first PC 3D cards

[megadrive0088]

see how my memory is. the first major 3D cards for the PC were:

1995
Creative Labs 3D Blaster using a cut down 3DLabs Glint chip
Diamond Edge 3D using Nvidia/SGS Thompson NV1
some card using a Mitsubishi or Fujitsu chip
anther 3D card (hah i cant remember)

first decent 3D accelerator that was a real step up for gaming: the
Verite` by Rendition.

first massively successful 3D card: 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics

 

[megadrive0088]

I also remember the Verite was thought by almost everyone to be THE
standard 3D gaming chip. it was really well liked, most notably by Carmack....He chose Verite, didn't he, to be the platform for accelerated Quake

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Yes, Carmack considered both Rendition and 3dfx to port the first version of Quake to hardware. At the time he made his decision, it was determined that the first Voodoo Graphics cards would probably cost $500, and Carmack figured it would just a niche part without wide acceptance. So even though the hardware was better, he created "VQuake" on the basis that rendition would be a much more successful platform.

Then...the bottom fell out of the memory market and prices plummeted. Voodoo ended up being "only" $300, which ensured its popularity. Carmack, not wanting to write another proprietary port, then had to decide between openGL or DirectX. Direct3D was a complete mess (version 3 at the time), and 3dfx agreed to write "enough" of a GL driver so that carmack could write GL Quake....and the rest is history.

 

[ERP]

3DFX got incredibly lucky with Voodoo 1, no one including 3DFX expected the massive reduction in memory cost that allowed Voodoo 1 to become a mass market item.

Everyone who saw the voodoo technology prior to release thought it was impressive, but nobody thought it would be a commodity part.

 

[Mariner]

Thinking back, I seem to remember that Rendition was reputed to have paid id to produce VQuake.

I (think I) remember the early discussions on Usenet that "Rendition was not better than 3dfx" just because VQuake was produced.

 

[megadrive0088]

I would have rather seen Rendition prevail with their Verite series than 3Dfx with the Voodoo line. the V2000 (or was it 2200) was nice, while the
4th generation part sounded like one MOFU of chip with its embedded memory and 120-125M transistors which is the same as the new Nvidia.
I like the name 'Verite' better and the discriptive Rendition, as well


the card that I wanted as a consumer graphics card more than any other was the R3D-100. holy crap did that card kick ass. with its three seperate processors for geometry, graphics and textures. there was much confusion in 1995-1996 about it. LM annouced it was entering the consumer space with a $200 or sub $200 card. right along side was a preview of the R3D-100 which people assumed was their bid for the desktop/gaming market. unfortunately, LM's desktop chip was a few years off and would be a totally cut down single chip device (I740) If they had R3D-100 out in 1996 it would have anhilated Voodoo and everyone else in real-world speed and image quality. R3D-100 wasnt vaporware like so many other chips either. it was proven technology in the low-end workstation space. damn...

 

[Chris]

The Matrox Millenium also supported some 3d primitive processing in hardware. I remember a test available in the drivers.

There was little to no game support but the technology was there.

I beieve that this was pre-voodoo 1 days.

 

[ram]

Don't forget PowerVR PCX1 that was available before Voodoo 1 IIRC. Ultim@te Race was one of my favorites at that time =)

 

[ben6]

Boy Rendition. My friend woked at Diamond then S3 and now works for Micron. Last time I asked him what he was doing, he's working on Flash memory (he was in the graphics side of things) . Now of course Crucial is making Radeon 9700s heh...

 

[Nappe1]

The Matrox Millenium also supported some 3d primitive processing in hardware. I remember a test available in the drivers.

There was little to no game support but the technology was there.

I beieve that this was pre-voodoo 1 days.

actually, I have seen Matrox Millenium running "hardware accelerated" NASCAR. This happened somewhere in late 1995. maybe it was christmas time, I am not sure.

the millenium's problem was that it supportted Hardware accelerated primitive (in this case; quads and triangles) drawing & shading, but not at all texture mapping.

well, I'll tell the whole story from that to here...
On summer 1996 I was getting my 2nd PC and for the graphics adapter, I had two choices: Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 2MB and Matrox Mystique 2MB. after all I checked few tests available on local PC-mags, I decided go for Diamond. After all, Mystique had just updated core of Millenium and though it had texture mapping support, it didn't supported filtering. Diamond (S3 Virge) had superior features compared to Mystique and actually I was pretty much happy with it (dropped few jaws to floor with S3d accelerated Terminal Velocity and Descent II) until christmas 1996, when MikroBitti (biggest and propably oldest computer mag in finland) had huuuuge 3D-card review and my glorious card got to last place. On summer 1997 I was again searching a replacement to Diamond because of 2MB was showing it's limits on D3D games. I found myself buying a 4Meg ATI 3D charger PCI (ATI Rage II+) . unfortunately, after I had installed it, I suddenly find out that my S3 Virge based card was a bit faster. Though, I now got all textures visible, drivers sucked. lines between polygons were more than usual. Again, I was stucked with this situation a year until got enough money to buy Voodoo Graphics. it was relatively cheap already because Voodoo 2 boards have come to stores and lowered Voodoo 1 prices considerably.

half a year after that, I moved to another town to start my studies on software engineering. and on janyary 99, it was time to buy another computer to here Kotka. First, it supposedly should have Voodoo Banshee, but because it never worked out with tv-card, I had to put some more money on it and got a G200 8MB AGP. Year after that, I changed it to 16MB G400. which caused that my that time system became heavily slowed down because of CPU (which was Cel300A) 6 months later I changed all but the GFX (700MHz Athlon TB on SLOT A mobo ) and got some nice boost. 6 months forward and we are at the christmas 2000. G400 changed to AIW Radeon, which has stayed all way to these days. And now I find myself wondering, if I should wait a bit more or got to Parhelia now... the idea having Parhelia 2 soon after my bought of Parhelia almost same price doesn't sound very nice...

