Most dissapointing graphics chipset launch to date?

[Bigus Dickus]

Just curious how the current sentiments fit in historically. I'm obviously limiting the choices to somewhat recent chipsets, but feel free to "pencil in" others as deemed appropriate. I'm also not listing all chipsets due to some being overwhelmingly accepted as "successful" or "good"; the ones listed had at least some controversy over their success.

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

IMO, Parhelia and VSA-100 run pretty close. I voted for Parhelia.

[John Reynolds]

Not to nit-pick but only the V5 was a chipset. The rest were just chips.

I voted for NV30. Delay after delay, promise after promise, and a disappointing "continuity" of AA options.

[demalion]

Shouldn't this be in "3D Boards and Drivers"?

Anyways, for the sheer amount of associated PR BS and presumed technology and performance leadership, GF FX seems the obvious choice to me. Otherwise, the Parhelia would have been my choice, but the margin is fairly distant (because most of the other options bear no strong impression of poor launches).

I suppose the last Voodoo launches may have been worse, but I don't personally have a proper frame of reference for those launches.

[Bigus Dickus]

Not to nit-pick but only the V5 was a chipset. The rest were just chips.

I voted for NV30. Delay after delay, promise after promise, and a disappointing "continuity" of AA options.

Bah! :evil:

:)

I debated for a while over whether to use 'graphics card', 'graphics chip', or GPU, and in the end I guess I abandoned all of those and typed chipset for some reason!

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

[quote="John Reynolds"]Not to nit-pick but only the V5 was a chipset. The rest were just chips.[quote]

LOL John, what is with you and this chip-set business! You've had this beef since the Voodoo1 days! I don't see how it can trouble you so much. If you take into account VLSI, the chip is really a massive union of processors. Otherwise, there are still other 'chips' on a graphics board, TV Decoders, controller chips etc. :wink:

[Mulciber]

I voted Parhelia, simply because of how many YEARS we waited for something from Matrox after a brilliant design like the G400.

S3 Diamond 2000 would be right up there with the GFFX and VSA100 chips though, simply because in the case of S3 the card really didn't ever function properly, and a lot of people bought those POSs.

[jb]

I dont buy the VSA-100 being a bad chip set. It had one of the best AA methods that just today have been topped. Sure it was not a feature rich card but we were never lead to believe it was. It was late but once it hit it did not do so bad..... NV30 only because it was hyped to hell.

[RussSchultz]

You don't necessarily need to be bad to be disappointing.

Take the NV30, for example. Its not BAD, its just not as exciting as it was hyped to be.

[Sxotty]

Remember people are always most dissapointed with current issue. However I voted for Matrox as well, I had high hopes for that card, with its insane amount of bandwidth for the time, and all the other seemingly awesome specs, not to mention getting another player in 3d graphics (for consumers that is), and well none of it panned out.

[Natoma]

I voted for the NV10/GF256. Reason being that Nvidia was marketing it with the tagline "It'll change the world" and whatnot. On top of that, they were going out of their way to promise a "T&L" christmas. On top of that, when it finally did launch, not only were there no T&L games, but in many cases it was easily slower than the TNT2 Ultra!! (remember the SDR version anyone?)

At least the NV30 is faster in every case than the GF4. I think it's gotta be the NV10 hands down. But the NV30 and VSA-100 are tied for 2nd imo. Then Parhelia (just because Matrox had been out of the game for so long I had really hoped they'd have something better).

[BRiT]

I wouldn't say I was that disappointed with the NV30 launch, as it was what I was expecting... I voted for it nontheless as it was the worst one to date... Matrox was a bit disappointing, but I wasn't exposed to any hype about it, unlike the constant hype from Nvidia, and hey, it at least runs quiet.

[Sabastian]

Well, I really thought that this was a no brainer vote really.

The Parhelia was fairly disappointing but I really wasn't expecting a lot from Matrox, hopeful but not expecting.

Nvidia on the other hand tripped and fell flat on their bloody face and I was expecting some of that old rabit out of the hat stuff and come out swinging to some degree (It is a bit like nvidia came back swinging with a wet fish or something ;) ) but nothing at all really impressive compared to the Radeon 9700 a full six months ahead.

