Most Useless video card features of our time article

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: kmmatney
I was one of the unfortunate soulds who briefly had a Voodoo Rush based card. What an utter disaster! It never did work right - I finally gave up and through it away.

The biggest video card debacle has to be BitBoys, however.

Remember MS's research project, designed around 2D spatial transforms to emulate 3D graphics rendering, in order to save bandwidth? I think that they actually talked Cirrus Logic into building some test silicon. I wonder whatever happened to that project. Guess it crashed and burned like the NV-1 (although that actually made it to the retail market, I have one).

Edit: LOL. I was looking for references for the above, and found something else. Apparently, Cirrus Logic and 3DO were going to team up and release a PC 3D accelerator based on the now-vaporware "M2" platform technology. link

We need a thread about "neat tech press releases that never happened".

 

[VIAN]

Used to have one of those 3Dfx V5 cards. It actually worked pretty well and I played all the way through Half-life with that bad boy. Thief with 2xAA back in the day was pretty durn cool. I always lamented the fact that the T-buffer was never used for anything other than AA. There was actually a demo that showed off the affects and they were pretty neat.

The Voodoo5 rules, it can handle UT2004 at 800x600 with everything set at low and all advanced graphic options unticked. I could probably make it look better, but I didn't feel like experimenting.

 

[gururu]

Originally posted by: VIAN
The Voodoo5 rules, it can handle UT2004 at 800x600 with everything set at low and all advanced graphic options unticked. I could probably make it look better, but I didn't feel like experimenting.

I think the UT engine is marvelous. It plays well on just about anything.

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarryEdit: LOL. I was looking for references for the above, and found something else. Apparently, Cirrus Logic and 3DO were going to team up and release a PC 3D accelerator based on the now-vaporware "M2" platform technology. link

We need a thread about "neat tech press releases that never happened".

About at the same time, Atari (the old, real Atari) and Sigma Designs (?) were working on putting the Atari Jaguar's three-processor 64-bit-ish 3D graphics solution onto a PCI card.

However, both 3DO and Atari fell into the bottomless pit of the console market decline in these days. That market didn't pick back up until a few years later.

 

[zephyrprime]

I think quadratic surfaces were ahead of their time. Flat polygons were unavoidable in a young industry with not enough pixel fill performance but that problem is fast fading so maybe quadractic surfaces could finally be feasible.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: gururu

Originally posted by: VIAN
The Voodoo5 rules, it can handle UT2004 at 800x600 with everything set at low and all advanced graphic options unticked. I could probably make it look better, but I didn't feel like experimenting.

I think the UT engine is marvelous. It plays well on just about anything.

Yeah. It even ran at better than 30fps on a 4MB PCI S3 Virge/DX card, at 800x600, on my AMD XP2000 box.
*boggle*

You should see it on a V3 3000 AGP, on Win98, running in Glide mode though. When I first saw it running like that, on a friend's K6-2 500 system (3DNow!), with an Aureal Vortex2 sound card (A3D 2.0 support), it was pretty amazing. It almost made me motion-sick, it was so smooth.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
I think quadratic surfaces were ahead of their time. Flat polygons were unavoidable in a young industry with not enough pixel fill performance but that problem is fast fading so maybe quadractic surfaces could finally be feasible.

I think that you have that slightly backwards. The NV-1 was based on Quadratic patches, and then everyone moved on to textured polygons. The lack of support for the emerging Direct3D standard is what killed the NV-1. It was interesting, if quirky, hardware.

 

[VIAN]

http://www.forumzone.it/topic....oom3+Su+Voodoo5+%21%21

Check it out.

Voodoo5 6000 playing DoomIII. There are also some links in there where the Voodoo5 5500 plays DoomIII with decent framerates of max 35fps.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: ScrewFace
The most useless feature is nVidia's support for Shader Mark 3.0. Games are just finaly using Dirext 8.1 pixel and vertex shaders. Shader Mark 3.0 won't be in full use for 2 years and by that time the GeFroce 6800 series won't be able to run the new games at playable framerates anyhow.

 

[Avalon]

Originally posted by: VIAN
http://www.forumzone.it/topic....oom3+Su+Voodoo5+%21%21

Check it out.

Voodoo5 6000 playing DoomIII. There are also some links in there where the Voodoo5 5500 plays DoomIII with decent framerates of max 35fps.