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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?
You only need 16MB to handle th highest resolution computer graphics displays ever made.
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.
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?
Quake 3 just happens to be a benchmark (and an old one at that) whose numbers are relative, but not necessarily realistic : Imagine if they benchmarked harddrives by always saying "The IBM 75GXP can load 40,000 10KB hello.c files / second", to which everyone follows that up by commenting that they only need to load 1 hello.c file, etc. In other words, for a more demanding task like the new Doom, Quake 3 with complex mods like Urban Terror, or much more complex games like Operation Flashpoint, 135fps in the stock Q3 equals ~15 fps in a complex outdoor scene in OpFlash. And as has been recapped many times in the past: We are just touching the surface of realistic environments (i.e. try to model nature in a dynamic fashion and the best boards put out single digits FPS, if that).
... 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.
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!
The only reason I mentioned the engine is because I'd love to design/write (I'd rather design) games one day, and that seems like something that would be a great thing for games, rather than re-implimenting Newtonian physics over and over again, there would be something akin to openGL that would have preset functions for things.
The processor itself would likely be a little specialized to handle (x,y,z,vx,vy,vz) style location/speed vectors and the such.
The closest thing I've seen to it was something one of my Materials Science TA's wrote to show and simulate forces on beams.
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.
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