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?

Comments

Number Nine

[guamman]

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.

Re:Number Nine

[ackthpt]

No mention of Tseng Labs. Maybe the 4000 chipset wasn't considered a Graphics Accelerator, but having one of those in a new 386DX25 was pretty cool and what I first played Return to Castle Wolfenstein and a few ID games on.

Only 7 years?

[Thnurg]

I was playing Elite in 1984. Damn, that was a fine game.

Re:Only 7 years?

[Bilestoad]

Elite lives on - if you have a PDA there are three or four clones, a couple of them GREAT, right down to the 3D combat. When I did my knee on a snowboard trip a year ago, the Visor Prism with an elite-clone helped me forget about the snow.

Why 7 years?

[Jacek Poplawski]

Why only 7 years of 3D graphics on PC?
What about Stunts, Elite, and other 3D games?

Only 7 Years?

[green pizza]

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.

sevenTEEN years

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Just incremental improvements

[green pizza]

My voodoo2 SLI still kicks all kinds of ass.

Amen, brotha... my only real PC at home is a PII/400 with a pair of Creative Labs Voodoo2 cards running SLI. Win98SE is stable (enough) for the few games and utilities I run on it. And 56 FPS in Quake2 and 41 FPS in Unreal is good enough for me.

Rendition? Did you say Rendition?

[Rogerborg]

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?

Re:How fast do we really need to go?

[EllF]

The "SOFTWARE realtime raytracing" you're referring to is rendering extremely low-detail primitives (spheres, cones, etc.) in one-pass tracing at a tiny resolution, then bilinear filtering the image and scaling it. This is neither photorealistic (as the original poster was inquiring after) nor impressive.

What was being discussed was not 1x1 traced, static geometry localisation demos with environment mapping and scanline rendering. What was being discussed was full-fledged, true real-time raytracing of complex scenes with lighting and reflection taken into account in the trace passes. Show me something with even the complexity of Doom in a real-time raytraced environment, I'll be impressed. Half-way demos like this (not that they aren't pretty) just don't cut it.

Interesting trend.

[Frag-A-Muffin]

The first thing that jumped out at me was this interesting trend I see on the chart.

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. ;) (Yeah .. I know. I'm biased. Nintendo Forever! :)

(On a side note, I wonder how long the line would've been for the xbox! :)

Where are the real physics engines?

[linzeal]

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?

The real beginning of 3D hardware

[Animats]

The first real 3D hardware was the Evans and Sutherland Line Drawing System 1, in 1969. This was the first graphics device with a hardware 4x4 matrix multiplier, the basic geometry engine component.

I saw one once, at Case Tech, in 1969. About six racks worth of hardware. Nobody really knew what to do with it.