 

[Crusher]

I would have rather seen Rendition prevail with their Verite series than 3Dfx with the Voodoo line. the V2000 (or was it 2200) was nice

I had a 2100 based card (Diamond Stealth II S220), because I needed a card with 2D capabilities to go with the Voodoo 2. Occasionally a game would try and use the primary display adapter instead of the V2. It was painful to watch...

 

[OpenGL guy]

I had a 2100 based card (Diamond Stealth II S220)

That was my first 3D card I was pretty impressed by the features you got and the low cost ($129?). My friend had some Permedia 2 based board and we would play Quake 2 together... he was complaining about seeing rainbow textures, whereas everything worked fine for me. I ended up buying him a Stealth II for $79 for Christmas, I think.

 

[Fuz]

Don't forget PowerVR PCX1 that was available before Voodoo 1 IIRC. Ultim@te Race was one of my favorites at that time =)

Yeah, I remember that game, even though it lacked any sort of bi-linear filtering, it still looked fantastic, and ran like butter. IRC, the PCX1 was at fault, cuase it didn't do bi-linear filtering. Later it was ported to glide... the Voodoo1 ran that game just as fast, and with filtering too.

 

[Clashman]

I had a thriller 3d (v2200) and later added a voodoo 2. These two cards replaced a Stealth 2000 which I just about never actually got any 3d games running on. The V2200 was my first real taste of 3d, and my jaw dropped to the ground when I saw it running quake 2 at 14 fps on my Cyrix MX200. Nothing since has touched that initial wow factor.

BTW, does anyone know much about the v3300, (not the 4400)? It was supposed to come out around the time of the original TNT. I remember a series of Facts Of the Week that were used to build up for the launch, which never happened, (thank you micron ). Anyone know what the architexture/performance of the card would have been?

 

[Nappe1]

BTW, does anyone know much about the v3300, (not the 4400)? It was supposed to come out around the time of the original TNT. I remember a series of Facts Of the Week that were used to build up for the launch, which never happened, (thank you micron ). Anyone know what the architexture/performance of the card would have been?

V3300 was expected to be 6MB on chip eDRAM with microcode programmable core. (as well as 1100 and 2200 were microcode cores)
it was scrapped due to V4400, which eventually made it´, but never made it to shops.

V4400 was late and got ready on christmas 1999. it had 12 MB eDRAM and total amount of transistors was whopping 125 million. during development of V4400 Rendition went under Micron and Micron decided not to bring this chip market due to too rapid DirectX development. Afaik, this was the official reason, but those who have been telling that they saw V4400 running behind closed doors, told that it heated a way too much to get on market.

In late 90's there were at least three companies making eDRAM based chip. Bitboys with their Glaze3D, PixelFuzion with their PF 150 and Rendition with their Verite V4400. Glaze3D never got to market and officially Bitboys announced on march 2000 canning the original idea and continuing development Glaze to Axe. Rendition / Micron announced V4400 on late autumn 1999 and on the same press release, thay also announced that V4400 not going to massprodcution. Pixel Fusion got their chip ready on early 2000 as well, but their exclusive card manufaturer, Number Nine, went bankcrupt and the whole project collapsed. Also Pixel Fuzion was very close to bankcrupt and board of directors decided to turn the chip for high speed networks device. So only Bitboys was left developing eDRAM solution for PC-market. and now they are gone too.

 

[Mulciber]

I had a Verite 2200 for a while and I loved it. Best visual quality of any card I ever saw until the G200. But standards started changing around that time I guess.

 

[mboeller]

here is an link to the FOW's :

http://www.renditionrevival.com/fows/fowindex.html

happy reading.

 

[Clashman]

I forgot what alot of those were. The Rredline looked like it really would have been special. Lot's of stuff that didn't get touched by other companies until much later, like dualhead and whatnot. Damn you Micron!!!

OTOH, the v2200 did have some serious driver issues, and perhaps it's best that I didn't end up getting incredibly frustrated again with great hardware humbled by terrible drivers.

 

[megadrive0088]

I did not mean to leave out PowerVR. they are near and dear to my heart with the Dreamcast, and ousting 3Dfx from the Sega console. I never owned a PowerVR Series I board (PCX1 or PCX2) but I watched PCX2 closely because the first solid info on Sega's Black Belt console (according to Next Generation Online) was that BB would use a PCX2. only later was it revealed that 3Dfx would provide the BB 3D chip and that Sega was developing two seperate console, one with 3Dfx, one with PowerVR using the next generation technologies (Banshee derivative and PowerVR2 derivative)

Series 1 should have had the sofware support it was promised from Namco. Rave Racer, Tekken and Air Combat 22, all would have helped make PowerVR a more desirable product. unfortunely 3Dfx won most of the mindshare in 1996-1997 :/

 

[Roly]

How programmable was the v2100/2200 compared to more recent chips? I remember the various driver releases used to come with a .UC file which I think was the microcode. Apparently there was a microcode for DVD motion compensation recognized by one specific software DVD player but I never saw it. I had a Stealth s220 and was really impressed with it, ran Half-Life no worries with decent performance at lower resolutions. Does seem a shame Rendition died, a die-shrunk, overclocked v2k series with a wider-bus and more RAM would have been an okay product in mid-1998, or even an interim product with 2 meg of embedded DRAM plus external memory might have done pretty well against TNT (though drivers were always a problem.