There actually were DOS games that could take advantage of Glide. Descent II, Tomb Raider, and Mechwarrior II come to mind. My guess is that the executables were statically linked to a DOS-native implementation of Glide to communicate with whatever 3dfx card was present in the system.
For Tomb Raider, I'd be willing to believe it. There was something "muddy" about 3Dfx's texture filtering that obscured fine detail somewhat. Sadly the PCX series didn't support a lot of blending modes, which made upcoming titles with colored lighting a difficult (and unattractive) proposition.
I seem to remember that DirectSound was nearly impossible to get working, and that the waveOut default audio lagged by ~500 ms on most of the systems that were running it. There was also muttering about some kind of SMP weirdness a loooong time ago, though I'm pretty sure it was a driver issue on the host system. Fair enough, I recant on the rest.
The S3 ViRGE was the "decelerator" of its time. Had they been used as glorified software renderers expected to do little besides push point-sampled, perspective corrected textures onto polygons, with all geometry calculations handled by the host CPU, they would have been better, but the competition was too steep for anyone to bother writing what would amount to an enhanced software renderer. Visual quality would have been shown up badly using such a scheme, so the native titles for the ViRGE were pretty but terribly slow. From what I recall the Descent II port was a pretty heroic effort.
The Rendition cards were really very solid by comparison, but the V1000 series took a noticeable speed hit when they were expected to handle on-chip z-buffering. Their fillrate was also around half that of the Voodoo1, but they would still have been price-competitive if RAM prices hadn't fallen through the floor and made the Voodoo Graphics board realistically obtainable.
Not by using this - GLQuake was a Windows exclusive, targeted for Windows 95, that didn't even like playing nice with NT 4. The only DOS-native port of Quake that took advantage of 3D accelerators was VQuake, a terrific port of the game to the Rendition V1000 graphics cards. I would literally give a tooth to see a properly written Rendition chip emulator... the image quality and feature set of those cards was far ahead of its time, apart from the lack of per-pixel mipmapping. Emulating a 25 mpix/second card on a GeForce 9600GT might actually cause my brain to explode.
Glide was a neat low-level library, but Unreal's support for anything besides Glide and its software renderer was flat-out awful... terribly CPU-intensive, slow, and twitchy across a wide range of hardware. The enhanced OpenGL and Direct3D renderers written by cwdonahl would put the G400 comfortably ahead of the Voodoo2, were you to run the test today.
My Cliq XT's been no picnic, let me tell you. The update to 2.1 was promised back in the second quarter, and we're still waiting. It would be swell to receive a surprise around Christmas... and there's a very slim chance that might happen, since there was a freak unexpected update pushed out last week. Any sign of life is, at this point, welcome.
I'm not sure about "poor game support" so much as a lack of standardization across different distributions, and a lack of polish in the APIs available. As certain distributions become more widespread (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you), polish will follow, and a certain baseline functionality will come to be expected for most systems operating in the capacity of a desktop. With that will come polish.
ALL the rest? So we just toss Peter Watts, Charlie Stross, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Alan Dean Foster, Harlan Ellison, and all the rest aside just to read Starship Troopers? I'm not even sure it's one of Heinlein's very best...
I think ioQuake3 might be for you. By all means, keep the VM for other stuff, but there's literally no reason you shouldn't be running ioQ3 natively on your modern system.
I agree with the general thrust of your argument, but you should give ioQuake3 a try if you haven't. It runs on basically everything, has a lot of nice bugfixes and feature improvements, and is still actively updated. Win7's cavalier dismissal of thousands of 8-bit DirectDraw apps feels more than a little cynical, I'll admit... I'm fortunate in that my productivity hasn't been shackled to The World's Favorite Software.
Having a GPU on the same die isn't technologically equivalent to the SIMD execution units of the CPU literally sharing resources with the geometry processors of the GPU, with which it has both figuratively and literally been, er, fused. I'm really quite intrigued to see how Fusion turns out, and can guarantee it'll be better than this water-muddying SoC Atom solution.
Easier, yes, but according to the agreement(s) you agree to when starting the PC for the first time that might invalidate the PC's warranty. That kind of greasy dickery is hardly beyond them.
A lot would have been forgiven if they'd acquiesced to Trent Reznor's demands. I don't remember many games that had less impressive sound effects out of the box than Doom 3. Firing a machinegun was like menacingly shaking a coffee can full of pennies at the legions of hell, never mind the pistol that sounded booming and impressive when it was being fired at you, but turned into a 'piff-piff' affair in your hands. Installing a modified version of the leaked / extracted Doom 3 alpha's Reznor-provided sound effects made a huge difference.
