An awesome history of 3d gpus"

kaimera

linkage

My first gpu was the voodoo banshee iirc!

I went to buy the rage at one point but couldnt afford the 200 punts being asked!

TerrorFirmer

Good link. always love reading that. this summer I have a load of older games to play like Kingpin and Quake II. I always laugh when I think of one particular memory I have, of playing allied assault and return to castle wolfenstein on my 32mb tnt2, and being so outrageously jealous of my friends geforce 2 64mb. that's really the only time i've been actually jealous of someone elses hardware and to think a geforce 2 would cost about 5 euro now...

my first card that i can remember would have been a vanilla regular tnt 16mb, though i had one before that but i was too young to know what it was, as it came in a machine. think it might have been a riva or rage pro, not more then 4mb anyway. but sure back then i was playing doom and eh...putt putt goes to the moon.

Ironically, those same ‘cutting edge’ features took a toll on the ViRGE silicon resulting in underwhelming 3D performance. In some cases, performance was so bad that users could obtain better results with the CPU, causing the ViRGE to be unaffectionate dubbed the first 3D decelerator.

hah! funny actually that it mentions the cpu, i noticed the last day having never noticed before that even UT2k4 offers software video, like the original ut - surely must have been the first game in years to support that. doesn't look half bad either.

some great gpu's in there. ati rage maxx - sort of like a old version of the X2 cards, must have been a monster in 1999. geforce 2 ultra - beast, was supported even in call of duty 2! look at the picture for the fx5600 too.

lot of cards in there i've never heard of and that's even in recent times. like the volari v8 ultra - dual gpu on single pcb too. in fact i'd assumed xgi were an old gpu manufacturer, didn't realise until now they made cards recently.

one thing though seems to be that they've entirely left out the s3 chrome cards, they've been making gpu's right up until now.

cherryghost

my first one was that intel card malarky :P load of rubbish... but i got to play age of empires 2, and thats all that mattered.

superfly

my first was the Voodoo3 3000 and it happily played Half-Life
ah memories

Darwin

Good article, another omission was the original NEC PowerVR card - was my first 3D accelerator! Fun to look back to count the number of cards I've gone through (and all that wasted money :eek:)

Dingatron

Wow thats a good read. I've had more of them than I'd care to mention. Fond memories of the Voodoo.

Blazer

No Diamond Viper Ultra either.
Remember this kicked ass in 98/99? I think when they came out.
HL had just been released and goddamn it looked fantastic on these cards.

Flaccus

My 1st 3d gpu was the S3 Virge (integrated job), followed by an ATI Rage, then a Matrox Mystique. Then all variations of the 3dfx voodoo cards starting with the Orchid Righteous 3D and upgrading at some point to the more serious Canopus Pure 3D which had more vram than any other card. I even had SLI back then. Also had various TNT and TNT Ultra cards, not sure if they were Diamond branded or not. I also had all the incarnations of the PowerVR cards. However I think the big deal for GPU's was the 1st to boast T&L support and that's when I started buying Geforce cards, and eventually ATI cards.

Mr. CooL ICE

kaimera wrote: »

My first gpu was the voodoo banshee iirc!

Me too! My PC (well, my parents') had two free PCI slots but IIRC, some stupid Win95 restriction meant I would have run our of IRQs if I use a Voodoo2.

The Banshee was a godsend, and Incoming (which came free) looked amazing



A little off topic, but I thought this was funny:

Wikipedia wrote:

Incoming is a 3D shooter developed by Rage Software and published by Interplay. The PC version was released in late 1998 and the Dreamcast version, a launch title for the console, was released in 1998 in Japan and in 1999 in the rest of the world. Set in the near-future of 2009, the game primarily revolves around controlling vehicles and turrets to fight alien invaders of Earth in one of the Campaign modes, the Arcade mode, and with or against another player.

Hank Scorpio

3dfx was awesome. Had a voodoo 3 myself. I remember i went in to buy unreal tournament in late 99' and the guy asked what 3d card i had.

I told him, and he said, sure thats the best card out right now.

Jesus i felt great

Amalgam

Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Exxtreme - 4MB - PCI





(Permedia 2 chipset)

I was amazed by Open GL plugins on Winamp. Pure joy 'watching' the music flow by..

Never found out what the input/output pins were for. I often wondered.

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Non english site, but they have superb technical details and hires pictures of even the most mundane cards.

Enjoy: VGA Legacy http://82.114.193.227/vga/index.php

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astrofool

Amalgam wrote: »

Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Exxtreme - 4MB - PCI





(Permedia 2 chipset)

I was amazed by Open GL plugins on Winamp. Pure joy 'watching' the music flow by..

Never found out what the input/output pins were for. I often wondered.

---

Non english site, but they have superb technical details and hires pictures of even the most mundane cards.

Enjoy: VGA Legacy http://82.114.193.227/vga/index.php

---

The pin outs allowed you to double the memory, if I remember correctly.

I held off on 3d cards until the matrox mystique came out (and had a wrapper for glide), and have had just about every high end (single chip) card since then to a 285 today.

I think the biggest change was getting the geforce 2 gts, it was such a powerful card compared to the competition, and then a couple years later, the 4 ti 4600.