[downtempo beats] - Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing. And this is gonna be one of those that's all about that early
3D accelerator experience of the mid 90s. And in particular, we're taking a look at this really rare beast right here. This is the Creative Labs 3D Blaster VLB a rather physically large and pretty expensive card for its time. It was $349 during its
initial launch window in the holiday season of 1995 debuting at that fall's
Comdex show in Las Vegas. And this is from that era of
extremely exciting transitions in the world of personal
computing in the consumer space just becoming more and more advanced on a month to month basis,
which was pretty clear at that Las Vegas show 3D
was huge at Comdex that year with 3D games, 3D glasses,
3D capable VR headsets, and of course, 3D accelerators
in the form of graphics cards. Like this fantastic, or debatably fantastic,
Creative Labs 3D Blaster VLB. This card in particular
is one of the first to try establishing a consumer
3D acceleration standard. And that's just one reason
I've been wanting to cover it for so very, very long. I simply love this era of proto
standards, experimentation and just tossing technical
spaghetti at the wall and seeing what graphics,
APIs, and games stick to it. And yeah a huge thanks to LGR viewer Nathan for loaning this to me for this video this is one of those holy
grail kind of devices for anyone and our 3D graphics
accelerators like this. So it's a huge privilege to finally be able to
check this thing out. So yeah, throughout this video,
we're gonna be going over the PC gaming landscape
surrounding the cards launch in 95, setting it up with an era
appropriate retro computer running the VL-bus, and play
a whole pile of games for it that rendered and graphics modes exclusive to the Creative Labs
CT6200 3D Blaster. If you're into obsolete 3D this is gonna be fascinating, I think. And the reason for that is
really all about the context of when and how this was released, because this is from that
time when everyone was racing to get the first consumer-focused
3D card on the market you had companies like Number
Nine, S3, Diamond, Matrox and of course, 3dfx, all in
the race to try and get there and get something out there
that people would like and of course they were
all doing their own thing. And they pretty much all
had one thing in common despite that though,
and that was the PCI bus which had been around since 1992 and had really become the go-to choice for Pentium systems in
'93, '94 and into '95. But Creative Labs here,
they didn't go that route, and instead they were
the only 3D accelerator as far as I know that
used the VESA local bus. So you have your standard
16-bit ISA right there but then you've got this little extra bit and it was really kind of a stop gap in between 16-bit ISA and PCI. And a lot of 486 systems
had it in the early 90s. Now I'm assuming that one
reason that they put this out instead of PCI, is that we're
working on some PCI cards but they weren't ready yet and they were trying to
get to the market first. Well, it didn't work. What did end up getting to
the market just before this was this right here this
is the Diamond Edge 3D, this is the 2000 series model. And this ended up crossing the finish line before the 3D Blaster with
an Nvidia NV1 based chip set costing $299 for the two megabyte version. And yeah see my super old video about this if you'd like to see more. Or don't, because it's a super old
video, I kinda don't like it. But anyway it is a fascinating
card in its own right and is also a kind of holy
grail type of experience for early 3D graphics
enthusiasts on the PC. It did a bunch of cool things. It's got a built-in sound card, did Sega Saturn conversions
ported to the PC. Anyway! It's also worth
noting that there were multiple 3D Blaster cards
from Creative as well. So this is not the 3D Blaster PCI that came out just like
six months after this and used the Rendition Vérité
1000 chip that was $199, four megabytes on board instead of two. It was just better received and better supported all around. And it's also not the
3D Blaster Voodoo cards like the Banshee or the Voodoo 2. Those of course were
3dfx-based things. And yeah, it all used
the 3D Blaster model name but this is specifically
the VLB that we're gonna be taking a look at it
cuz it's the rarest. Although, having just mentioned the Voodoo it is kind of interesting
that it also uses a passthrough setup very much like what the
3dfx Voodoo cards, at least the earlier ones, were
doing where you had a 2D card that you needed in your computer in order to be able to get this going. And it passed that signal
through the 3D Blaster to your monitor and all
of the actual 3D stuff, the acceleration was taken care
of by the 3Dlabs Game Glint or Gigi chip, which was
a kind of scaled down Glint 300 TX chip from 1994. And that was more of a
workstation thing designed for professional 3D modeling, rendering and CAD
applications, things like that. Not consumer-oriented stuff at all. Whereas this thing was,
and I mean look at how ridiculously huge that QFP is! That is just a monstrous chip with a 25 megapixels
