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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
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.
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
Back then, the hardware specs (so you could program the device) came with all the accessories you bought for your PC. Imagine that.
Printers had a book with all the Escape codes, Video cards told you which modes they supported, modems had AT command set references...
Try getting the specs to a PCI card nowadays....
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?!
It's basically just an article on the early 3dfx cards and then a quick skim of about 1/4th of nVidia's lineup and a love-fest with ATI's most recent cards.
It almost sounds like the author only talked about the cards he owned.
Just on the nVidia side, he barely mentioned the TNT and it's various derivatives, didn't mention the TNT2 Ultra or other TNT2 cards (except the baseline), and didn't mention that the GeForce 256 came in SDR and DDR versions, pretty much solidifying the future of DDR on video cards (because there was little other difference between the cards to explain the difference in benchmarks). Not to mention the later GF2 upgrades, the GF3, and the GF4.
Even with his early mentions of ATI he missed the mark a bit. ATI wasn't aiming for the 3d market so much because they had a solid hold on the OEM market, which didn't care (at the time) about 3d. When the OEM's started to care, nVidia had their chipset ready in part because of their XBox work (or they got the XBox work because they were working on the chipsets for the OEM market, either way it wasn't long before they were releasing motherboard chipsets), and a solid hold on the lead in 3D graphics technology.
Beyond that, he mentions that nVidia 'bought out 3dfx', which isn't quite right, since nVidia simply bought most of their IP and left the company to it's own devices (3dfx basically sold all of their assets and shut down).
Overall, it's a very light article that could be surpassed by a quick read through the review history on most sites that review graphics hardware.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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.
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
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.