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Video Card History
John Mathers writes "While searching the net for information on old Voodoo Video Cards, I came across this fabulous Video Card History article up at FastSilicon.com. It's nice to see that someone has taken the time to look back on the Video Cards that revolutionized the personal computer. Here's a quote "When 3dfx released their first card in October of 1996, it hit the computer world like a right cross to the face. That card was called Voodoo. This new card held the door open for video game development. The Voodoo card was simply a 3D graphics accelerator, which was plugged into a regular 2D video card; known as piggy backing."
I note that the history of this article starts in 1996 . . . one year after Rendition's Verite chip became the first consumer add-on 3D accelerator.
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
I was excited to load this article up and hope to see my first VGA card by Paradise. I believe it was called Paradise 256K or something like that. I had a Sony VGA monitor, and my friends and I were blown away by some 320x200 x 256 color graphic of a parrot. Then we found a nude GIF. Whoa. I think I had that card about 2 years before any game really supported it, although Police Quest in EGA mode was nothing like we could imagine.
I'd love to see a history of all video cards for the PC platform...
Aahh, 1996...the good old days...
I remember when we would write ASCII graphics contouring programs for line printers!
The Voodoo card was simply a 3D graphics accelerator, which was plugged into a regular 2D video card; known as piggy backing.
This isn't entirely correct, as any Voodoo 1 user could tell you. The card took up its own slot, and used a pass-through video cable to connect the monitor: When a Voodoo-compliant video signal was detected, it hijacked the output to the monitor and took over.
Nice design, for the time. The best thing was, it was CHEAP for the time (considering the performance). I think I paid $199.
M-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
but it'd nice to have a history of things before 1996 (i.e, pre-voodoo cards). Video card history between 1996-2000 was very well documented, perhaps thanks to all of the articles that came out near/after 3dfx's demise, and most of us remember everything within the last three years.
...the art of being slashdotted in record time
I remember my first Voodoo cardie. I was playing TWCTF alot with my buds, and many of them had fast systems (at the time) running glquake/glqw. Finally after being a software user for so long, getting decent lag-frags, I did the unthinkable and ditched the software client for some better visuals with my very own piggybacked Voodoo card, from 3dfx. Gaming has changed quite a bit since then, but you have to understand how much fun it was playing Quake in software mode. The mods were cool too, but everything about that experience was killer fast. Now since then, games have mostly slowed down on PC. Quake 2 and Quake 3 were much slower. The speed of play for TW back with software, was intense. You had to hold your adrenaline rush to the bitter end of any match. By the time I was playing for ZFA, everyone had a 3d card. I can remember the Q2 LAN parties when guys would show up with their configs all set for zero textures and no coloured lighting. The levels would all be just plain white, and guys would be saying how awesome it was they could get 100fps doing this. To me, it always took something away from the game to run configs like that, even if it could give you an edge in matches.
When I saw Quake 2 CTF for the first time at the Respawn LAN party, Zoid showed us on this decked out system, how totally amazing it was. I remember how georgeous q2ctf1 looked for the first time my eyes caught it. It was magic. I even wrote about it. You could never have seen it if it wasn't for the people at 3dfx, who pretty much paved the way for all the gaming rigs we've got now. It's a shame that the same people who built this dream had to shut their business down.
I guess, that's how we award our innovators today... with steady, constant competition, or you're out. Seems cold, doesn't it?
FastSilicon.com - not so fast anymore.
[alk]
I remember when I was craving for a Voodoo card so that I could run Quake better. I finally sprung for a Voodoo II card when they had a $50 rebate. I was so excited to get online with my ISDN line and frag everyone in OpenGL graphics that I threw away my Voodoo II box along with its product bar code. No proof of purchase no $50 rebate. Doh! Damn, that hurt my wallet.
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
Nuke warm cards huh? How many fans do you need for one of those?
The Internet needs an editor or two hanging around.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Maybe they should change their name from fastsilicon to smokingsilicon.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I have a Voodoo 2 with 12 megs of ram still plugged into my 8 meg agp card. I was so excited when I got it back in 98 i just haven't needed anything else and it still looks good.... when I play quake 2. :)
How long until history catches up with the X Windows System, and I can get an X server that renders entirely to the OpenGL API? I'd love all those panel edges, drop shadows, animated buttons, textured skins, and other 3D "embossed" window decorations to come from my video card. The X server code could be much smaller, factoring out all the rendering code that it could reuse by calling the OpenGL API. And the X graphics primitives could become unified behind a widely cross-platform API, already implemented by blazingly fast hardware in the most competitive market in computing. And once XGL implemented the current style of X server display, we'd have an open, popular, and modular platform for experimenting with 3D spaces for "desktop" visualization. Let a thousand raytraced xscreensavers bloom!
--
make install -not war
I think what finally brought 3-D graphics acceleration into the mainstream was the introduction of graphics card chipsets that could combine decent 3-D acceleration with fast 2-D graphics all at once.
nVidia's pioneering RIVA 128 chipset was the first chipset that could compare itself in 3-D mode against the vaunted Voodoo cards of that period; once nVidia unveiled the groundbreaking TNT chipset it was pretty much over for Voodoo's separate board approach. This is what spurred ATI into developing the Rage Pro and later Rage 128 chipsets in the late 1990's, starting the competition between ATI and nVidia that has lasted to this day.
I had one of these original Voodoo I PCI boards. It had a VGA passthru connector on the back. The card didn't even have any heatsink or fan at all on it! I remember it ran at 43 Mhz or something like that, but I had overclocked mine to a whopping 47 Mhz! I glued a motherboard northbridge heatsink to the Voodoo chip to dissipate the extra heat, but I lost the neighboring PCI slot due to the size of the heatsink.
Ah... those were the days.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
We sold Diamond Monster 3D's like hotcakes back at Best Buy in the mid 90's.
Then the Voodoo Rush came out. All in one. It stunk.
Then the Voodoo II came out. Remember you could buy 2 of the cards and some games (SLI) would run faster than with just one!
Then they did the combiniation card again...Voodoo Banshee. Worked pretty well.
Then NVIDIA wiped them off the face of the earth.
At some point shouldn't we just have really versatile CPUs? All these 3D cards are just kludges that happen to be tuned for 3D processing. They can do other general purpose processing as well. Thus the CPU can do their processing, given enough versatility.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
When 3dfx released their first card in October of 1996, it hit the computer world like a right cross to the face. That card was called Voodoo. This new card held the door open for video game development. The Voodoo card was simply a 3D graphics accelerator, which was plugged into a regular 2D video card; a practice known as piggy backing. (Oh the days of piggy backing, I remember them well. Having that black cord sticking out of the back of your case was especially annoying). A few months later a new card was introduced, the Voodoo Rush. It was the 3D and 2D card all rolled into one. However, it ran significantly slower than the normal Voodoo. This, combined with driver issues caused the Rush to be seen as a flop by the community.
In all races, there must be competitors. ATI (A company that has been around for twice as long as NVIDIA or 3DFX.) and NVIDIA had cards out shortly after that to compete with 3dfx. They were named Rage, and RiVA 128. This was long before they both took the 3D giant 3DFX completely out of the race though. They were just tiny blips on the radar for 3DFX at the time. To counter the new competition, 3DFX released the Voodoo2 in March of 1998. It was a vast improvement over the Voodoo, having a 90 MHz core clock and a whopping 12 Mb of video memory. Voodoo2 could produce a resolution up to 1024 x 768, and had a blistering fast 3.6 Gb memory bandwidth - top of the line back then. As before, the Voodoo Banshee came out after the Voodoo 2, and like the Voodoo Rush; it was a waste of money due to performance issues. Incidentally, the Voodoo2 was still a piggy-backer; they did not drop that method of 3D graphics card integration until later.