per second fill rate, two megabytes of combined onboard memory. So one megabyte DRAM for
texture and Z-buffering and a one megabyte VRAM
frame buffer on the board for a combined two megabytes. And like pretty much
earlier the other cards that were coming out around that time it was using its own
proprietary API with this one, it was known as the Creative
Graphics Library or CGL. And there were only a couple
of cards from Creative that supported this. Although they seemingly
had much bigger plans for other chip manufacturers to be able to support it later
on, but that never happened. And on its own with this
particular card right here that's all it supports. Though there was DirectX
support later on, if you had Windows 95 and you
had an add-on memory board as stated in the Windows
95 driver for this card "Microsoft DirectX requires four megabytes "of memory on the 3D Blaster
VLB for effective execution. "Therefore, if you're interested
in playing DirectX games "on your 3D Blaster VLB, "it is strongly recommended
that you acquire "the two megabyte upgrade
module for this card." And that would plug in right
here, you have a daughterboard, two megs of memory and
just plop right on there if you could find one. It was at least advertised
I found multiple ads for it and it seems that it costs 49.95 at retail. But I haven't seen any photos. I haven't found a single
person that has one or even ever had one. If you've got any pics or
additional details on this board, please let me know. It's one of those forgotten
bits of retro tech that's become absurdly hard to find along with the main card itself. And it's really no surprise seeing as the 3D Blaster
VLB was never a big success being replaced hardly six
months after it launched. For all its theoretically
high polygon pushing and texture mapping and Z-buffering the thing was still stuck with
the Vesa Local Bus in 1995, which meant it was effectively
restricted to 486-class PCs since that's what the VL-bus
was most often paired with and was designed for in 1992. Now that's not to say VLB Pentium
motherboards don't exist, they did, but they weren't
that common back then and they're even less common now. I've only ever seen a few
photos of these things online and I've never come across one myself. So yeah, the CT6200
here was trying real hard to punch above its weight with VLB regardless of the PC
gaming world rapidly moving towards Pentiums with PCI motherboards. And contemporary reviews from
journalists and customers alike were not kind! PC Format magazine for
example gave the card a pathetic 20 out of 100, stating that every single game
performed so badly on a 486 that they were down right unplayable. And that its best feature
was the box that had came in. Ouch! The reportedly abysmal performance was a common critique back then as was the need for a
2D card alongside it, the lower number of games with CGL support, and the fact that it didn't
come with a sound card on board. [chuckles] Yeah, it seems silly now, "oh my video card doesn't have a sound card on it." Well, yeah remember its closest competitor though was the Diamond Edge and that had a 16-bit sound
chipset right on the card. Whatever though, both cards
flopped in their own unique ways with both becoming unobtainium
decades later. How poetic. 3Dlabs themselves continued on at least, even without
Creative Labs' partnership. They went on to release the
Permedia series of cards from 1996 to 1999 or so. And while their cards were once again geared towards workstation
3D and CAD things, they also added support
for Direct 3D and Open GL because hey, PC gamers
got money too, so why not? On that note, there are 13 or 14 games known to support the 3D Blaster VLB. Four of them were
bundled with the CT6200: Hi-Octane, Magic Carpet Plus,
NASCAR Racing, and Rebel Moon. With Rebel Moon in particular
being a standout title since it was exclusive to
the first two 3D Blasters. Though it did get a retail sequel, Rebel Moon Rising, which I also have. But it supports all your
standard rendering modes and it's a bit of a
different thing, so yeah. And it also seems that Flight Unlimited was a fifth pack-in game at one point, so we'll have to try that out as well. And by the way, a huge thanks
to Vetz on the Vogons forums for not only making a lot of
great posts about this card and other early 3D cards over the years, but also hooking me up with
these VLB exclusive editions of the pack-in games. And that's enough of the
random preamble ramble. Let's go ahead and get things
installed in a mid 90s PC, set up all the drivers and
software, and test it out with some CGL DOS games
and see what it was like to own a $350 3D graphics
accelerator in 1995. [beats fade out] Okay! So I've got the LGR
Woodgrain PC going here with the card already installed. In terms of getting it installed
it was very simple stuff, just a straightforward
VLB card installation. And it goes into a slot down here near the bottom of the board. It's always a bit of a pain
getting VLB cards installed 'cause you have those extra
set of connectors on the far end just makes it, nraugh -- a little
bit of a thing to get in there. But once it's in, that's pretty much that it's gonna be working alongside the existing 2D only card.
