S3 Virge GX (1996) - 3D gaming experience (60fps, ENG subtitles)
Jirka Zima (swarm)
Feb 3, 2019 18:56
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STB Nitro 3D (S3 Virge GX) was an entry-level 3D accelerator with support for S3D and Direct3D APIs introduced at the end of 1996. It offered good DirectDraw and DOS/VGA performance as well as video acceleration. I want to show the 3D performance of the card in multiple games released between years 1996 and 1999.
EDIT: I explained all the features of this card in a deep dive article here: https://retro.swarm.cz/s3-virge-325-vx-dx-gx-gx2-series-of-early-3d-accelerators-deep-dive/
The S3 Virge GX 3D performance is heavily limited by pixel fill-rate for textured polygons with bilinear filtering – it can draw only 9.7Mpix/s (millions of pixels per second) on triangles with filtered textures. Pixel fill-rate can be increased to 19.3Mpix/s if the texture filter is disabled (the original S3 Virge draws 5-7Mpix/s and it is insensitive to point/bilinear filtering options). Due to that low fill-rate numbers, a faster CPU will not help the card to render faster in old games.
I did all the benchmarking on STB Nitro 3D. However, for the video, I used Virge GX2 due to higher installed memory (4MB instead of 2MB). The card clock was modified to get exactly the same performance as with STB Nitro 3D in order to show what was possible with the best S3’s 3D accelerator (released at the same time as 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics). A good 100-MHz Virge GX2 (like Diamond Stealth 3D 4000) can offer up to 25% better performance.
Games in this video:
Science & Technology
#S3
#Virge
#Virge GX
#3D acceleration
#1990s
#1997
#Quake
#Turok
#Motoracer
#Croc
#vintage computers