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7 Years of 3D Graphics
xtra writes "At Accelenation they are running a nice timeline about 7 years of pc 3d graphics
contains much info and even talks about some of the not so well known players
anyone still remember rendition? or BitBoys?" How many cards on their
timeline chart have you used?
I remember when Number nine came out with the first consumer level graphics card to use 128MB of memory. There was no GPU, but you has an almost infinite amount of resolution settings. And that was over two years ago.
I was playing Elite in 1984. Damn, that was a fine game.
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
At the going rate, the board with CPU and chipset will be a daughterboard of the graphics motherboard. :]
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
STB velocity 4400..And no real need to upgrade yet!
move along, nothing to
Why is it that my primary chip is slower than any of the present chips?
"Goodness, how did you people live long enough to invent tools?" -Hobbes (the tiger, not the philosopher)
Why only 7 years of 3D graphics on PC?
What about Stunts, Elite, and other 3D games?
Can graphics technology possibly get any faster? Well the GeForce2 GTS chip ran Quake3 at 80fps in May of 2000. Just twenty-two months later a GeForce4 Ti4600 can run Quake3 over three times faster. On that reckoning the GeForce6 in two years time should be running Quake3 at over 700fps. Is that fast enough for you!
Is there really much visual difference between 700 fps and 135 fps? I'm not really sure if the human eye can make the distinction. They're sure pretty-looking numbers, but do the results show for it?
And how long before video cards can render essentially photo-realistic graphics? Soon games will be more like interactive movies.
http://www.terarecon.com/3d_prod_1000.shtml
sweet!
I remember cards from S3, Number 9, Chromatic Research/mPact!, Real3D, Pyramid 3D, Rendition, and Trident. I remember the Voodoo Rush. I remember the 3D "add-in" cards like the Voodoo and the PowerVR.
I remember nVidia's first hardware accelerator, which used quadric patches. We never got that one working.
I still have a Trident flashlight, a 3dfx clipboard, an S3 T-shirt brick, and an mPact! golf shirt.
Best of all, I remember iSmell.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
Heck, I still remember the "which is better, Silicon Graphics Reality Engine or Ferrari Testarossa?" threads in the USENET from the summer of 1992. Even the dual pipe / dual head SGI VGXT "Skywriter" from 1989 was pretty damned impressive. Even many, many years later.
FYI, Bitboys actually has a presence there and answers questions sometimes (I troll bitboys mercilessly). The news there has the latest cebit rumors in the graphic card industry especially those revolving around VIA aquiring PVR technology to pair with their SIS graphics cards in some unknown relationship.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
My voodoo2 SLI still kicks all kinds of ass.
The Rendition cards, like most cards, were quite good presuming that the folks coding the games knew how to utilize the power of the card. My personal favorite game (Grand Prix Legends) is a little over 3 years old but was written specifically for Rendition cards and Voodoo2 cards - OpenGL support was tacked-on later. And of the three, there was no doubt that Rendition was the best for that game. Nothing inherantly wrong with the cards, imo, but they just got done in by the Voodoo cards of the time (which, of course, got done in themselves not much later).
Anyway, thanks for asking if I remembered Rendition!
Cheers.
It looks like their servers couldn't handle more than 7 concurrent users...
In a related note, what the hell ever happened to the Future Crew? Man, I remember waiting with bated breath for Second Reality to download over my 2400 baud modem.
--saint
History for Nerds.
Just seems to be allot of history stuff lately.
Get a free ipod.
I remember when my dad brought me to work in 1988 to see their shiny new Silicon Graphics 4D/240 twin tower with GTX graphics. The beast drove a 1280x1024 monitor as well as a broadcast quality NTSC second head. I remember some pretty cool city drive-thru demos as well as a fairly decent "talking computer puppet" demo. (The downside was that the puppet was controlled via a box with 8 analog knobs on it, no commerical body motion control at that time).
I was totally impressed, especially considering that the "way high end" computers at my highschool were 386's and 68030 Macs. Though I did see many similar SGI demos at my dad's office a few years earlier on their SGI IRIS 2400 Turbo (also with a 1280x1024 monitor -- but 30/60Hz interleaved, heh). Man that thing was a weird box, back when SGI used 680x0 CPUs rather than MIPS CPUs.