Off the top of my head, here are just a few bad design decisions. The incessant use of imps. Ammo being incredibly available, and absurd carrying capacity - my marine can carry around up to 320 shotgun shells at once? Bosses with lame, 16-bit era gimmicks you had to use in order to defeat them. New monsters being introduced with no fanfare, then suddenly "emphasized" in a subsequent cinematic 20 minutes later. Poor use of monsters in maps, given their strengths and weaknesses. Monsters standing in place, screaming at you for upwards of two seconds of vulnerable shoot-time, then moving into position to attack. Tremendously effective monster jump scare in one map as a new demon's head tears through the overgrown hellflesh... then never seeing a trace of that monster again. Terrible specular mapping, giving every character and monster in the game the appearance of a cheap wax mannequin. Visual design still ripped off Aliens 18 years after the fact, without any apparent understanding of why that visual design originally worked. Finally, most damningly, the inability to render many monsters on-screen at once made it impossible to replicate Doom's defining sensation of being alone, hunted by a merciless battalion of monsters.
Doom wouldn't run on a 286, silly man, though Wolfenstein 3D did.:P I seem to remember anything south of a 386DX/25 being kind of a stretch for Dooming, and a 33 MHz 486 offered an experience decent enough for multiplayer. A DX/2 66 was good enough to show off, and any kind of Pentium managed to top out the framerate in all but the most demanding user-made maps of the time. The video card could be a bottleneck, too - folks with 256k Trident VGA cards were at a disadvantage compared to S3, Tseng Labs, or ATI's cards. I reckon SciTech's UniVBE saved a lot of people from buying new graphics boards...
For a single player game a target framerate of 30 fps is pretty reasonable. 30 fps was also a decent target framerate given a lot of the hardware being targeted: such obsolete tech as Geforce3s, Geforce4 MXes, and Radeon 8500s rendered the game while looking shockingly good, and managed to run at between 20 and 30 fps. I ran the game on my old workhorse: an Athlon XP 2400+ with a gig of RAM, and a GeForceFX 5900XT. It cranked through the game at around 35 fps, and I was very happy with that.
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There actually were DOS games that could take advantage of Glide. Descent II, Tomb Raider, and Mechwarrior II come to mind. My guess is that the executables were statically linked to a DOS-native implementation of Glide to communicate with whatever 3dfx card was present in the system.
Creepy... the drivers for the hardware we had available must have let us down. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
For Tomb Raider, I'd be willing to believe it. There was something "muddy" about 3Dfx's texture filtering that obscured fine detail somewhat. Sadly the PCX series didn't support a lot of blending modes, which made upcoming titles with colored lighting a difficult (and unattractive) proposition.
I seem to remember that DirectSound was nearly impossible to get working, and that the waveOut default audio lagged by ~500 ms on most of the systems that were running it. There was also muttering about some kind of SMP weirdness a loooong time ago, though I'm pretty sure it was a driver issue on the host system. Fair enough, I recant on the rest.
The S3 ViRGE was the "decelerator" of its time. Had they been used as glorified software renderers expected to do little besides push point-sampled, perspective corrected textures onto polygons, with all geometry calculations handled by the host CPU, they would have been better, but the competition was too steep for anyone to bother writing what would amount to an enhanced software renderer. Visual quality would have been shown up badly using such a scheme, so the native titles for the ViRGE were pretty but terribly slow. From what I recall the Descent II port was a pretty heroic effort.
The Rendition cards were really very solid by comparison, but the V1000 series took a noticeable speed hit when they were expected to handle on-chip z-buffering. Their fillrate was also around half that of the Voodoo1, but they would still have been price-competitive if RAM prices hadn't fallen through the floor and made the Voodoo Graphics board realistically obtainable.
I see your PCX-*, and raise you the Rendition Vérité. Give me.
Not by using this - GLQuake was a Windows exclusive, targeted for Windows 95, that didn't even like playing nice with NT 4. The only DOS-native port of Quake that took advantage of 3D accelerators was VQuake, a terrific port of the game to the Rendition V1000 graphics cards. I would literally give a tooth to see a properly written Rendition chip emulator... the image quality and feature set of those cards was far ahead of its time, apart from the lack of per-pixel mipmapping. Emulating a 25 mpix/second card on a GeForce 9600GT might actually cause my brain to explode.
Citations, please. I never got to see a vintage PowerVR card in action. :)
Glide was a neat low-level library, but Unreal's support for anything besides Glide and its software renderer was flat-out awful... terribly CPU-intensive, slow, and twitchy across a wide range of hardware. The enhanced OpenGL and Direct3D renderers written by cwdonahl would put the G400 comfortably ahead of the Voodoo2, were you to run the test today.
