[Retrohardware] Your favourites retro graphic card

That it could run Quake 3 was even more impressive, IMO. UT was basically Unreal with new maps, models, and textures. And, that engine was basically designed for Voodoo1 and Glide anyway.

BTW, I've confirmed that Savage 2000 T&L is definitely borked lol. Neither Quake 3 nor Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens works correctly with HW T&L. Quake 3 is almost ok, but walls and other things flicker badly sometimes.

 

i revisited DMZG when i got my 9700 and it was still pretty impressive looking. i bet even now it would look pretty swank on newer cards at 1600*1200 with some transparency AA. too bad so little became of the engine. last think i saw released on it was a paintball game for xbox.

 

Hi Simon: nice to meet you even here...
Well, Riva 128 does a sort of texture autocompression, if i remember well...

 

RIVA128 was definitely a major turning point for NV. Honestly, it probably saved them from a bad end too, lol. NV1 failed and NV2 never went anywhere at all. In fact, the card had such fast DOS and Windows performance that it was often considered a more than adequate 2D/3D combo. It was one of the first of such cards that could rival (actually beat) Voodoo in speed while being cheaper and more convenient than Voodoo + separate 2D card.

RIVA128 was pretty ugly though. I remember playing Battlezone on one and being rather amazed at the rendering errors (polygon break up) and the filtering. That may have been old drivers too though, as it was a Dell system a friend owned. Horrifyingly, it only supported per-polygon mip-mapping initially (which is absolutely terribly ugly). Verite V2xxx had the same issue, actually, and it wasn't fixed (in OpenGL at least). NV's later drivers fixed a lot of things.

BTW, RIVA128 can not run Unreal in D3D mode at all. I've tried it with the final drivers. Apparently the chip is lacking some necessary feature.

 

A tnt2 ultra was the first card I bought by itself. And it was excellent and amazing to see the difference compared to what I was previously used to.

 

IIRC, nVidia made some almost slanderous about ST when they were making the kyro line. something that implied "the kyro is manufactured by a company that wasn't good enough for nVidia".

 

Wasn't RIVA128 partly broken? Something that got fixed in RIVA128 ZX I believe.

 

The original could only support 4 MB RAM. ZX allowed 8 MB. That's all I know for sure.

 

Theoretically, Riva128ZX supports full scene antialiasing, while Riva128 only sports edge antialiasing (drivers 3.37 have these checkboxes): practically, both forms of AA does not function and RIVA128ZX, despite the doubled ram, is slower.

 

I've only seen edge AA with 1) N64 2) Rendition Verite Speedy3D/RRedline game ports (VQuake, Indycar 2, etc)

 

Can I suggest that someone with a Riva128 post some screenies of AA in use ( or supposed to be in use ) .

 

Oh absolutely. VQuake works very nice with Verite's AA, although some edges get missed due to issues with edge AA technique. Intersections with models and stuff. Indycar Racing 2 looks amazing, honestly. Very smooth image quality, no aliasing, and a good framerate. Again on Verite, in DOS.

I had shots of VQuake on this forum a year or so ago.

 

Found my old screens:

Vquake on Sierra Screamin' 3D 4MB PCI (Verite V1000E)
Max resolution @ 768x512
Edge AA enabled