In March of 1999, 3dfx came out with the Voodoo3. This time, the Voodoo 3 was separated into different steps to cover different consumer needs (sound familiar?). The Voodoo3 2000 was the low-end budget card, and it had a core speed of 143 MHz to offer. On the next rung was the Voodoo3 3000, which offered up a 166 MHz clock speed. At the top was the 3500 version, which featured a TV-out port, and a 183 MHz clock speed. All these cards were offered in PCI and AGP versions (a new concept, also shared with an ATI card called the 3D Rage Pro).
Like many underdogs, the competing companies started catching up to the hardware giant. NVIDIA released a card around the same time as the Voodoo3, called the TNT 2. The TNT 2 was the successor of the TNT, and upped the ante from 8 million to 10.5 million transistors - a huge jump in complexity. It also offered 32-bit color support, and digital flat panel support. The Voodoo3 barely beat the TNT2 in pure FPS, but the TNT2 had much higher visual quality, so people started checking out the competition. It didn't cripple 3dfx, but it let them know that they better have something groundbreaking with their next release. ATI, possibly one of the cleverest (or maybe luckiest) of all three companies was content to sit in the corner and watch NVIDIA and 3dfx battle it out. ATI still released new cards - they weren't spectacular, but by no means were they horrible. The cards were just enough to keep them in the race. ATI's strategy seemed to be to lie in wait for their time to strike, which wouldn't come until later.
On October of 1999, NVIDIA dealt the final blow to the 3D giant, with the introduction of the Geforce 256, 3dfx didn't have anything to combat the new card with, so they took the blow right to the face (we saw this same situation happen to NVIDIA later on). The revolutionary Geforce 256 brought much to the table, including four pixel pipelines at 120 megahertz, DDR ram support, along with many other new features. 3dfx had two cards that were very highly anticipated but delayed long past the original schedule (Sound familiar?). But once the voodoo4 and 5 did come out, they were well accepted, but far too late to do damage to NVIDIA. Basically, they just added more GPUs and more RAM to beef up the new cards. Which was fine and dandy, but it made the cards about twice as big as the previous models, fo
Erm. That's not even enough to fill in a single horizontal bar of the screen (unless you're running in 320*240 resolution). Perhaps they meant megapixels? This was hardly the only such error that I noticed, though - these guys really need to have someone proofread their articles.
--- Bwah?
He totally forgot the ATI's RAGE which if I remember right was one of the first cards, and it supported SEGA Satrun games.
He also slights 3DFX a bit. The Voodoo 2 was huge, although I had TNT 1, every one I knew was running Voodoo 2.
The rest, as they say, is history :-(
Stick Men
Check out Tom's Hardware Guide
http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/1997.html
http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/1998.html
http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/1999.html
http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/2000.html
http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/2001.html
Now there was a card that announced it was taking over the monitor - the not-so-delicate *clang* as its mechanical switch moved.
R Tape loading error, 0:1
Video Card History article up at FastSilicon.com
Whoops, not anymore...
I remember plugging a 'piggy back' 12mg voodoo2 into my 4mg (or was it 8mg) Hercules graphics card, i remember installing UnReal and firing it up, when you get out of the ship for the first time and see that waterfall with the music playing i thought it was the most amazing thing i had ever seen. To this day it still ranks up there with the first time i saw a dinosaur in Jurassic Park and thinking 'this is the way to go' and being seriously in awe of all things to do with computer graphics.
:(
:)
Now I have a 256mg geforcefx 5600 (some letters after it) and all games look amazing, in my other pc i have a 64mg geforce2 4400 (i think) and all games look good. Shame they dont play like Unreal did
ps that voodoo2 is still going, its running on a p3 500 with a 8mg rage card, still can use it to play quake3 in a 800x600 res with pretty good textureing and fast as well
ahhh any other memories or first time looks at the games that made you go 'ohhhhh thats pretty' ?
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
I first saw this card when a friend bought one to play Tomb Raider. I was blown away; the game went from chunky, halting software-rendered 3d to beautiful, smooth, detailed hardware 3d. I immediately bought one of my own (from Canopus, the Canopus Pure 3D), which I proceeded to use for several years. I can remember the big pit in Tomb Raider where a couple of lions and gorillas were running around in the fringes of darkness. I thought it was so cool that you could see these animals from far away and rather than being blobs of smudgy pixels, they looked like real animals in miniature. It made the game feel so much more realistic.
...
...
The last games I played with my Canopus Pure 3D were the updated versions of Tie Fighter and X-Wing, which really ran well on an AMD K6-233 and Canopus Pure 3D. Those games had the advantage of not needing to render any backgrounds, it was all just black space, so they only had to render the actual ships flying around. I upgraded to a TNT2 card halfway through Tie Fighter but that game didn't get much faster or prettier, it was already well taken care of by the Voodoo-based Pure3D.
I bought another Pure3d for the system that I built for my sister in mid 1997 as a wedding present. A Cyrix 233 with 32 megs of memory and a Canopus Pure 3d, with monitor and printer, was over $2000 to hand-build at that time. You couldn't sell one of those systems for $50 these days
Ah the memories
Damn :/ i almost get to page 3 this time! :/
There's nothing in there about chips from PowerVR, S3, Rendition, etc.
I owned a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 card. Didn't the Voodoo2 series have the ability to be cabled *directly* to another Voodoo2 card for greater performance? I forget what they called this piggybacking, but maybe he's confusiong the passthrough video cabling with this ability.
Video card history going back to 1996 isn't really necessary -- if you're around 25 and bought the Voodoo 1 back when it came out, you can probably recite all the facts from 1996-2003 from the back of your head.
And if it's just 3D chipsets that count, what about the [near useless] S3 Virge, before the Voodoo? What about the extra details, like 3dfx buying out STB to manufacture its own integrated 2D/3D solutions (Voodoo3 onwards), effectively pissing off an entire industry?
Oh well. Maybe next time.
Does anyone else notice that this "Video Card" history starts off with about the 3rd consumer 3D accelerator? They didn't even mention the groundbreaking Rendition Verite. Nor any of the non-PC 3D systems that came before it (Jim Clark / SGI's Geometry Engine based systems in 1983 or the image processors from Evans & Southerland).
And if it's a Video Card history, why no mention of EGA/CGA?
Sounds more like "the 3D accelerator world since the Voodoo" history. It's articles like this that make me wish the slashdot editors would remember they have some readers that are older than high school age.
[end rant]
I have never understood how this breed of cards exists to this day. Really... the difference between a "stock" GeForce and a workstation class Quadro GeForce... just doesnt justify the cost difference anymore.
When you go back about 3 or 4 years ago... when you contrasted a Oxygen video card, or a FireGL vs a TNT or 3DFX card, you could see where the extra money went. But now, todays commerical grade video cards are more then capable. In fact, alot of people I know that work as graphic artists, use traditional Radeon or GeForce 4's in their workstation machines. Outside of say... Pixar, I just dont understand people buying the workstation class cards.
What? No mention of the IBM CGA card that you could destroy by putting it into video modes it didn't support? One of the few circustances in which PC hardware could be broken by software. That in itself should be worth mentioning!
This card was massive and would never have been used in a server.
That was a horrid timeline.
Let alone the historical inaccuracies, the guy writes like he's in the 4th grade.
Here's my favorite typo, "As time went on, ATI and NVIDIA battled between themselves, releasing card after card. The cards released then were rather nuke warm."
Yeah. We wish.
