Memory Lane... The Good Old Days of Graphics

[Googer]

Years ago, (during the golden age) there were many companies producing video cards or chipsets for discreet videocards, 3dFX, matrox, rage3d, ati, S3, Intel (made an AGP or PCI card), etc. Most of those companies are long gone due to buy outs, mergers, and poor performance (VIA Chrome 3D AGP). Nvidia bought out 3DFX and Creative Labs bought out another, who was it?

 

[AnandThenMan]

Creative Labs bought the assets of Aureal after the legal battle between the two (Aureal went bankrupt fighting the case) but I don't know of any GPU tech that Creative was involved in. Interesting question.

Wait, they did have a graphics card with the Permedia chip, so you are probably thinking of 3DLabs, completely forgot about that. edit - I was able to find a review on this site, neat. They were acquired by Creative Labs in 2002, you have a good memory.

 

[Arkadrel]

http://vr-zone.com/articles/revenge...gpu-pcie-card-coming-later-in-2012/14609.html

3dFX, matrox, rage3d, ati, S3, Intel (made an AGP card), etc. Most of those companies are long gone due to buy outs, mergers, and poor performance (VIA Chrome 3D).

PowerVR (Imagination Technologies), I think will make a come back.

Remember how at first 3DFX was just a add-in card, to aid your graphic card with 3D? Imagination Technologies has a card in the works. They are in the final stages of bringing a real-time ray-tracing accelerator card to market. A dedicated ray tracing processing unit, doesnt sound like such a bad thing, if it means useing raytracing becomes something that ll be possible for the masses.

we were told that the card is set to be introduced in the second half of this year,

Soon (maybe start of 2013?) we ll all be playing games useing Ray-tracing. ^^



Im guessing if this takes off, first its a 2nd card in your pc, kinda like Ageia/physx/first 3DFX ones, then lateron Nvidia and AMD pay royalties to add the chip's directly onto their GPU's.

 

[Joseph F]

I would love to see real-time ray-tracing in games.
Why can't current GPUs render ray-tracing graphics?
I thought I had heard that they can't to the calculations needed for it at all, let alone in real-time.
(Either that, or the architecture of current GPUs wasn't optimal for it)
Edit: I just read-up on ray-tracing a bit and it seems that the massively-parallel nature of current GPUs would be well-suited to ray-tracing.
Is it just a matter of computational power and software optimization that is keeping us from real-time ray-tracing?

 

[Arkadrel]

Why can't current GPUs render ray-tracing graphics?

They can do Ray-tracing.

Our next benchmark is SmallLuxGPU, the GPU ray tracing branch

However a "A dedicated ray tracing processing unit" will probably make it go much much faster.

 

[IlllI]

trident
number 9
3D Labs Permedia
Rendition
nvidia buying STB
Ati buying ARTx

 

[blackened23]

trident
number 9
3D Labs Permedia
Rendition
nvidia buying STB
Ati buying ARTx

3dfx bought stb, not nvidia


...and that was the beginning of the end

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Tseng Labs ET6000 + Canopus Pure3D = sex...

 

[skipsneeky2]

I bought only one card by nvidia besides a evga and that was a bfg,

It was a 7800gs and i always enjoyed how they displayed the cards in the box so you saw what you got as versus now you open it and the heatsink might look different then whats advertised.

They would display all their cards in their box's so you see the actual product in such a way to say"what you see is what you buy" so there was no surprises and if they were still around i am sure i would almost favor them over evga just on that aspect.

 

[Googer]

Creative did buy Aureal, but that was for soundcards. On the graphics side, I recall now; Creative bought out 3dLABS and did almost nothing with them. It's a real sad state of affairs, we have these days with only two graphics giants duking it out and any one who challenges them gets KO'd in the 1st round.

 

[Googer]

About 5 or 6 years ago, I remember there was a start-up effort to produce a graphics card to compete with AMD and NVIDIA. It was promised to have specs to match AMD and NVIDIA and do it for 2/3's the cost. The drivers were very beta like. Does anyone remember what that card was?