Here it is:
Google Cache
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
"Motion blur".
Or how about "rendering passes"?
Or how about "anti-aliasing"? (Kind of cheating on that one.)
Or how about "soft shadows"?
In short, more is better. If you give me higher framerate, I'll figure out what to do with those extra cycles.
Education is the silver bullet.
Don't forget http://www.scene.org as well :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
its getting old. think of something new.
... it's time for the next wave of 3D.
I love playing with the SGIs at work and I enjoy playing with the wizbang PCs that my roommates and I have, but to be honest, I'm really not that impressed with modern gfx accelerators. The original geForce was pretty neat, and SGI's last big leap (InfiniteReality in '95) was cool... but golly, things really haven't changed much since Clark and his gang from Stanford opened our eyes to 3D in '82.
We've gone from cabinets to cards to chips to a single chip. We've added some gfx extensions and now do multiple rendering passes to make things look prettier... but really, nothing has changed much in the recent years. It's smaller, faster, cheaper. Steady evolution... but so is the scum growing in my bathroom sink.
Please excuse me while I yawn.
From the article:
To this day there has never been a single impact on PC gaming to equal that delivered by the first Voodoo chip-set.
What about sound? Or VGA, or VESA? I think this comment is a little short sited...
Click here for the google cache of the main page. I hope this works.
I still have nightmares about developing for the Rendition Verite 1000, which was a lovely graphics decelerator on anything faster than a P100. When we got our first batch of Voodoo 1's delivered, there was a brief but very ugly struggle to get our clammy hands on them. You ain't seen pathetic until you've seen geeks wrestling and squealing like stuck pigs over 4Mb graphics cards, let me tell you.
Question to anyone else who has developed 3D graphics: who did you find driving the demand? In our games house, there was a running battle between the programmers and the artists. Us code monkeys were forever on at the artists to cut down the polygon counts, but they kept trying to slip in models that were barely stripped down from the FMV sequences. In the end, we came to an equitable solution: they won, the game ran at 10fps, and all the programmers left.
I wonder how many other games were ahead of their time in that regard, and how many of them would be rescuable given cards that scoff at polygons and eat dozens of 256x256 textures before breakfast?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Voodoo 1. Sucks to be me.
But I've still got HPs TurboSRX uberframebuffer, weighs around 35kg. No, it doesn't kick NVidias ass. Modern PC-gamers can't even lift my graphics "card".
Seven years of graphics down the drain...
I was wondering if anyone had applied Moore's law to 3D graphics. A quick google search and...
d /F 00_Whi tted_slides.pdf
http://www.3dlabs.com/product/technology/moo resla.htm
Unfortunately it's a company paper and very biased towards the 3Dlabs Wildcat. That, and it's a bit dated. Then I found a Microsoft Research pdf:
http://amp.ece.cmu.edu/ECESeminar/slides/Whitte
it's an interesting read, but not 100% relevant. Anyone else have relevant info?
My first 3D card was a rendition Verite' 1000. I liked it. Quake1 was my game of choice then. But when I went to usenet, all I would see would be posts from guys with Voodoo based cards:
"Voodoo Rocks!" "Voodoo's great!" "Look at all the little kids playing with their little toy Verite' cards. Like that's soooooo retarded!!!"
So I eventually broke down and got a cool Voodoo based card. And I asked:
"OK, so how do you turn on the antialiasing? These non-antialiased scenes just look raggedy."
And I heard back:
"Errrm... Ummmm.... Uhhhh.... Well.... That's just not how OpenGL works! Followed by learned treatises about how OpenGL renders and how hard it would be to do antialiasing in that model."
To which I replied:
"But my lowly little Verite' chip did this quite well at 640x480."
And I heard back:
"Voodoo rocks!!! Look at how many triangles per second Voodoo's can do!"
So I asked:
"If the Voodoo's can do so many times more triangles per second, why isn't the (more expensve) Voodoo all that much faster than my Verite was, even though it's not doing antialiasing?"
