marketing, 16-bit output on 3dfx really did look way better than on anyone else's cards, even Matrox.

[Species]

I bought my first PC back in 1999: A Pentium III 550 MHz and a TNT2 Ultra! That graphics card served me well for years and was only replaced by the GeForce4 Ti 4200.

[rovervitesse]

Drooling over that Leadtek winfast A350 geforce 5900 behind you. And next to it the fail of the era: the hopeless 128 geforce fx5800 with its vacuum cleaner cooler. The design of that leadtek a350 is one of my absolute favorites still and only is bettered by the Gainward 6800 gt golden sample with similar design but in red and the ultra rare Chaintech Apogee GeForce FX 5800 Ultra golden card with blue LEDs inside. Love that period

[winjr]

The TNT2 Ultra was my first graphics card, bought in the summer of 1999.
I had a friend that was adamant about the Voodoo. And we argued a bit about it.
But I do remember that pretty much all reviews put the TNT2 Ultra ahead. And that was the reason I bought it.