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
There was a patch or something for Quake 1 that let you run it with a voodoo card, and its why I bought a voodoo card to begin with,
I still have the Q1 CD, but it occured to me -- can I even run it and get good graphics without a voodoo card, or am I stuck with software rendering? IIRC the Q1 patch was voodoo specific.
I'm also wonder if Q1 wasn't a DOS game as well, which might make it impossible to run on XP, unless a subsequent Windows version was released.
What about the early cards, TIGA, 8514/A & other 3D attempts like RIVA, Mystique, Virge? What about the cheats on PC benchmarks, back in VGA, now in 3D tests? What happened to Number 9, ELSA and other "Big" names in cards that are nolonger? Reads more like a Time magazine article then a serious attempt at a history of video cards Most glaring to me is the ATI 8500/Nvidia GF3 omission.
I still have a voodoo card. A Canopus Pure 3D. The machine it was in died, so it is sitting there with all the other dead machines. I actually thought of using it's tv out capability in another box for a MAME machine in the living room.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
ScanLine Interleaving. To get over the fillrate bottleneck, one card pumped pixels for even-numbered scan lines, the other worked on the odd-numbered scan lines. Back in the days when a dual PII/400 and dual Voodoo2 was the gamer's ultimate machine. There were even a few companies that stuck two Voodoo2 chipsets on a single card.
A lot of professional/expensive 3D systems before the Voodoo2 used a similar technique. If one of the texture ram modules comes loose on an SGI Indigo2 MaximumImpact, textured models will suddenly lose half of their scanlines!
and the site's History
Not sure why this article is so great. They seem a little biased towards ATI. I realize that the current ATI cards are supposedly faster than the NVIDIA variety, but I'm sure they still have the same crappy driver support. At least with an NVIDIA chipset, I know I will have great Detonator driver support. Oh, did I mention great linux support.
Sorry, ATI is that great. I'd rather sacrifice a little speed for stability and driver support. (Although I do like my ATI Tv Wonder card)
Spend two minutes there and you'll see what I'm spouting about.
Vastly inferior to a comparable, older work at www.accelenation.com
I had a 3dfx Monster3d (Voodoo 1) back in Winter 1996, when it first came out. I remember the passthru cable that connected to my turbocharged 2MB video card and my overclocked P150 (to a P166, yeah baby!), and I certainly recall the brilliance of GL Quake and the absolutely gorgeous Grand Theft Auto (1!) after it supported Glide.
I also recall the controversy of transparent water in Quake and how that was considered "cheating" by en large. Those poor non-accelerated folks had to get in the water first to see anything!
Me, I'd just wait until they all jumped in the water and fire off that Lightning Gun. Sure it's suicide, but is it really suicide when you get to roast at least 5 or more people at the same time? DM3, how I miss thee.
EGA was expensive and slow compared.
Stick Men
Big players back in the VESA Local Bus days :-)
1Mb CL5402B on a 40MHz VLB.... like a greased whippet!
JS
GLide wrappers. They interpret glide calls into opengl or directx calls and allow glide games and apps to run on other non-voodoo cards. Dos & windows version available. google for it. Tombraider, Jane's WWII fighters, Quake all work with either my GF2MX or My 8500. Thanks UltraHLE for helping spawn these glide "emulators"
Didn't they have relays too? When a 3dfx-supported game started you'd get a 'clunk-clunk' as the relay clicked in? I'm sure they did.
This was definatly a cool card. I remember getting together at the local univerity for "Quake Fest". It was awsome, I was the only one who owned one of these at the time. So everyone elected to connect my computer to the huge projection screen.
Man those were the days.
Nice. A "video card history" lesson that doesn't include any of the cards that I have in my machines.
S3? Matrox? Ringing any bells? Dull, shitty bells perhaps, but they ought to be ringing.
--saint
Please,
Mod Parent UP!
A bit harsh.
Remember, computer years are like dog years, they advance so much faster than anything else.
I admit the article isn't the best in the world, but its still interesting to read. I was expecting bumph on old Hurcules cards and Tridents and the like, but it still took me on a little trip down memory lane.
Horrible article. Filled with many falacies. Also.. why start at 1996? A small company called Rendition were the first to 'REALLY' make 3d gaming possible. Remember VQuake?
The Voodoo card was simply a 3D graphics accelerator, which was plugged into a regular 2D video card; a practice known as piggy backing.
Try hi-jacking. It never piggy backed, if anything, the 2d piggy backed on the 3d card untill the 3d card took over the signal.
Like many underdogs, the competing companies started catching up to the hardware giant. NVIDIA released a card around the same time as the Voodoo3, called the TNT 2. The TNT 2 was the successor of the TNT, and upped the ante from 8 million to 10.5 million transistors - a huge jump in complexity.
3dfx played catch up at this point. The TNT2 was released 'BEFORE' the voodoo3. Also the TNT which was nvidia 'real' first winner is mentioned as an after thought!
ATI, possibly one of the cleverest (or maybe luckiest) of all three companies was content to sit in the corner and watch NVIDIA and 3dfx battle it out. ATI still released new cards - they weren't spectacular, but by no means were they horrible. The cards were just enough to keep them in the race. ATI's strategy seemed to be to lie in wait for their time to strike, which wouldn't come until later.
ATI wasn't clever or lucky. They actually owned more market share than 3dfx due to the Rage3D/Pro cards that shipped with most computers. I recall thinking to myself at the time, '3dfx is a great add-on board to an ATI card'. Even though Matrox had the fastest 2D at the time (mystique i believe). Everyone just slapped in a voodoo card along with the already owned Ati card.
In March of 1999, 3dfx came out with the Voodoo3..... NVIDIA released a card around the same time as the Voodoo3, called the TNT 2..... On October of 1999, NVIDIA dealt the final blow to the 3D giant, with the introduction of the Geforce 256
So basically.. the TNT2, Voodoo3, and GF256 all came out in the same year? I don't think so. What about the 'refreshes' on the TNT and TNT2 that nvidia performed? What about the Ultra? What about the many versions of Voodoo3's? Also,the rage 128 (Ati's breakout 3d card) is mentioned later as an after thought! More clarity is needed here!
Sadly, the last card 3dfx constructed was the Voodoo 5 6000, which was rarely seen at all. That is rather hard to believe seeing that it's one of the biggest graphics cards I have ever seen. It's equipped with 4 GPUs (That's right, 4.) and 128 megabits of memory. This card was mostly only seen in servers though.
Yeah.. cause a lot of servers need Voodoo5 6000's. Pfff. Rarely seen at all.. but mostly seen in servers... LOL.
Rampage was an amazing new card that would have pushed 3dfx far ahead of the game.
Any proof of this?
If you didn't know, when you buy a company out, you also get the rights to anything that company produced. So, this means that NVIDIA had the rampage project in their hands, and it was rumored that it was put into use on their NV30 (Geforce FX) series of cards. This shows just how ahead of its time the Rampage project really was.
Also.. if you didn't know. you get the rights to all intelectual property, which is what the rampage was, it was not a produced product. Also.. rumors hardly prove anything!
I'm also very disappointed that the first Radeon, the base of Ati's current core isn't even mentioned. Also.. what about SiS? Intels i740? And for gods sake.. MATROX.. sure.. they're not gaming cards, but alot of companies use them, threfore its signifigant!
You mean, this
... "History for Nerds and Stuff that used to matter."
