3DFX's Canceled Rampage GPU Pictured, Put Through the Paces in 3D Mark 2001

[Raevenlord]

3DFX is a well-known name for most in our community, I'd wager (I don't have the data to back me up on that, but bare with me). The company is one of the highest-profile defunct companies that vied for a place in the desktop, high-performance GPU space back in the day, and brought its guns bearing on NVIDIA and then ATI. The Rampage was the last GPU ever developed by the company, and looked to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce3. That never saw the light of day, though, with the company shutting its doors before development became viable for market release.

DSOGaming has some images of some of the Rampage GPUs that survived 3DFX's closure, though, and the graphics card is shown running Max Payne, Unreal Tournament & 3DMark 2001. For those of you that ever had a 3DFX graphics card, these should bring you right down memory lane. Enjoy.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ironcerealbox]

Awwwwhhhh yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhh! Crazy fast times back then with new graphics card releases every 6 to 9 months.

 

[phanbuey]

yup...

those were the good days. 3dfx voodoo banshee ftw.

 

[Ferrum Master]

aaagh... good memories

 

[Jose Jeswin]

Any info about the SAGE T&L geometry unit?...always wanted to know more about it...

 

[dorsetknob]

""Like many here i still hang on to my last 3DFX Graphics Card"
I only went to AMD because Nvidia were Crap (my Opinion)
and I still view Nvidia as CRAP (Over rated Over priced Expensive).

 

[Ferrum Master]

""Like many here i still hang on to my last 3DFX Graphics Card"
I only went to AMD because Nvidia were Crap (my Opinion)
and I still view Nvidia as CRAP (Over rated Over priced Expensive).

Still I liked Matrox more... screw me

 

[AsRock]

Still I liked Matrox more... screw me

I loved the memory modules of that time, although they sucked for gaming.

""Like many here i still hang on to my last 3DFX Graphics Card"
I only went to AMD because Nvidia were Crap (my Opinion)
and I still view Nvidia as CRAP (Over rated Over priced Expensive).

Soon came the 9700 and 9800 though

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Still I liked Matrox more... screw me

I traded away my matrox 3d gutted, i stil have a unused boxed 3dfx evil king from powercolour, i can't bin it it's new

 

[lexluthermiester]

If NVidia hadn't bought out 3DFX this card and more like it would have been a thing. Kinda sad actually.

 

[Ferrum Master]

I loved the memory modules of that time, although they sucked for gaming.

I had the G400. Best 2D image, image as ice, it was so obvious using CRT's during that time... their RAMDAC was superb.

I traded away my matrox 3d gutted, i stil have a unused boxed 3dfx evil king from powercolour, i can't bin it it's new

I had the Parhelia also, well... they were just unlucky, I would be glad if they would be still around with their own silicon.

 

[bonehead123]

v.
O.
o.
D.
o.
O......

we wantz moar voodoo.....

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

It's sad to think that if 3DFX had poured their R+D money into this instead of buying STB and re-developing their voodoo3 into the VSA100, 3DFX could have still been around today. The rampage was shaping up to be a fantastic card of the time. I dont know if 3DFX could have ever caught up in the DirectX space, but perhaps their support of glide could have brought DX12 style lower level API access more then a decade earlier then we ended up getting it.

 

[sixor]

awwwwwww yeah those were the times

i regret buying my ati rage fury 128 over the voodoo 3000, that was dumb, cool to have 32bit colour, but voodoo 3000 was the best performer

it had vulkan for the time (glide)

 

[ZoneDymo]

If NVidia hadn't bought out 3DFX this card and more like it would have been a thing. Kinda sad actually.

Same with Nvidia buying Ageia Physics, rip bright past/future.

 

[Fouquin]

I was under the impression that this particular person has had at least the one working Rampage card for many years. I recall a Quake demo video posted up somewhere 7-8 years ago. Maybe I'm mistaken though.

If NVidia hadn't bought out 3DFX this card and more like it would have been a thing. Kinda sad actually.

If 3Dfx hadn't bought STB, if 3Dfx hadn't mismanaged their R&D, if 3Dfx hadn't cutoff their AIB partners, if 3Dfx had restructured instead of fractured and sold to nVidia. Lots of things were working against them by 2000, and honestly given the state of the surviving dozen or so Rampage boards these cards were not going to be ready for 2001. Maybe if they had kept more partners, and didn't have the manufacturing overhead. It sucks but really they took themselves down.

