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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.
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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...
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?
Nuke warm cards huh? How many fans do you need for one of those?
The Internet needs an editor or two hanging around.
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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!
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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.
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?
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 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!
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.
OTOH, most of the peers of the early PCs had total crap text modes; they couldn't do what the PC could do. (Yes, this includes the Apple. There were no Macs yet.) This is one of the major reasons the PC ended up dominating; text mode was simply more important. Remember that back then most all business use and a good amount of home use was in text mode (word processing, spreadsheets, financial, etc.).
The original IBM PC and its clones usually came with a specially designed monochrome text mode monitor with relatively high resolution (720 x something, no dot pitch to worry about). The monitors had a very long persistence phosphor that totally eliminated flicker. The monochrome text-mode video cards had a very nice serif font stored in their ROMs. IBM's intent was to recreate the feel of their expensive dedicated mainframe text terminals.
This setup had a very high quality feel, and you could stare at it all day without getting eye strain. Early color graphics monitors, OTOH, were horrible at showing text. This was compounded by the crappy fonts that were shipped with most early graphic OSes. This made most of the PC's early competitors pretty useless for doing long stretches of serious work.
IBM's attempt to provide color graphics did suck big time [*]. Originally, you had to buy two graphics adapters and two separate monitors to get text and graphics on the same machine. One of Compaq's claims to fame was getting the patent on unifying the PCs high-quality text mode and its graphics modes on a single graphics adapter and monitor.
[*] The original 16-bit color mode of the EGA cards and VGA cards must have been designed by somebody who was high on crack. You can't get at the pixel memory without setting up a bewildering array of registers that control mandatory and mostly non-useful logic operations on your bits. The memory is accessed as 4 independent planes, so you have to unnaturally slice every pixel up into individual bits and have a PhD in boolean logic to get them on the screen as you intended. It easily could take a newbie a whole day of reading manuals and hacking before they could get a single white dot on the screen.
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