EGA with 16 colours better than a Commodore Amiga? HAHAHAHA. In Ham mode, the Amiga was kicking out 4096! 16 colours are just garish. The Atari ST lead the charge, then the Commodore Amiga. The performance of the VGA graphics on my 386DX25 were dreadful. I added extra memory to my Paradise card so that it could handle 256 colours @ 640x480 under Windows and you had to watch it draw the screen line-by-line. The Commodore Amiga had been blowing it away for years by then. And for those who cared about improving the image on the Amiga, most of them went for a SCART connection rather than wasting their money on a monitor. PC owners didn't have a choice.
NVIDIA bought them out in December of 2000.
This text has some flaws... Nvidia didn't buy 3dfx nor its assets. It won them in a lawsuit with 3dfx.
-B
In colour display, the Amiga beat any PC "standard" in colour depth and resolution. Commodore also had the A2410 card.
"I realize that the current ATI cards are supposedly faster than the NVIDIA variety, but I'm sure they still have the same crappy driver support."
And why would you be so certain? Have you tried the recent ones, and they confirmed your supposition? Or are you simply hoping that if you repeat something enough times it will be thought of as truth?
If so, then repeat after me "I am a millionaire geek with women swooning at his feet."
If you trying to decide between an ATI and an Nvidia, don't forget Matrox! Both ATI and Nvidia have been busted for pumping frame rates, but not Matrox! Sure, you may only get 15-20 fps, but at least you know your Matrox got them honestly. They will look really beautiful too.
I was wondering, which was the first option for 24 bit color (truecolor)?
Both at high end workstations, and for home desktop? I remember seeing ads for true color boards in 1989 Mac magazines. When were them avaliable to the PC? Where they at all avaliable to Intel PCs or Amigas earlier than for Macs?
If someone is kind enough to answer in a nice way (I could not find an answer in google), please consider making it ready for a write up at E2.
-><- no
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
ATI generally releases an new WHQL Windows driver about once a month and a new Linux driver about every 6 weeks. I've had no problems with their XFree86 4.3 driver. They don't have a FreeBSD driver, though, but I guess a PowerBook would give somewhat of the same experience (BSD-based OS, XFree86-based X envrionment, Radeon 9600, plus Quartz/DisplayPDF and access to Mac apps). Mac OS X also has the ATI (and nVIDIA) drivers built-in and are updated with the software update utility.
ATI's Windows drivers are offically updated once in awhile, and are generally rock solid, but there are occasionally problems that aren't resolved for months at a time.
"...these guys really need to have someone proofread their articles."
I recommend one of the Slashdot editors. I hear they're good.
Is it just me or does Forceware sound like a copy of MS Office shoved in yer face at work/school?
I wonder what HEMOS called those cards that were needed to supply pictures for CGA (Cool Graphics Adapter) back in the early '80s. Wait! That's when about half of you guys were born!
You had a 12 milligram graphics card?
Stick Men
I don't know if it was the actual cause (certainly might have been) but buying them seemed to distract the company for long enough for NVidia to take over.
My first accelerated gaming card was a Quantum 3D Obsidian 100SB which was a funny sort of Voodoo1.5 pass-through card (never saw another one). I also had a horrible Virge3D card which was slow for everything, STB card, Cirrus Logic, Trident, you name it. I still run a Voodoo3 in m y 200MMX system but haven't played a game on that one in AGES...
Anyone remember the 3DLabs Permedia cards? They never worked right for games (had missing geometry and texture for unsupported nodes) but were one of the first and fastest serious accelerated OpenGL boards. They still appear to be in business but they are still professionally oriented, not game oriented.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Does OSX have an X server that merely calls the OpenGL API? What about DisplayPostscript? I'd love to see a Postscript API that called the OpenGL API.
--
make install -not war
Wrong. The ST had inferior graphics capabilities compared to the Amiga except for the mono 640x480 mode that was absolutely gorgeous to work with. But the other two modes were crap compared to the Amiga - 640x200, 256 colours and 320x200, 16 colours. The STE made things much, much better. I used to love my ST - I just tolerate my PC nowadays...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Continuing brain-dead memes like "Moore's law" just identifies you as a socialized zombie. Think for yourself.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
"Try getting the specs to a PCI card nowadays..."
Try finding someone who understands them.
um... th E ky on my keyboard only works now and again, somtims it works and sometimes it dosn't
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
There was at least one virus out there that could destroy a CGA card by doing such. There was another that did similar to MFM harddrives.
Really, we're lucky that the modern virus authors aren't focusing on the BIOS and other destroyable aspects as much as one might expect. I'm only aware of one BIOS-trashing virus..
I remember that as well... for me it was Tomb Raider 2, though... the difference between software and hardware rendering, when I finally had it configured, was absolutely phenomenal.
I was disappointed by a lot of the reviews I saw at the time. One in particular was comparing image quality (it may have been Tom's Hardware). They were saying things like "This is how it's supposed to look" under an image generated by a Voodoo card, and then "this is the rendering on the Rendition card." This is how it's supposed to look? The Verite (won't slashdot let you do special characters? ampersand eacute doesn't work?) was so much smoother... almost like built in, always on antialiasing or something. It was beautiful.
The only problem I had with it, of course, was lack of Linux support. I ended up buying a commercial X11 (actually, I got work to pay for it).
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Understanding them isn't hard, it's understanding which parts are wrong is the tricky part!
CGA: 640x200 1 color or 320x200
EGA: 640x350 16 color
VGA: 640x480 16 color or 320z200 256 color
EGA had digital pseudocolor. VGA had both digital and analog pseudocolor.
These are only the IBM offerings. There were plenty of EGA+ cards featuring higher resolution plus the monochrome graphics cards. The Tseng ET4000 introduced 16-bit and 24-bit true-color DAC's for the first time on PC's. It was the ET4000 that first enabled photorealistic displays.
no text
You had a 12 milligram graphics card?
What...you haven't heard of the new light weight graphics cards?
Second thought...that could be tyhe amount of crack he smokes every hour...
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
It is possible to scale performance that way, but the result will be less than double the frame rate, simply because the time to generate a frame does not scale linearly with resolution.
To do 60 frames per second, you have roughly 16ms to generate a frame. A couple of those ms will be gobbled up with I/O transactions and various wait states, so you're already at the point where double the power is only going to result in 1.75x the performance. This will also be highly dependant on how well the 3D code can be parallelized (are there a lot of read_pixels callbacks that require both GPUs and both banks of memory to talk to each other? etc).
This has actually been done by SGI for awhile now. A couple years ago they took their Origin 3000 architecture and stuck on dozens of V12 GPUs and tiled the graphics for higher performance. That concept has been tweaked for their Onyx4 sytems... one large single computer with up to 34 ATI FireGL X1 GPUs. 16 GPUs work on each display in a 4x4 grid. Each GPU generates its 400x300 piece and 16 of those are composited in real time to make up a 1600x1200 display. I believe the biggest such machine to date has 32 GPUs powering two zippy fast 1600x1200 displays and 2 GPUs driving an additional 4 lesser powered displays. SGI gets quite a speedup by doing it that way, with 16 GPUs per display, but there's also a lot of overhead (even more in SGI's case, with 34 AGP 8X busses in said system). Their implementation of OpenGL and OpenGL Performer is tweaked for this, though.
So yeah, it can be done, but the fact that the GPUs will spend a significant amount of time doing non-rendering tasks (I/O, waiting for data, copying the final result to frame buffer, etc) means that you won't see a nice linear scaling. The cost of making custom hardware and custom drivers also adds up. With top-end PC 3D accelerators costing $400 already, I can't picture many users shelling out $1000+ for a dual GPU card.
Looks like DirectFBGL is 16 months old, although XDirectFB has a v1.0rc5 that's only 6 months old. I can't tell how you'd "make install" the two together, and whether existing apps would "just work", but someone else seems to be working on it.
