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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!"
at best buy a couple weeks ago... too bad the box was supposed to contain a Nvidia 260... s3, 3dfx, all kinds of old ass graphics boards in the box.. but no 260...
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Without it, you wouldn't be [trudging] through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor
Hmmm...is anybody able to play Crysis in all its visual splendor?
But the market never accepted them because no matter how thin they made the peripheral slots, the damn things would just fall through the case.
So, don't get me wrong. I love beautiful graphics. I love the immersive environments that they create. The atmosphere of games like Bioshock are great. Even WoW, which arguably has very scaled down graphics, is extremely involved and really pulls you into the game.
HOWEVER...
For as much as I like these graphics, games just do not hold my attention like they used to. I know I'm going to sound like "The Old Guy" with his nostalgic memories, but I spent hours and hours on games where graphics wasn't the primary draw (even for that time period). Heck, I didn't get Legend of Zelda (the original) until well after SuperNES has been out for quite some time. But, I spent so much time on that game, my original Nintendo practically burned itself up.
Basically, the point I'm trying to make is that, while graphics are important to the gaming experience, if a company really spends time on the storyline (Fallout 3, or Bioshock for example), or focuses on the fun factor (Smash Brothers!) games can be just as awesome and fun. It's not just about (or at least should not be just about) the "visual splendor."
Had beautiful graphics and ran on a 386sx with a 128 MB VGA card and a 2D GPU.
So I call Bullshit- the only reason a high powered GPU is necessary is because game programmers have become LAZY.
I call bullshit. 128MB "VGA" cards never existed. The only reason for a card to have more than a few MB of RAM (back in the day) was 3D graphics (i.e. textures). Even today, 16MB of VRAM should be enough for 32bit color depth at 2560x1600. In the days of the 386sx, having 4MB of VRAM was quite a lot. Heck, having 4MB of system RAM wasn't too bad, in those days.
The intro says to include ... other tasks that [were] once handled by the CPU.
In fact, there is a regular cycle of inventing video add-on processors, seeing them spread, then seeing the CPUs catch up and make the older video processor technology obsolete, moving the work back to the CPU. Then, of course, someone invents a new video co-processor (;-))
Foley and Van Dam, in Fundamental of Interactive Computer Graphics called this "the wheel of karma" or the "wheel of reincarnation", and described three generations before 1984.
I suspect the current effort is more directed toward building fast vector processors, rather than short-lived video-only devices. Certainly that's the direction one of the Intel researchers suggested she was headed.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
Lol. I think the mods missed your humor, but yeah, before Quake... The games technically "looked" better because they were pre-rendered cut scenes.
Remember:
Under a Killing Moon
Phantasmagoria
7th Guest
Myst
I could go on but before Quake there were a lot of games that ran on a 386/486 (actually I don't know if Killing Moon ran on a 386) and looked good because they were pre-rendered.
The real reason for the advent of the 3d card was to allow user interaction with the game world. I mean it looked like you were interacting with those games but it was just all pre-rendered.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Yeah. I started to get misty eyed seeing all the S3 and Matrox cards.
I used to work in a computer shop back in the late 90's and for home users who didn't 3d games, we'd always suggest the S3 cards over ATI simply because of stability issues with Win95 and 98.
I mean back then no one really needed the 3d part except gamers which were kind of rare.
Now 3d is integrated with the desktop. How times have changed.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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...
I remember the days of my trusty Matrox card playing Descent and Duke Nukem. Anything that ran on DOS seemed fast.
For shear enjoyment, Rise of the Triad and all of its 2D-ness still gets my vote for all-time game. Who can forget such classic weapons like the Drunk Missile and the Fire Wall? Just pray you don't cross into a hallway that someone had targeted with the firewall at the wrong time.
Good times.
Bearded Dragon
You need the Bitchin'fast3D2000
The V2 could only hit 1024x768 in SLI configuration, otherwise, you're right.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I can live with bad grammar in the submissions, and of course in the comments, but can Technical Journalists PLEASE take a few goddamned English courses?
My Babylon
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?