That is also a VLB card that's in there, a Cirrus Logic chipset. But yeah, that only does 2D and then of course they're both gonna
be in there at the same time and it is a passthrough situation. So the output of the old card goes in to the 3D Blaster VLB and then
the output of the VLB goes to our monitor and my capture situation. And yeah, this is gonna
be a bit of a nightmare in terms of getting this
camera or any camera really to match up with the refresh rates because it's constantly
changing through here and so I'm gonna be going
back and forth between direct capture and not. So yeah, once you get
the drivers installed you get a couple of directories. And just real quick, the
installation for that was an interesting thing as well
because this is a full plug and play card for both DOS and windows. Setting up the IRQ and
different memory addresses and just everything that it needs in terms of resources on the card itself and it does it through software. There aren't jumpers on
the card itself, cuz yeah plug and play. Or, plug and pray. It got this stuff put
in here, and let's go, we have this. Got a DOS directory with some programs. And actually some of it runs -- INIT3D actually runs on startup and provides you with
a nice little message at the boot of your computer
as it loads into DOS. It's just letting you know that 3D Blaster has been initialized and that's good. But it's also no guarantee
that it actually did so, it just means that the software is there. So you actually go into
this test 3D application. Yeah, again, sorry for the refresh rate, I'm gonna switch over to a direct capture. And this is just the utility for verifying the 3D Blaster control
region, frame buffer, I/O port addresses, and interrupt. And yeah, it just runs
through a bunch of tests to make sure that nothing is conflicting because you can set up all of these things however you want to in the setup program when you first installed it. But that doesn't mean
it's actually gonna work. It's relying completely on the other things in your
system not conflicting. Then once all the testing is
done for interrupts and such it brings up another section for checking out the different
video modes, resolutions and refresh rates, making
sure that it can display it on your display, which is this right here. So we've got four different
things here and again, sorry about the refresh rate weirdness, but this one is cool. So we got 640 by 400
70 hertz, it's testing the color, we've got a gradient for monochrome here. And then it goes through
three more of them, different refresh rates
and different resolutions with the maximum one being
actually less than 60 hertz. That's interesting. And then once those are done we've got a utility here to run a demo to verify the 3D Blaster is
working and check that out, that is 3D acceleration in DOS. How impressive, you got a
demonstration of the perspective correct textures and some
kinda animations, I guess of scaling of textures going
on a Z-buffer and whatnot. I don't know exactly
everything it's showing off. Also check this out. I cannot get this, any
of the 3D Blaster modes when it's in 3D acceleration to work on this particular monitor at least with the geometry, it's always throwing things off and yeah, I have adjusted literally
everything on here to try to get it, but it freaks out man. Sometimes there's all kinds
of different situations where if I take the settings too far, it gets way way more out of whack. So this right here is about
as good as I can get it. And sometimes it won't even
sync to the refresh rate at all. Like when it goes below 60 hertz. [laughs] It worked fine on my LCD. And thank goodness my capture
device setup over there, handles this, but yeah it's
just all kinds of strange. And with that being said, let's
go into Windows real quick 'cause this is cool. [silent Windows startup] Don't have sound configured
right now, but check it out, Hi-res Windows 3.1. We do have the 3D Blaster control
panel now, so that's this. And right now I've got
to set to the highest at least in terms of resolution
1024x768 at 60hz and 256 colors. But there's also 800x600
at various refresh rates and down a 640x480 up to 75hz and it can do 16-bit color as well. But yeah, that's what this is. It's just neat to see
things in higher resolution in Windows 3.1 at all,
which you know I could do with my Diamond Speedstar
and other things. I've actually covered a
Windows 3.1 2D accelerator and LGR in the past if
you'd like to see that, that went all the way up to
1280x1024, if I recall. So, yeah this is not meant
to accelerate Windows exactly. It can do it. It's not geared towards Windows 2D. Another thing it's not geared to do is touch anything that is
not that creative CGL API. Instead, it was just doing
similar to -- again, like what the 3dfx Voodoo cards
were doing just a year later. It relied on your existing
2D non-3D accelerator card that you have in the system which means that it runs just
as crappy as it did before. Wow. - Let's rock. [Duke3D gameplay commences] - [Clint] It's just as terrible because it's not affecting anything. So you can run any of your
older games that are not built for the 3D Blaster VLB,
they're not gonna be affected. They're not gonna be any better or worse, they're just the same. In fact, as a direct example of that you can unplug the
Creative Labs card entirely and then just switch your monitor over to your existing 2D card and you'll still see the
game coming through because and that's what it's doing,
it's still running there. So anyway, I thought that was kind of fun. Speaking of which let's
go over and actually play some actual CGL games
starting with Rebel Moon. And yeah, like I mentioned
earlier, I believe it is exclusive to the
Creative Labs 3D Blaster. In fact, when you're setting
it up, you get a message straight away saying that
it requires a 3D Blaster. And in particular, this
one requires the VLB. There's a VLB version and a PCI version for both the 3D Blasters,
because of course the PCI was using a Rendition
Vérité chipset instead. I quite like the ambiance
