3dfx Rampage ;)

Those specs are total BS. The cards were:

low: single Rampage chip with onboard T&L
middle: single Rampage chip with SAGE T&L coprocessor (well, even if it's not technically a coprocessor, it might as well be called one)
high: dual Rampage chips with SAGE

That was it. A four-way chip was possible (as way a 2 Rampage 2 SAGE, IIRC), but the expense was unbelievable.

 

perhaps those were actually some Quantum3d systems. The specs would make sense and fall right into place with Quantum3d's customers low, mid, and high end demands.

 

Wrong on the low end, because there was no onboard T&L built into Rampage.

 

Hmm, I remember Tag always saying it had some basic, crappy and rather slow T&L/VS on the Rampage chip. Amusing how people can't always agree on the specs of such an old dinosaur!


Uttar

 

Correct, guess you beat me to it...where's Tag?

 

::starts casting summon: Tagrineth spell::

 

There was, but it was a basic VS1.0 T&L engine, specifically so they could claim DX8 compatibility on the low-end model. It wasn't anywhere near as fast as even GeForce3's built-in T&L, probably not even as fast as GF2's even, but hell, it was there.

Rampage was never meant to be more than dual-chip in consumer space - 3dfx learned their lesson with the incredibly infamous Voodoo5 6000.

Rampage did make it to silicon, however one COULD make the argument that SAGE never existed, as it was about a week or two from tapeout - so there really WASN'T ever a real SAGE.

Rampage had a really weird method to performance aniso, it would jumble the sample points while doing MSAA and pushing back LOD. Trust me in that it should've (in theory) looked better than what XGI is doing, but honestly not as good as true AF. They did support pure AF along the lines of GF3/4Ti though. For its time, their performance AF would've been quite impressive, but of course today it'd look quite ridiculous compared to R3x0 and NV3x's implementations.

NV25 incorporated almost all of Rampage's 2D engine.

I'm sure there are snippets of Rampage basic design in NV3x, but of course I can't be sure of this.

One facet of Rampage is actually indeed used by R3x0 (I can't remember if NV3x used it too), in that to make up for a lack of extra Z test units, the core can borrow and re-use them during texture loops (I believe we found that R300 has two Z units per pipeline)... tremendously reducing the pipeline strain while performing MSAA with multiple texture layers.

I'm fairly sure the single Rampage/single Sage board was targetted to compete with GF3, and would've probably tied or slightly lost to the GF3 in most tests, but the dualR/singleS would've quite handily crushed GF3.

Now, two points I'll address directly with quotes:

Rampage was good for its time, but by the time nVidia got it, they already had the not-necessarily-superior-but-one-hell-of-a-lot-cheaper GF4Ti nearly ready, so there was really no point in pursuing it. Besides, releasing Rampage would've basically amounted to nVidia admitting defeat and saying "Hey, yes, we bought them because they had a superiour product and we were scared of them!"

The thing about Rampage is, it had some new bandwidth saving tech compared to VSA-100, came at a higher default clock, had two more pipelines per core, supported DDR memory, and was generally laid out more efficiently - keep in mind, VSA-100 was natively running everything in what amounts to a hacked-to-all-hell GLide! Rampage was designed from the ground up for D3D and OGL (D3D being the primary platform - nVidia's being OGL of course).

The main difference though was that Rampage was due out the doors before GF3. April 2001 was the target release date... and the core was mostly bug free, main issue being an incredibly retarded reversed DAC on all three working cores produced.

 

On a side note, pretty much everything I just said has already been said previously in this thread. Can we just let it be, now? Jesus, even I'm sick of mangling the poor beat up maimed horse corpse at this point. >_>

 

lol, hence the dongle...

 

OOOH! It'd be nice to own one of those, does it actually function in a standard computer?(well, I guess there are no drivers for it)

 

Maybe you missed the comment about "three in existence total." And people only know where two of them are

 

A minor detail at best, and if people only know where two are, it means there's a 3rd up for grabs!

 

there seems to be a flaw in your logic... think about it- you have one of three in existance, the ONLY one unaccounted for. is there any chance in hell that they would be able to pry the thing from your cold dead hands? And even then, would they be able to find someone capable of removing your vengeful spirit from it? Somehow I doubt that...

 

Oooh nice, but I feel a bit sad now. I wanna see the rampage running if they ever finish the drivers, but I'd say those shots are at least on par with a voodoo 5 with 4x FSAA.(exceept the second picture doesn't appear to have 4x fsaa, and possibly not even 2x)

 

That wouldn't be SLI.

One wonders how that'd fit on the board....

 

Yup, Hank sent one of the known working Rampage boards to an Italian group for testing... seems they managed to get D3D working. Good on them! (those crazy Italians... first it was AmigaMerlin, now them - I don't have any names yet, but they did an awesome job!)

Jeff White got OpenGL working in debug mode 14 days before the buyout... but that's as far as the company itself got. The three famous Q3A screenshots that did the rounds some time ago were from that driver build.

Larger versions of two of those screenshots - here and here

In case anyone REALLY wants to know, the single site with the most confirmed (and one unconfirmable but I'm 90% sure it's there) info on what Rampage really was - http://tiger.towson.edu/~tzeger1/3dfx/products/rampage.html

Rashly is the true God of Rampage Knowledge, I'm just a lowly peon Goddess. Hehehe. I should drag him to this thread.

 

I want to say that John Reynolds was involved with the creation of that presentation... but I'm not sure at this point (the boredom of high school is like an ice pick in my brain).