Sell it, if you can. There are people increasingly willing to spend more than you'd think for a 3dfx board.
My Cliq XT's been no picnic, let me tell you. The update to 2.1 was promised back in the second quarter, and we're still waiting. It would be swell to receive a surprise around Christmas... and there's a very slim chance that might happen, since there was a freak unexpected update pushed out last week. Any sign of life is, at this point, welcome.
That would be called "veal."
I'm not sure about "poor game support" so much as a lack of standardization across different distributions, and a lack of polish in the APIs available. As certain distributions become more widespread (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you), polish will follow, and a certain baseline functionality will come to be expected for most systems operating in the capacity of a desktop. With that will come polish.
Well, I'm glad this revelation is coming from a clearly unbiased source.
ALL the rest? So we just toss Peter Watts, Charlie Stross, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Alan Dean Foster, Harlan Ellison, and all the rest aside just to read Starship Troopers? I'm not even sure it's one of Heinlein's very best...
I think ioQuake3 might be for you. By all means, keep the VM for other stuff, but there's literally no reason you shouldn't be running ioQ3 natively on your modern system.
I agree with the general thrust of your argument, but you should give ioQuake3 a try if you haven't. It runs on basically everything, has a lot of nice bugfixes and feature improvements, and is still actively updated. Win7's cavalier dismissal of thousands of 8-bit DirectDraw apps feels more than a little cynical, I'll admit... I'm fortunate in that my productivity hasn't been shackled to The World's Favorite Software.
Would a power outage result in a scene that was sad, or genuinely horrifying?
Having a GPU on the same die isn't technologically equivalent to the SIMD execution units of the CPU literally sharing resources with the geometry processors of the GPU, with which it has both figuratively and literally been, er, fused. I'm really quite intrigued to see how Fusion turns out, and can guarantee it'll be better than this water-muddying SoC Atom solution.
I meant in terms of software support, but thanks for calling me on that.
Easier, yes, but according to the agreement(s) you agree to when starting the PC for the first time that might invalidate the PC's warranty. That kind of greasy dickery is hardly beyond them.
A lot would have been forgiven if they'd acquiesced to Trent Reznor's demands. I don't remember many games that had less impressive sound effects out of the box than Doom 3. Firing a machinegun was like menacingly shaking a coffee can full of pennies at the legions of hell, never mind the pistol that sounded booming and impressive when it was being fired at you, but turned into a 'piff-piff' affair in your hands. Installing a modified version of the leaked / extracted Doom 3 alpha's Reznor-provided sound effects made a huge difference.
Off the top of my head, here are just a few bad design decisions. The incessant use of imps. Ammo being incredibly available, and absurd carrying capacity - my marine can carry around up to 320 shotgun shells at once? Bosses with lame, 16-bit era gimmicks you had to use in order to defeat them. New monsters being introduced with no fanfare, then suddenly "emphasized" in a subsequent cinematic 20 minutes later. Poor use of monsters in maps, given their strengths and weaknesses. Monsters standing in place, screaming at you for upwards of two seconds of vulnerable shoot-time, then moving into position to attack. Tremendously effective monster jump scare in one map as a new demon's head tears through the overgrown hellflesh... then never seeing a trace of that monster again. Terrible specular mapping, giving every character and monster in the game the appearance of a cheap wax mannequin. Visual design still ripped off Aliens 18 years after the fact, without any apparent understanding of why that visual design originally worked. Finally, most damningly, the inability to render many monsters on-screen at once made it impossible to replicate Doom's defining sensation of being alone, hunted by a merciless battalion of monsters.
Doom wouldn't run on a 286, silly man, though Wolfenstein 3D did. :P I seem to remember anything south of a 386DX/25 being kind of a stretch for Dooming, and a 33 MHz 486 offered an experience decent enough for multiplayer. A DX/2 66 was good enough to show off, and any kind of Pentium managed to top out the framerate in all but the most demanding user-made maps of the time. The video card could be a bottleneck, too - folks with 256k Trident VGA cards were at a disadvantage compared to S3, Tseng Labs, or ATI's cards. I reckon SciTech's UniVBE saved a lot of people from buying new graphics boards...
For a single player game a target framerate of 30 fps is pretty reasonable. 30 fps was also a decent target framerate given a lot of the hardware being targeted: such obsolete tech as Geforce3s, Geforce4 MXes, and Radeon 8500s rendered the game while looking shockingly good, and managed to run at between 20 and 30 fps. I ran the game on my old workhorse: an Athlon XP 2400+ with a gig of RAM, and a GeForceFX 5900XT. It cranked through the game at around 35 fps, and I was very happy with that.
It sort of exists. I haven't tried it, but search for Doom 2.5.