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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?
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
Obviously there's no perceptual difference between 700fps and 135fps, but its just a benchmark. Since QIII is reasonably popular among those who care about fps in FPS games (*cough*), you can get a better idea of the GPU's relative increase.
It looks like their servers couldn't handle more than 7 concurrent users...
Given that ZX81 (aka TS1000) emulators for the PC were around from day dot (or a ZX81 emulator running on an Atari ST emulator running on a PC...) how about 3D Monster Maze? It's not that much more primitive than Doom. Run! Run from the scary Tyrannosaur!
(Yes, I know, the article is probably about hardware that draws triangles real fast, but it's Slashdotted hard, so we may as well have some fun reminiscing. If nothing else, it'll confuse the young 'uns ;-) )
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.