and overall vibe of this. [game music begins] And here we go. Oh yeah, controls. [chuckles] [game sound effects] 3D acceleration on a 486. And it's not the smoothest
experience in the world, at least in this particular configuration, but it's trying, trying real hard. And yeah, let me just switch
over to a direct capture here cuz I feel like it. [game sound effects] So yeah honestly, it's kind of impressive and not at the same time. I like the overall aesthetic of the game it's got kind of a semi-Marathon vibe with some very clear Doom
influences of course, but. I mean it's just a neat looking game. But again that performance
is immediately disappointing, it's just not great. Especially when you have a
whole bunch of action going on a bunch of dudes on screen,
shooting and explosions and sound effects music,
and the whole thing. And this is not exactly the
slowest 486 at the moment. I mean it's not a 486. I actually have a Pentium
Overdrive installed in the 486 socket, it's running
a bit faster than a DX2/66 but honestly just not as fast as it should or as much as you would think I suppose for a Pentium Overdrive system. Yeah, I've covered this before on LGR, if you'd like to know more about it, but ah. My point being that this
is not the slowest system so you would hope that even
more of the heavy lifting would be moved over to the
graphics card side of things. And the 3D Blaster 3D accelerator
would accelerate things in 3D and blast them away but the performance is just kind of so-so. Now, that being said, this is not a game that
has a software mode. At least not by default. I think maybe it's been modded to do that but I don't have the modded version,
this is just. This is just the one
that came with the card. Yeah, I can't exactly compare
it to what it would be without the 3D Blaster. So instead we are going to move on to something where we can
do a direct comparison to how it was without the 3D
Blaster and how it is with it. So I've got all these games to test out. So all the bundled games, as well as a few retail
releases that supported it. And ah yeah, we'll move
on to NASCAR Racing here because it's always a good test. So yeah, this one installs
it doesn't actually ask you about the 3D Blaster VLB or anything but it's definitely a different
version and straight away this part is higher resolution. And then when you get to the menu, well. - This is NASCAR Racing! - [Clint] I forgot you have
this little intro thing here, but yeah immediately
just higher resolution all across the board. Fantastic looking sharp textures and graphics and everything. And you get an idea of the
performance, it is... fine! I guess. So the menu is different, that's a thing. And all the graphics options I believe they're all exactly the same as they are in just the
regular version of the game, non-accelerated and software mode. [game sound effects] So loud.
Oh they're leaving me behind, no. [engines revving] Ah, geez I just noticed the refresh rate is
ridiculous on this game. So that's just silly. I'll move over to a direct capture here. So yeah, as you can see the game looks really good for what it is. If you're familiar with the
game without 3D acceleration, I mean, this should look amazing. The performance, it's not
unplayable by any means but it is also just not great.
And sure you can turn off all the textures and effects
and things like that. But then what's the point
of using this ridiculous what was a $350 3D
accelerator card back in the day if you've gotta turn everything off? And you can't change
the resolution in this or pretty much any of the
other games that use CGL. Like one or two of them I think allow you to change the
resolution in accelerated mode, but most of them don't. And so you're stuck with that
performance for the most part. Now, a lot of it's just relying
on the rest of your computer the memory, the CPU, hard
disk, that kind of stuff. And this right here is a comparison to the regular retail version of NASCAR Racing, running without any kind of 3D acceleration whatsoever. So this is just 2D card and
software mode, relying on your whatever you got installed in
terms of the CPU and graphics. Yeah, you're pretty much
getting the same thing just much lower res. And honestly the
performance is comparable or sometimes even better, I don't know. I don't have any way to
measure this directly. But yeah it's mostly the
increase in resolution and just overall clarity
looks much tighter on 3D acceleration which you would expect. But man, it'd be so much cooler if you had like a way faster
computer to put this in, but you're limited by the
VL-bus 486 and all that. [engines rev loudly past the wreckage] Alright, so next pack-in game, I've got Magic Carpet Plus. Another one of those where
you can't really change anything in terms of the settings, you've got sound and
that's pretty much it. And I'm gonna go ahead
and swap over directly to direct capture here and
just show the thing running because it takes a few minutes to get into and I don't feel like waiting right now. [airborne carpeted ambiance] If you're familiar with
just original Magic Carpet, non-accelerated, this looks pretty cool. You have some different graphics
for the heads up display. It's a little sharper,
a little more detail, and then the overall world geometry. I don't know if the actual
geometry is increased, but with the higher resolution, you can certainly see
more detail in the hills and the mountains and tree
pieces and all that kinda stuff. The draw distance doesn't seem to be any notably better or worse, it's just kinda bad no matter what. And probably a good thing because
the performance is so bad, it is much more playable in software mode on this particular computer,
and that just sucks. I genuinely would much rather
have a lower resolution yet faster kind of gameplay,
than higher resolution crispier menus and graphics and stuff. It's so slow, especially during combat when you're shootin' crap, and if there's just multiple
things on the screen at once beyond the basic
landscape and a few little things down on the ground,
it's practically unplayable. Yeah, don't recommend it.
