Memory Lane... The Good Old Days of Graphics

[Googer]

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?

I think it was XGI, that I was thinking about.

 

[Googer]

I remember when EVGA was the small fry with monthly giveaways. At the time everyone was buying "Golden Samples" and EVGA was pretty much ignored, but I had faith in them.

 

[PliotronX]

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.

Never did completely fix that m5288 SATAII bug.

I enjoy this thread very much

 

[Googer]

Never did completely fix that m5288 SATAII bug.

I enjoy this thread very much

When you cant beat 'em buy 'em out!


(3DFX, ULI, AGEIA, to name a few)

 

[Googer]

Video cards used to have ram you could upgrade; socketed just like a motherboard. Too bad they don't make them like they used to.

 

[Martimus]

Tseng Labs ET6000 + Canopus Pure3D = sex...

Hey, I had an ET6000 when I played "Under a Killing Moon" (your avatar).

 

[Stuka87]

When you cant beat 'em buy 'em out!


(3DFX, ULI, AGEIA, to name a few)

3dfx's creditors started bankruptcy proceedings which then lead to the company simply selling themselves. nVidia bought most of it.

3dfx failed mostly due to management issues which resulted in very late product releases that were over promised and under delivered. Not to mention the purchase of STB was a HUGE mistake that ultimately helped push them over the edge.

It was such a sad day when I heard the news that 3dfx was going away

 

[ultimatebob]

I remember when it was NVidia vs 3DFX fighting for the 3D performance crown, and companies like ATI, Matrox, and S3 were also rans. It honestly wasn't all that long ago.

 

[Stuka87]

I remember when it was NVidia vs 3DFX fighting for the 3D performance crown, and companies like ATI, Matrox, and S3 were also rans. It honestly wasn't all that long ago.

14 years is like 140 years in the computer world.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Couple different things-

They, in any way you can imagine, were *not* the good old days. I'd like to play this game, but I need a RRendition; I need a custom OpenGL renderer to get this game working, this game says it supports D3D, but it runs sub 5FPS unless you put it in Glide. The terrible old days were insanely bad. Once the industry standardized on D3D nVidia put everyone else out of business(everyone wanted their own format to win so they could dominate, nV pushed D3D and OpenGL). ATi followed whatever nVidia did, it kept them alive(although they were never competitive until the bought out ArtX and they gave them some actual engineering talent to go with their, at the time, solid management team).

Real time ray tracing kind of sucks, rather in a huge way. Ray tracing does reflections very nicely, everything else it is *terrible* at. All your shadows will be razor sharp, good bye dust/smoke/haze. There is a reason we don't do real time ray tracing, mainly because it's dumb. A hybrid engine that utilizes rasterization for most elements and only uses ray tracing for reflections is a smarter way to go(although, it still is going to have a massive performance hit for a relatively tiny improvement in overall graphic fidelity).

PowerVR- IT(they guys that made Kyro) aren't dead, not even close. They may end up with more of their GPUs selling this year then AMD, they just left the close to no win world of PC graphics. Every iPhone and iPad you see? PowerVR GPUs on board, along with a decent amount of Android devices. They aren't gone, they simply couldn't come close to going toe to toe with nVidia/AMD in the desktop GPU space(if they had been ready at the very start they could have blown everyone out of the water and they may be a monopoly today, but their rendering technique's advantages were less of a factor the further we advanced).

 

[Maximilian]

Heres a list i found on wiki of all the defunct graphics chip companies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_graphics_chips_and_card_companies

 

[Joseph F]

Heres a list i found on wiki of all the defunct graphics chip companies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_graphics_chips_and_card_companies

A moment of silence is in order.

 

[exar333]

I miss the innovation and 'newness' of those days, but definitely not the cross-competing standards.

 

[Bateluer]

People are still pissed at Creative for buying Aureal . . . and shelving their entire product line and tech.

 

[PliotronX]

When you cant beat 'em buy 'em out!


(3DFX, ULI, AGEIA, to name a few)

That's the name of the game D:

Couple different things-

They, in any way you can imagine, were *not* the good old days. I'd like to play this game, but I need a RRendition; I need a custom OpenGL renderer to get this game working, this game says it supports D3D, but it runs sub 5FPS unless you put it in Glide. The terrible old days were insanely bad...

Yep, each generation away from DOS it was successively easier to run games. I still have nightmares about conventional memory.

People are still pissed at Creative for buying Aureal . . . and shelving their entire product line and tech.

I've still got my torch and pitchfork from those days. Their practices sure came back to bite 'em in the ass.

 

[IlllI]

Heres a list i found on wiki of all the defunct graphics chip companies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_graphics_chips_and_card_companies

guess someone didnt bother to read all the comments. i posted that on page one.

 

[dkm777]

People are still pissed at Creative for buying Aureal . . . and shelving their entire product line and tech.

Please don't remind me. I had a Vortex card back in the late 90s. Playing Unreal with headphones in surround sound was godlike. Fast forward to today and there's virtually nothing that can do 3D audio with two sources. F'kin Creative and their business model of selling overpriced 5.1 speaker systems.

 

[exar333]

Please don't remind me. I had a Vortex card back in the late 90s. Playing Unreal with headphones in surround sound was godlike. Fast forward to today and there's virtually nothing that can do 3D audio with two sources. F'kin Creative and their business model of selling overpriced 5.1 speaker systems.

Talk about digging-up skeletons. This STILL pisses me off. LOVED Aureal 3D! We had better audio effects almost 15 years ago then we do today in many cases. I will NEVER buy Creative, ever.

Rockin' my Xonar 7.1 with my middle-finger pointed at Creative.

 

[wahdangun]

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?

that is why AMD and NVDIA go bumping up their compute power so when the ray tracing game hit the store their card will be capable to handle it

 

[wahdangun]

btw can anyone find me a link to this card spec and review

 

[Googer]

Please don't remind me. I had a Vortex card back in the late 90s. Playing Unreal with headphones in surround sound was godlike. Fast forward to today and there's virtually nothing that can do 3D audio with two sources. F'kin Creative and their business model of selling overpriced 5.1 speaker systems.

Talk about digging-up skeletons. This STILL pisses me off. LOVED Aureal 3D! We had better audio effects almost 15 years ago then we do today in many cases. I will NEVER buy Creative, ever.

Rockin' my Xonar 7.1 with my middle-finger pointed at Creative.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,629855/PCGH-History-The-most-beautiful-soundcards-ever/Knowledge/

 

[tigersty1e]

When almost every card seller had lifetime warranties.

 

[ElFenix]

rage3d was an ati product.

ati cards were slow but they made more money than anyone due to OEM contracts back in the late 90s. their first halfway competitive 3D product was the original radeon, iirc.

 

[exar333]

When almost every card seller had lifetime warranties.

Those old cards were built like tanks, and used very little power in comparison to today's GPUs. You could what, put a Voodoo2 in a 250W PSU system and it was fine? Now many GPUs use this power ALONE. Crazy.

My old Voodoo2 8MB is still kicking after how many years?

 

[Googer]

When almost every card seller had lifetime warranties.

All of the manufacturers seemed to have all stopped the practice at about the same time BFG went under. Perhaps they saw their own fate in BFG or maybe too many people were abusing the warranties?