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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!"
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.
You need the Bitchin'fast3D2000
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?
> It's also very noisy.
In the words of Bender, "that's not ironic - it's coincidental"