What was the best and most successful video graphic chip ever built!

Not in the days of 286. But in 1992 SGI had a demo truck full of Crimson workstations visiting the uiversity I attended at the time. Many oohs and aahs by the 100MHz M4400 processors with graphics subsystem with 50Mpixel/s fillrate (goraud-shaded, non-textured). Priced at the cost of a small house too.

Cheers

 

The decision to make a Verite-native version of Quake but not a Glide version was an economic one rather than a reflection of the hardware. At the time 3Dfx initially approached Carmack they were planning on selling the voodo 1 for $400, which would have put it out of reach of all but the most rabid enthusiast. Carmack correctly calculated that, at that price, not enough people would own one to make it worth doing a native port of Quake, so he ported it to the Verite instead.

Then there was a sudden, massive price crash in the fast EDO RAM market, which took everybody (including Mr Carmack and 3Dfx) completely by surprise. As a result of that, the Voodoo 1 price dropped to just under $300, which made it cheap enough to achieve significant penetration. Every other 3D card at the time was designed to sell at a reasonable price without a massive price drop on fast memory, and as a result the Voodoo 1 was simply miles ahead of the competition for more than a year.

 

Well... most professional cards at the time (things like 3DLabs cards) emphasised polygon throughput rather than fill-rate. There was no other professional card available at the time which could have made a good gaming product (unless you count 3Dfx's own "Obsidian" line, which was the same basic technology as Voodoo).

 

how about the intergraph intense 3D / realizm mentioned in my post above
there's a manual for it here seems to be very capable for the time
https://support.intergraph.com/itservices/sysdocs/graphics/dha017120.pdf

it also appears to have optional t&l

 

Makes sense. I do remember the price crash and how it helped 3Dfx sell their product. It probably made the company. I eventually got an Orchid Righteous 3D in '97 new for $180 and obviously nothing at all could touch it for 3D support and speed.

 

I've always seen 3Dfx originally as an arcade hardware manufacturer that got lucky in the PC market because DRAM prices allowed them to make something that could fit in a consumer PC's price range. They were SGI vets who saw the potential of the poly rasterizers for more than just pro workstation hardware. The PC Voodoo Graphics card was just 2 of their arcade chips. The arcade machines usually had a few more of each chip and more RAM.

Real3D tried to do the same but the hardware they tried to sell us was unimpressive compared to a Voodoo2/3 or NVIDIA's stuff (more SGI people there).

 

Not entirely sure about that. I was using a Silicon Graphics Crimson in 1993 that had plenty of textured fill-rate throughput.

I might well argue that Savage3D did more for 3D than the Voodoo1, by giving us S3TC...

 

but the voodoo2 gave us sli

 

Voodoo or R300. I pick these two because I think they largely shaped the market the same amount. The Voodoo basically created the market but the R300 is nearly fully responsible for shaping what we have today. Without the R300 (and other ATi improvements at the same time) 3D graphics would likely be nowhere close to what they are now. R300 really scared the shit out of Nvidia and you could give it credit, in some ways, for giving us these constant upgrades that nearly double performance each generation (and actually being released to market). I also have to say the 9500 Pro is my favorite card for it's massive potential to become a freaking beast.

 

Eh? ATi has been continually in contention and many would consider the RV770 a very significant win and the best chip they've released since R300. I don't think we'll see either company release such a shockingly fast product compared to the other. Many forget that R300 wasn't that far after the release of Nv20 and Nv30 took a good while to come out and still couldn't compete.

 

Aye ATI really taking to NV this gen with thier r770/R700. There selling like hot cakes. When is the last time you saw ATI on Newegg'S top seller list like itds been for the past few months ?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048 4802&name=Top Sellers this one shows a 4870X2 !

It changes often like last night it was a powercolor 4870 and it may be an NV product tomorrow, but my point is ATI products were almost never top sellers before the 4000 series

 

I had a Voodoo 2 and for its time, it was an awesome card. I also had the very first Gforce card with a GPU..not sure which NV card that was though....then I bought a Radeon 9800xt and notice how well I remember what its name was. The freaken card is still working in my son's PC and can still play todays games with excellant IQ.

That card is the GFX card that gave me the biggest wow factor ever. Defentely the best card Ive ever bought . Its a shame that ATI had to fight against NV's market mindshare at the time cause if not for that mind share, ATI would of been a hell of lot more succesfull based purely on superior tech. The card was insanely fast, awesome IQ and it was ATI's true beginning at the top of the performance/IQ charts. I also think that it took several years...maybe even up to the g80 to top the IQ of that card, but I could be wrong on that one. Lets just say that as far as IQ goes, NV took several years to match it. My vote goes to R300

 

heretic - goes rooting in shtals bin

 

Back in those days, 1997 to 2000 I had a Pc gaming shop. People would come in and rent a PC station to play games in a lan enviroment. At first when we started out, we had 6 pcs with ATI rage3d cards. They played games ok. We then started to upgrade with a PowerVr chipset 3d Add in cards..my memory is a bit week here so Im not sure which card they were. Those were a pretty good upgrade. Then we upgraded to Diamond Voodoo 2 cards which were by far the best cards we had back then. We later bought more pcs and by the time we closed, we had 14 pcs. /Sigh...I miss those days of lanning on quake, Quake 2, Unreal, Descent, rainbow Six, red Alert, Mech Warior, Age Of Empire, StarCraft, Warcraft, Everquest and many more games.

 

No kidding huh? All of those games were basically fresh ideas back then. What a riot they were too. I would love to run a gaming center like that. So much tinkering to do and all in the name of games and a good time!