[Retrohardware] Your favourites retro graphic card

Those are the actual sizes of the screen for the game. There is no way to get a bigger screenshot. The fact that you are having a hard time seeing aliasing should tell you something. Look at the shot with the rocket launcher.


That's some pretty awesome AA if you ask me.

The framerate at that res isn't good. It runs 640x480 fine though. AA isn't much of a hit at all really.

Here's a cool newsgroup post from back in the day. It has a Rendition fella discussing how they got Quake working with Verite.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp...0&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rnum=56

 

what happened to edge aa why did it dissapear a long time before fsaa arrived ?

 

The sad thing is I still remember exactly in the game where Swaaye's screens are taken from.

 

I've owned some crap in my time (voodoo rush anyone?), and I missed out in a voodoo2, opting instead for a 16MB pci voodoo Banshee (Creative Labs). This was probably the first card I owned that truly amazed me. Playing Unreal, or Quake, on 3d hardware with decent speed was incredible! Especially in comparison to the crappy software rendering I was used to. Mind you, my 225MHz Cyrix wasn't exactly fast! LOL.

So the Banshee is memorable because it was my first proper (useable) 3d card.


For a time, I loved Unreal Tournament so much, I went out and bought an S3 Savage4 (32MB agp) so I could use the S3TC compressed textures on the second install disk. Running in S3 MeTaL, wth the compressed textures installed was incredible! The first time I saw it I loved it. Shame about all the instability I suffered with the card. I always put it down to poor drivers, but I'm pretty sure it was actually down to the bad agp implementation that was rife on all Socket7 motherboards.

The Savage 4 is memorable for the first use of high resolution textures.


My dream card for a time was the TNT2, but with the crappy agp I had on my Socket7 stuff, I was deliberately steering clear of agp cards. Then I discovered the Voodoo3 agp cards didn't support agp texturing, and basically worked in pci mode over the agp port, meaning they worked fine on crappy MVP3 or AlladdinV motherboards. So I got an agp 16MB Voodoo3 2000. It was great, fast, EVERYTHING worked on it and support was brilliant. I put a huge heatsink and ramsinks on it and managed to overclock it to 200/200! Considering it was based on an old 5 layer 0.25micron aluminium proccess, and could fry an egg at stock speeds, that was some feat! LOL
I ended up keeping that card for years. Only 3dfx's demise and the lack of new drivers killed it for me.

The Voodoo3 was memorable because it was my first foray into overclocking. Plus it was a fantastic card.

 

I picked out a Banshee for a friend back in college. I think he went to that from one of those goofy and fairly awful MPACT DVD/3D/2D cards. Banshee ran Unreal (no UT yet!) excellent and back then we played tons of that game multiplayer over the LAN there. He had a Pentium II 350.

Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 are indeed like the best choices for Super 7. They just work. And, they are really fast with pretty good image quality. I've found that later AGP cards with T&L might be a little faster, but it's not a big deal. It's far more important that the drivers are tuned for those mobos and that they put some effort into 3DNow!. 3dfx did just that.

 

IIRC...

Back then, edge AA typically involved a driver hack to draw additional translucent lines along the edges of polygons. I can't say if this was, specifically, how Riva might have done edge AA but it would not surprise me.

.. because of the above. It wasn't really a hardware AA solution but a software trick.

 

I've owned quite a few 3D cards dating all the way back to the Virge, Mystique and Voodoo 1, but that lovely trip down gaming nostalgia memory lane has already been covered quite well here.

Instead I figure I'll concentrate on a quirky little hobby of mine which evolved over time, namely collecting cards with more or less contemporary graphics chips in PCI format. I've always had a habit of keeping older video cards handy; it's just nice to have that ISA Oak VGA or Trident 8900 standing by for diagnostic purposes when your fancy newfangled VLB board refuses to boot for whatever reason.

So similarly, I was the proud owner of a PCI Diamond Riva 128 (4MB version, I'm not sure if the ZX ever made it to PCI), and was particularly in awe when I found an actual PCI Nvidia 2MX-400 from a - to me - rather obscure brand called Palit. At the time, PCI 2MX-200s were for sale everywhere, but which enthusiast would settle for a 64-bit memory bus if other options are available? The little card that could was matched with an AGP GF4 Ti4600 and voila, 3 screens of Flight Simming goodness! Unfortunately, its dinky little fan died eventually, but by then PCI FX-5200s were widely available and to this day I use a number of those for quad-screen 2D workstations at work.

