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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.
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
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
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?
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
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
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.
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 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
Which is a pretty simple way to get double the performance. I wonder why noone's done this recently
They are, in the chip itself, sorta. Modern all-in-one GPUs have multiple texture pipelines, which does split some of the load on the silicon level. It's not SLI, but it's the same concept.
The problem is SLI only doubles the fillrate. Both 3D chipsets need to work on the exact same dataset. SLI was a great boost back when 3D hardware was slow at texturing. These days the hardware can pump a couple thousand frames per second worth of textures, it's fancy multipass rendering and dynamic shaders (and to some extent, the geometry) that take up all of the frame generation time. SLI could speed some of this up, but it wouldn't help with most of the bottlenecks. It would be like putting new tires on a car that needs an engine tuneup.
iD released a win32/OpenGL version of quake as unsupported, though free, software a couple of years after the original, called GLQuake.
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
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.
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.
i'm aware of two 3d accelerated versions of quake for windows back in the day: vquake, for rendition's verite line of cards, and glquake, which worked with any opengl compliant video card. glquake at first was used almost exclusively with 3dfx voodoo boards and so people thought it was 3dfx specific. in fact, 3dfx's voodoo card only supported a subset of the opengl api, hence they provided a "mini gl" driver that implemented only so much of the spec as glquake required. if you're fiddling with it today and don't have a voodoo card, you should remove the opengl32.dll in your quake directory - if memory serves, the one that came with glquake was 3dfx specific i believe and will load before your systemwide opengl library. both vquake and glquake were true win32 apps, so nothing of the dos based origins of quake should keep it from running in XP. and if it doesn't, i'm sure somebody out there has fixed it (the source is gpl'd now after all) and provides a patch and binaries for XP.
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
You had a 12 milligram graphics card?
Stick Men
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
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.
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
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.
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.