Sega Linbergh naked

[Megadrive1988]

PowerVR no longer interests me as it once did. they just cannot compete with Nvidia or ATI in the highend.

ATI is the most interesting to me, since they have a lot of the technology that Sega used in the Model-1, Model-2 and Model-3 series. Nvidia has some too, but I think ATI has more of it. of course I am talking about the former General Electric Aerospace, Martin-Marietta and Lockheed-Martin Real3D technologies. SEGA should just use ATI exclusively and would still be far cheaper than when that technology was from LM Real3D. The ATI R580 and upcoming R600 would be perfect for all of Sega's needs, and they can upgrade as newer ATI GPUs become available. if ATI is good enough for Silicon Graphics Inc and Evans & Sutherland, it's good enough for Sega.


Lindbergh should become Sega's low-end board. like Taito TypeX. ..... instead of the very lowend Aurora board which is not even as powerful as NAOMI 2.

Sega should then have 2 more boards, a mid-range board and a high-end board using a mix of ATI GPUs.

 

[SugarCoat]

way too big of a card to be a 6600. 6800GS, GT, or vanilla. Take your pick.

and for those that wondered, all OEM Nvidia cards have those heatsinks. PNY, BFG *only alienware as far as im aware*, and eVGA use those in OEM machines.

 

[Fox5]

PowerVR no longer interests me as it once did. they just cannot compete with Nvidia or ATI in the highend.

ATI is the most interesting to me, since they have a lot of the technology that Sega used in the Model-1, Model-2 and Model-3 series. Nvidia has some too, but I think ATI has more of it. of course I am talking about the former General Electric Aerospace, Martin-Marietta and Lockheed-Martin Real3D technologies. SEGA should just use ATI exclusively and would still be far cheaper than when that technology was from LM Real3D. The ATI R580 and upcoming R600 would be perfect for all of Sega's needs, and they can upgrade as newer ATI GPUs become available. if ATI is good enough for Silicon Graphics Inc and Evans & Sutherland, it's good enough for Sega.


Lindbergh should become Sega's low-end board. like Taito TypeX. ..... instead of the very lowend Aurora board which is not even as powerful as NAOMI 2.

Sega should then have 2 more boards, a mid-range board and a high-end board using a mix of ATI GPUs.

I don't think PowerVR ever quite made high end, at best they were more like Intel's Prescott's against AMD's Athlon 64s.
I think PowerVR was always most interesting for price versus performance and they still are, slower memory with the same performance is a good thing.

You find ATI interesting for inheritating the Model legacy though? They brought ATI into the gamer's market, but still weren't enough to compete with nvidia, it wasn't until the aquisition of ArtX that ATI turned around. (though they're losing all the momentum they built up, I think ATI's lack of success after aquiring real3d and their loss of momentum now is more due to management and poor design balance though)
I never thought the Model hardware was interesting, sure it was powerful, it was also extremely expensive, any card maker could achieve extreme levels of power if they could sell it for the prices Lockheed did.

 

[Lazy8s]

PowerVR has released at least two high-end chipsets. CLX2 in 1998 Q4, and 2xCLX2+ELAN in 2000 Q2.

Although Sega Sammy's primary use for Aurora is to power pachinko, pachislot, and other highly integrated arcade systems, it was designed for the restrictions of portable systems so that Sega Sammy could license it out as a platform to a wider range of manufacturers in order to establish it as a standard.

While the SH3707 has a slower T&L rate than NAOMI2 and is missing a few nice custom features like modifier volumes and hardware translucency sorting, it has more advanced vertex capabilities and also has curved surface acceleration.

 

[Lazy8s]

The company which got Real3D's actual IP technology was Intel when they bought the division. The staff -- those who hadn't already left for the other companies -- that they got from them, though, in part worked from outside Intel as contractors for them for a while.

Model 4 had begun design, and a concept 3D demo of a T-Rex was even in production.

 

[Megadrive1988]

The company which got Real3D's actual IP technology was Intel when they bought the division. The staff -- those who hadn't already left for the other companies -- that they got from them, though, in part worked from outside Intel as contractors for them for a while.

Model 4 had begun design, and a concept 3D demo of a T-Rex was even in production.

but Intel sold it all, or some of it, and now ATI has the Real3D IP, or so I thought. well at the very least, ATI has some Real3D engineers at ATI's Orlando design center, former Real3D HQ.

as for Model 4, I never heard anything on it, other than Next Generation magazine saying in 1995 that Model 4
was being "spec'ed up", and that was before Model 3 was introduced. I never heard of a 3D Demo of a T-Rex. The only things that comes to mind are, the T-Rex in Lost World Arcade game on Model 3, and a much older T-Rex demo for the Playstation1 shown in 1994.

what timeframe are you talking about on Model 4 and this T-Rex demo ?

