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Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

Everything from 1997-2000 was really just magical, for lack of a better adjective.

In just a few years we saw the Intel Pentium II and Celeron (insane overclock), the AMD K6/K6-2, along with discrete 2D/3D GPUs like 3dfx Voodoo3 and Nvidia GeForce.

Thanks to low-ping affiliation, I stumbled into an early Counter-Strike clan known as "The Space Offensive" (TSO) in the Seattle area that went on to be an early participant in the competitive gaming scene as "The Speakeasy Offensive" (after corporate sponsorship). I've been hooked on the cycle of gaming/hardware loop ever since.

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> In just a few years we saw the Intel Pentium II and Celeron (insane overclock), the AMD K6/K6-2, along with discrete 2D/3D GPUs like 3dfx Voodoo3 and Nvidia GeForce.

Don't forget the race to 1Ghz. Intel and AMD spent those years doubling core clock speeds every year. If you bought a system in 1996 and replaced it in 2000 the CPU might be four or more times faster. For some things that was a real geometric increase in computing power.

I still have my original Celeron 300A, made in Costa Rica, that I overclocked to 450MHz on an A-Bit BX6 2.0 mobo to play Quake 2.

I managed to snag my buddy’s old 4MB 3dfx Voodoo 1 to pair with the one I already had with the VGA pass through cable, an early form of multi-GPU.

> to play Quake 2.

In just a few years we had Quake 2 (1997) to Half-life (1998), Thief: The Dark Project and Quake 3 Arena/Unreal Tournament (1999). The year 2000 would see Dues Ex, The Sims, Diablo II, Perfect Dark, Final Fantasy IX, and Jet Set Radio... Not to mention Spyro, Red Alert 2, Paper Mario, Majora's Mask, Escape from Monkey Isand, Hitman 47...

So much amazing history in such a short period of time (let's not mention popular cinema...)

Don't forget Goldeneye!

Did that do much? I know a Voodoo 2 could be SLI'd but first I've heard about this working on a Voodoo 1.

I miss those days. I went from a P133 with 72mb RAM (bought a load of RAM cheap in '98) to a P3 500 with a TNT2 Ultra and 128mb RAM in 1999. Technology progressed at an insane rate.

Edit, I had a K6-2 500MHz in one machine around that kind of time too. Wasn't as good as the P3 personally though but was cheap and reasonable. Started me off down the path of using AMD CPUs in my builds (Duron, Athlon, Sempron) until I started moving away to Mac laptops predominantly (which coincided with finishing university and writing software for a living)!.

> Did that do much? I know a Voodoo 2 could be SLI'd but first I've heard about this working on a Voodoo 1.

IIRC the Voodoo 1 didn't have 2D capability so the pass through was to let your 2D handle that drawing.

Yeah - the Voodoo 1 was a 3D card so needed a 2D card also.

Sounded like this was 2x Voodoo 1s stacked together. I probably need more coffee this morning!

> I probably need more coffee this morning!

This is always good policy.

For some reason I have the box for the Asus CUSL2 motherboard still sitting on a shelf:

* https://www.anandtech.com/show/578

(Never bothered to throw it out.)

Everything from 1997-2000 was really just magical

That it was. I worked at a small computer animation studio around that time, and that was when a home built 'cheap' Intel machine with a GeForce cards started to first match and then surpass our high end SGI and Intergraph machines costing 5-10 as much in many workloads.

When I left almost all our animators where using 'home built' computers with Nvidia cards.

I have an SGI Indigo in my basement because at work they figured out that a PC running Windows NT had better performance, so all the SGI workstations went into the dumpster.

Some what similar for me, in the mid-2000's I was at a design agency that was moving to PHP/MySQL development. Mostly a Mac shop, but the development server was some HP thing we got from best buy for like $400. Put Red Hat on it and did nothing else, just whatever the default PHP/MySQL package was. No tuning or anything.

A little while later, Apple released the G4 xServe. We bought 2 loaded with the largest disks at the cost of several thousand dollars. But hey, OSX Server. It has PHP & MySQL and is rack mountable, etc. We also used them for file servers for all the design files.

Got all of our development sites migrated over and the performance was noticeable worse. The HP was at least 4 times faster serving up the sites. It was amazing.

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