The 3Dfx Voodoo 3, launched in 1999, was the card where 3Dfx finally caught up with the rest of the industry: a single board doing both 2D and 3D, no pass-through cable, no second graphics card required. It uses the “Avenger” chip and came in 1000, 2000, 3000 and 3500 variants, differing mainly in clock speed and outputs.
Where it sits
Compared with the earlier Voodoo and Voodoo 2, the Voodoo 3 is:
- an all-in-one 2D/3D card — much simpler to fit
- faster, with higher clocks and more memory bandwidth
- still Glide-first, so it runs the whole Glide back catalogue natively
Its main limitation is a hard 16-bit colour rendering pipeline (with a 22-bit post-filter) and a 256×256 texture size cap, both of which were starting to show against Nvidia’s TNT2 and the first GeForce. It was also close to the end of the road for 3Dfx as an independent company.
My card
Mine is a Voodoo 3 pulled from an arcade machine, bought for under $100 — cheap for a 3Dfx card. Arcade-board pulls turn up fairly often and, DIP switches and odd BIOS aside, are usually just standard PCI or AGP cards underneath. I put it through its paces on a normal PC to see whether it would behave as an ordinary desktop card.
Why it is a good retro pick
For a period Windows 98 build the Voodoo 3 is one of the most practical 3Dfx cards: one slot, no cabling, strong Glide performance, and common enough to be affordable. If you specifically want the 3D-only pass-through experience of the earlier cards that is a different goal — but for “I just want Glide games running well,” this is the easy choice.
Related on this site
- Does this Arcade Machine Voodoo 3 work on PC?
- This Fully Functional PC Fits on a Single Card! — a Voodoo 3 doing Windows 98 duty in an industrial single-board-computer build
- 3Dfx
- 3Dfx Velocity 100 — a cut-down Voodoo 3
- How To Play 3Dfx Glide Games in DOS
- DOS Glide Games — the maintained list