Hence I really was alot more disappointed with the GeforceFX 5800, I thought with that clock rate if it is anywhere near as effecient as the Radeon 9700 it should be ahead substaintially. As it turns out the GeforceFX clock for clock does not appear to be anywhere near as effecient as the Radeon 9700.. (This is an assumption, but I suspect if one were to downclock the GeforceFX to Radeon 9700 clock speeds you would see just how much more effecient the Radeon 9700 is.)

wait..... the GeforceFX 5800 isn't even shipping yet AFAIK. Yeah the NV30 is absolutely the worst to my knowledge. JMO of course.

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

Voodoo 5 may have had the best AA but that simply wasn't enough. T-Buffer wasn't a direction developers realistically could/wanted to push. It wasn't representative of what 3dfx did - push the direction of 3D. Compare the Geforce2 and Voodoo5 today, it's silly. One has the 'right' features, namely T/L and useful blending modes (dot3, cube mapping). The Voodoo5 has a funky T-buffer and that's it. NVIDIA got their priorities right and 3dfx didn't.

Yes I know, 3dfx didn't view the fixed blending modes as useful, saw them as intermediate steps which weren't good enough so they aimed for an aggresive texture computer for Rampage, but that just dragged and dragged. Sometimes you NEED an intermediate step, Geforce was in the right direction.

[Clashman]

I waited forever for the Rendition V3300 to come out...

and then it didn't...

I was very disappointed...

[John Reynolds]

LOL John, what is with you and this chip-set business! You've had this beef since the Voodoo1 days! I don't see how it can trouble you so much. If you take into account VLSI, the chip is really a massive union of processors. Otherwise, there are still other 'chips' on a graphics board, TV Decoders, controller chips etc. :wink:

Hey, damnit, at my age I'm entitled to a few pet peeves! ;) <goes off to empty coloscopy bag while grumbling to himself>

[THe_KELRaTH]

I voted for the Perhelia but my No.1 all time worst is the Voodoo Banchee.

Edit Banchee.. I meant Rush.. that so called 3D + 2D "thing"

[Freak'n Big Panda]

Totaly the perhelia! Omg when I saw the stats I thought it was going to kick the shit out of the ti4600 easily but it didn't even come close :p Ended up costing more than then the Ti4600 and performing no where close to as well :p I knew the GF FX was going to suck ever since I herd that it was on 128bit bus and I saw that fan. So I wasn't really dissapointed when it was benched.

[deviantchild]

I waited forever for the Rendition V3300 to come out...

and then it didn't...

I was very disappointed...

then there was going to be the Verite4400 and THAT didn't come out either :(

[RussSchultz]

Though many of you have probably forgotten about it, the voodoo rush was a terribly disappointing release.

Not only was it slower than the Voodoo1, its vga core stunk too. And the drivers stunk on top of all that other stink.

Oh, what 3dfx could have done if it was the banshee that came out instead of that stinky thing.

[antlers]

3dfx could've nipped NVidia in the bud if they had made banshee dual-texture capable--which I suspect was well within their technical capabilities. But they were worried about cannibalizing their hugely profitable V2 line, and chose to fight the TNT with litiigation.

[Joe DeFuria]

Small point of contention:

The PowerVR KyroII was one of the better, if not the best, launch of PowerVR tech.

You should replace the KyroII with the Neon-250. :shock:

And as Russ mentioned, the 3dfx Voodoo Rush also deserves a place on this list for a vote!

[Bigus Dickus]

I originally had several more poll choices, but the thing limits you to just 10. I wasn't sure which VR chip to put in there, so I just picked one. :D

Looks like the Parhelia and GFFX are duking it out. I'm not sure which way I'd go on that one myself. I think they are equally dissapointing, but nV sure hyped the hell out of the GFFX. :(

[horvendile]

I admit it's not very recent, but does anyone remember the Voodoo Rush? It was supposed to combine Voodoo Graphics 3D with good 2D - plus, you had extra memory (4 Mb framebuffer, 2 Mb texture memory)!

Ugh... GLQuake not working at launch, low performance when it finally worked, no 3D support in NT, W95 BSOD'ing when you dragged a file from a window to another, dubious 2D...
Things got better (though later, there was a massive and generous replacement program). But the launch was... not impressive.

