A History of 3D Cards From Voodoo To GeForce 320
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!"
Thanks (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when we were big time because we had color. No movement... just more colors than amber or green. Whooo Hoooo! We were the shizzle!!! Especially with our 9600 baud modems!
Then we got movement too, not just pretty words on the BBS, because, yeah, that was before the "real" internet happened.
Once more around the wheel of Karma, dear friends! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Why do they call them 3D cards? (Score:2, Interesting)
The environments are defined in a full 3d environment.
It's not until the end, when the coordinates are clipped for display on the monitor, that it becomes 2D.
So the term is accurate.
Re:Thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Matrox Millenium (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The times are a changin' (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember buying a voodoo for my P133. I had a lanparty at the same day (just 10 or so of us guys from school).
I build it in during the lanparty, and the first thing to try was glQuake.
I had run it before a couple of parties back, and people where like "AWESOME how this looks. Too bad there is only a frame every 5 second" (no joke, Gl software wrapper was slow as fuck. But pretty).
Well, it ran on the voodoo, just as nice looking, with 30fps.
Even though we were all kids without income, the majority of people in that room had a 300$ voodoo by the end of the month.
I dont think that i will ever see such a performance revolution again
Re:Ugh, s3 Virge... (Score:3, Interesting)
Resolution played a huge part in performance considerations. But there was also the problem with card support.
Remember UniVBE? You needed that to get high res display, but it was very, VERY slow. I managed to get 1024x768 with 256 colors on my 386, and about all it was good for was viewing photos because they took about a second to draw. I managed to get Win 3.1 run at that resolution and could watch the windows slowly appear on the screen.
One of the first games I remember playing in high res graphics was a chess game precisely because lack of performance wasn't such a big deal for that kind of thing.
Missing from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Matrox Millenium (Score:1, Interesting)
For me, RoTT still has some of the most fun weapons ever in that sort of game. Drunk missiles, the file missiles, the spinning things that would turn you into hamburger, 'shrooms, and many others. The 'hand of God' weapon was easily the neatest such weapon ever. Then there was the dog-bark weapon. Wow. LOL
RoTT was a game you could just play to have fun with it and the developer's sense of humor was rampant. Long before Google did their holiday-themed search pages, RoTT had themed intro screens. If it was Halloween, the 'cast' picture was suddenly all in Halloween costumes, or Santa suits at Christmas. Jackie Chan's name was one of the cheat codes. RoTT was a serious game, but also about having fun. Ludicrous Gibs all the way.
RoTT was also amazing as a modem game. Me and a buddy used to play each other over dial-up and it actually worked! It all worked. We were astonished. And then went off on an arms race to build faster and better computers to play these games.
Games like RoTT and Duke 3D and Descent and Doom really teased us into buying better and better stuff. I remember I got my first gigabyte hard drive around the time Duke3D came out. I thought I had endless space. Wow. This past weekend, put in a 1.5TB drive in my main PC and it seems small already. The disk space Duke Nukem once took up is now an acceptable rounding error.
TS:DR (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ugh, s3 Virge... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow! Thanks for reminding me about UniVBE. I used that a lot back in the day but had completely forgotten about its existence ;)
Pretty sure I used it on my 486 DX4/100 to get all manner of games running at 800x600 (which was the preferred resolution on the 15" monitor I had at the time).