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Remembering Intel 740

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Re: Remembering Intel 740

#31

Post by filiperui »

goldcd wrote: post #6

I've got somewhat fond memories of that card. I think it sat between my m3d and my first nvidia card (TNT?) I remember it being incredibly cheap - and with DirectX support my first card out of the years of the dark proprietary wilderness.

This! The i740 was my first "real" 3D graphics card - I remember running the Final Reality benchmark on it and feeling genuinely excited with the purchase.

After that I got the Riva TNT (Diamond Viper V550 iirc) which changed everything from a consumer point of view. Good times.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#32

Post by rasz »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #30

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 did…

I heard similar story probably a hundred times over the years about wrong initial choices. Whole 8(Amstrad/Spectrum instead of Atari/C64) 16bit (ST instead of Amiga) computers, cpu (386SX, Cyrix, K6, P4 Celeron, P4 generation on intel side in general, AMD Bulldozer) or cpu socket(anything ss7 instead of slot1 Celeron 300A), graphic cards (too many to list), motherboard chipset (via/sis instead of intel), ram (P4 with sdram), Zune :) etc. It always ends in the same way with victim seemingly doubling down and choosing to endure the pain out of spite instead of doing the logical thing and selling off bad components. Very weird way of coping with cognitive dissonance by being stubborn with a mix of post-purchase rationalization/Stockholm syndrome. And no, its not always about money, some of examples I stumbled upon were worse and more expensive (picking ss7 platform in 1998 is one great example).

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#33

Post by rasz »

filiperui wrote: post #31
goldcd wrote: post #6

I've got somewhat fond memories of that card. I think it sat between my m3d and my first nvidia card (TNT?) I remember it being incredibly cheap - and with DirectX support my first card out of the years of the dark proprietary wilderness.

This! The i740 was my first "real" 3D graphics card - I remember running the Final Reality benchmark on it and feeling genuinely excited with the purchase. After that I got the Riva TNT (Diamond Viper V550 iirc) which changed everything from a consumer point of view. Good times.

i740 was outright good (8MB models only) compared to bottom of low end market at the time. Permedia, Sis, Ati Rage Pro Turbo, Cirrus Logic Laguna3D, anything Trident.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#34

Post by Lammy »

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

TBH it was super impressive stuff at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/19970102114017/http://www.real3d...

Solid 60FPS in 1994 on the system's debut (and probably most famous) title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAcMqFTkAs8

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#35

Post by lproven »

tpmx wrote: post #9
giantrobot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They apparently sell a Custom PC magazine through the site. Other articles are nominally about the Raspberry Pi but then some are PC focused. It's very confusing. The article is interesting but the site is confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_PC_(magazine) In February 2019 the magazine, along with Digital SLR Photography Magazine, was sold to Raspberry Pi Trading, a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This. Custom PC was founded at Dennis Publishing, the UK publishers of PC Pro, Computer Shopper UK, MacUser UK, Computer Buyer & multiple other titles. I wrote for most of them, starting out on the staff of PC Pro and later I wrote the Linux column for Custom PC for its first year. (After that, they cancelled both their columns, sadly.)

It's a good mag with a high level of tech expertise. They generously kept my free contributor's subscription running for well over a decade. :-)

Dennis seems to be outsourcing its magazines now, and CPC got spun off to an independent production company headed by its editor, Ben Hardwidge, who I know personally from our previous career intersections. They've always given a lot of coverage to the RasPi and RasPi-related projects.

Which is probably why the RasPi Foundation bought it. :-)

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#36

Post by dan_hawkins »

rob74 wrote: post #4

Yeah, 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…

S3 Virge 3D rendering was faster than software rendering unless you wanted bilinear filtering - then it wasn't :)

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#37

Post by giantrobot »

lproven wrote: post #35
tpmx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_PC_(magazine) In February 2019 the magazine, along with Digital SLR Photography Magazine, was sold to Raspberry Pi Trading, a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This. Custom PC was founded at Dennis Publishing, the UK publishers of PC Pro, Computer Shopper UK, MacUser UK, Computer Buyer & multiple other titles. I wrote for most of them, starting out on the staff of PC Pro and later I wrote the Linux column for Custom PC for its first year. (After that, they cancelled both their columns, sadly.) It's a good mag with a high level of tech expertise. They generously kept my free…

Thanks for the additional info! I don't check the RPi foundation site with any regularity and when I have it's only been RPi articles.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#38

Post by thereddaikon »

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…

Thanks for the insight. Seems they had a similar line of thinking that Nintendo went down with the N64. They gave SGI a lot of money to develop a world beating GPU at the time and then gave it no memory and expected it to share RDRAM with the CPU. I don't think they even gave it DMA support. And I don't care what Apple or Sony or anyone else says in their keynotes, UMA is always a cost cutting measure.

From the perspective of the late 90's I can see the appeal. Rambus was supposed to be the future. One would think the high latency of the memory would have been more apparent though. And of course RDRAM had its downfall not all that long after. I still have in my collection a Willamette P4 and its RDRAM modules I salvaged from one of those ill fated systems.

I'm not sure how much the Intel IGP held back gaming, best I can remember nobody seriously tried to game on it. Many games outright didn't support the chipset. And those that did didn't work well. For years I gave the advice that gaming meant dedicated video card and the IGP was only good for displaying normal applications. This changed temporarily with the first Iris GPUs in early Core. They were actually competitive with AMD and Nvidia's IGPs at the time. That lasted maybe a year or two.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#39

Post by nickpeterson »

Svperstar wrote: post #12
rob74 wrote: post #4

Yeah, 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…

I remember being 11 years old and feverishly researching video cards to play unreal and quake 2 and basically was deciding between a power vr and a voodoo 2. This 3-4 month period, along with a few years later building a pc from parts contributed to my career in software more than anything else I can think of.

Re: Remembering Intel 740

#40

Post by rasz »

dan_hawkins wrote: post #36
rob74 wrote: post #4

Yeah, 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…

S3 Virge 3D rendering was faster than software rendering unless you wanted bilinear filtering - then it wasn't :)

Virge fastest modes were around Pentium 100MHz software rendering speed.
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