And I heard back:
"Errm... Uhhhm... Uhhh... Well, OpenGL just doesn't work that way! Followed by more learned treatises about how OpenGL renders and how things are drawn over and over in many passes so you have to be able to crank out a lot of triangles per second to get passable performance."
It was years before I could say I liked any Voodoo's rendering as well as my "little toy" of a Verite' card.
Yep, after all the fanboys started demanding the games in 3d, and then the game companies turned to supplying them, the effective graphic quality of computer games plummeted, and has only now maybe reached the beauty that we had at the pinnacle of sprite-based games. Sure, you could only see one side of the monsters, etc., but they were good-looking monsters - none of these chunky triangular-looking things that didn't even have fingers, toes, etc. and were plastered with dim-looking repetitive textures.
3d is almost getting good enough that I can stand to look at it. But for a while there, it really made games look a lot worse, just for some undefined promise of realism that was never really satisfied until maybe recently - those early 3d games just looked unrealistic in different ways than the 2d ones had. It's like the gaming industry fired anyone with taste and just kept all the techs.
OK, I think I'm done ranting now.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Lambert shading is more primitive, essentially flat.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
> You only need 16MB to handle the highest
> resolution computer graphics displays ever made
you will allways need more memory (in 3D graphics accelerators), even if the display resolutions don't increase. Lets say we settle for a nice 2000x2000 ish display. Thats 4M pixels, at 32-bit is 16MB for the display.
At least double (32MB) but preferably triple (48MB) buffer this so you can create a new frame while the old one is being displayed. Then we need a Z-buffer (or W-buffer) to hold the depth values (24bit values) for each pixel, so we know what is in front of what, typically you might want to do some stencil effects to (8-bits, can be packed with the Z-buffer) that would be another 16MB. Now we have the basics for a 3D graphics display and are at 48-64MB.
But we are not done yet, now for some more interesting effects:
- Texture memory. Typically use the leftover graphics memory and swap the rest from host memory (but we don't like swapping, so preferably all textures should be in onboard mem) 2-64MB
- 2x Antialiasing (1 Backbuffer + 1 Z-buffer 2*2*size of display buffer) = 64MB (4x antialiasing = 256MB)
- Shadowbuffer (rendering into a kind of Z-buffer from the lightsource to create realistic shadows) 16MB
- Accumulation buffer effects like motion blur (very expensive, a good blur could take 4 to 32 frames) or depth of view could make us want another 4-32*16=64-512MB
I for one could easily use more then 1GB of onboard graphics memory.
where do you think guys at remedy came from? and madonion? out of thin air? ever saw that final reality with the max payne scene that was shown in(???)'97 assemblies? (afaik the max payne scene wasn't on the final reality later released to 'net)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The first thing that jumped out at me was this interesting trend I see on the chart.
:)
;) (Yeah .. I know. I'm biased. Nintendo Forever! :)
:)
The companies that have long red lines (meaning the time it took for them to ship since their announcements, ie HYPE) are all gone!
The ones that kept a relatively consistent schedule are still around. Once again, a smart business plan wins, not super-hyped, non proven stuff.
(On a side note, I wonder how long the line would've been for the xbox!
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Note the downward trend in those bars for product life there. They may not be entirely accurate, but note how the ATI and especially Nvidea bars generally get shorter and shorter....
Heh. Could this have any factor in their success?
Physics specalized processors? Can anyone show some nice linkage for them? That sounds like the next step for games today complete and utterly lifelike physics engines instead of scripted crap. Would make mapping much easier as well, imho. I know of geomod tech from the people that did red faction and freespace but what else is out there up to and including programs or languages for astrophysics and geomorphology simulations?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I was in a program for 'smart kids' in middle school, and we had a couple 'top of the line' systems
#1 - A Zenith Data Systems 486DX2/50 with 6MB of RAM and VLB slots. When we weren't using this to run Turbo C++ programs, we were playing Doom! The entire Math class would be huddled around the 14" VGA monitor as one of us would battle the damned
#2 - We had a Quadra Macintosh. This computer was SUPPOSED to be used for internet access with Netscape. We had the Falcon flight simulator. Hi-res graphics at it's best. Kind of a boring game, it had a cult following in our science classes, but the graphics far outshined anything the 486 was capable of.