 

[Lazy8s]

The interactive T-Rex demo was being produced by long-time Lockheed and SEGA production assistant, EPLi, early in 1997, before the shift to Dreamcast.

 

[Megadrive1988]

The interactive T-Rex demo was being produced by long-time Lockheed and SEGA production assistant, EPLi, early in 1997, before the shift to Dreamcast.

interesting. is anything else known about Model 4 ?

 

[Sonic]

It may have had some type of IBM developed CPU, possibly another variant of PowerPC. That's really it from what's known out there.

 

[Megadrive1988]

It may have had some type of IBM developed CPU, possibly another variant of PowerPC. That's really it from what's known out there.

probably some derivative of the PowerPC 604. just a wild guess.

but what about the GPU(s)? the Real3D Pro 1000 was completed in 1995, so, I'm trying to find any mention of a then-nextgen highend Real3D GPU/chipset.

Namco was threatening to overtake Model 3 performance with a System 33 board using a MIPs CPU and 4 early prototype PowerVR1 chips, with a combined performance of 2M pps.
that never worked out, Namco switched strategies and went very low-end with the System12 board.

I guess Sega decided that beefed up versions of Model 3 were more than good enough to win the 3D graphics arms race with Namco that it was still waging in 1997. plus the further decline of the arcades, would make Model 4 unjustifable. plus the Dreamcast, although not as good in some areas, had higher polygon performance than Model 3, and that was that.

 

[Pozer]

The company which got Real3D's actual IP technology was Intel when they bought the division. The staff -- those who hadn't already left for the other companies -- that they got from them, though, in part worked from outside Intel as contractors for them for a while.

Model 4 had begun design, and a concept 3D demo of a T-Rex was even in production.

You just reminded me of one of my fav video cards an intel i740. Had some good Half-life1 playing on that thing. It also blew the pants off my 3dfx banshee and my buddies TNT1 on a k6-2 300. Had nicer IQ than the tnt also. It was also only like $50. I believe it was the first true 'GPU' in that its rendering speed wasn't as dependant upon a fast CPU as other 3d accellerators of the time.

The i740 was the best $50 I ever spent on a piece of computer equipment.

Either way it would be nice to see someone like intel take another stab.

 

[Megadrive1988]

You just reminded me of one of my fav video cards an intel i740. Had some good Half-life1 playing on that thing. It also blew the pants off my 3dfx banshee and my buddies TNT1 on a k6-2 300. Had nicer IQ than the tnt also. It was also only like $50. I believe it was the first true 'GPU' in that its rendering speed wasn't as dependant upon a fast CPU as other 3d accellerators of the time.

The i740 was the best $50 I ever spent on a piece of computer equipment.

Either way it would be nice to see someone like intel take another stab.

heh, and lowend 740i had barely better real world performance, if as good at all, as the old MODEL2 board from 1993-1994. although more modern features.

 

[swaaye]

i740 was a POS. Don't compare it to a TNT lol. A TNT is faster than Voodoo2, which is definitely outside the realm of an i740. i740 even gets smoked by a Riva 128! No it doesn't look better, either. It performs more like a G200, if that.

Did you know i740 is designed only to use AGP texture memory? In order to build a PCI version they had to "fake AGP" on the board and have it think the memory on the board was AGP RAM. LOL. Needless to say, a TNT with 16MB 110MHz 128-bit local SDRAM is going to just destroy a i740 accessing 64-bit 100MHz SDRAM, ignoring the horrid inefficiences of going thru all that glue logic to get to system RAM, and that it's shared with the CPU, and that the chipsets K6 was on had the worst AGP implementations ever (i.e. it basically didn't work.) The only boards to use on K6 are Voodoo boards because they don't use AGP for much at all, and Glide is a very low overhead API.

 

[Pozer]

i740 was a POS. Don't compare it to a TNT lol. A TNT is faster than Voodoo2, which is definitely outside the realm of an i740. i740 even gets smoked by a Riva 128! No it doesn't look better, either. It performs more like a G200, if that.

A TNT will not outperform an i740 on a k6-2 300 in half life1 benchies. A pentium2 system is another story. At the time I only played Half Life1 deathmatch and on a k62-300 the i740 outperformed a TNT1 and Banshee in half life DM. Of course once SOF and Kingpin came out it was over for that thing.

