I assume one of the reason Intel could never develop it's own graphics adapter business is that any proper GPU would initially decrease the load on the CPU, partly reducing the justification for more expensive versions of their main product. Marketing-driven tunnel vision and all that.
Remembering Intel 740
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#12Yeah, around that time there were quite a few "hopeful" 3D cards/chips that ultimately didn't quite cut it. I couldn't spare the cash for a 3dfx card at the time, but I wanted a 3D card, so I got an S3 ViRGE-based one. That chip later became infamous as a "3D decelerator" because with hardware 3D rendering most games were slower on a decent PC (albeit a little prettier) than with software rendering. The only game I e…
In 1996 I had got my first PC, I wanted a 3D card but didn't have the technical knowledge to understand the difference between cards. I got a Matrox Mystique. It ran a couple of games well that it came with. It was completely incapable of playing GLQuake or any other titles I was interested in.
Sad thing is a salesmen had tried to convince me to get a 3dfx Monster3D, but I thought the passthrough dongle thing was trashy and cheap looking. Learned my lesson hard. To this day I research the crap out of anything I buy in the PC space before buying it.
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#13All the names and terminology, MMX CPU, 3Dfx Voodoo, VideoLogic PowerVR, AGP, i740, Cyrix 6×86, AMD K6, ALi Aladdin, Super Socket 7, 440BX.... etc. It just put a smile on my face. :) And I have every single one of them somewhere in my house.
But it didn't touch on the real reason why i740 failed. It was Drivers.
Intel fail to invest enough resource to catch up in Driver quality. The constant rendering bug, crash, and performance on non-optimised Games were dismal. ( Games that were not on Review Benchmarks list )
That is why I am sceptical of Intel re-entering the GPU space. This time around they do have their iGPU marketshare as test bed and foundation to built on, but driver quality will continue to dictate Gaming performance. Even AMD barely manage to get ~15% discrete market GPU.
And as a side note. Nvidia market cap at ~$630B is now worth three times more than Intel. I am wondering if Nvidia could be another trillion dollar company.
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#14All the names and terminology, MMX CPU, 3Dfx Voodoo, VideoLogic PowerVR, AGP, i740, Cyrix 6×86, AMD K6, ALi Aladdin, Super Socket 7, 440BX.... etc. It just put a smile on my face. :) And I have every single one of them somewhere in my house. But it didn't touch on the real reason why i740 failed. It was Drivers. Intel fail to invest enough resource to catch up in Driver quality. The constant rendering bug, crash, and…
And yet INTC net income is 3x NVDA, 21B vs 7B
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#15>> Lockheed Martin created a spin-off dedicated to consumer 3D graphics tech called Real3D, mostly using employees from GE Aerospace.
Imagine aerospace trying to compete with startups like NVIDIA and 3Dfx
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#16I assume one of the reason Intel could never develop it's own graphics adapter business is that any proper GPU would initially decrease the load on the CPU, partly reducing the justification for more expensive versions of their main product. Marketing-driven tunnel vision and all that.
Just 1 year later they released the i810 which was Intel first attempt of integrating their own GPU on the motherboard chipset. They didn't get into 'Intel HD graphics', integrated into the CPU for almost another 10 years.
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#17Let's hop in the time machine and look at John Carmack's .plan
Intel i740 —- Good throughput, good fillrate, good quality, good features. A very competent chip. I wish intel great success with the 740. I think that it firmly establishes the baseline that other companies (especially the ones that didn’t even make this list) will be forced to come up to.
Voodoo rendering quality, better than voodoo1 performance, good 3D on a desktop integration, and all textures come from AGP memory so there is no texture swapping at all.
Lack of 24 bit rendering is the only negative of any kind I can think of.
Their current MCD OpenGL on NT runs quake 2 pretty well. I have seen their ICD driver on ’95 running quake 2, and it seems to be progressing well. The chip has the potential to outperform voodoo 1 across the board, but 3DFX has more highly tuned drivers right now, giving it a performance edge. I expect intel will get the performance up before releasing the ICD.
It is worth mentioning that of all the drivers we have tested, intel’s MCD was the only driver that did absolutely everything flawlessly. I hope that their ICD has a similar level of quality (it’s a MUCH bigger job).
An 8mb i740 will be a very good setup for 3D development work.
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#18Wohaa!! I had one of those. Those were my first few years with computers and I was just learning with a friend of mine how to build and tune them to support better Doom, Quake and all the games we were playing at the time. I think this stuff was the ignition of my profession.
So many good memories. I feel old :-s.
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#19Yeah, around that time there were quite a few "hopeful" 3D cards/chips that ultimately didn't quite cut it. I couldn't spare the cash for a 3dfx card at the time, but I wanted a 3D card, so I got an S3 ViRGE-based one. That chip later became infamous as a "3D decelerator" because with hardware 3D rendering most games were slower on a decent PC (albeit a little prettier) than with software rendering. The only game I e…
In 1996 I had got my first PC, I wanted a 3D card but didn't have the technical knowledge to understand the difference between cards. I got a Matrox Mystique. It ran a couple of games well that it came with. It was completely incapable of playing GLQuake or any other titles I was interested in. Sad thing is a salesmen had tried to convince me to get a 3dfx Monster3D, but I thought the passthrough dongle thing was tra…
That's the one I got for my first PC as well.
I managed to out-do myself my pairing it with a Cyrix 686+.
So not only did I have an unsupported gaming card, I had a CPU that didn't like doing floating point and ran quake like powerpoint.
...as you said,you learn from your mistakes.
Re: Remembering Intel 740
#20All the names and terminology, MMX CPU, 3Dfx Voodoo, VideoLogic PowerVR, AGP, i740, Cyrix 6×86, AMD K6, ALi Aladdin, Super Socket 7, 440BX.... etc. It just put a smile on my face. :) And I have every single one of them somewhere in my house. But it didn't touch on the real reason why i740 failed. It was Drivers. Intel fail to invest enough resource to catch up in Driver quality. The constant rendering bug, crash, and…
It is always lack of execution, I was on the Larrabee session at GDCE 2009, and wow it was going to take over the gaming world, history followed another path as we all know.
On a similar note, Solaris has successfully used memory tagging with SPARC ADI, ARM is following along with MTE, meanwhile Intel removed the buggy MPX from their chips.
Then we have the whole StrongArm or Edison boards.
NVidia is very strong in tooling, documentation and being open to polyglot programming on their GPUs, to a level that Intel and AMD keep failing at.