--
make install -not war
Ah, yes. I remember it well. When I first wrote a VGA device driver for the Coherent operating system (Mark Williams Company's inexpensive UNIX knockoff that was killed by free Linux) as a prelude to porting the Bell Labs MGR Windowing system, I was jumping for joy when I saw monochrome outlines of halloween ghosts on the streen. Silly little white ghost outlines on the screen and I felt an immense sense of triumph. Monochrome was the easy part of course, just one plane. What a horrible video mode.
Of course, in a way it wasn't the graphics card's fault that it was so horrible to access its memory. Comes down to the "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates quote. With only 1MB of accessible address space, where do you put the video buffer? Later cards would overlay their buffer in extended memory and with some motherboards, that RAM was lost from use, not remappable elsewhere.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
All your Voodoo are belong to ME!!!11!!!!
As others said, it's sad that the "video card history" on that page only starts in '96. There were several other important 3D cards before the Voodoo1. Of course the Voodoo1 really DID revolutionize the way games were played. As soon as the first serious 3D cards came out, you basically selected the card based on which one had working "3D patches" for the games you wanted to play. I remember back then buying a Matrox Mystique because they offered a working 3D patch for Tomb Raider. I already had the game and it played halfway decent on my S3 card (in 2D mode). Then I plugged in the Mystique, applied the 3D patch and whoa - smooooooooooooth graphics :-)
:)
The only problem was that not enough games HAD 3D patches. A standard was missing. No game company wanted to write 3D patches for ALL the cards out there. Then the Voodoo1 came along, and it was WAY faster than anything else, and they had Glide (which apparently was pretty easy to program for). Suddenly, almost all new games came out with 3dfx support - and you had games you NEVER could have played on the old 2D hardware. The funny thing was, once you had a 3dfx card in your machine, the processor power was not that important anymore. The only thing which mattered was that you HAD a Voodoo card in there. No voodoo - no serious gaming. Voodoo in there - happiness
Well, then Quake and Quake2 came along, and you all know the rest.
The only thing to remember is that the Voodoo1 DID revolutionize gaming. It was a quantum leap. Either you had one, then you could game. Or you did not have one, then you wanted one.
ATI's Windows drivers are offically updated once in awhile, and are generally rock solid, but there are occasionally problems that aren't resolved for months at a time.
I meant to say NVIDIA.
ATI updates their WHQL Windows driver about once a month, somtimes more often than that.
NVIDIA updates their offical driver once in awhile. Thus occasional problems aren't resoloved for months at a time.
Both companies make good cards and good drivers these days... so buy what you can afford. Personally, I love my Radeon 9600 Pro. But my GeForce 4 Ti 4200 is still a good performer too.
The EGA mode with the most colors had a fixed 16 colors in a 320x200 display. The ST and Amiga both had better capabilities than that.
VGA cards may have looked better on paper than the Amiga or ST, but the slow (8mhz, shared among all cards) ISA bus really hampered their performance.
It wasn't until SVGA and local bus technology (VLB and PCI) became available (1993ish) on the PC that PCs surpassed the Amiga (a computer from 1985!)
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
If only the base 2D engine and Quartz Extreme were open source, we could migrate more functions across the QE APIs to be OpenGL functions. We could also wrangle the revised layers onto a Linux desktop. We'd probably even buy more Macs, since their graphics HW is so sleek.
--
make install -not war
One phrase Integrated motherboards.
I think the MFM drive killer just seeked it to death. (Not hard to do with those old Seagate MFM drives...) Other than flashable-BIOS (which should be flashable, so it's not a defect in design... maybe a "BIOS flash enable/disable" jumper is needed?) that CGA card was the only case I could come up with (re: killer software).
;)
Of course, with kiddie trojans dialing 911 on the modem, I could see circumstances in which software might kill the user, but that's a little far-fetched...
Well, don't laugh, but _the_ game which got me sold on a graphics card feature, was... The Sims. Not even really 3D, but it did have the option to turn (edge) anti-aliasing on and off. All that hype from 3dfx fans and counter-hype from nVidia fans was good and nice, but seeing first hand that 800x600 anti-aliased looked _much_ better than 1024x768 aliased, was just the kind of definitive first-hand proof that I needed. Next thing I was buying a Voodoo 5, and haven't played a 3d game without anti-aliasing on ever since.
Hmm... Unreal was already mentioned, and a beautiful game it was indeed.
But older "whoa, it's beautiful" moments would include stuff like Might and Magic 3. Those pre-rendered marble walls with reflection effects, now that looked great. In 320x200 with a whole 256 colours too. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, it was basically a turn based RPG, somewhat like the Eye of the Beholder series.)
Or does anyone remember Dark Seed? It was the first adventure game I've played which ran in 640x480, instead of 320x200. Whoa. I thought it looked great.
But just for the record... you know what? The games I remember fondly typically aren't the ones with the flashiest graphics, though. It's the ones who were fun to play, and/or brought some innovation to the table. Often they were fun in _spite_ of the graphics, not because of them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Unless you unclude ye olde TFB (Toby Frame Buffer) video cards form the Mac II's.
I remember 1990. One mac ci with 3 video cards and 3 monitors. One was even a Radius Pivot. Ohhh, the 90's
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Yes he should have had Matrox listed.
However, Matrox has shown one thing since the days of Millenium cards... and that is they don't care about the consumer market.
They left the consumer behind to go for the business market and it has done them well. As for 3d gaming, they were irrelevant back in the days of 3dfx because 3dfx marketed their cards and their API to the people that mattered; developers.
Matrox has had superior technology a lot of times, their problem is it rarely does anything people really want. (and a handful of geeks doesn't count)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Hi, Just got done instant messaging with the editor of Fastsilicon.com, Nathan Odle. He asked me to post here that he's pretty frustrated that the article was released without his editing, it wasn't ready yet and would have been quite different had his red pen gotten ahold of it. You can read the other articles on the site and see that this is the case - Nathan's standards for the content are VERY high, some heads are going to roll because of what happened here. I ask you ALL to check out the other content there, it's definitely well worth reading.
-JT
I didn't say the ST was as good or better than the Amiga. It was better than the PC, and it was more popular than the Amiga at first.
The CGA card was probably the shittiest piece of EE work ever to gain acceptance in the mass market. It's amazing that IBM ever let it see the light of day.
It had more DIP packages than an entire Apple ][ motherboard, and the graphics quality pretty much spoke for itself. You could have any four colors, as long as they appeared on a Cherry Coke can.
EGA with 16 colours better than a Commodore Amiga? HAHAHAHA. In Ham mode, the Amiga was kicking out 4096! 16 colours are just garish.
:)
Ah yes. The Amiga Bigots. I'd forgotten about these guys too. Ahhh. The warm memories...
I was disappointed when I saw this card started in '96. I was hoping for some talk of the Millenium and Millenium II, Hurcules, Number 9's, and other true "classic" cards, not just the start of the 3d revolution. Oh well, good article anyhow.
From 1994 till 1999 i used my 486DX40 (later DX2/80) on a Vesa Local Bus Board. I just could not affort to upgrade my PC because I was a student those days. Looking back I have to say I did not need it. Perhaps this is the reason why I am not affected by this First Person Shooter graphics orgies. The last FPS that I really played (and not only lookd at) was DOOM, which ran quite fine on my machine.
I guess this was also the time where the lifecycle of a PC was dramatically reduced. A machine that would have been used for 5 years before this time was only good for 2 years.
I still have my 2 Voodoo2, each with 12 MB, setup in SLI mode, each taking up one PCI slot, and then fed into a STB 128 card... sweet 3d gaming, all for only 400 dollars at the time.
