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A History of 3D Cards From Voodoo To GeForce
Ant sends us to Maximum PC for an account of the history and current state of 3D video cards (single print page). "Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be [trudging] through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today... Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that [were] once handled by the CPU. It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgic ride you don't want to miss!"
The 'MeTaL' acceleration was bullshit.
Given that "MeTaL" was for Savage3D, not Virge, it's not surprising that it didn't do very much for you.
What would Lemmy do?
Then you've lived through some really terrible drivers and I'm sure more than your share of BSOD's. ATI might make great hardware but they don't seem to be able to write a decent driver to save their life.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
this time the image quality was improved, particularly at higher resolutions (1024x768) where the Voodoo1 struggled.
Interesting, considering the Voodoo2 had a 800x600 resolution limitation
Actually CGA was only 4 simultaneous colors, from only two color palettes.
P.S.: read the "160x100 16 color mode" part. Interesting stuff.
The V2 could only hit 1024x768 in SLI configuration, otherwise, you're right.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Personally, I found the article quite nice - it was a nice trip.
Me too, but it also made me realize that I've spent way too much money on video cards over the years. My first 3D card was a Monster Voodoo 1 w/ 4 MB of RAM, which I returned when I found a 6 MB Voodoo 1 from Canopus for the same price. It paired nicely, at the time, with a 4 MB Matrox Millennium.
I was kind of surprised that they missed quite a few cards though. There was a company nameded Obsidian (or maybe that was the name of their cards) that made $1000+ cards with up to at least 4 (I think they had a 8 GPU board) Voodoo 1 chips at the time.
Since they also mentioned some other flops, I thought they'd have mentioned the Matrox Mystique and some of the other cards that were more CPU dependent.
S3 Virge, not regular Virge. There was a difference. S3 Virge used MeTaL. Regular Virge/VX/DX/Trio3D did not use metal. S3Virge cards did.
Sorry, I think your memory is somewhat faulty there. MeTaL was definitely Savage series only, I know because I helped write it.
What would Lemmy do?
Am I missing a joke or is it an error that the description of the GeForce FX 5800 features the image of a vacuum cleaner? I mean... not that a vacuum cleaner with 15 million transistors is not impressive...
It was REALLY loud
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYWaUJakMfg
Stereoscope cards can be had for well under $500.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Read the article. The FX 5800 got nicknamed "the Dustbuster" because of its high noise level.
ATI's driver quality is fairly decent these days. I used to get hard locks when playing Oblivion on my old Radeon 9800 Pro, but those disappeared as soon as I got a better cooler and fan on it. I don't think I've ever had a bluescreen or crash in Windows XP with my current X1950 Pro. The Linux drivers have been a different matter, but at least the open drivers seem stable enough.
Those games you mentioned didn't utilize any 3D acceleration.
Umm.
http://www.savagenews.com/drivers/s3/s3metal.php
MeTaL Drivers for the S3D ViRGE GX2 AND Savage cards. The S3D ViRGEGX2 was an AGP card that used MeTaL. I used it for UT'99 and UT'99 recognized it as a MeTaL device.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Then, oh the joy of AMD 486 overclocked Intel clones that drove the VGA straight of the CPU pins - what was that called again? -
VESA Local Bus (VLB). They had it on Intel DX/2s as well. Adaptec (and others) made SCSI controllers for the VLB also.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Those drivers are all for Savage: it says "Supported Savage Cards" at the top. You're correct, there were AGP Virge cards. The native API for these cards was called "S3D" not "MeTaL" and was a different (and older) codebase. UT99 would have definitely blown goats on any of the Virge series.
What would Lemmy do?
Actually the graphics for TF2 could have been done ever since the release of the GeForce 6 series of cards. I point you to .kkreiger , which comparatively (for only 64k of code) looks pretty comparable to TF2.
BTW anything using the Source Engine (TF2) can scale down to run on much older hardware. HL2 ran just fine on a GeForce 2 MX when I first played it, of course only at 640x480 but it certainly looked good and ran well.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They really were 3D games. It's just that all the calculations were done on the CPU. You could actually run those games on a regular VGA card with as little as 256k video memory. Duke Nukem 3D could utilize VGA mode 13h, so even 64k of video memory was enough.
The first I-War game was designed for software rendering and the 3D was bolted on afterwards. This meant that the ingame rendering on a 3DFX card was noticeably higher quality than the pre-rendered cut scenes.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.