Chuck(G)
25k Member
Yes, Vodoo and some other early 3D video cards only did 3D - the 2D portion required you to use another card and hook up a pass thru. I had an Encore DVD card that let you play DVDs on a machine as slow as a 133 MHz Pentium. How can a 133 Mhz Pentium decode DVDs without dropped frames or slowdowns? Well it had a special add-in card that did the MPEG2 decoding in hardware. It also thus needed a pass-thru. Strange times.
At one time, this was the only (legal) way to play DVDs on a computer, as the decoding algorithm was treated as secret and proprietary by an industry consortium calling itself DVD CSS.
The remainder of the story is a fascinating story filled with lawyers, judges and hackers.