Lockheed Real3D demo footage [Pro/1000 ?] from Comdex 1997

Siggraph 96: http://youtu.be/BI_puH7gYR8

By rivaling you mean completely eclipsing in every possible way? Is it because of the 'T&L'? Do we know if their Geometry Processor was at least functionally equal to the T&L? It is not something CPUs are terrible bad at, and PowerPC was cheap FP king. So how big is the benefit in multichip arcade machines? 100 MFLOPS for geometry looked strong in 1996 game technology, by 1998 it was low end. Do you now if Model 3 chips were actual Pro-1000 and not derivatives? Claimed polygon rates of Real3D Pro chips are very very high, but games were using still what, >10,000?
I think you should consider i740 as a balanced (geometry to fillrates) integration of Model 3 engine of effectively similar speed. Of course some of the performance is lost in PC environment.

 

I just read yesterday that Model 3 Pro 1000 chips were derivatives in some way.
http://www.supermodel3.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=313


By the way Putas, I rediscovered your Vintage3d site the other day and have read most of it. Very insightful and interesting.

 

Damn, I feel nostalgic and old at the same time

 

Hello, I am the person who uploaded the footage Megadrive1988 found on Youtube. I was searching Google for some more information about Real3D, which led me to this post. It's a small world, and all that.

In 1997 my buddy and I (we were both LAN administrators at the time) convinced our bosses they should send us to Comdex to learn about new network technology. As you can tell from the footage, we spent the majority of our time checking out new gaming technology instead.

In 1997 I didn't own a digital camera, but I did own a small camcorder, which I took. I also owned a Snappy, a parallel port device that allowed you to capture still frames from a video source. My plan was to shoot video at the show, pull digital stills from the footage, and then share the pictures online. Who could have imagined that 10 years later it would be just as simple to share the video?

That Real3D demo was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in person. The footage (especially in the space demo) almost looked like they had shot footage of a miniature and were overlaying videogame graphics (the shoddy explosions you see) over the top of it. At one point in the footage you can hear my friend say "it's skipping." Every now and then the video would skip or jerk, which led us to believe at the time that it was being played off of a laserdisc or DVD.

I hope you guys found the footage useful or at least interesting. I've been dumping all my old camcorder tapes to AVI and thought that someone might get a kick out of seeing that one from Comdex. Looks like I was right!

 

The explosions are animated textures of low framerate, common at that time. The shooter could be just as well interactive movie, can't tell if they are in control of movement.

 

The footage reminds me of the demos SGI showed for N64's hardware. Except with Real3D the games actually ran on the demoed hardware. SGI demoes were only accurate from a basic featureset angle.

I get all tingly thinking about how hyped up I was for N64 and 3DO M2....

 

Hah, MAMEDEV's and other Model 2/3 emu devs had a copy of that for years. My backup dates from January 2004, it may even have been before that. Anyhow, there's a few more PDFs there, but they're not that interesting. Example:
Pro-1000 Multigen Database Developer's Manual 1.1e Feb. 1997
Pro-1000 Product Description 3.1e Nov. 1996
Pro-1000 Product Description 3.1 Dec. 1996
Pro-1000 Product Description 4.0e Dec. 1997
R3D-100 Architecture Overview 2.2 Nov. 1996

BTW, there's other footage on their site. I forget which of these work and don't, but I archived a few off there months ago in order to upload to Youtube for Megadrive1988 to obsess over.

http://web.archive.org/web/19970102122401/http://www.real3d.com/images/spacec1a.mov

http://web.archive.org/web/19980610030421/http://www.real3d.com/cool/pyramid.mov

http://web.archive.org/web/19980610030511/http://www.real3d.com/cool/town.mov

http://web.archive.org/web/19980610030558/http://www.real3d.com/cool/water.mov

http://web.archive.org/web/19970102121507/http://www.real3d.com/images/spacec1a.avi

http://web.archive.org/web/19980610030135/http://www.real3d.com/cool/pyramid160.avi

http://web.archive.org/web/19980610030226/http://www.real3d.com/cool/town160.avi

http://web.archive.org/web/19980610030333/http://www.real3d.com/cool/water160.avi

http://web.archive.org/web/19970102115515/http://www.real3d.com/images/dbayou1m.avi

 

By the way, it would be superb if you could share with the world that Model 2 tech manual that you guys have. Maybe in the future, if it's not appropriate to do so now. Also, if you don't want to post it here, it's enough to quietly leave it at some googleable site.

 

I've been messing with a Riva 128 card lately and reading about its various shortcomings and secret design compromises that make it render in its special fugly way. Intrigue such as the seemingly fake per-pixel mip mapping box in the driver control panel....

I stumbled upon a giant Real3D interview from the ancient times. I figured Megadrive1988 and others would probably enjoy it. A lot of interesting stuff. Sega, i740, competitors and more.

 

Aside from the revision mess, AGP was also problematic for most of its lifetime due to many half-baked implementations -- cheap motherboards, chipset and driver bugs. In many cases, most of the AGP's advanced features had to be turned off or dialed down to provide stable operation either manually or through the default device driver settings, and simply act as a high-speed conventional PCI bus for the graphics cards. Gladly, the on-board video memory grew fast enough in all market segments to offset any need for "remote" texturing. It was a good riddance when the much better PCI-E came around and put things in order.

 

Yeah until about 2000 you needed to go with Intel chipsets if you wanted to get AGP that worked.

It's interesting to see how these Real3D people were so excited about AGP texturing. With memory prices dropping regularly you'd think they would've seen where things were going. Maybe this is partly their Intel partnership and some AGP brainwashing from that. Less than a year after i740 launched there were 16MB cards making AGP texturing much less valuable.

 

You could go for 3dfx if you wanted a lack of AGP. Virge PCI or AGP + Voodoo2 PCI or Voodoo2 SLI, Banshee AGP, Voodoo3 AGP ; all aforementioned AGP cards really are PCI cards in an AGP slot. (even the Vooodoo5 !)

I did that by accident, had a K6/2 fsb 100 rig at some point and I wasn't aware of the AGP problems back then.

Lack of proper AGP got annoying on Voodoo5. 3.3 volt was the bigger limitation, need to hunt for specific motherboards with a universal AGP slot. Then in texture heavy games (such as UT2003 or even 2004!) running out of memory got you very slow texture swapping going on at 1 or 2 fps whereas a real AGP card and a 4x at that could possibly do two-digit framerate.
But it's a bit amazing it did not crash and did 1 fps instead!

UT2K3 was playable for real, UT2K4 not so much and totally unusable with any "terrain" map.

 

Starfighter PCI had an AGP emulator on board, as the i740 could only 'talk' AGP.

But they didn't change the PCI ID, so the AGP and PCI driver would both detect the card but were completely incompatible.

In Win 95 this had the affect that if you swapped cards (like us devs might do for testing...) and forgot to forcible remove the old cards driver before, windows would die in a horrible (sometimes reinstall only fixable) way on boot.

I loved working with the Starfighter PCI!