[Arun]

My vote would be on the NV17 ( GeForce 4 MX ) - if you don't consider that, it's on the NV30 ( which is what I voted for )

IMO, the GF4 MX is simply horrible. It delivers acceptable performance, but due to its DX7 feature support, it held back an entire industry for over a year!
Sure, there wasn't much hype surrounding it. But everyone had hoped for a low-end DX8 solution to make the developers use the technology. In a single day, all hope was lost.

IMO, the NV17 should have been limited to a Mobile & Workstation ( NVS series ) GPU.
nVidia should have done something with DX8 features but slower and with slower RAM, maybe. Should have been sufficent...
But they didn't *sigh*


Uttar

[BoardBonobo]

Parhelia for me :? I was really looking forward to buying a Matrox card again. I still like to play around with my old Millenium II (with 4Mb expansion) and my Voodoo 2's. For some reason it just seems slicker than anything else I've owned.

[TazUk]

The Parhelia was dissapointing for several reasons, it's performance was lower than expected, which might be attributed by the delay bringing it to market, the problems with banding which Matrox seem keen to ignore and the price. Of those the banding issue is probably the most supprising as Matrox have always been known for making high quality hardware and sadly the Parhelia doesn't live up to that reputation. The chances of them turning things around are slim to non existent considering the ammount of people they've lost, it's a shame really the industry needs someone like Matrox :roll:

[Nite_Hawk]

Was the Parahelia for me too. I had an original millenium and a G200 both of which were fairly decent cards in their own right (especially for the 2D). With the parahelia, there was supposed to be the nearly free 16X antialiasing, and a 256MB bus! the thing should have creamed everything on the market. In reality, it was slow, the antialiasing was 16x, but didn't work in a lot of circumstances, and the places where it didn't work really stood out. The poor texture filtering also hurt given matrox's previous good image quality.

On the other hand, I have to say that the NV30 launch was probably worst in general. It's just that I personally was expecting a lot from matrox, and I think the NV30 overall is a better card than the parahelia is, even given the timeframe difference. It seems like the NV30 launch disappointed a lot more people than the matrox launch (as most people don't really care about matrox these days).

Nite_Hawk

[Blade]

Sadly, I had to go with the Voodoo Rush as my first real video card. It was okay though, because it ran everything up to Tribes "acceptably" and I didn't have to buy a 2D video card. (I had budget issues at the time)

[Nagorak]

I had to go with the GeforceFX. It was just such an absolutely huge disappointment, and the PR BS behind it just made it that much worse.

A close second would be the Parhelia... A $400 card that is slower than a card that's already been on the market for a year (Radeon 8500). On the one hand no one would take the card seriously for gaming, and on the other no business would benefit from the 3D horsepower.

Coming in third is the R9000, which was just disappointing in that it was slower than the original R8500. With the R7500 I thought ATi had set a precedent where the new budget line-up was faster than the older mainstream, but I guess that's just because the original Radeon fell short of what they initially wanted so the R7500 was in order to catch up with the competition. If I hadn't had higher expectations for it, the R9000 would have been a fine chip (not that I'd ever own one myself).

I also agree that the Voodoo Rush was total crap. I had the misfortune of owning one of those for a week, before it fortunately broke and I was able to return the damn thing.

[Psikotiko]

My list:
-Savage2000
-GeforceFX
-Rush
-Neon250

[RussSchultz]

What about Glaze3d? Or can it not be disappointing if it never happened?

[gravioli]

Though many of you have probably forgotten about it, the voodoo rush was a terribly disappointing release.

My first real 3D accelerator, if you could call it that. I think I still have it somewhere.....

[PVR_Extremist]

For me the Neon 250

It wasnt a bad card by any means it was just horrendously late. If it had been released when promised (around Voodoo 2 time) I'm sure it would have changed the entire direction of the 3D graphics industry and given TBDR a significant stance today.

As it happened it got sidetracked into dreamcast tech (nice little earner mind) and was a full 18 months or so late to the PC party competiting with the likes of the TNT2 Ultra (which trounced it) instead of the V2 :(

Second is parhelia........Massive bandwidth put to poor use.... :(

[Radea]

Definatly the Parhelia was the most disappointing. Ive just had a gut feeling the whole time that the NV30 would not deliver, and hence it wasnt disappointing :)

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Dunno, I threw the coin and I voted for the FX, Parhelia was my 2nd option.

[epicstruggle]

fx, parhelia. close call but fx is my vote.

later,