At least not on here. If I had this on an actual Pentium system or even much more capable
486, it'd be pretty good I imagine, but not in this configuration. Okay, we're gonna be moving on here to another Bullfrog game, we got Hi-Octane. And this actually runs
on the Magic Carpet engine, I guess an updated version of it. Okay, moving over to direct capture here. And yeah, you can tell
that the menus are slower for one thing, but also
a higher resolution. So the track selection. Yeah higher resolution
tracks spinning around, and the vehicles of course
also look sharper, a bit slower. That much is clear immediately. And then once you get into a race or a battle or whatever
you wanna call it in this game, the performance, man. It is what it is. [hovercraft engines whirring] [hi-octane chaos ensues] Yeah, this is actually
one of the few games for this card where the VLB mode on this system actually does make,
I think, an objective improvement
all across the board. Frame rate included,
even though it's still not a good frame rate, it's
better than software mode, which we'll compare it to in a moment. But yeah, you do get slightly better speed and that's nice in a racing game, but it's also a combat game and you wanna be able to
pick out your targets. So a greater resolution, just
sharper imagery all around. And some nice crispy
looking, overlaid graphics and stuff for your ammo
count and all these things, they just look nicer in the CGL mode. The 3D Blaster VLB does
a pretty respectable job. And yeah here it is compared
to the software renderer. As you can see of course,
much lower resolution, but actually worse performance,
kinda surprised to see that. Because up to this point the CGL modes were running pretty badly
compared to software mode. And another thing I wanted to point out, look at the sky, the textures. You're getting some different things going on between the two. You actually have a little
bit more texture in software. I also noticed that in Magic Carpet Plus, and I think some of the
textures in NASCAR Racing. I don't know, it seems like there's just
trade-offs and concessions you might not think are gonna be there until you do the direct comparison. It's just like, okay,
well that's different too. But Hi-Octane on the 3D
Blaster VLB, pretty good stuff. Although still not great
with this particular system. So yet the pattern here is
pretty obvious at this point, I think. Even with all the
games that were bundled with it, you think those would be
some fantastic examples of this running as it should. And well, I guess that
is how it should run. It's just not very great, on these kinds of systems from that era. So what are you gonna do? On the other hand, there is one of them that
doesn't even work at all. So it could be worse. Flight Unlimited. I don't know why I wasn't able
to get it to work, at least with the version that was
provided for me from Vetz. And I also tried another version
burned on like, better media at a much, much slower
speed, actually down to 1X. That didn't work either,
tried multiple installations, tried another download,
none of them worked. It crashes every time
that you tried to load up the Creative Blaster
VLB version of the game. Just sticks on the Looking Glass logo and that's as far as I could
get with Flight Unlimited. Which sucks because it
looked pretty darn cool. In fact, if you look at the YouTube video that Vetz put up on his
channel, Retro Compaq Guy, then you can see some of the footage of Flight Unlimited running on his VLB, it looks pretty awesome. It's a faster system than
mine too, better performance is gonna help any of these games, but a flight game especially. All right, so the last ones
that I have are just a few retail game releases
that supported the VLB either on-disc or through
a downloadable patch that you could get from the
game developer or publisher. And the first one I tested out was Battle Arena Toshinden,
the very first one. And this is another one of those where it seemed like it was gonna work just fine. In fact I had a message on
menu, it's like, "oh, VLB detected." Everything was going fine. I just wanna get into a fight! And then once I got in there,
it crashed every single time. Again, burned multiple
copies, downloaded another ISO tried to see if there
was any kind of settings that could change around, there was not. [chuckles] So. Don't know, I don't know, it just didn't wanna work at all. Did get at least a little
bit further I suppose than Flight Unlimited did. So another one!