Same with Nvidia buying Ageia Physics, rip bright past/future.

Ageia actually had a decent follow-up card for the PPU, but it was delayed well into Q4 2007 and by that point it was too little too late. I think they were unprepared to enter the AIB market as a major player and just kinda folded under the pressure, taking the deal with nVidia as an easy way out of it. Ideally they could have secured more investors and just pushed through successive generations, but even the second generation cards were not coming close to what GPUs were starting to be capable of in the mid-range.

 

[neatfeatguy]

I remember back in the day when Voodoo 3 card came out and my step-dad picked up a card to put in my younger brother's computer.....so damn jealous because the kid couldn't even DOS! He was too young and he got the new GPU!

 

[AsRock]

I had the G400. Best 2D image, image as ice, it was so obvious using CRT's during that time... their RAMDAC was superb.



I had the Parhelia also, well... they were just unlucky, I would be glad if they would be still around with their own silicon.

Well that's what Matrox were really good at.

 

[GeorgeMan]

Still keeping my retro gaming lovely pc, it combines a GeForce 2 GTS with two Voodoo II 12MB in SLI... Those were THE times...
It's of course paired with a 19" CRT monitor.

 

[Basard]

Still keeping my retro gaming lovely pc, it combines a GeForce 2 GTS with two Voodoo II 12MB in SLI... Those were THE times...
It's of course paired with a 19" CRT monitor.

Hm... I remember the TNT being ALMOST as good as the dual Voodoo II's... In D3D. It seems almost redundant to have the Voodoos paird with a Geforce 2 though. But If you have the cards, why not?!
You have every PCI slot in that machine filled?
I could only afford a single TNT card at the time it was released. Huge upgrade from my Matrox G200, Half-life was like a dream--moving up from software mode!

I remember back in the day when Voodoo 3 card came out and my step-dad picked up a card to put in my younger brother's computer.....so damn jealous because the kid couldn't even DOS! He was too young and he got the new GPU!

I hope you thoroughly kicked his ass on a daily basis for that.

 

[GeorgeMan]

Hm... I remember the TNT being ALMOST as good as the dual Voodoo II's... In D3D. It seems almost redundant to have the Voodoos paird with a Geforce 2 though. But If you have the cards, why not?!
You have every PCI slot in that machine filled?
I could only afford a single TNT card at the time it was released. Huge upgrade from my Matrox G200, Half-life was like a dream--moving up from software mode!

I hope you thoroughly kicked his ass on a daily basis for that.

It's actually a hybrid pc, running on a super 7 AMD K6-II+ 550MHz with an ISA sound card with opl2 fm synthesis chip and a pci one. It has the unique ability to disable the L1 cache and make it a slow 386 in terms of performance, or disable L2 and L3 and lake it perform like a 486. So I dual boot to real DOS 6.22 for those special old games with CPU speed scaling issues, or those taking advantage of opl2 chip and at the same time I can boot to windows 98se and enjoy any dx6-7 game until 2001 (xp era) or enjoy at it's full glory some glide API game on the voodoos. All that in just one pc. It's as versatile as it gets, and you know better than me how fast things were progressing back thenb and what incompatibilities they had between each generation. I'm born in 1990 after all
Later Pentium II and above couldn't simulate the speed of a 486 by disabling caches, so you either get a 286 or a super fast Pentium. That's an issue on speed ensitive games of the past.

 

[OGoc]

Got to play Quake a second time through as if it were a new game. And Nine Inch Nails on the sound track... DAMN what a game!

 

[Hockster]

I had a Voodoo 5 5500 and was the coolest nerd in the clubhouse.

 

[Deleted member 50521]

You guys were rich. Growing up during that period I only get to play with S3 and some OEM ATi cards. That best I had was a second hand I got from a Goodwill PC tear-down Matrox G100.

 

[Prima.Vera]

After all those years, I still think VooDoo2 was THE BEST video card ever released in history based on the impact it had on the Gaming comunity. I remember switching from Quake 1 400x300 VGA to 800x600 SVGA with GlQuake, and the impact was shocking! Games like NFS 2, Drakan, Unreal, Quake 1 and 2, Star Wars, etc, etc, were the real treat on my Voodoo2. Never had so much satisfaction as a gamer ever in my entire life.
Good memories.