#3 - We had a Silicon Graphics Indy from the Earth Visions people. I personally didn't do much with it, but from when I seen it was a pretty powerful machine. 133mhz, built in Camera, etc etc
Rendition was the first to offer a version of 3D Quake adapted to work with its chipset. The Verite chipset started the 3D card craze, with all the geeks clambering to get one.
The design was quite elegant, and the cards were very clean in comparison to the multi-chip behemoths the 3Dfx cards were. Plus, they did 2D AND 3D!
I still use one of mine, a V-Raptor Vx2200, in a server box; the other one, an ELSA Vx1000, is sitting in a static bag. Ooh, RRedline Tomb Raider
really kicked ass back in the day!
Its a nice article, finally something different from the dribble about benchmarks of video cards and motherboards. But the author does not have a lot of things right here, many of the mainstream product speeds and release dates are not right.
For example, the radeon came out after the gf2 gts, and performed at the same level. The V5 came out late, and performed slower, although he is saying that the v5 was faster then the radeon, which is completely wrong. It was miles slower.
He also made very similar mistakes in the generation before that, the TNT2s, GF, rage 128, etc.
Although he got the current generation right, which isn't hard. And I have no clue about the earliest cards, they were not cost viable, or much of an improvement from the more cpu dependant onboard chips at the time.
I also find it quite funny that he starts to talk about professional 3d cards, but never mentions them again. A lot of action is happening there, ATI bought fire gl, 3d labs released a lot of good cards, nvidia's only manufacturer of workstation cards went under.
i still have my v1000. granted, it isn't hooked up to anything. i'm not sure whether or not to sell it on ebay as nostalgia or keep it just for the hell of it. served me quite well for a number of years (and i was quite the envy of my friends at lan parties when i showed them vquake)
I still remember the first 3d hardware, and I still have a pc running with a matrox mystique and a 3dfx voodoo I...
...)
I had been involved in demo coding for a while as an high school student and we had managed to implement a 3d software engine which was working really fine, at higher resolutions as well. The most important thing is, we were having lot of fun.
Maybe I am getting wrong now, but I believe the first version of quake came out without any kind of 3d acceleration (everything was software made, they just wrote an almost perfect code
But one day, well, 3d hardware came out and the whole thing wasn't funny any more. In the beginning it was very difficult for a single person to develop something decent using 3d hardware (because of a lack of good docs), while big companies started to produce lots of games using 3d acceleration, which were very badly optimized.
Well, I don't know, I still think that 3d acceleration took away a big part of the intellectual work due to the optimization process of code in games. Of course there were and there still are exceptions.
Plz see nxt article.
thx!
Maybe the whole video thing is VIA sending a message to nVidia. "W3 0wnz j00!". VIA kicked nvidia in the motherboard arena, and is fixing to knock them in the video area.
More power to them.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
My radeon 7200 will kick your v2 sli any day. I only paid $50 for it too. Just find your deals right and you'll be fine.
Voodoo2 was a revolutionary card for it's time, but it's been 4 generations scince then. Time to get a real card again.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
and I've owned at least 12 of those cards!!! Voodoo1 (Diamond Monster) Voodoo1 Canopus (Extram memory) Voodoo 2 12 MB then a 2nd Voodoo 2 12MB for SLI!!! By the time I had the SLI I was using a TNT1 (Velocity 4400) for my 2D card and when I got my TNT2 I ditched the Voodoo setup. Couldn't resist the Voodooo3 card though but it didn't hold up to my TNT2 Ultra or the Geforce 256 32MB or even the Geforce 256 64MB DDR RAM I gave the Voodoo 5 5500 a try, it was so....big, but it wasn't as good in Open GL as my Geforce 2 GTS 64MB, my subsequent GF 2 Ultra, Geforce 3 or my current Geforce 3 Ti 500. No, there's no Geforce 4600 on the way yet... Of course as Director of IT, many of these cards were aquired via "extended burn-in" testing in my home machine's to make sure they were "Work Safe". Now when is Dell gonna bundle the Geforce 4 4600 in its new Dimension's....?