Next one I wanna try, a retail game: Euro 96. This was one, I believe
I had to get a patch for the retail version to get it to work, but it does now support the
3D Blaster VLB so that's fun. Switching over to direct to capture here and you can see that, in the menus. Yeah, we got some more options. In fact, this is one of the few that lets you change around
the resolution, low and high. And both of those are higher
res than the software modes. Low or high on the 3D Blaster I think it's 640x480 and 800x600. And on software, I believe
it's 320x200, 640x400. - [Computer] Spain against Bulgaria, Bulgaria are the winners of group seven where they qualified ahead of Germany. I think you remember their
beat in the quarter finals of the world cup in the United States. No doubt, we have a close
before contest in prospect here. [general footy ambiance] - [Clint] Right, so on the one hand this is running in 800 by
600, 3D accelerated in DOS. That's just wild,
especially on a 486 board. Pentium Overdrive 486
motherboard, in this case. But is this really what
you would consider playable, especially when you're playing
against a computer, because a computer, it just doesn't
care about frame rate. It's gonna calculate and do
the same crap regardless. Now, if you're say playing head-to-head against another person, you're
both on the same crappy boat. So maybe then it wouldn't be as bad but you still don't wanna
play at a frame rate like this no matter how impressive
the resolution is. And of course, moving on to the software renderer comparison and you know, it's not terribly better. Though I believe the frame rate is a little smoother in software. It certainly felt like it when I was playing
them both back-to-back. But honestly it's just bad
either way with this game. Just the fact that it's running it at all in either mode is pretty
cool to me, but yeah. Is the increase in resolution worth the lackluster performance? Probably not. And as a result you've got a pretty lackluster sport experience here. So the final one that I wanna
try here is Fatal Racing, also known as a Whiplash. Another one of those retail
releases that I believe supported it out of the box
in some versions. I know there was 1.0 that
you need a downloadable patch. I've got the one with the patch, which has this FAT3D executable that you run to run the game. [Fatal Racing FM synth menu music] Yeah! I was happy to see this one run well after all the other fails. So this one has some interesting caveats in terms of the way I was
able to get it running. The configuration. Now the graphics detail
settings, I do have the same when I was comparing
this to software mode. And then you have this
VGA display and SVGA, which will switch between the resolutions. So I got those the same but for whatever reason, there's this. And when you run the 3D
Blaster version of it it restricts you to this
four meg version of it. Whereas in software, it had
me in the eight meg version. And I do have a 16 meg setup here in the system in terms of RAM. So I'm assuming that's what it means. I don't know why I'm
restricted to one or the other though depending on my renderer, but I am. So! They do look different.
Switch over to direct capture. There's really crazy
amounts of dithering on the 3D Blaster, which
certainly helps the performance. It just looks very different. So the comparison isn't
exactly the most direct between the two in terms of the visuals and the way it runs either way though it's an interesting comparison I thought. And yeah, I hadn't
actually played this game very much either, it was
pretty fun, I quite enjoy it. And I found it entirely playable. I quite enjoy both rendering modes, with or without the dithering,
higher resolution or not. It's just a neat looking game either way. And it's yet another
bullet point on this card not entirely performing,
maybe as you'd expect. Especially for $349 in 1995. So yeah, that is where I'm
gonna call it for this video. It has gone on a really
long time just looking at my recording oh man, there is -- why do I have four hours
of footage to edit down? I do.
[exasperated LGR sounds] It's crazy, but anyway! Fascinating card. I hope that you've enjoyed
seeing it in action. There's just this whole era of early 3D acceleration
is downright fascinating. Especially these failed ones where they were barely on the
market for less than a year. And they were completely obsolete within like six months by something in its own product range. [chuckle of obsolescence] The follow-up 3D Blaster, the PCI version, was just so much better. Or at least I assume, I don't know I've never used it, but on
paper it should be a lot better. But yeah, that's about it. Let me know if you've ever used
one of these back in the day and I hope you enjoyed
seeing it here in 2021. And if you enjoyed this episode of LGR then do stick around for the
others that I've got planned. I got a new video each
week, when all goes well. And I've covered a bunch
of other graphics cards and retro PC related
things on the channel. So check out the older
stuff if you'd like. And as always thank you
very much for watching!
