Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

[skyrish10]

Video by Clint Basinger of Lazy Game Reviews

[drfrag]

But why now? This story keeps appearing from time to time. MesaFx?
It started back in 2004: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/doom- ... -2.114025/

[Graf Zahl]

Things we really do not need - chapter 10...

[Kinsie]

But why now? This story keeps appearing from time to time. MesaFx?
It started back in 2004: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/doom- ... -2.114025/

The video's author specifically says that he remembered those old articles and wanted to try it himself now that he had the "proper" hardware.

[SouthernLion]

This is really awesome. lol

[PlayerLin]

It made me think about HL1 software renderer was looks like...but even worse.

[InsanityBringer]

ah haa, I swear this has gotten mention on these very forums a few times, even. pretty nice to actually see it in action, I gotta agree with LGR in that I'm amazed it ran as well as it did.

[leileilol]

Yeah it's a big timeline to me, but since a known youtuber's doing it.... it's LGR's legacy now and of course this exaggerates the functionality of the Voodoo2 to appease the 3dfx fandom too much about their holy "powerful" card. I've a few Voodoos myself for ages and haven't considered them to be legendary for anything other than for supporting blending functions/palettes properly at the earliest opportunity.

And frankly, you can do the same with any (Mesa-based)GL ICD with enough software paths and tolerance for missing extensions had one cared enough. If the same were to happen to like, "Doom3 on PowerVR PCX2 !! (Beta Dreamcast GPU !!)" the value of the MSRP$99USD Matrox M3D will increase tenfold. though it'd be more practical to write a GL 1.1 path for doom3's source since the code's been out and just drop a CPU vertex light process on every poly from every light (and calculating the normals of all MD5s on load as well since they don't have em) so the rest of the 97-99 generation of 3d cards can work without relying on a specific hacked MesaGL driver meant for one API and brand of card and it'll look a lot better than this.

It's also important to note that Doom3 doesn't really have any high poly models. All those individual fingers are merged in a mitten with a normal map, etc. 800-1.5k triangle budgets are had. Makes perfect sense for Carmack's Reverse, and is really the only leverage for the Voodoo2 to have any performance going at all....and before "onboard triangle setup" is mentioned, that's not HW T&L and the Voodoo2 doesn't scale to the moon.

Finally a reminder that a 12MB Voodoo2 is not 12mb of texture memory. It's 4mb of textures per TMU (the second TMU not being utilized for anything here at all as there's no lighting to combine in) and a 4MB framebuffer (mainly large to do double buffering on 640x480x16+depth)

[AlphaSoraKun]

I just saw this LGR thing, and to me, trying to run this game on Windows 98 would make it look terrible. It would look like HALF-LIFE, but not as good. And from personal experience, Doom 3 doesn't like to work with my computer.

[leileilol]

Windows 98 shouldn't affect the graphics capabilities in any way and can look as intended with the right card (R300s etc). Doom3 normally doesn't run on it due to artificial breakage for WinXP marketing (many games had that deal around that time to screw the w98 holdovers, Doom3's one of the early ones, while other games had "XP bonus packs" etc)

[SouthernLion]

Windows 98 shouldn't affect the graphics capabilities in any way and can look as intended with the right card (R300s etc). Doom3 normally doesn't run on it due to artificial breakage for WinXP marketing (many games had that deal around that time to screw the w98 holdovers, Doom3's one of the early ones, while other games had "XP bonus packs" etc)

I remember when Halo 2 came out, it *required* Vista, but on DAY ONE a cracker made a patch for it to run on XP flawlessly. lol

[Chris]

I remember when Halo 2 came out, it *required* Vista, but on DAY ONE a cracker made a patch for it to run on XP flawlessly. lol

It required Vista as a result of using DirectX 10, which MS didn't make available on XP as an attempt to force people to buy Vista. However, some people were able to hack in some limited DX10 compatibility into XP.

[Graf Zahl]

due to artificial breakage for WinXP marketing...

... or maybe *just* because such backwards compatibility costs a lot of time and money?

In commercial development, if you can increase sales by 2-3% while increasing costs by 10%, either because of added testing or implementing some workarounds for the old system's deficiencies, it won't be done. That's life. If you insist on running some old clunker system for whatever strange reasons you have to be prepared for some software no longer working.
Once the new stuff reaches critical mass, the old one will be dropped, and the only deciding factor here is the cost-benefit ratio.

That also applies to GZDoom, btw. Even in GZDoom terms, it's these backwards compatibility concerns that have held back progress for its entire development time, because it's just not feasible to target current hardware because there's far too many people out there who think that running 10 year old hardware would be fine. Well, if they think it is, why aren't they using versions of the software that were made when their hardware still was state of the art?

Of course, if the ray tracing thing of NVidia's new cards delivers what it promises we might be seeing the biggest shift of how game rendering is done since the first 3dfx Voodoo card, rendering all existing graphics hardware obsolete in a couple of years. It's too early to tell, but in my opinion only a matter of time. And then people will again cry how unfair it is that all those newfangled games won't run on their system that has been adequate when it was new (i.e. several years ago.)

[ZZYZX]

Wow, Graf posting somewhere not in dev

On topic though I probably have to agree with Graf, unless this conspiracy theory is actually confirmed by disasm or any other kind of reversing of the actual games that don't work.
Because what I know is that difference between W98 and WinXP is way more fundamental than difference between WinXP and Vista, due to the fact that W98 is not even NT and is based on the fk-ng DOS, thus 80% of WinAPI common for us today was not available on W98.

[Kinsie]

Of course, if the ray tracing thing of NVidia's new cards delivers what it promises we might be seeing the biggest shift of how game rendering is done since the first 3dfx Voodoo card, rendering all existing graphics hardware obsolete in a couple of years.

It'll probably take longer than that, on account of the usual API shakedowns, other card manufacturers finding their own take, and the requisite pricing battles to render it all affordable by people who don't have more LEDs in their case than RAM. (And of course, developers and publishers probably won't be too willing in the short term to do anything that'd prevent them from cheap, easy and highly profitable ports to the weak Nintendo Switch hardware...)

I'd probably give it until the start of the first console generation to properly support this stuff, possibly about a year in, before ray-tracing ultimately settles in as The Compulsory Thing. So probably... three and a half years at the barest of minimums.