Someone mentioned elite, etc. Yes, there was 3D graphics before there were dedicated processors on PCI/AGP cards for this purpose. Going by this ethos, shouldn't we also be celebrating the modularization of the sound support and serial line comms support functions of the modern PCs? Why is the birthday of the 3D card celebrated, and not the ISA/PCI/USB modem, or sound card? Or perhaps Mac users should celebrate the day the monitor was split off the case.
Any processor intensive application will spawn modular add-ons to take some of the burden off the CPU. So long as the task itself, of course, is generic enough to have a sufficiently large market. Basic economics.
By saying there was no proper 3D graphics before the advent of the accelerators, you are doing a great injustice to the demo scene as it was back then. Remember the 256 byte competitions? The 1 kb and 4 kb competitions? Now here were people who knew how to milk code for every iota of juice that was there. The (almost) forgotten art of Code Optimisation.
Heck, there was 3D graphics on my old Commodore 128; I still have Elite. What do you call the original Battlezone? The only difference was, there wasn't any specialised add-on card to do this task on the market back then.
I don't mean to disrespect current makers, researchers, coders, and gamers. I just think there's got to be many more significant birthdays to commemorate.
How about a feature on the demo scene on slashdot? The younger crowd will appreciate the demos, and we'll get these funny comments from the war-torn 386 vets about how they used to make their own transistors out of sand...
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
OK, he's talking about mainstream gaming stuff...
But there was some killer high-end stuff for the PC architecture!
Anyone remember the Intergraph workstations? They had custom 3d hardware. In late '98 (or was it early 99?) we had an Intergraph with Wildcat graphics. 16MB framebuffer and 64MB texture (I may have it backwards). Highly accelerated, and killer. We used it to run ballistics and weather simulations.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
"Some might say that the modern era of 3D hardware acceleration began with the release of the first Voodoo boards in October 1996 (first demonstrated at Siggraph'96 in August)."
Bzzt. I purchased a Diamond Monster 3D from the Palo Alto Fry's Electronics on July 28, 1996, about a month after shrink-wrapped boards began to appear.
You might think it's a minor point, but it moves the significance of the Voodoo much farther back than the author gives it credit.
S3 ViRge forver!!
Matrox isn't going away because of the following key features:
1: The best multimonitor around
They starting it, they perfected it, they can do different resolutions under Windows 2000 (they were the first, if not only)
2: Excellent overlay charactaristics
Wanna use a TV tuner card at high resolutions? Ignore nVidia. From my experience programs that run overlay really like Matrox's card, w/ the DVD max feature that allows any overlay to be displayed on the secondary monitor you can port divx video out to the TV. Also, overlay works at much higher resolutions than nVidia solutions have. I don't want to turn my 19" down to 1024x768x16 bit just to watch a DVD, my 14" runs more than that.
3: Acceptable 3D performance, exceptional 3D quality
Although it's not the fastest card on the block, it will still play virtually all games atleast acceptably. And when you are playing them, they have a low amount of artifacts and the textures are well drawn.
4: 2D quality
Although it's much overlooked, it's what most people stare at a majority of the time. Matrox makes thier own boards so they can have a tight control over the filtering components.
I've used a couple S3 cards (low end), Permedia 1 and 2 cards, Riva128ZX, TNT, and TNT2, Matrox MGA, G400 and 450 cards. And so far I have to give props to Matrox for a product that matches my needs. Granted my needs are different from most.
(triple monitors w/ TV tuner and alot of video player programs)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I was very impressed by the architecture of the 2 Rendition offerings (V1000 and V2x00)... I thought that the idea of a programmable RISC core was really slick. All you needed to do was include a microcode (.uc) file and you could instantly support a new API.
:)
Of course, this was before every card supported DirectX and OpenGL...
Hey, remember "native APIs?"
Nice work...
:)
Great article
There are some serious omissions here.
