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."

Comments

Well, sort of.

[ultramk]

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-

Re:Well, sort of.

[daBass]

What they also forgot to mention was that you could daisy chain cards to get even better performance.

At the ISP I worked at I had two Voodoo 2 cards, which, on a lowly PII-350, ran Unreal Tournament with full detail in 1024*768 at a massive framerate!

Re:Well, sort of.

[PainKilleR-CE]

Nice design, for the time. The best thing was, it was CHEAP for the time (considering the performance). I think I paid $199.

The Voodoo2 cards started at $250 and $350 (or somewhere around there) for the 8MB and 12MB models, respectively. The only way to get the 1024x768 mentioned in the article was to have 2 12MB cards in SLI mode (which meant connecting the 2 V2 cards with a small ribbon cable between the two cards inside the case). Additionally, the pass-through cables that came with most V2 cards caused some degredation of the signal going to the monitor, so the graphics tended to be a bit dark, but was easily fixed by buying a better cable.

The performance was definitely solid, though, since the V2 cards I had were originally passing the 2D signal of a Riva128, and then a TNT, and finally a TNT2Ultra was the card that made me decide to pull out the V2 cards (not to mention that the V2s I owned did not have fans on the boards/chips, which meant that one of them burned up within about 6 months).

The combination of the lack of real OpenGL support, lack of 32-bit colour, and the speed of the TNT2 Ultra was what finally put 3dfx to bed, as the Voodoo 3 couldn't keep up and the Voodoo 4 was delayed far too long while 3dfx kept talking about how raw framerates were more important than features, and that no one could see the difference between 24-bit (the V3 supposedly output 24-bit colour through some tricks) and 32-bit colour anyway. Quake 3 proved them wrong quite quickly, as anyone could show with a few screenshots at the time.

An interesting tidbit.

[MtViewGuy]

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.

Some egregious errors here...

[Bagels]

From the article...

The GF2MX was a small step down, it cut off two of the pixel pipelines, and took the fill rates down to 350 pixels per second.

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.

Re:Revisionist History?

[Anonymous Coward]

What bullshit! The Rendition Verite supported bi & tri filtering, 32 bit color and a whole bunch of other 'now common' 3d features. The chip was well ahead of its time. It was the same problem nvidia first had. It had great features, but wasn't as fast as 3dfx. If Rendition would have released another card during the Riva128/TNT days (they did release the Vx2200.. which was nice, but a bit slow) with a tad more speed, we might be talking about Rendition, Nvidia, and ATi instead of just the latter two. All in all.. i can still remember playing VQuake, the first 3d version of quake, back when Carmack fully supported Verite and their far superior 3d technology.

Any article which try to encapsulate the history of 3d cards but fails to mention the Verite cards is a piss-poor article right from the get-go.

Want to read more about older video cards?

[vasqzr]

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

Re:Revisionist History?

[merlin_jim]

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

And absolutely no mention of Matrox whatsoever... despite the fact that their add-on 3D accelerator was arguably superior to the voodoo, and the parhelia is the ONLY 3d solution to support 3 display devices.

Not a complete history by any means...

[Graemee]

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.

Re:Revisionist History?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this one:

http://www.accelenation.com/?ac.id.123.1

Re:Bullshit

[Malc]

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.

Re:Revisionist History?

[sznupi]

And I'll add only that Matrox basically invented (or at least first implemented in commercial product) video ram something like quarter century ago and that they had API capable of hardware accelerating 3d aps in a window in the times of win 3.11 (several years later Voodoo couldn't do it)
And no mention about that company whatsoever :/
But hey, what can you expect from (probably) fps kiddie biased negatively towards Matrox among others - because if he'd be JUST fps kiddie (not anti Matrox and...) he'd mention the fact that for ~half a year in 99 Matrox was the leader BOTH in performance and quality...too bad since then only the second holds true.

parallel graphics pipelines

[green pizza]

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.

Please Mod Up - Fastsilicon.com Response

[johnthorensen]

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