Nothing will ever come close to that initial awe of playing Descent3D, and making my friends sick as I swung the ship around with 6 degrees of movement.
B.U.N.G.
I agree the most significant card after the Voodoo 1 was the first TNT chipset. TNT2 was great, but TNT1 was the first chipset that produced graphic quality on par with Voodoo but with integrated 2D. It even matched up well in speed to a single Voodoo, losing just by a little.
= 14 50
The TNT2 Ultra (by Creative) really turned the tides. A single (AGP) card with the performance and quality of a dual Voodoo 2 system (a dual Voodoo 2 system still piggybacked, so required 3 cards) or a Voodoo 3. And, if you were lucky, you could overclock it some more! And, if you were really feeling randy, you could run in 32bit mode. 3dfx's embarassing lack of 32bit support led them to making some really silly pronouncements about how the the average gamer didn't really want 32bits because of the reduced frame rate. Within mere months of this announcement NVidia had cards out that provided higher frame rates in 32 bit mode than 3dfx could provide in 16 bit mode.
Anyway, to fill in the back story some, nVidias Riva 128 was a pretty lousy card, the Riva 128ZX was the first really useable card from them. It had Open GL support, so it was about the only other card you could use with Quake/Quake 2 besides the Voodoo.
The first popular combined 2D/3D card was the Matrox Mystique. The Matrox Mystique was cheap because it used regular SDRAM (instead of VRAM/WRAM) for its memory. This allowed them to add a lot more memory (4M IIRC) to it so that the 3D system could operate from on-card textures. The main thing responsible for the Matrox Mystique's popularity was that it worked with Tomb Raider, which was THE game at the time.
Anyway, this article seems to be all excited about NVidia versus ATI. Of all the stories in the time frame this article covers, this is a very minor one. Much bigger is the rise and fall of 3dfx and the fall of Matrox (the 2D champion). Furthermore, I think the story of S3, who popularized graphics acceleration and took the very first stab at integrated 3D acceleration, is worth telling.
Anyway, I happened across a decent link about the earlier stories here.
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=412&pid
they just realised that the voodoo was shafting them so they quickly licensed and produced clones of the PowerVR card (which as you mention was superior to the Voodoo). I think the Matrox version was called m3d.
lol. Actually I'm sad to say that I had to sit quietly on the sidelines as my Amiga and ST owning friends compared the size of their, errr, ummm, processing power. I had an Amstrad 1512 (8086 @ ~8MHz) running glorious CGA, or some extended proprietary mode that was only really ever supported by GEM Desktop. If my friend's turned their attention to other platforms, it was Apple. The PC wasn't even worth their time mocking :( Which reminds me, one the favourite arguments amongst Amiga bigots was based on how good Defender of the Crown was compared to the other implementations... I see they're trying to market that game as original on the XBox now.
If you were playing games, obviously the 4096 colour goodness the Amiga provided was great for static screen art (if I remember, it wasnt well suited for sprites and the like as it made use of a primitive compression system). But the resolution of most of the Amiga modes wasn't great - 320x200, or 320x240, something like that.
Of course, f you're doing word processing, the superior 640x480 resolution of the PC screen (however many colours it has) is going to come away on top.
It just depends what you wanted to do with your computer.
This article is not a "history of video cards". At best it's an "overview of two popular 3d accelerators". There are a whole bunch of 3d accelerators missing, and there is no mention of the long history of 2d cards either. S3, Hercules and Matrox should have been covered, but aren't.
I had a Canopus Pure3D back in the day, 6 meg Voodoo card, as opposed to everyone elses 4 meg. For 179, vs 200+!
Man I miss Canopus. I'd probably be bu
Corrections:
- The ST's mono mode is 640x400 in 2-bit (b&w)
- Amiga's standard modes were: 320x200 32-clr, 640x200 16-clr, 640x400 16-clr (laced). Of course there was HAM mode, EHB (half-brite), etc.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
In my old 240MMX (formerly 133mhz, CPU upgrade from Evergreen), I had 64mb EDO RAM, and a Matrox MGA Millennium 4mb WRAM PCI Video Card with a Diamond Monster 3D VooDoo 3400 xl 2 PCI Add-On 4mb 3D Accelerator.
With this config, I was able to play Half-Life at 800x600 with nearly all of the options turned on, at an acceptable frame rate (25+).
If anyone wants to buy this rig, pay for shipping and I'll send it to ya with an AHA-2940 scsi card and a 1gb scsi HD, an NEC 6x cd-rom, and a few other things. I even upgraded the ram to 128mb EDO a few years back.
Oh yeah, sorry I forgot they are now called Forceware. :) Kinda expected my computer to levitate after installing the latest drivers. Not sure why they changed names? Guess it's better than the computer exploding.
What about the S3 Virge?
I watched the video card wars from inside a game company. Watching the development issues with Glide vs DirectX was a huge part of the decision on what card to get. The number of versions of DirectX that we have gone through was as important to the early development of competitors to 3dFX, because 3dFX OWNED the original API. doing to DirectX allowed NVidia and ATI to compete on pure hardware issues.
3dfx won a lawsuit, but nVidia bought them out. I was sad when I read that. =/
T F- 8&q=Nvidia+buys+3dfx+lawsuit&meta=
1 08
More info, copy/pasted from an AC comment:
3dfx won the lawsuit and Nvidia did buy 3dfx google it!
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=U
http://www.vr-zone.com/Home/news71/news71.htm#1
In a Rage, the Voodoo was blown away by TNT.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Actually, I'd say one of the far too -many- circumstances where PC hardware could be broken by software.
But I'd say it's much more of a software problem. The operating system should NOT allow direct hardware access to any software except the ones that know what they're doing (read: device drivers).
Note that even with a decent operating system, it is sometimes still possible to physically screw up hardware with a bad driver.
(Like the recent debacle with Mandrake screwing up LG drives, even if the fault wasn't as much in the device driver as in the drive firmware)
ATI's strategy seemed to be to lie in wait for their time to strike...
In October of 1999, NVIDIA dealt the final blow to 3dfx...
If this writer ever gets tired of the tech industry he may do well to apply at Ring magazine.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
Unfortunately, even though we still use SGI for live broadcasts, it's just too late. All of our 3D work is done on PCs, and our IR, which we use for VizRT (a Real-time 3D package) is going to be replaced with a PC, soon.
Sounds about right. A lot of older VizRT setups (generally those using pre-HD video hardware) are being replaced with PCs as television stations move to higher resolution. Even SGI is moving towards commodity graphics hardware. Onyx4 uses an Origin 350 with 4, 9, or 16 ATI FireGL X1 GPUs tiled and composited per pipe. It's faster than IR4 for most things, but does not yet have all the features. It's only a matter of time before IR4 (or even an IR5) is replaced alltogether by a matrix of GPUs. Even the goofy scoreboard/replay animations on NFL broadcasts don't need anything more than a single FireGL/Radeon9800.
One of our local stations is going to "low" res 480p next month when it goes digital. Because they had no need for HD, they simply replaced their SGI O2's analog video i/o board with a CCIR-601 SDI digital video i/o board they got from some used sgi dealer for next to nothing. Others are still using their digital video boards in Indigo2 IMPACT series machines! I guess if it works, don't fix it! HD boards for Onyx and Octane aren't cheap... still above $8K used. It's almost cheaper to get a whole new PC for on-air graphics. Plus the station engineers love the warm fuzzy feeling of using an OS they have at home and on nearly every desk in the office. Some of the lesser engineers who have never quite figured out NFS or FTP love the ability to run Illustrator and Photoshop on the same machine as well.
