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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.
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?