There's a couple of blatant omissions fron this article:
1. Matrox Millenium I/II - Matrox's best card until the G200 came along. The Millenium II was, at the time, one of very few cards that could be bought with up to 32MB of RAM. Many entry-level 3D workstations running NT4 shipped with such a configuration.
2. Matrox Mystique/Mystique220 - I STILL have one of these AND it's in service. Matrox believed that speed was king, so they designed the MGA1064SG chip for just that, but failed to add features like bilinear filtering, transparency, and mip mapping. As a result, games flew on these cards, but tended to look like utter crap. Both versions had the ability to be upgraded to 8MB or RAM or to full-on video capture and compression using the Rainbow Runner capture daughtercard (which is why I still have/use mine).
3. PowerVR PCX2 - Superceded the PCX1, faster than the original and also an add-in accellerator like the Voodoo1/2 with one two major differences: 1. It didn't require a pass-through cable for operation. 2. It could render 3D in a window as well as full screen. It was also one of two 3D chipsets with native API support by Unreal at it's launch (the other being The Voodoo chipsets). It had, in my eyes, only one major problem - no alpha blend transparency. It could do transparencies, just not alpha-blended. It did have it's own API, PowerSGL, and games coded in it (like Unreal and a Japanese game called "Pure Vex") could look quite good and were pretty fast as well. A few games had after-the-fact patches that added PowerVR support (Mechwarrior 2). Interestingly, the PCX2 could scale much better than the faster cards of the day. I'm not sure of what it's upper limit was, since most reviewers stopped testing it after a while.
4. Savage4 - The Savage series of chips from S3 had their own API called MeTaL. Unknown by many, Unreal (in later patches) and Unreal Tournament both supported MeTaL and through it S3TC. Unreal Tournament 99 looked it's absolute best when run with a Savage4 and the extra textures installed from the second CD. The S4 also had full scene AA, though I doubt anyone ever bothered using it.
5. S3 Virge - The 3D image quality of the S3 Virge was rivaled only by the Voodoo (this was repeated several times in magazine reviews). No other card delivered 3D that looked as good at the time... It was still unbearbly slow.
6. i740 - The Intel chip was one of VERY few that could run Quake III Test when it first appeared thanks to its complete OpenGL ICD.
7. 3DLabs Permedia 2 - Known, but not known... The Permedia 2 was everywhere for a minute. Most card companies were pushing this entry level 3D workstation chip as a 3D gaming platform. Performance wise... well... it kinda sucked. It was missing some features, but thanks to 3DLabs' bulletproof OpenGL ICD, it was one of few cards on the market that could properly render the particle effects on Quake II AND could run Q3T on arrival. Superceded by the Permedia 3, which WAS a better chipset in every way, but still not competitive against the likes of Nvidia and 3Dfx.
There's also the Matrox G400/450, which I still have 4 of in service at home (DH for the wife and 450's for three of my kids).
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
In the words of Bender, "that's not ironic - it's coincidental"
I have to say, this article didn't sufficiently emphasize the importance of the introduction of the GeForce and the GeForce 3. Almost every other graphics card was just "more" and "faster", but not the huge game-changing revolution that these two graphics cards represented.
Before GeForce, everything was all about accelerating rasterization - the act of filling in triangles.
With the first GeForce, lighting and transform was put into silicon. This was *huge* - this means that real math processing units were put into hardware. Scene complexity went up drastically, since we were finally able to push a lot of the more expensive operations into hardware.
With the GeForce 3, we had the introduction of the *programmable* graphics pipeline. This was a huge game changer - for the first time, the developer was limited only by their own intellect and creativity what kinds of things could go into the hardware. This was the beginning of what could be considered the first mass produced commercial stream processing unit. The graphics card has become a general purpose computational unit, a blazingly fast computational unit with applications into fields that have absolutely nothing to do with computer graphics.
I'm not sure what the ultimate evolution of the stream processor will be, but it still has the potential to really change the fundamental architecture of how future computers will be designed. Stream processors might eventually displace CPUs as the main computational workhorse in a computer.
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
Not to mention the added luster of nostalgia. I was showing my mom Fallout 3 and her comment was like "wow, it looks almost as good as Myst!"