3dfx & TnL?

[Nick]

I decided to build myself a Glide machine...

For nostalgia of the hardware or the applications? In the latter case I would suggest to look for an emulator.

 

[Kaotik]

For nostalgia of the hardware or the applications? In the latter case I would suggest to look for an emulator.

Both, and I dare to say that getting most of the games to work under x64 Vista might be quite a challenge even if it was just for the apps

 

[mczak]

I recall PowerVR having a T&L unit in those dual-chip arcade boards named ELAN. If memory serves well, I think it was capable of 10M Tris/s with a high number of lights for its time and a quite CPU bound platform.

The T&L Elan chip in the Naomi 2 arcade system seems to be a videologic design, not powervr (but Naomi 2 certainly has 2 series 2 powervr chips). The quoted throughput was 10M Tris/s with 6 lights, which is quite good indeed for that timeframe, though it'll probably depend what type of lights is used...

 

[Mariner]

Videologic = Original name of Imagination Technologies.

They're the ones who developed PowerVR - just ask SimonF!

 

[mczak]

Videologic = Original name of Imagination Technologies.

They're the ones who developed PowerVR - just ask SimonF!

Ah right. I thought that PowerVR was a subsidiary of Imagination Technologies, didn't know that it first only was a product name & that Imagination Technologies was actually Videologic.

 

[Ailuros]

IMG was called if I recall correctly Videologic in the past; then they changed it somewhere down the line to IMG and named their product division "Videologic:. Nowadays their product division is named PURE digital; they don't make GPUs or sound cards anymore.

It's been a long time and it could very well be that Elan was actually build and sold through Vidoelogic; but it must had been developed by their graphics division PowerVR.

In any case I recall Simon mentioning that the platform was quite CPU bound, hence the quoted numbers for Elan could had been higher with a stronger CPU.

 

[Simon F]

I recall PowerVR having a T&L unit in those dual-chip arcade boards named ELAN. If memory serves well, I think it was capable of 10M Tris/s with a high number of lights for its time and a quite CPU bound platform.

I don't think it would matter now to say that the processing rate was one (vertex,"light") calculation per clock assuming 6 or more lights per vertex. A "light" could do things other than just lighting.

In any case I recall Simon mentioning that the platform was quite CPU bound, hence the quoted numbers for Elan could had been higher with a stronger CPU.

I don't recall that.

Naomi 1 was quite CPU limited as it did all the T&L on the CPU. I suspect that Naomi II, where much of this was offloaded to Elan, would not have been. IIRC, elan (and the CLX2s) could be clocked much faster but they shared the same clock as the SH4 which limited the system to 100MHz.

 

[Simon82]

Anyway the first linked images are obviously fake.

 

[no-X]

No-one of these images of 3Dfx boards is fake. There are even more exotic voodoo-based products, e.g. Voodoo Graphics-based 3TMU / SLI / RGSS-capable Primary Image boards:

 

[Rys]

To add to that, I've got a pair of 3dfx boards with four NVIDIA NV4s on