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: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.

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.