Guden Oden said:Fox5,
You're smoking some seriously heavy rose-colored glasses in the last couple posts you've made, I haven't heard such BS in a long good while...
What EFFECTS have you seen Glide make that no other cards could do until DX9??? They don't exist!
The Voodoo3 was seriously stone-age tech compared to PVR2DC/Neon250 (these were the exact same chips tech-wise, except Neon250 was faster and had AGP interface). V3 had faster on-paper fillrate, but lack of overdraw elimination and general inefficiency of old hardware pretty much eliminated that advantage, especially when transparencies are involved.
V3 lacks not only the fairly pointless 32-bit color on textures and framebuffers, it also lacks the on-chip 32-bit rendering and one-step downsampling to 16-bit of PowerVR's. It doesn't have modifier volumes either, or antialiasing, or anisotropic filtering. Heck, it didn't even have true trilinear as far I know. On the other hand, it requires much faster (and more expensive) RAM chips on a memory bus twice the width to offer competitive performance, and it runs much hotter too. See what happens to an immediate-mode renderer once you halve its memory bus width; performance dives down into the toilet.
V3 may have been the most sold retail card at the time but that's a worthless thing to brag about; 3dfx was the *only* manufacturer of Voodoo cards at that time, lack of competition made them win that badge. If you were to look at which chip made most retail sales, it'd been the TNT2 instead, which was available from a dozen + manufacturers, hence driving down the sales volumes of each individual manufacturer.
So when you say you believe a V3 would smoke PVRDC 9 out of 10 times, I believe you should reconsider...
Sure, it's easy to talk about overdraw elimination when you say "only" an overdraw of 2x..but on the other hand that means every pixel on the screen is blocked by one other pixel, so I don't think 2x is as common as is said. And what old hardware? Voodoo3 was released 1999, pvr2dc hardware was prototyped in 1997, so voodoo3 was at least a year newer, and as for the cores both were based on, I think the voodoo core was only about 6 months older.
Voodoo3 had 22bit color or something, it easily matched nvidia's 32 bit color in most games.
V3 had trilinear and anisotropic, but I don't think it could do them at the same time as multitexturing. It had edge AA as well...sure pvr2dc had super sampling, but come on, how many games could actually take that performance/memory hit? Voodoo3 technically could have done super sampling, voodoo2 did.(not sure if the software that did it was compatible with voodoo3 or not, but performance died while doing it)
I don't know how the tnt2 sold at retail, but the voodoo5 during its first 5 months only sold slightly worse in retail than the combined sales of every geforce2 card maker, and slightly better than the combined top 2.
As for effects glide can do that couldn't be done till dx9, I just look at emulation, the pixel shader like effects of the n64 I've only seen done using glide and buggy dx9. The glide version usually uses the framebuffer to do it, because for whatever reason voodoo cards were extremely fast at accessing that, and the voodoo 4 and 5s could load the entire thing into a shadow buffer or something, and voodoo3 and I think banshee had partial support for shadow buffers.(don't know what a shadow buffer is, but that's how the plugin's site describes it)
As for v3 smoking a pvrdc....well show me something to prove it, not just looking at something on a dc and saying "V3 couldn't do that." Of course, my idea of performance on a voodoo3 may be a bit skewed, during winter I had mine overclocked to over 200mhz on both core and ram(don't think you could adjust them seperately) and in the high 190s during the summer.(probably why it died a few months after I sold it to someone once I got a geforce 3) Still, voodoo3 crushes the neon250 in basically everything, at best it can only hope to equal the voodoo3 under rare circumstances(I think quake3 with the neon250's quake 3 minigl driver was the only time I've seen a benchmark where it happened, and forget space and flight sims), and show me a port from the dc that came out while the dc still was alive(to make sure it doesn't have overly high hardware specs) that a voodoo3 couldn't do better. I played the typing of the dead demo on my pc, seemed to run just as fast if not faster than the dc version. Not sure how house of the dead 2 and crazy taxi would handle, I think they came out later and could be bloatware.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/19990929/neon_250-05.html
Check this, on a p3 550mhz(while we're on this pro-dc ride, we can argue that a 200 mhz sh-4 with optimizations performs as well or better than a p3 550mhz, right? at least in floating point operations), neon 250 can sort of almost keep up at low res in shogo, crushed at high res. Same for expendable, but not as much. In quake 3 it can keep up fairly well, though it we go by what tom says, despite the tbr, it has memory bandwidth issues and that's why performance dies at high reses.
Performance is way behind for descent 3, and if I recall correctly, dc had quite a few games with wide open areas and little overdraw, so in those cases voodoo3 would have been a much better choice.