My latest pride and joy is a PCI PNY GF6200, which at 74EUR was rather horribly overpriced as with all things PCI, but it's got 4 pixel pipelines of the extremest variety, a screaming 256 MB of DDR2 memory, SM3 and PureVideo and it runs Vista Aero and 3DMark and all that jazz. Which is of course vital to my diagnostic purposes.

 

Sorry for the OT, but I too opted for K6-2's.

The First PC I ever owned was a store bought Packard Bell. In fact, it was the only PC I ever bought, I've built all the rest since. Anyway, the Cyrix M2 300 it had inside was dire, and it actually ran at 225MHz (3x75 - 75MHz was the maximum FSB). I quickly replaced it with a K6-2 400, but could ony run it at 300MHz since the maximum multiplier available was 4 (4x75).
Performance was much better, and when I coupled it with the Voodoo Banshee, the difference in games was amazing!
I then found out that if you used an x2 multiplier of on a K6-2, it would set an actual multiplier of x6. Meaning that when I backed the FSB down to 66MHz and set the multiplier to x2, it would actually run at full speed; 6 x 66.6=400
I was surprised to find that there wasn't much difference in performance at all. This was repeated when I moved upto a Voodoo3 and a K6-2 550 on an AlladdinV board. I even removed the aluminium heatspreader, added a huge HSF and used the x2 multiplier trick to overclock it to 660MHz (6x110), and still there was hardly any difference.
A freind's Voodoo3 equipped 500MHz Katmai P3 would completely destroy it, even though it was 160MHz slower!

I guess what I'm trying to say is, K6-2 performance didn't ever seem to scale well with regards to MHz. I'm guessing it was the rubbish Super Socket 7 platform and bad chipsets. Also, AGP was never any good on SS7, again due to crappy chipsets and poor implementation.
This meant that in my early experiences with 3D, I was never able to truly explore the limits of the hardware since it was always CPU limited.


Anyway, apologies again for the OT.

 

K6-2 is gimped by horrible memory and cache performance. Not only is the cache off-die, but it's also on the same bus as everything else. P3 had better FPU, backside cache bus, higher cache clock, and games were ususually optimized for the Pentium/P6. And yea, AGP on Super 7 was terrible. You really wanted a board that didn't bother with fancy AGP features at all, like a Voodoo. It all spelled doom for K6 performance.

Quake 2 with the 3dnow patch is probably the most optimized K6-2 software in existence.

I have a K6-III+ @ 616 right now at home that I'm messing with. It is a lot slower than a Katmai P3 at 600, for sure. Maybe not in general Windows apps, but with say UT, the Katmai will obliterate it.

 

Indeed. As I said in my earlier post, the agp Voodoo3 was my super socket salvation!

When I moved on to K7 and Irongate, the performance leap was unimaginable!

 

k6-2's might not have performed like PII's did, clock for clock, but they cost a hell of a lot less. plus, there were definatley worse performers back then (cyrix). back in the day you could assemble a pretty decent system and save a pretty decent amount by going K6, because the chips and the boards were cheaper.

 

Well, of course. Why would you have bought the platform, if not for it being cheaper?

I skipped out on the K6 series, but some of my friends went for them cuz they were cheaper. I got to see how poor the platform was when we played games, though. UT was quite bad. Or Total Annihilation. Or Quake 3. Nothing really ran well on those things when you put them next to a P2 or P3.

And then I tried putting a GF256 in my friend's ASUS P5A and watched it reboot over and over because of the awful motherboard/chipset. I was running an Abit BF6 440BX at the time and it had no such troubles. His board also was limited to caching like 128 MB, cuz of the chipset/retro cache again. P2/P3 had no such limit.

 

K6 were quite good chips - for general purpose integer code. As noted though the fpu was a bit weak compared to P2/P3. I guess in the design phase they didn't realize how important a strong fpu would be, since before quake1 almost noone needed a fpu at all! So for "newer" games a a K6-2 350 often was only about as fast as a Pentium MMX 233 (when not uinsg 3dnow optimized apps at least), and a celeron 300A, even unoverclocked, ran circles around it (with games). That and the aging platform (front-side cache...) surely hurt it.

That actually looks like a power problem - I think some early agp slots weren't quite designed to handle the incredible 20W or so fast graphic cards were demanding .

Actually, this is not 100% true. Not only were there old boards which could handle up to 512MB (like 430hx), but the early P2 Klamath had such a cache limit too. However, the limit was 512MB so not a practical issue, though the performance difference made it actually a hard limit on ram support (since it also affected L1 cacheability, you'd got something like a factor 100 performance hit when using more ram...)