Bzzzt - wrong - Apple used it for the Mac 2 in about 1987 (pre windows), SuperMac did large screen 8-bit cards aropund the same time (and later 24-bit cards and accelerators). Windows took forever to catch up - largly due to evil address space limitations forcing bank switched displays (VGA et al) and crappy backplane buses. It wasn't really untill VLB and PCI took off that real video cards started to blossom for the PC platform
It's when I read articles like this i feel really old. Someone writes the history on graphics cards and things like the Hercules/CGA card is not even mentioned. Guess thats why history repeats itself, nobody bothers to learn from it.
Some of my favorite cards were the 'decelerators' such as the Yamaha device. They hadn't yet figured out how to do 'perfect scan' so if you rendered a pair of triangles with a common edge then the pixels on that edge would be rendered in both triangles. If you rendered a square tesselated as triangles in the obvious way then the corner pixels were rendered 6 times. I had arguments with the guys about performance. They told me my drivers sucked as I couldn't match their laboratory performance. It's astonishing that a company could bring a device as far as first silicon without knowing how to rasterize a triangle correctly! Even without such mistakes they were still slow as the PCI bus was no way to send 3D instructions, geometry and textures anywhere. It would often take longer to format the data and send it to the device than simply rasterize directly to screen memory in software - even on early Pentiums!
Then there was the first nvidia card that you may or may not know about. My God this thing was bad. Now I can't remember the exact details (this is many years ago) but it was very like the Sega Saturn's 3D system. (I don't think there's a coincidence here, the card came with a PC version of Virtua Fighter so I guess Sega and Nvidia were working together). Basically it was a sprite renderer. A square sprite renderer. But it had been hacked so the spans of the sprites could be lines that weren't raster aligned. So you could render twisted rectangles. With some deviousness you could render polygons with perspective and you had a 3D renderer. But it basically always 'pushed' an entire sprite. So it was pretty well impossible to do any kind of clipping. It was next to impossible to map the functionality to any kind of 3D API and so could only run applications dedicated to it. Again they complained that we were unable to write proper 3D drivers for their card. Admittedly their design did at least allow some games to run fast but I'm still amazed by the lack of understanding by the early nvidia guys. So when they eventually overtook 3dfx I was completely blown away.
And then there was the question of APIs. In the old days there was no Direct3D. There was OpenGL but most PCs were a long way from having the power for a full OpenGL implementation. Early on only one company was interested in OpenGL - 3dLabs. They were the only company who understood what they were doing on PCs in those early days. So there was a variety of APIs: Renderware, Rendermorphics, and BRender among others. Rendermorphics was eventually bought by MS and became Direct3D. The first few revisions were terrible but as they always do MS eventually 'got it'. Renderware is still going. They are part of Canon. Anyone who knows Canon will be aware that they patent everything. If you dig out the early Canon patents you'll find they patented fast rendering of speculars by a technique which meant they didn't actually move as the viewpoint move. (If you know 3D you should be laughing loudly right about now.) But Renderware did get their act together and now have a 3D API that runs on a few consoles. And some of the earliest and coolest 3D hacks were first patented by them. BRender just disappeared though Jez San, the guy behind it, recently received an OBE for his influence on the British computer games industry. (Gossip tidbit: at one point SGI were looking for a 3D API for PCs and chose BRender over OpenGL for their FireWalker game development system.) If you dig into the pre-pre-history of 3D accelerators you'll see that San's company, Argonaut, developed the first commercial 3D accelerator (though not PC card) - the FX chip for the SNES, used for Starfox.
And this is all from memory so please accept my apologies for errors and post corrections!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Oh yeah, HAM mode was great - if you liked going blind. It was Interlaced rendering it nearly useless. If you think setting your PC monitor at 60Hz is bad, try 30Hz. Ugh!
:-)
I owned an Amiga 2000 and enjoyed it thoroughly. It served it's purpose. Now it is just a piece of computer history. Ooops! Sorry! I hope the Amiga bigots aren't reading this.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
period. I don't understand how/why it is posted in /.
Is it absolutely necessary to have a sig. ?
how many fucking times have we had the fucking history of fucking video cards fucking posted now?
fuck!
you mean that, when you buy a graphic card for games, they are giving you buggy drivers on purpose? (as much more stable drivers are in fact available). How nice of them... :-)
The sad part is that it's partly true, as can be seen here (note: it was just the first link I found after a quick search on google).
What, no Voodoo 6 8000?
With today's CPUs having more than enough power for most tasks done by the average user, when will we get to the point where we don't need a video accelerator? The six month cycle makes upgrading to a new video card an expensive and risky proposition afterall.
For example, I wonder how many FPS a P4 3.2 or an Operon can pump out @1024x768x16bit in Q3 with only software rending.
Now if I can only file down my GF5950 hsf to fit into one agp slot... getting close.... My Hercules EGA card is smaller, maybe time to convert.... I think there's a way to overclock that baby!!
Finally can use the digital port on my LCD panels!
You could use HAM in non-interlaced modes as well. The problem with HAM was not interlacing but that it was basically a kludge, only appropriate for static images. It took years before the first paint program could effectively do HAM and fix most of the HAM color inaccuracies.
It's Buckaroo Banzai, you great dope. :-P
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
i had one these things. it had a blue video hub attached to the card that snaked out. it was funky. it imported video pretty well though on my pii 266. also ran quake ii nicely.
This is not accurate. The article starts off with the Voodoo being the first 3D consumer card, which is false. ATI had the 3DXpression PC2TV (Mach64 based chipset), Nvidia had the NV1, and Matrox had the Millinuem 1 and the NEC PowerVR powered M3D out before 3Dfx released the Voodoo1. Yes, all but the PowerVR were week competitors to 3Dfx, but they were first.
Jim
"Life is art...Paint your destiny"
Sure it was really brief, but it left out a lot of major cards and even left out the main reason 3dfx died: no 32-bit color support. Sure, that hardcore gamers didn't care, but the hardcore gamers only represent 0.000001% of the world market.
When the average consumer sees two card that are about the same except one is dramatically better in something EVERYBODY understands without a CS degeee, that card wins.
Not only did he miss the Verte, there were a lot of things that he skipped between the introduction of the GeForce and present day history. He pretty much went over the forces that brought 3DFX down, but not what brought the gfx industry to where it is.
He missed the initial release of the Radeon, the quality of the drivers, the fast paced competition between ATI and Nvidia at the time (Radeon 8700 vs. GeForce 2/3). He missed the little companies like the one that produced the Kyro and Kyro II, which had better framerates than any other card in Serious Sam. I wanted to buy one, just because I thought the implementation was the coolest thing since sliced cheese, and the blue orb fan on top didn't hurt.
He failed to mention the graphical libraries that stimulated the archetecture, about how MS's DirectX/Direct3D slowly took over, and how OpenGL got stuck in the quagmire of beauracracy. The TNT2 card was great for OpenGL, as are newer generations, BUT they're design are almost all MS-centric. You see the cards lined up against DX versions, TXT2 = DX6, GeForce 1&2, Radeon = DX7, GeForce 3 & 4 = DX8, Radeon 8900 = DX8.1, GeForce FX / Radeon 9700-9800 = DX9.
If you claim to do a history, I expect to see more than just a summary of events. I expect to see the politics, the intrigue, the setting, the plots, the espionage, the murder, the killings, the agreements, the treaties, etc. Why is RDRAM used in Saturn and N64, but doesn't show up on Gfx cards? Why are computer graphics so much different from the consoles? What happened within 3DFX that caused them to fall? The decisions made within that particular company have to come down to a precious few... what were they're names?