To ignore the early GLINT work from 3DLabs and not give them their own column in the table is a bit unfair.
The Number9 stuff is missing (no great loss).
Other early work is missing, for example SGIs PC graphics card which predates all of this by about 5 years.
http://www.mathengine.com/
It doesn't require maths coprocessors though, but perhaps if it becomes a standard it will support them...
Has anyone tried to make a GPU for ray tracing? Good ray tracing scenes can be much better than the scenes drawn by polygon engines.
Yeah, it would mean a whole change of code for current software. D3D would have to change, or maybe have another API beside it, say DirectRay. But the rendering would really get better. Todays hardware should be able to handle the load. And they should scale well also. More GPU's equals more parallel rendering of pixels.
Imagine a truely ray traced virtual world. {shudder with anticipation}
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I saw one once, at Case Tech, in 1969. About six racks worth of hardware. Nobody really knew what to do with it.
which is why at Futuroscope in Poitiers they have a high definition high speed cinema for showing footage from a helicopter. It would look terrible on a standard cinema screen.
Is it just me?
There is no spork.
The people that made 78 rpm records claimed you couldn't tell it apart from the actual artist. I can. Some people claim that panning in movies looks smooth. To me it looks jerky. Note that in the cinema each frame is shown twice, so perhaps the motion blur may not work correctly.
see subj.
My first "3D" graphic card was the Voodoo2. For a while I resisted buying a dedicated 3D card, that was until I saw glQuake ;)
:)
:)
I have tried the ATi Rage 128, Voodoo2/3,nVidia Geforce 2 and nVidia Geforce MX. Without exception, all these cards perform better under Linux than under Windows.
No, this is not a troll. I have got people to try linux after they have seen TacticalOps running on my slackware powered laptop
The best example of this was running Return To Castle Wolfenstein on my Geforce 2. It played OK under Win2K (latest DirectX, drivers etc.) - but I had to run it at 800x600 for it to be playable. Running the same binaries under Transgaming's WineX, I could bump it up to 1200x1024 and get a better framerate than under windows at 800x600!
The best supported cards I have owned have been the nVidia cards. Regular driver releases available for both Windows and Linux from their web site - I challenge you to find another gfx card supplier that does the same!
Ok, so part of the drivers are binary only. I say : so what? Nvidia are good at maintaining them, they know the card best and seem happy to support us, so why moan?
Now I'm waiting for my Geforce 4 Ti4600 to arrive...
Yah, GPL was pretty much the ONLY reason that the Rendition card was able to stay around so long.
Pretty darn good game still, hell, damn GREAT game still, heh.
I remember a looking from at a screenshot from GPL printed on the then Highest Resolution Printer In The World(tm)Lexmark z(whatever). Damn nearly looked like a photograph.
When I saw screenshots of it directly, hell, it DOES look damn nearly like a photograph!
Whatever API they used and however it interacted with that chip was damn powerful, blew the living shit out of anything to come for another 2 years or so.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Well i was looking at Matrox vs. the other card makers on there and i like what i see. The red lines are veryt short and there is a stable rate of release for their cards. I think that more manufacturers should spend their time making a product not promoting it. Nothing makes me more angry than waiting an entire year for their card that "around the corner". I am a proud owner of some nice matrox cards as well as other cards and i like the 'G' series matrox cards. I knwo everyone says that they are no good for gaming but the title says 7 years of 3d GRAPHICS not GAMES. I use my cards for theiur duel moniter configs for apps spread all over the place, to me that is more useful than just another 10 fps in QIII. Well i hope that competition stays tough out there keeping the next card pushing the limits. Thanks to all who spend their time making my puter beter...
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Is it bad if I still use one of the first video cards there? The Virge 3d from S3
Hmmm, I have 5 mod pts, its time to metamod, and on top of that I have to meta-metamod? When do I get to read slashdot?
Thwarted by Slash! Nice try!
Wasn't Mistery house on the Apple ][ the first 3D game of all time? It was published around 1980, I believe.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
In 1974 I was in 9th grade and we would go to the
Princeton University Chemistry department and use
their Evans and Sutherland LDS-1 line drawing
system, connected to a PDP-10. We would play
spacewars all night. I wrote hidden line removal
functions.