 

[swaaye]

Well NV did have troubles with their cards on the wonderful Super 7 platform. Basically everyone did lol, except 3dfx cuz they ignored the intial AGP marketing buzz. AGP was useless back then anyway, except for the Real3D/Intel i740 which was forced by Intel to use AGP to further their standard.

I'm surprised the card worked at all in that case. AGP just didn't work well on Super 7 boards. Most cards will force themselves into a AGP 1x mode without any AGP texturing. VIA's later mobo chipset drivers do that in any case. And the platform/CPU made high performance cards slaves to their driver's CPU utilization.

 

[Megadrive1988]

unshackled from Intel/AGP/lowend/PC limitations, Real3D GPUs could kick the ever living-crap out of anything from 3Dfx, Nvidia, ATi during the 1995-1998 timeframe. it would not be until 1999 that Nvidia would be able rival (more or less) Real3D with the introduction of a chip that had been designed by the former SGI InfiniteReality team, the NV10.

 

[Pozer]

This was also on a ALI based Super 7 mb chipset. I actually preferred them to the VIA based chipsets of the time. I always had better stability with the ALI. Also running the latest beta refrence drivers was a must on the i740.

As i remember, I preferred the IQ quality of the i740 over the creative TNT1. The i740 seemed to have a 'glide like' look to it's 3d. While I always thought the TNT had muddy looking colors. But that was a long time ago. I did love my Diamond Monster TNT2. Paired with an abit bp6 dual celeron, man I miss those days of computing and gaming.

 

[Fox5]

i740 was a POS. Don't compare it to a TNT lol. A TNT is faster than Voodoo2, which is definitely outside the realm of an i740. i740 even gets smoked by a Riva 128! No it doesn't look better, either. It performs more like a G200, if that.

Did you know i740 is designed only to use AGP texture memory? In order to build a PCI version they had to "fake AGP" on the board and have it think the memory on the board was AGP RAM. LOL. Needless to say, a TNT with 16MB 110MHz 128-bit local SDRAM is going to just destroy a i740 accessing 64-bit 100MHz SDRAM, ignoring the horrid inefficiences of going thru all that glue logic to get to system RAM, and that it's shared with the CPU, and that the chipsets K6 was on had the worst AGP implementations ever (i.e. it basically didn't work.) The only boards to use on K6 are Voodoo boards because they don't use AGP for much at all, and Glide is a very low overhead API.

Not to mention 3dfx was amazingly fast in getting out well-optimized 3dnow drivers. Ah, if only their driver updates could have been as fast towards the end of the company's life.

BTW, I have some doubt that the i740 was a full GPU (T&L and all), but even if it was, DirectX did not support it at the time so uh.....what was the point?

http://www.d128.com/reviews/agp6000.html
And these benchmark shows the Riva 128 whooping the i740 in performance. (primarily in the OpenGL benchmarks, but Halflife ran better in OpenGL than Direct3d)

 

[Fox5]

This was also on a ALI based Super 7 mb chipset. I actually preferred them to the VIA based chipsets of the time. I always had better stability with the ALI. Also running the latest beta refrence drivers was a must on the i740.

As i remember, I preferred the IQ quality of the i740 over the creative TNT1. The i740 seemed to have a 'glide like' look to it's 3d. While I always thought the TNT had muddy looking colors. But that was a long time ago. I did love my Diamond Monster TNT2. Paired with an abit bp6 dual celeron, man I miss those days of computing and gaming.

Like current Intel integrated graphics, it appears the i740 did little "optimizing" of the graphics so they look about as good as they can. Real3d's emphasis on additional features at no additional performance hit (at the expense of silicon) probably helped, though the original Radeon had that philosophy too and didn't look all that great. Eh, at least it had better than nvidia's image quality, while still supporting modern features and offering somewhat competitive performance. Oh, but the drivers sucked.
Oh, and nvidia cards looked abnormally bad at the time, they had horrible RAMDACs and did not feature any sort of color post filtering. ATI was a bit better back in the day, and both Matrox and 3dfx (on their later cards) had much better RAMDACs and included some form of postfiltering.

 

[Megadrive1988]

BTW, I have some doubt that the i740 was a full GPU (T&L and all), but even if it was, DirectX did not support it at the time so uh.....what was the point?

you're right.

the i740 was not at all a GPU. it had no geometry processor / T&L. it was just a rasterizer like all the other consumer PC 3D chips until the NV10 - GeForce256. the only thing i740 had going for it was high image quality. it had poor performance.

if Lockheed Real3D had the balls to produced an single-chip GPU version of the Real3D-100 chipset for $300 with 8 MB RAM in the 1996-1997 timeframe, with a timely follow-up in 1999, Real3D would've wiped out the competition.