Are You Truly Ready? :D

One thing I always wish we'd see is more of a story behind the old chips. Now that the tech is ancient I wish the engineers could chat about them. Though we do get a lot of that for some old stuff, such as PowerVR and the old consoles.

RIVA 128 is basically why NVIDIA still exists, for example. NV1 sucked and bombed hard, NV2 never came out at all for various reasons. RIVA 128 was their first chip that was built for MS's D3D and for OpenGL. I imagine the pressure for it to succeed was pretty crazy. And while it's definitely not perfect, it was one of the first chips that could actually compete with Voodoo 1.
 
swaaye said:
One thing I always wish we'd see is more of a story behind the old chips. Now that the tech is ancient I wish the engineers could chat about them. Though we do get a lot of that for some old stuff, such as PowerVR and the old consoles.

RIVA 128 is basically why NVIDIA still exists, for example. NV1 sucked and bombed hard, NV2 never came out at all for various reasons. RIVA 128 was their first chip that was built for MS's D3D and for OpenGL. I imagine the pressure for it to succeed was pretty crazy. And while it's definitely not perfect, it was one of the first chips that could actually compete with Voodoo 1.
Click to expand...

I agree!

From my POV it was even better, but for games Voodoo had it's GLIDE where games were playing as intended by devs. On the other hand in D3D and OGL Riva 128 had upper hand despite quite few bugs in earlier drivers.

I loved when I took my K6-2 300 PC with Riva128 4MB to a small LAN-Party and every computer hosted by organizers had Voodoo in it. People were playing 640x400 or lower to maintain playable frame rates and I was able to smoothly run 800x600 :cool:!
Besides, railgun particles looked so much better on nVidia.
 
Lightman said:
I agree!

From my POV it was even better, but for games Voodoo had it's GLIDE where games were playing as intended by devs. On the other hand in D3D and OGL Riva 128 had upper hand despite quite few bugs in earlier drivers.

I loved when I took my K6-2 300 PC with Riva128 4MB to a small LAN-Party and every computer hosted by organizers had Voodoo in it. People were playing 640x400 or lower to maintain playable frame rates and I was able to smoothly run 800x600 :cool:!
Besides, railgun particles looked so much better on nVidia.
Click to expand...

That where then tide started changing :) Although I was too young back then, I remember my cousin's ramblings.

In the following years the tnt and tnt2 came, and voodoo was nomore.
 
I believe this was one of the first D3D I played with my Riva128, or at least one I remember so fondly due to super crisp visuals and framerate at the time. Note the excellent smoke and fire effects:

incoming_screen005.jpg
 
Lightman said:
I agree!

From my POV it was even better, but for games Voodoo had it's GLIDE where games were playing as intended by devs. On the other hand in D3D and OGL Riva 128 had upper hand despite quite few bugs in earlier drivers.
Click to expand...

Well as long as you didn't need to do any lighting. In which case Riva 128 lit the scene by blocks rather than by pixel... This allowed for some very atrocious lighting in some games.

What it had going for it was speed. IQ was virtually non-existant on Riva 128. But it was definitely enough to keep Nvidia in the game. And a few years down the road, they were still in business while 3dfx was gone...

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Well as long as you didn't need to do any lighting. In which case Riva 128 lit the scene by blocks rather than by pixel... This allowed for some very atrocious lighting in some games.

What it had going for it was speed. IQ was virtually non-existant on Riva 128. But it was definitely enough to keep Nvidia in the game. And a few years down the road, they were still in business while 3dfx was gone...

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

Being a single board that did everything was its strength. I had only gotten the nvidia because it came with my Dell desktop back then, I didn't even know much about 3D accelerators or add-in cards, all I had seen was some benchmarks in PC magazine where it beat everything else, so I ordered my P2-266 desktop with it. Which came with a 6.4 GB hard drive partitioned into three 2GB partitions because FAT32 was brand new back then. Which meant reinstalling windows 95 OSR 2 and reformatting it to a single partition of course!

I remember opening the case up, looking at the card, seeing the made in mexico sticker and a wire connecting a pin to some other point in the PCB on it! Even back then Nvidia was on its way to becoming the king of OEM wins, fast redesign cycles fueled by profits from volume sales sealed the deal over 3dfx.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Well as long as you didn't need to do any lighting. In which case Riva 128 lit the scene by blocks rather than by pixel... This allowed for some very atrocious lighting in some games.
Click to expand...
Do you mean per polygon mip mapping? It got the much superior per pixel variety eventually.
 
corduroygt said:
I believe this was one of the first D3D I played with my Riva128, or at least one I remember so fondly due to super crisp visuals and framerate at the time. Note the excellent smoke and fire effects:
Click to expand...
"Incoming" was very popular IQ benchmark at the time, due to it's intensive use of blending effects and flashy coloured lighting. Dithering artifacts were quite pronounced on different graphics hardware. The humble i740 fared rather excellent in those comparisons.
 
fellix said:
"Incoming" was very popular IQ benchmark at the time, due to it's intensive use of blending effects and flashy coloured lighting. Dithering artifacts were quite pronounced on different graphics hardware. The humble i740 fared rather excellent in those comparisons.
Click to expand...

Yes, I had i740 for brief period, but because it was not really an upgrade performance wise moving from R128 I've quickly swapped it with brand new then Savage3D 8MB!
That was excellent board with piss poor OpenGL support! (with time much improved)

Regarding "INCOMING" that game was great. Fantastic graphics for it's time and fun to play!
I had it on my HDD together with almost forgotten FinalReality benchmark by Remedy (aka MadOnion, aka Futuremark).


:)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Lightman said:
I had it on my HDD together with almost forgotten FinalReality benchmark by Remedy (aka MadOnion, aka Futuremark).
Click to expand...

Oh, nostalgia! No need to get to the city fly-through to recognize the music from Skaven. ;) I had a similar experience when playing Bejeweled 2 on my iPhone. The music was so strangely familiar...
 
Speaking of old benchmarks, does anyone remember Tirtanium? :p
AFAIK, the last update was for adding DX7 T&L pipeline support.
 
fellix said:
Speaking of old benchmarks, does anyone remember Tirtanium? :p
AFAIK, the last update was for adding DX7 T&L pipeline support.
Click to expand...
Yup I remember that one a little.

How about GLExcess. lolz

One that not many people have played with is 3D Winbench.
 
I still have Tirtanium 1.9 (with separate exec for 3DNow) and GLExcess!
I like music in GLExcess :smile:

Haven't ran Tirtanium for ages now... I must give it a go when I put my computer gear back together at new home (I just finished moving, every muscle hurts now). It wont be today for sure, I'm dying ...
 
Wow, nice shots guys, really brings back the memories - tried them all, Glexcess, Tritanium even the crappy 3D Winbench from ZDNet (I think) .

I was a fan of the slightly later Vulpine GLMark benchmark also - a prelude to Farcry/Crysis if there ever was one.. Played it on loop for ages.
 
3D WinBench has a rather nice suite of tests that verify functionality of 3D features. That aspect is pretty cool and was used a lot of in magazine reviews of the time. That was useful back when a lot of chips skipped features or did them completely wrong.
 
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