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Using two Rage Pro processors in parallel, the card carried a fairly high price tag
The Rage Fury Maxx used to Rage 128 Pro chips. I found this article to be missing a lot of milestone video cards. No review could be complete w/o a Virge card, plain and simple. The first 3D decelerator.
Is it just me or is there a really big gap between the end of ATI's Rage series and the release of Radeon 9700? The author seemed to have omitted everything during that period, which saw the most dynamic "battle between ATI and nVidia.
While the Matrox Mystique did offer 3-D acceleration, the board sacrified just WAY too much graphics quality to pull off that acceleration. It had a short burst of popularity but once nVidia rolled out the Riva 128ZX and Riva TNT chipsets that could handle 3-D acceleration of more complex graphics, it was all over for the Mystique.
:-(
Matrox did fight back with the much-improved G400/G450 series of cards, but unfortunately Matrox never really advanced beyond that, being quickly overtaken by nVidia's GeForce 256 and ATI's Radeon series of chipsets. I'm disapppointed that the Parhelia from Matrox didn't come out that great, because Matrox could have produced a card that could have made them a major competitor against ATI and nVidia again.
That's not history! Not only is in grossly incomplete for the period of time it covers, it only encompasses about a third of the timeline. What about CGA, EGA and the original VGA? What about the Hercules? What gave rise to the incompatible SVGA specs? What was the first accelerated 2D card? And don't forget the Mac and Amiga!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Correction:
:o)
The ST's mono mode is 640x400 in 2-bit (b&w)
2-bit would be 4-color. B&W would be 1-bit.
HAM mode was great - if you liked going blind. It was Interlaced rendering it nearly useless.
Uh, no.
Interlacing is a method of increasing the vertical resolution of your screen without increasing the bandwidth - you draw even/odd lines on different passes, which doubles the number of lines you can display, at a cost of 'flickering' when you have high contrast on the even/odd lines on the screen. (An interesting note - some early S/VGA monitor manufacturers produced low-end interlaced monitors for the PC.)
HAM stands for Hold And Modify. It was a method of increasing the color depth (not the resolution) of the display, by allowing pixels to either be a color index, or as modification of part of the RGB value of the previous pixel.
Note that the two of these are completely independant, and while is possible to have an interlaced HAM image, it was also possible to have a non-interlaced HAM image, as well as an interlaced non-HAM image.
A minor annoyance for those who are familiar with boxing is that a right cross only comes from a person who is using a left lead. This implies that the person is left handed. For most of use, it would be a LEFT cross.
Something like jab, cross, hook, cross, down for the count (right, left, right, left, relax).
Ok, my memory is not completely clear on this. However, I don't recall there being any way to get HAM in non-interlaced mode. I remember looking for any way to get rid of the flicker. I thought it was a limitation of the graphics hardware, not the monitor. I could be wrong. Are you speaking in generalities, or based on experience with actual Amiga hardware?
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
1) Riva 128. It was NVIDIA's first competitive 3D card, and one of the first to beat the original Voodoo.
2) Riva TNT. Almost as fast as a Voodoo 2, but much better image quality and a lot of modern rendering features not present in the Voodoo series. One of the first consumer-level 3D cards whose OpenGL ICD was good enough to run pro-level apps.
3) ATI Rage Pro. First competitive AGP chipset.
4) Intel i740. First 3D chipset specifically designed for AGP. It was quite fast (TNT-1 class) and had pretty good image quality.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You could also damage or destroy a lot of older monitors by driving them at unsupported sync rates. Modern monitors will usually blank the screen and print a message. Old ones would attempt to match the rate and sometimes fail. I nuked my boss' monitor at one job switching Windows to a refresh rate I thought it could handle (but was wrong). The few seconds the confirmation dialog displayed were enough.
I used Amigas for close to 10 years. HAM colour modes are available on both interlaced and non-interlaced screen modes, however on the early revisions of the Amiga chipsets (OCS, ECS), HAM was only available in 320x256 (PAL) and 320x512 (interlaced PAL), also the NTSC modes (320x200 and 320x400 I think they are). The OCS and ECS chipsets didn't allow more than 16 colour modes above 320x512.
:)
Later on with the AGA chipset, HAM was available on all screen modes (from 320x200 all the way up to 1280x512 (PAL) and the VGA modes (800x600)). The AGA chipset also enabled 2 to 256 colour displays in all screen modes.
Hope this helps
I'm not so sure ATI knew they were being so clever at the time. I'm sure they were content to be among the worst in the market, either.
It seemed to me that they were screwing up and struggling, making crappy cards and only finally were able to establish a solid reputation after they stopped screwing up their Radeon drivers finally. The author is giving them credit for a "master plan" I doubt they ever had. This is empty history is rather tainted by present conditions. It's only in retrospect we can think maybe ATI was just being really clever.
No, it was a choice between Reggae and Miami Vice. Each had a choice between high and low intensity versions, giving 4 palettes of 4 colors each.
As many have stated this article leaves some importnant cards out of it's line up.
To me, the Intel i740 was the pick of the "early" 2D/3D cards. While not as *powerful* as the TNTs the i740 was an absolute bargain. I seem to remember picking one up for about $100 AUD (~$50 US?) with 8mb RAM.
It really was the first *affordable* video card *many* gamers found..
I don't actually have anything before TNT2 on here, but I think it's still interesting.
I had the exact same machine. It was CGA alright, but the trouble was my dad bought the version with the 4 grayscale b/w monitor. So each CGA color was some shade of gray. Can you imagine the disadvantages of both Hercules (no color) AND cga (really low 320x200 resolution, pixels the size of a house) in one easy package ? Urgh. I'm glad graphics hardware got a lot better, I can still feel my eyes hurting from trying to play games on that monstrosity.
The killer app for the 3d card was first Quake. Everything else then patched, even Quake was a patch. Tomb Raider then became the next big game in 3d glory (putting to shame any picture in software mode let alone on the Playstation on a television). But Quake was really a killer app for the Pentium as well. People that never had computers before bought one (me included) or new ones in order to play Quake. For better or worse 3dfx and Pentium was the best and ONLY card/system to really play Quake on.
The Nvidia TNT is completely left out, which is a shock considering the TNT is the card that lead to the downfall of 3dfx. It was the first card that beat the Voodoo2's 3D performance and offered 2D in one card:
Pentium 2 400mhz - Quake 2 @ 800x600
TNT2 = 40fps
Voodoo2 = 37fps
And the TNT was priced lower than a single Voodoo2, easily making it the best bang for the buck. How good was it really? Tom said it best: "This article shall answer the question if NVIDIA's RIVA TNT will be able to replace Voodoo2 and if it's indeed better than Banshee.... To already answer this question for my part, yes, I am using TNT and there are no 3Dfx cards in my own system anymore, the first time after more than 2 years."
After the TNT everything changed for Nvidia: the TNT2 followed in early '99, with the Geforce late '99 and Geforce2 in 2000. 3dfx never really caught up after the TNT, releasing the Voodoo3 in '99 but it wasn't quite up to par with the TNT2 (despite FastSilicon claiming "The Voodoo3 barely beat the TNT2 in pure FPS") and it clearly didn't compete with the TNT2 Ultra or Geforce. The rest is history.
For more video card history I suggest reading Tom's Hardware. He's still got the reviews from 1996-1997 and 1998. A much more complete history and no cards have been left out.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It was listed on the main site the day before it was slashdotted. If he doesn't want the world to see his articles before he edits them then perhaps he shouldn't post them on the main page?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone