That will, no doubt, be due to the texture compression employed on the voodoo for the TR port.
IIRC (from the programmers guide I saw) to drive the virge you had to poke all the values in via registers which was never going to be fast
Help me remember all pre-Voodoo PC 3D accelerators.
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
- Start date
IIRC (from the programmers guide I saw) to drive the virge you had to poke all the values in via registers which was never going to be fast
As the man who had to write all the triangle setup routines for the D3D driver in assembly I can verify that it was not a fast programming model...
As the man who had to write all the triangle setup routines for the D3D driver in assembly I can verify that it was not a fast programming model...
LOL yikes. I need to add a newer Virge to my collection of junk. I had a STB Nitro 3D once many years ago. It was sort of Virge GX oddity, using EDO instead of the SGRAM that GX was "supposed" to use.
I added a Diamond Edge 3D to my collection a few months back. What an odd card. For example, it has really bad DOS support. I used SDD 6.53 on it for VESA 2.0 and it told me that the hardware lacks important features for DOS (sorry can't remember exactly). It does some weird initialization when Windows 9x is starting up, where the screen blanks out from DOS for about 10 seconds or so and then Windows GUI shows up. I couldn't find any supporting 3D games on the web, and I was too lazy to eMule any at the time.
edit: I dug up the help file--
I suppose this means if you want to play a DOS game that runs 16-bit color that it will be pretty icky looking.
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Blazkowicz
Legend
for quake I had settled on 360x350 (I liked how there were a few dozens weird resolutions )
)Quake 1 just polled the VBE to and just let you choose any resolution. I still remember setting Quake 1 to 1024x768 and being amazed at how nice it looked... and how slow it ran
So, I question the gsme devloper community, wtf has happened to modern games that only show you a fixed list of resoultion when it's trivially easy to get GDI or Direct3D to enumerate all the avaliable supported resolutions.
So, I question the gsme devloper community, wtf has happened to modern games that only show you a fixed list of resoultion when it's trivially easy to get GDI or Direct3D to enumerate all the avaliable supported resolutions.
funky UIs happened. and then LCDs stepped in for extra funk ; )
i remember when i first saw a 3d game that supported just 2 resolutions, and the higher one was too high for my single voodoo2 (1024x768 - takes SLI) so i played only at the lower one. but the UI was a blast ; ) oh, alomst forgot - the game was freespace2, a GOTY space sim by volition.
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Super Duper [size=+2]Tritech/Bitboys/VLSI Pyramid3D[/size]
well, in fact, not quite. while project started clearly before Voodoo Graphics, chip became such a huge monster (programmable vertex engine and microcode programmable pixelpipeline. vertex engine had 32K words program lenghts, supported loops, jumps, conditions, etc. pixel shader had 3 color and 3 temp registers, able to use 2 textures per pixel, program lenght of 32 words, internal 32 bit rendering, early z-kill, etc...) that getting out working revision took a looooong time and the release went as far as August 1997. Unfortunately, Tritech losed audioside patent lawsuit in September 1997 and went bankcrupt early 1998. Technologially 7 years ahead, chip falled back on memory bandwidth and due huge complexity, clocks were quite low, so no one was interested to keep chip alive.
I am still looking for possibility to put this thing against one of the it's possible competitors from 1997/1998.
EDIT: to get right mood while reading, I recommend playing Chris Hülsbeck's Giana Sisters Intro as SID version in background... it gives a quite lot of glamour on this post.
well, in fact, not quite.
while project started clearly before Voodoo Graphics, chip became such a huge monster (programmable vertex engine and microcode programmable pixelpipeline. vertex engine had 32K words program lenghts, supported loops, jumps, conditions, etc. pixel shader had 3 color and 3 temp registers, able to use 2 textures per pixel, program lenght of 32 words, internal 32 bit rendering, early z-kill, etc...) that getting out working revision took a looooong time and the release went as far as August 1997. Unfortunately, Tritech losed audioside patent lawsuit in September 1997 and went bankcrupt early 1998. Technologially 7 years ahead, chip falled back on memory bandwidth and due huge complexity, clocks were quite low, so no one was interested to keep chip alive.I am still looking for possibility to put this thing against one of the it's possible competitors from 1997/1998.
EDIT: to get right mood while reading, I recommend playing Chris Hülsbeck's Giana Sisters Intro as SID version in background...
it gives a quite lot of glamour on this post.
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Several ones. Even different versions.
Bitboys / ATI Europe Research Center at least used to have (few office moves before
) "huge stacks of those", whatever that means. Guys at the offices said that they were too lazy to go thru all of them to find survived samples and sent over them.but I haven't given up yet.
EDIT: and in Assembly 1997 and DirectX Meltdown 1997 tech demo was ran with real hardware. (and yes, it's the tech demo that included the robot inside some pyramid or something... the very same thing seen in tritech pr papers.)
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I just resurrected my PCI/ISA 486 for some Diablo. What does one do when there is little left to tweak/oc/optimize with the modern system? Build something challenging, like a 486!
Here're my official, personally authorized specs:
There's also something magical about pulling 25+ MB/s in HDTach on a 486! It's like having Ultra SCSI or something lol. The PCI bus in the thing is just maxed out. HDTach's sequential read test showed a big, flat graph of the same transfer rate across the platters.
Like I said I've been enjoying some good 'ol Diablo on this for the past couple of nights. I also loaded up VQuake to see what a Verite could do for a 486. I don't think I've ever seen such a variance in framerate lol. It goes from like 60 fps to 10 fps, depending on where you're looking (geometry complexity obviously).
Here're my official, personally authorized specs:
- AMD 5x86-P75 @ 160 Mhz (40x4) 3.45v
- MSI MS-4144 Baby AT mobo: 3 PCI, 4 ISA, no PS2 (uhg! serial mouse!), SiS 496/7 chipset
- IBM 75GXP Death..Deskstar 30 gig (!!!)
- 1 fabulous 3.5" 1.44MB FDD
- Diamond Stealth II S220 4 MB Verite V2100
- Philips Seismic Edge PCI audio (Tbird 128, get that CPU util down!)
- Promise SATAII150 TX2 (need Ultra DMA for me IBM Deathstar! SATA in 486 too lol!!!)
- 3Com Etherlink III 3C509 ISA NIC (only 3 PCI slots!)
- Ensoniq Soundscape ISA (fine wavetable for DOS, horrible CPU util in Win)
- Windows 95C (runs very fast, much better than 98)
There's also something magical about pulling 25+ MB/s in HDTach on a 486! It's like having Ultra SCSI or something lol. The PCI bus in the thing is just maxed out. HDTach's sequential read test showed a big, flat graph of the same transfer rate across the platters.
Like I said I've been enjoying some good 'ol Diablo on this for the past couple of nights. I also loaded up VQuake to see what a Verite could do for a 486. I don't think I've ever seen such a variance in framerate lol. It goes from like 60 fps to 10 fps, depending on where you're looking (geometry complexity obviously).
I keep meaning to spend an evening playing with Virtual PC to see if I can get some old games like Magic Carpet and Carmageddon going on it. Otherwise, I'd have to use that box that I've kept all the bits for a decent P2 in. Bet finding half the software I need to run the AWE64 and similar things would be the trickiest bit nowadays.
sigh... memories....
I remember being so excited to have my very own Creative 3D Blaster VLB (Vesa-Local-Bus).
Unfortunately, however, with only two motherboard ports, and also needing a hard drive controller card, I ended up running the card paired with a ISA S3 card for 2D.
It ended up not working very well at all. But it did do hardware stipple-alpha! (not serious) And the dithered texture filtering was cool (serious). Luckily my favorite game of the time, fatal racing, was pretty much the only supported title that ran above 5fps.Oh man, reading this brings back all the memories. Makes me want to go home and reset up a K6-2+/MVP3 system for some Win98/Glide action. I have a Righteous 3D and a pair of Creative Voodoo 2s. I installed that Righteous on a more modern machine, but I think the guy that sold it to me lied about it working... Oh well, still a neat board to have.
Archimedean Dynasty was one of my favorite games of all time, and going to the 3dfx version was pure heaven for me. What really sucked was the amount of support it got for later 3dfx chips, cause I really wanted to play that on my Voodoo 5 with FSAA enabled. No such luck.
Archimedean Dynasty was one of my favorite games of all time, and going to the 3dfx version was pure heaven for me. What really sucked was the amount of support it got for later 3dfx chips, cause I really wanted to play that on my Voodoo 5 with FSAA enabled. No such luck.