3dfx Voodoo 5: Legendary graphics cards get widescreen support – after more than 20 years

Anyone who wanted to buy a graphics card in recent years only had the choice between models from AMD and Nvidia. But that wasn’t always the case: Between 1994 and 2000, the Californian company 3dfx, among others, raged on the market, whose products impressed with what were then fast chips and the in-house Glide API. Even today, the manufacturer’s Voodoo graphics cards still have numerous fans in the retro scene.

New community driver

However, if you run your own 3dfx PC for retro games, you will encounter several problems at the same time. On the one hand, the appropriate hardware is difficult to find these days, and on the other hand, software support often causes problems. With regard to the latter, however, there is now a relief: In the 3dfxzone forum, the user has Dolenc released an updated community driver that ensures that old Voodoo 5 graphics cards can no longer only control CRT monitors, but also more modern screens.

The picture format used to be a problem here: when 3dfx was active on the market, modern formats such as 16:9 or 21:9 were not yet established on the market, and they were therefore not supported. In the meantime, however, monitors are almost exclusively produced in the modern, wider formats, which could lead to problems in combination with an old GPU.

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The from Dolenc published “3dfx Wide Driver v1.0” starts here and comes with the appropriate support. The driver intended for Windows 98 and Windows ME supports OpenGL, Direct3D and Glide games, whereby a few further adjustments are possible with the latter API in order to use widescreen formats The driver has also only been tested in old Unreal Engine games so far, but it shouldn’t be long before retro fans try the software with other engines as well.

Source: 3dfxzone via hothardware