Weirdest actual 3D card for PC's

[Mulciber]

A bit off topic, but back in Autumn 1997 I was about to built my first PC (was a Mac user prior) and figured out that I might better get to the bottom of things and turned to tomshardware for the prime advise on a new videocard.

There's a lot of hype thrown at us from all the different card and chip manufacturers on the graphic market too and you can easily face a huge disappointment if you should make the wrong choice.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/19971109/index.html

Well, I went for a Riva128 and it turned out to be a disappointment. Neither Unreal (D3D) nor Quake II (OpenGL) was any good and I ended up playing both games in software mode. That was kind of a weird experience - even back then...

Yea, I went for the Riva128 AFTER reading toms review haha. At that point, all he had done was a few final reality benchmarks though and I really thought it was the good choice. I need a new 2d card and I couldn't afford that and a Voodoo1, so I went for the Riva. Turned out that it was probably a bad choice and I should have just saved up some more cache. I was plagued with driver probs too.

 

[stevem]

The design basically stuck a x86 compatible (Cyrix IIRC) chip on the graphics card and run the TnL portion of D3D on the card, it had direct access to the triangle engine etc.

AFAIR it was a V2200 board with a Fujitsu Pinolite geometry engine handling fixed function T&L. The end results weren't all that impressive given the new wave of TNT & V2 chips coupled with faster PII CPUs. They abandoned the project, although Rendition/Hercules had a number of prototypes.

the fujitsu pinolite board was a result of rendition's very lame drivers at the time. apparently, some new driver guy at rendition rewrote the GL driver to outperform the pinolite board. that helped kill the project.

IIRC, DX didn't have TNL at the time, and DX programs wouldn't have benefitted from pinolite until DX7. two years later geforce came out...

The benchmarketing racket had already begun & their aim was QII @ 30fps (640x480) on a P200 with settings set to max. Given the wide use of the Quake game engine, OpenGL acceleration was their aim. IIRC about 25fps was the best they ever achieved, so the project was scrapped. The last beta ICDs included support for MMX & 3dnow! & were indeed more useable. IIRC the beta6 drivers (cancelled by Micron) were to have brought substantial gains to 2D & D3D. Those were the days, Dim3D, Bjorn3D....

 

[swaaye]

Well, I have a Sierra Screamin' 3D (V1000) and a Hercules Thriller 3D (V2200) sitting in a drawer. I had the Diamond V2100 board at one time too... I may need to get some VQuake going on that V1000, since I've never seen it!!!

It sure was something to live thru those early days of 3D. I have a collection of Computer Gaming Worlds going back to like '93, and all the ones covering those early 3D days. Fun to read those articles now days and see how their "prophesies" turned out

Like the Diamond Edge 3D disaster, lol. Those things were like $400 too!! Look how far we've come! (I need to get one of those cards for my little collection, stash it right next to my full length ISA Ensoniq Soundscape Elite, lol)

 

[Legion]

what was the power benefit on average for the V2 SLI

 

[BRiT]

what was the power benefit on average for the V2 SLI

Nearly twice as fast with same resolution. Higher resolution that ran faster too.

I always opted for the faster play at the higher resolution [1024x768-V2SLI ran significantly faster than 800x600-V2].