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7 Years of 3D Graphics

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the three-dimensional-memory-lane dept.

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?

3 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Number Nine by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Uh? I don't remember any #9 cards with 128MB of memory. In fact, #9 was out of business two years ago. You may remember the #9 i128 series of cards, but those are very old and do not have 128MB memory.

    You only need 16MB to handle th highest resolution computer graphics displays ever made.

  2. calling Dr. Jim Clark... by green+pizza · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... 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.

  3. Re:Where are the real physics engines? by Telastyn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.