Oh, I’m aware! It just felt funny that the very first consumer dedicated 3D graphics card prove that poster’s assumption wrong. In any other case they’d be right. In fact, in those days in 1996, there was the SECOND graphics card that had a 3D processor that DID do 2D graphics too, the Sierra Screamin’ 3D (with the Rendition Verite GPU). It was about 2/3ds the cost of the Voodoo 1 (3DFX) even if the Sierra wasn’t quite as fast. You’d buy the Sierra because you wanted dedicated 3D but couldn’t afford a high end 2D card and the high end 3D card.
OG Doom does not support (or need) hardware 3D acceleration. It’s not a polygonal rendering engine.
Relatedly, and probably not to anyone’s surprise, this is why it’s so easy to port to various oddball pieces of hardware. If you have a CPU with enough clocks and memory to run all the calculations, you can get Doom to work since it renders entirely in software. In its original incarnation – modern source ports have since worked around this – it is nonsensical to run Doom at high frame rates anyhow because it has a locked 35 FPS frame rate, tied to the 70hz video mode it ran in. Running it faster would make it… faster.
(Quake can run in software rendering mode as well with no GPU, but in the OG DOS version only in 320x200 and at that rate I think any modern PC could run it well north of 60 FPS with no GPU acceleration at all.)
I remember those old games that would run faster to the point of hilarity if you put them on anything more modern than they were originally intended to run on. Like the game timing is tied to the frame rate.
Command and Conquer Generals lets you choose game speed for skirmish matches, the natural cap of 60 and an option to uncap. You need superhuman reflexes to play with an uncapped speed on modern hardware !
There used to be dip switches on some older machines (386/486 era), eventually ‘turbo buttons’ that accomplished the same thing, toggling would cut the clock speed so older software would be compatible with clock speed. Those turbo buttons were more a ‘valet mode’ than anything, but it all died out before the Pentium/Athlon era to say the least
All this text, yet nowhere its mentioned whether it runs Doom. Clearly the most important thing to run on any device
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say if it can run Quake, it can safely run Doom as well.
The original Voodoo 1 graphics card could run Quake, but NOT Doom. Thanks Obama!
Only because the Voodoo couldn’t do 2D at all - it had a passthrough on the back, so you’d connect your 2D-capable graphics card to it.
Oh, I’m aware! It just felt funny that the very first consumer dedicated 3D graphics card prove that poster’s assumption wrong. In any other case they’d be right. In fact, in those days in 1996, there was the SECOND graphics card that had a 3D processor that DID do 2D graphics too, the Sierra Screamin’ 3D (with the Rendition Verite GPU). It was about 2/3ds the cost of the Voodoo 1 (3DFX) even if the Sierra wasn’t quite as fast. You’d buy the Sierra because you wanted dedicated 3D but couldn’t afford a high end 2D card and the high end 3D card.
As an enormous Id Tech nerd that’s too young to know this, this is very interesting!
IIRC the Voodoo 5 6000 also required an external power supply and people thought this was crazy at the time.
OG Doom does not support (or need) hardware 3D acceleration. It’s not a polygonal rendering engine.
Relatedly, and probably not to anyone’s surprise, this is why it’s so easy to port to various oddball pieces of hardware. If you have a CPU with enough clocks and memory to run all the calculations, you can get Doom to work since it renders entirely in software. In its original incarnation – modern source ports have since worked around this – it is nonsensical to run Doom at high frame rates anyhow because it has a locked 35 FPS frame rate, tied to the 70hz video mode it ran in. Running it faster would make it… faster.
(Quake can run in software rendering mode as well with no GPU, but in the OG DOS version only in 320x200 and at that rate I think any modern PC could run it well north of 60 FPS with no GPU acceleration at all.)
I remember those old games that would run faster to the point of hilarity if you put them on anything more modern than they were originally intended to run on. Like the game timing is tied to the frame rate.
Command and Conquer Generals lets you choose game speed for skirmish matches, the natural cap of 60 and an option to uncap. You need superhuman reflexes to play with an uncapped speed on modern hardware !
There used to be dip switches on some older machines (386/486 era), eventually ‘turbo buttons’ that accomplished the same thing, toggling would cut the clock speed so older software would be compatible with clock speed. Those turbo buttons were more a ‘valet mode’ than anything, but it all died out before the Pentium/Athlon era to say the least