>What was X like
You were either there or you weren't, just accept that you weren't, we're not your fucking grand parents

>>12927745
It was awesome. I'd drop hundreds of dollars on a top of the line card and then in a couple months when a new card would get released mine became obsolete.

>>12927770
This anon beat me to the joke.

You’d get a top of the line card and less than a year later something exponentially better came out and two years later new games coming out wouldn’t even support your cards software

Console baby this and console baby that, but at least a PlayStation 2 for $299 was supported for 13 years and had thousands of games, or get a Voodoo 3 3000 for $250 that was obsolete in two years because it couldn’t do hardware T&L and no one supported Glide API anymore

>>12927782
To expand on anon's post, by sheer coincidence, the PS2 was released at the exact culminating point of the video card wars. The GeForce 256 had been released the previous winter, and it immediately made all older video cards obsolete. Its competitors attempted to fight back, but most didn't manage to produce functionally equivalent offerings. S3's implementation of HT&L was buggy (by this point an S3 tradition), Matrox had it only on the most expensive Millennium version (and it was retardedly locked behind some proprietary API), PowerVR used a mediocre graphics driver emulator, 3dfx never had it (at least not on any commercially released cards). Only ATI managed to release something reasonably competitive.

And all of them were really fucking expensive, even the shitty ones. I think there was yet another RAM cartel going on at the time (these fucking things tend to appear all the time, behead all who strangle the chip supply, in Roblox).
So it's not surprising that many people, who still had something like a Pentium 1 with a Voodoo 1 (decidedly obsolete by 2000), chose to peace the fuck out of the PC components race by going console.

>>12927782
>a Voodoo 3 3000 for $250 that was obsolete in two years because it couldn’t do hardware T&L
Hardware T&L has nothing to do with why a Voodoo 3 was obsolete a couple of years after launch - API support was. The GeForce 256 was also obsolete a couple of years after launch since it also only had DirectX 7 support. Hardware T&L was only ever a workaround for CPUs of the 90s being so slow. It wasn't a feature that added graphical capabilities. It was purely to offload work from the CPU. By the time you got to the early 00s and CPUs took off into the multiple gigahertz range, it was better to disable the hardware T&L on older cards and run it on the CPU, because those CPUs were so powerful that they could do the work a lot faster than the primitive and slow T&L engines present on cards like the GF256. You straight up gain performance by turning off hardware T&L on such cards when paired with an Athlon XP or better.

The Radeon 9700 Pro was the first GPU with any real staying power, and that's because ATI were always early adopters of new features and got in on DX9 early. Meanwhile GeForce 4 cards only supported DX8, and GF5's DX9 support was so half-assed and glacially slow that it might as well have not been there. ATI were raping Nvidia in the ass for a couple of years there, but the latter had gotten their shit together by the GF6 lineup, the Radeon X1000 and HD 2000 cards were dog shit and the rest is history.

>>12927756
Rude.

>>12928298
You forgot the bit about Huang bribing benchmark devs to display higher values when detecting nVidia BIOS (that one got swept under the rug suspiciously quickly).

>in 2000s when 3DFX, ATI, Nvidia and Matrox all competed?
Matrox left the race by 2001, and 3dfx was dying by 2000.

What were the last major titles to have official support for Glide and/or other proprietary APIs, anyway?

>>12927745
it was only between ati and nvidia

>>12928516
Not true, Rendition had a couple good chipsets out there and even their own APIs (speedy3D for DOS, and rredline for Windows. For a short time they were top of the line. I owned a card from Sierra I used to play Tomb Raider and Quake on that had a Verite chipset in it. It was pretty great up until it wasn't.

>>12927745
>3dfx, matrox
>2000s

>>12928513
Deus Ex maybe?
it even has S3 metal support

>>12927782
>>12928298
>hardware T&L

This little requirement killed so many early 2000s 3D games for me because all our familiy computers were prebuilt Compaqs with shitty integrated graphics, I remember not being able to play Medal of Honor for PC because there was no T&L support

>>12928612
And now you know it was all bullshit and just an arbitrary restriction. That's why some manufacturers (like PowerVR with the Kyro series) built a toggle into their driver software that made it report hardware T&L support despite the card not actually having it. After that games would run fine.

>>12928513
Divine Divinity from August 2002 if you're talking retail games. There was probably fan and indie stuff later than that. Most other APIs like S3 MeTal were only ever supported by a handful of games in the first place.

>>12927745

It was still pretty cool - the Voodoo3 was a cult like item and the GeForce256 a real game changers.

>>12927745
Great