 

[Googer]

However a "A dedicated ray tracing processing unit" will probably make it go much much faster.

That is untill NVIDIA buys them out and just sits on the patents like they did with ULI (M1695:awe. Prior to the buyout, ULI was smashing nVIDIA in chipset performance, features, and cost.

 

[ctk1981]

About 5 or 6 years ago, I remember there was a start-up effort to produce a graphics card to compete with AMD and NVIDIA. It was promised to have specs to match AMD and NVIDIA and do it for 2/3's the cost. The drivers were very beta like. Does anyone remember what that card was?

Crap I know who you're talking about and I cant think of the company. I think they were offering quite a few dual gpu boards.

 

[kidsafe]

IMS / iXMicro

Also don't forget the bygone brandnames for these cards too: Chaintech, Leadtek, Elsa, etc. in addition to STB and Hercules/Guillemot.

 

[ctk1981]

Hercules immediately makes me think of the Kyro II card. Course, I had one or two of them way back then.....

 

[tynopik]

and bitboys was going to blow them all away

 

[billyb0b]

my 16mb voodoo 3 agp card spanked on the original unreal tournament in 1998-1999. ran it in a pentium 3 400MHz.

 

[Maximilian]

Havent seen XGI mentioned yet

Anyone remember their attempt to take the performance crown vs the 9800 XT and 5950 Ultra?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/xgi-volari_19.html#sect1

Didn't pan out so well.

 

[ctk1981]

Havent seen XGI mentioned yet

Anyone remember their attempt to take the performance crown vs the 9800 XT and 5950 Ultra?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/xgi-volari_19.html#sect1

Didn't pan out so well.

Thats the company I was thinking about! Back when I was making custom heatsinks for various cards I had requested a XGI card so I could have a pattern. Mind you, I wasnt asking for a working card a dead one was perfectly fine by me. Sent it off to just the regular "contact me" email address they had at the time, got a reply back from what was supposedly the ceo and said he would check into it for me and see what they had around. Lol

 

[Maximilian]

Thats the company I was thinking about! Back when I was making custom heatsinks for various cards I had requested a XGI card so I could have a pattern. Mind you, I wasnt asking for a working card a dead one was perfectly fine by me. Sent it off to just the regular "contact me" email address they had at the time, got a reply back from what was supposedly the ceo and said he would check into it for me and see what they had around. Lol

Did they send you one?

 

[ctk1981]

I think they kinda fell off the face of the planet after I had requested a card. I had a couple follow up conversations, but basically it amounted to they didnt have anything they could spare at the time, even a dead card. I was told to check back later, I never did follow up.

I do remember they had pretty impressive hardware at the time, but the drivers werent up to snuff. They had made improvements, but it was taking them way too much time and they were probably running short on funds and talent to compete with ATi and nVidia.

Never know when someone will come out of the woodwork with something. For example when matrox dropped the Parhelia on us. Most of us at the time had used Matrox for their superb 2D quality, 3D gaming and Matrox was non existent. Not like the parhelia was the king of gaming, but it did well enough coming from a company that was not known for 3d gaming.

 

[IlllI]

what was that card intel tried to sell back in the day? I think it was a rebadged card made by s3?
oh and I found a list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_graphics_chips_and_card_companies

 

[SlowSpyder]

About 5 or 6 years ago, I remember there was a start-up effort to produce a graphics card to compete with AMD and NVIDIA. It was promised to have specs to match AMD and NVIDIA and do it for 2/3's the cost. The drivers were very beta like. Does anyone remember what that card was?

Kyro maybe? I remember something about their GPU using tile processing or something along those lines. I believe it was a Power VR chip, the successor to the GPU in the Dreamcast maybe?


*edit - http://www.anandtech.com/show/735/3

Maybe this?

 

[ctk1981]

Heh......maybe the kyro III. The next big thing that never happened. Was supposed to feature T&L hardware, direct x 8 features, higher clock rate......the GeForce 3 killer!!

Course, I never thought Id see duke nukem forever released either....

 

[Nintendesert]

I remember when i first used a Voodoo2 card. I was blown away like nothing has done since. Those were the days.