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Remembering Intel 740

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Re: Remembering Intel 740

#21

Post by fredoralive »

bluedino wrote: post #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

Well, they did have decades of experience with real time 3D from flight simulators, so what could some johnny-come-lately's really do, especially when paired with the mightly Intel? (Well, didn't work out...[1])

I suppose if the chip hadn't been a stinker I suspect Real3D would've ended up being spun out of Lockheed Martin somehow as it doesn't seem a great fit for the rest of the business. Presumably the spinoff would have less embarrasing way of being sold to Intel on the cheap and having the tech used for (motherboard) intergrated "Intel Extreme"(ly bad) graphics.

[1] Although ATI wasn't exactly a startup by the 3D era, and 3DFX crashed and burned, so it wasn't quite "startups win".

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#22

Post by pengaru »

bluedino wrote: post #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

Skunkworks

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#24

Post by SavantIdiot »

ksec wrote: post #13

All 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…

I disagree. The 740 didn't have the triangle pipeline speed that competitors had as poly counts went up.

It had great memory and rasterizer bandwidth, it was just starved by transformation. The pipeline was balanced for polycounts that came before it, not what was to come.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#25

Post by Svperstar »

goldcd wrote: post #19
Svperstar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I emailed Matrox and asked if support for GLQuake was coming and they emailed me back and said "We are currently working on the drivers" Total lie. The Mystique was completely incapable of supporting GLQuake. Live and learn. I had Voodoo 2 SLI like a year and a half later.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#26

Post by thereddaikon »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #23

I worked on the 740, under Tom Piazza (RIP) from Real3D when Intel acquired them. Fun project. Uncompetitive before it even shipped. Got questions? Ask away! It was a very simple pipeline.

Why was the decision made to use system memory as vram instead of shipping more on the card? It seems like a cost cutting measure, but had an outsized effect on performance.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#27

Post by SavantIdiot »

thereddaikon wrote: post #26
SavantIdiot wrote: post #23

I worked on the 740, under Tom Piazza (RIP) from Real3D when Intel acquired them. Fun project. Uncompetitive before it even shipped. Got questions? Ask away! It was a very simple pipeline.

Why was the decision made to use system memory as vram instead of shipping more on the card? It seems like a cost cutting measure, but had an outsized effect on performance.

AGP was designed to allow faster access to memory because VRAM was expensive. There was just enough for the framebuffers. Texture size was known to be huge, which would live in RDRAM b/c VRAM would have been crazy expensive (I think the dual 3DFx at the time was like $1k). Also Intel was investing heavily in RDRAM (remember that?). The idea of integrating graphics and southbridge was on the long-term roadmap, which would use UMA (unified memory architecture) to make cheap mobos, which board vendors were begging for. So this also figured into the decision: it wasn't about the graphics crown, it was about selling CPUs. These became the 810 and 815, which the game developers HATED because it held back progress for years: the 810 was the most common graphics chipset by I believe more than one order of magnitude.

So yes, cost cutting due to the desire to dominate the motherboard market, which they did, which led to even more market for their CPUs. Even at the expense of overall graphics software performance for years.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#28

Post by genocidicbunny »

ksec wrote: post #13

All 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…

Even far after the 740, with relatively recent iGPUs, Intel's drivers leave something to be desired. I've worked on codebases that had plenty of specific Intel GPU driver versions called out as buggy. This has gotten better over time, but I think you're right to have this concern.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#29

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #27
thereddaikon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was the decision made to use system memory as vram instead of shipping more on the card? It seems like a cost cutting measure, but had an outsized effect on performance.

AGP was designed to allow faster access to memory because VRAM was expensive. There was just enough for the framebuffers. Texture size was known to be huge, which would live in RDRAM b/c VRAM would have been crazy expensive (I think the dual 3DFx at the time was like $1k). Also Intel was investing heavily in RDRAM (remember that?). The idea of integrating graphics and southbridge was on the long-term roadmap, which w…

I remember when AGP came out and it was advertised as making it possible to store textures in RAM, requiring your GPU to only have enough VRAM to act as a cache and frame buffer.

It quickly became apparent that AGP, even as AGP 8x became a thing, wasn't fast enough to do the job, as every GPU still had tons of VRAM.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#30

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

I remember those early days of 3D accelerators...

When the 3dfx Voodoo came out, I really wanted one so I could run all the games written using the Glide API. I asked for one for Christmas, and my dad got me a Rendition 2200. I was actually pretty upset, because so many games were written using Glide, which was a 3dfx-proprietary API. GLQuake existed and used OpenGL, but OpenGL drivers were either non-existent or didn't work, I don't remember.

I ended up hating 3dfx for how they had ruled the 3D accelerator market for a short period of time. I was glad when the Voodoo 5 was a failure and AMD and NVIDIA ended up taking over.

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