 

At the same time the Cyrix line outperformed both of them in 2D and regular windows work on a per clock basis while costing much much less . They were a good choice for those on a budget . So for an example a Cyrix 233+ ( ran at 188 ) performed as well or better than a Pentium II 233 in 2d work . What people notice and laughed at was the fact that it performed only on par with a Pentium I 166 or 150 MMX in games . But the catch was ..................... it was cheaper than any Pentium over 133 MHz . So why should a budget buyer ( as I was in school ) buy anything else ?

 

yeah, i actualy owned a cyrix (pr133 or 166 or something?). it was my second "real" computer; i bout it off a firend for next to nothing because it wouldn't boot anymore. turned out to be a faulty IDE cable my plan was to upgrade it to an intel P233, but a local shop was dumping their cyrix CPUs, so i ended up with a PR233 (180 mhz or so), and it was actualy a pretty decent performer in windows. in games, as long as you ignored the PR and went by the clockspeed you were actualy pretty well off. Cyrix had pretty insane bus speeds back in the day. intel was using a 66mhz bus back then, and cyrix was 75!

for gaming, AMD was a decent middle of the road. they performed better than the cyrix chips and cost less than the PII's. plus, they had 3Dnow!, so there was always that "once games start using this they'll kick ass". of course, that didn't really pan out. even the custom quake2 was superceded, making it impossible to play online with the 3Dnow enhancements.

 

Well, yes the P5A was most likely a power issue. I don't know about the overall quality of the AGP implementation of that chipset because I've never used the chipset significantly personally.

But, look at the VIA MVP3 chipset. Its AGP is not only electrically unreliable with newer AGP cards (NV10, NV15, R100), but the chipset/BIOS/drivers don't/didn't work with most newer AGP cards well at all. Things like the AGP aperture being 16 MB no matter what. Messed up texturing. In fact, the only cards that work really well in the boards are Voodoo cards because they treat AGP as PCI66.

I totally stand by my opinion that those boards had awful AGP designs, both with simple power delivery and with the actual AGP implementation. I just didn't go into much detail with my original post. I actually have a K6-III+ on a FIC VA-503+ at home right now. I've put like a dozen different cards into it to see how it works with them. The Voodoo5 is inevitably the card that runs the fastest and works the best. I'm not sure off hand exactly which cards have been the most troublesome, but I'd lean towards NV1x.

As for cacheability, yeah the P2 has a 512 MB limit. But, at the peak of that CPU's time, most people were running 128 MB or maybe 256 MB (I had 64 MB initially). The Super 7 / Socket 7 boards frequently came with 512 KB cache, which meant a 64 MB cacheable limit in writeback mode (except the rather rare 430HX and only then with the proper tag RAM setup). I had a SuperMicro 430HX that could only do 64 MB because of its stock tag RAM configuration. All Intel Socket 7 chipsets, aside from 430HX, are maxed out at 64MB cacheable no matter how much cache you have. A VIA MVP3-based board with 1024 k cache can only cache 256 MB (128 MB in writeback). The 2048 K cache boards probably do 512 MB, but they were quite rare too. Pentium Pro and later P6s all cached 512 MB at the very least.

For Super7 boards, I agree that 128 MB or 256 MB was plenty at the time though.

If you go outside the cacheable range with RAM on a K6-2, you'll lose a huge amount of performance. It's like turning off L2 cache. K6-III fixed this by doing its own cache mapping internally, and that was up to 4 gig RAM. That chip was not cheap though and was certainly not a good gaming value.

But not like it matters anymore lol. It was something how awful AMD had it back then. Then they totally turned around a couple years later with Athlon. That was amazing.

 

Yes you lose some performance, though it was still usable at least (that L2 cache didn't really provide a huge performance increase in the first place...).
You're totally right that those "super socket 7" boards were often problematic. I'd say it's because they were built for low-cost from start (chipsets) to finish (board manufacturers skimping on power regulation circuits and similar). There's a reason I used a K6-III on a board with a i430hx chipset (yes, with additional external tag ram upgrade!) and 128MB ram (unfortunately the highest possible you could go without paying a fortune, 64MB/128MB EDO modules were never available at reasonable prices). I actually liked that rig (with a voodoo3, if that counts as retro graphic card that would be my favorite), even though it wasn't that fast for games for general application performance it sure was decent. And you know what? This box is still in use today (with only a matrox mystique 2MB, so that's strictly 2d), and even with Windows XP (if that would still be my box I certainly wouldn't have bothered with XP and stayed with 2000 due to the low ram amount). I think though it's now reaching EOL, Vista is probably really too much for it .