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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."
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Check this one:
http://www.accelenation.com/?ac.id.123.1
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.
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.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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