S3 ViRGE: When Hype Meets Disappointment

Finally! We are checking out the S3 Virge AKA 3D decelerator.

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[Smakificator]

S3 Virge is THE video card of my 1996 retro tower. It really delivers on the DOS era 2D performance. And the stigma about it is STILL keeping the price low.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

You know where hype never meets disappointment?

Phil's Computer Lab

[dan_loup]

The 2D of this card was pretty amazing at least.

[Halon]

The ViRGE was hobbled by a number of issues. One of its bigger problems was that they had to maintain voltage and form factor compatibility with the preceding S3 Trio chip it was a die shrunk improvement upon; they simply incorporated a basic 3D rasterizer into the space freed up by the die shrink. Another issue was that the ViRGE was intended to be an improvement for software-quality rendering over a low-end Pentium without a GPU. IIRC the ViRGE wasn’t even meant to handle z-buffering on chip, a limitation it shared with several other designs including Rendition’s V1000. Later updates to the ViRGE design made the most of a bad situation and 2D was quite good, but the ViRGE was flat out limited.

It is pretty funny to see a Pentium II equipped with one struggle to manage GLQuake with a miniGL wrapper though.

[Dukefazon]

1996... I was still playing Amiga 500 games at home while I saw Duke3D, Quake and Tomb Raider at my buddies' places. I wasn't really jealous, I still liked the Amiga, I enjoyed all the games I could get on that little machine and I enjoyed my time at my buddies too.

[wysoft]

I had an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 in my first decent PC build - a K6-2 300. It was a really good combo, the Virge was a very fast 2D card and compatible with everything in DOS and Windows that the Voodoo couldn't play, had all of the features of the Trio64V+ and a whopping 4MB RAM.

[Dee_Just_Dee]

2:12 Ah, Matrox. They hold a special place in my heart even though I've never used any of their cards. See, they're based in my hometown of Montreal. They had been making commercial and industrial video cards since the late 1970s, and so, as their consumer products were consistently outdone by Nvidia, ATI and even 3dfx in the mid to late 1990s, they just shifted their focus back to commercial and industrial cards, and so they're actually still alive and kicking to this day. Matrox's founder and owner has been quite the philanthropist, donating tens of millions of dollars to local Universities' sciences departments even in the last couple of years.

[glitchwrks]

A S3 ViRGE or Matrox board was often the pairing of choice with a Voodoo 2, at least with the friends I knew who could afford to run Voodoo 2s :P

[lemagreengreen]

I had one but honestly never even bought it with any 3D Acceleration in mind, in 1996 these things were immediately cheap and available from the usual vaguely branded Taiwanese manufacturers with the crazy box art, they were popular cards just because of the price and acceptable 2D performance with 2/4MB of VRAM for 1024x768+ displays.

I don't even remember mine coming with any ViRGE versions of games etc, I don't recall anyone having one and being disappointed by the 3D performance because very few even tried that 'capability'. Also in 1996 we had the release of the Rendition Verité and of course the Voodoo which was basically all the enthusiast magazines talked about, if you were building your own PC's and buying components you likely had one or the other.

[joshstucki]

I remember people back in the day defending the S3 Virge only on the basis of its 2D capabilities. I think if it hadn't pretended to offer accelerated 3D, it would have had a far better reputation.

[JimLeonard]

Reminds me of the incredible disappointment I had with my ATI 3D Expression+PC2TV card (Mach64 GT-B chipset). It was a PCI card, installed in my Pentium 120. Toggling "acceleration" would mostly make the game slightly better looking, but wouldn't really improve the framerate. I was so confused at the time that I called ATI and spoke to tech support, thinking my card was broken! At least the S-VIDEO TV out was excellent (I even used it to make a commercial DVD).

(It is possible the 60 MHz front-side bus speed of my Pentium 120 might have made things worse, as the card was probably only tested on a 66 MHz FSB of a Pentium 100 or 133, but still, I was expecting actual acceleration.)

[Caseytify]

Never was much of a gamer. Back then I had a Matrox Millennium PCI, which was very good for 2d acceleration. When I got interested in some gaming (Quake) I first got the Voodoo 2 2000, then later the Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, which card I still have today. To think 16Mb was once considered a lot of video ram. 😏

[helldog]

I remember what I had in 1996. I had a Pentium 100 MHz with 16MB of RAM, a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 with 1MB of RAM, a 1.4GB hard drive, Sound Blaster AWE32, with Windows 95. It was a pretty stable machine. DOS games ran well and Windows worked decently enough. I did supplement it later in 96 with a Diamond Monster 3D, and this was also the first system I got a Subwoofer for. One of those Labtec sit by the monitor jobs, the LCS-2420 which was way more powerful than the cheap little speakers I had from the local computer shop. I played so many different games on that machine. But the one I remember most vividly was Lands of Lore Guardians of Destiny.

[sebaslive]

my jaw dropped when I saw Unreal on a voodoo 2, the moment when you leave the ship and step outside ... awesome

[Kaynos]

Anyone who had a computer back in the 90's was using a 3D Virge. I remember that card very well.

[ZanderLexx]

My first PC was in October 1998 as a gift from my father for entering by exam into Politehnica University Electronics Division. It had a AMD K-6 II 300mhz and an S3 Virge GX/DX(that's how it was seen by Windows GX/DX and not just GX). My first games on this PC were Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2 I think, Age of Empires.

[ricardobornman]

I remember our market here is South Africa was flooded with those S3 PCI cards and the people who bought computers with those cards where expecting Voodoo quality performance and then ended up being disappointed and regret not shelling out the extra bucks for a proper Voodoo card. Beer drinkers with a taste for campaign I guess. Ahh, sometimes I miss those days. 🤔 The S3's were amazing cards in the Windows 3.1 era and their VLB cards were great.

[casualretrocollector]

The voodoo was really fantastic when it came out. Blew all the competition away. I tried a voodoo in a 486 and could get 25 fps in tomb raider in 640x480!

[Jonathan-fses]

I had a top of the line Compaq at the time, it came with some sort of S3 chip built into the motherboard with Intel Indeo video capture a 233Mhz Pentium SDR ram like 32MBs and a zip drive and CD rom and a 6.5GB quantum hard drive (crazy large for the time lol) depending on the 3D game some ran OK and some games ran faster in software. I upgraded the cache RAM and later on I added a VooDoo 2. That Voodoo card was an amazing upgrade!!! I really loved that computer even with all the headaches, the zip drive got the click of death about a week or two before the hard drive failed... lost like 6 months of work I was doing on a file sharing program that would have been like a proto version of bit torrent. This caused me to stop programming all together. But playing games on that machine was a lot of fun :)

[systemchris]

I don't think people realise just how great a job 3dfx done in making their chipset. It was like a bulldozer