A "friend" of mine used to work for Bitboys.. as one of the main designers if I understood correctly.
I think the company failed because the business these days doesn't care for "now" but only "future" or something..
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
When will people realize that the human eye can only distinguish 23 frames per second? At 24 fps, it becomes movement. Any framerate beyond 24 fps is just wasted processor time (which could have been used to make thing more beautifull).
As a current user of a Matrox G400 DualHead AGP 32 MB card, I can definitely say that the 2-D graphics quality of this card--like all Matrox cards--is second to none. Not even the latest ATI Radeon 8500 series comes close to the amazing sharpness of 2D graphics that the Matrox cards now offer. I've seen the output of the better quality cards that use the nVidia chipsets and they (on the average) don't even come close to the crisp display quality you get from Matrox cards.
This is why I'm REALLY hoping that Matrox does make another stab at a high-end 3-D graphics card that can compete against the Radeon 8500 and GeForce4 Ti4200/Ti4600 series but still offer the unrivalled 2-D display quality Matrox is famous for. Using the modern 0.13 micron process to make the next-generation Matrox chip, they could easily offer industry-leading graphics acceleration and MPEG-2 decoding equal to that of the GeForce4 series. Such a card--even if it costs slightly more than the cards that use the GeForce4 Ti chipsets--would be instantly lapped up by gamers who want the clearest graphics display.
Well they don't call them BitBoys Oy for no reason, as we Australian's say when we've been pulled a swifty "OY!", with a ginger temprement.
As an avid console gamer who had stopped gaming for a couple of years after the PSX succeeded the throne of console dominance from the Super NES, I understand _exactly_ what you're talking about. In my absence from the gaming world, I lamented the "death" of 2-D at the hands of ugly, boring, primitive 3-D graphics. Even within the SNES era, people raved over games like StarFox, a 3-D game which had very little appeal for me, but which for many was a vision of how games should look and play. Meanwhile, I foresaw that it would be many years before 3-D graphics would even approach the beauty of sprite-based graphics, and that's turned out to be true IMO.
However, it should be noted that there are examples of games that utilize 3-D graphics while maintaining 2-D gameplay and feel to great effect. One example that comes to mind for no real reason is ThunderForce V, which is a great horizontal-scrolling shooter (aka shoot-em-up or "shmup") that uses 3-D graphics which are small enough to be somewhat detailed. The kicker comes when encountering boss enemies, where the camera seamlessly zooms and rotates around the scenery from the standard side view, taking obvious advantage of the 3-D nature of the graphics.
I now happen to enjoy a lot of games that have made the switch, in all sorts of genres. Some quick examples include Mario (platformer), Zelda (action RPG/platformer), Final Fantasy (RPG), Hundred Swords (SRPG), etc. Street Fighter EX in any incarnation will never be able to replace its 2-D progenitor for me, but in many other ways, I've come to tolerate 3-D graphics in games where its usage adds more to the gameplay than it detracts from the visual appeal.
In this last regard, I think Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was revolutionary for me (as it's the one game that brought me back to console gaming). It was full of rough graphical edges, but to be fair, its immediate 2-D predecessor on the Super NES used graphics that were small and fairly undetailed, and in comparison were less impressive overall at the time. Ocarina of Time is still beautiful, and 3-D graphics helped that game achieve incredible depth, as well as a fantastic sense of the sheer vastness of the game world.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
That game ruled!
Especially when you were in the f1-spun out of control, and your rear fin acted in reverse forcing you a mile into the air!
Or throwing you into a tornado...
Not many people knew this... But if you have stunts, see if you can throw the car around into the air, it makes the game worlds of fun.
God spoke to me
I remember doing 3-d graphics in the early 70s.
I wrote a fortran program that did hidden line removal and displayed the results on a line printer.
I also wrote one that did vector graphics on a Tektronix 4010 running on a PDP-11/40.
That one was a spaceship that was controlled by the front panel switches, and displayed in "real time" (about 5 frames/second).
7 years, indeed!
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana