Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Every GPU That Mattered

sheets.works

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 217 posts

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#111

Post by ryandrake »

mizzack wrote: post #68
mrweasel wrote: post #35

It's probably just me being out of touch, but I don't think the GeForce RTX 4000 or 5000 series really mattered/matters that much. At the same time I'd add the S3 ViRGE and the Matrox G200. Both mattered a lot at the time, but not long term.

Or the S3 Savage3D, which, while being inferior to the TNT2, pioneered texture compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

The article blew a huge opportunity to showcase the great diversity of “Pioneering Era” 3D accelerators (they weren’t called GPUs until later). But instead they just pretended it was always NVIDIA vs ATI, and threw in a few Voodoos.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#112

Post by esseph »

cestith wrote: post #109

Rx580 is on there, but not the R9 290. I’m not sure where the Rx500 series actually pushed technology forward. They always seemed like the AMD budget line. And if 580 is important, why not the 590 or the 570? Few of the “pre-GPU” graphics accelerators that seem to have mattered are here. The ViRGE. The Mach32 and Mach64. The Trident cards, like the TGUI9440. Yet the Voodoo often isn’t considered a GPU and is on the l…

The 590x was great and lasted me around 5-6 years until I picked up a replacement, but it was really just a rebadged 580.

The 580 is a solid card that was an excellent price/performance value and held a respectable spot in the market for a very long time. Many video games now use is as the entry level bar for playability.

It doesn't hold the same "type" of spot, but it's a workhorse in the same way something like a NVIDIA 1070 was.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#113

Post by pavon »

rvz wrote: post #77

You all fell for a marketing site for: https://sheets.works . I have to say that this site is complete low-effort slop.

Yet if it weren't for the people complaining about it being an ad I wouldn't have even noticed who it was an ad for. Thanks for helping them out!

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#114

Post by jeffbee »

wk_end wrote: post #107
jeffbee wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SGI IMPACT would be another

Or the RealityEngine, but really any SGI - that's kind of where modern 3D computer graphics began.

Sure. I picked IMPACT for having hardware textures. An interesting list would contain the first examples of processors that had things we still have today, like geometry processors. It would also contain evolutionary dead ends that tried to do things differently, like the Rendition Vérité.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#115

Post by hypercube33 »

vman81 wrote: post #23

Honorable mention, the Rendition Vérité 1000 https://fabiensanglard.net/vquake/index.html Released before the Voodoo 1 with glquake and gl support for Tomb Raider.

This sent me down a huge rabbit hole of memories and reading. Thank you! I remember everyone being hyped for that card for their first Pentium / Pro builds at the time but I think a lot of people held off for the Pentium II and a TNT or Rage 128 card that I was hanging around with.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#116

Post by mikepurvis »

Well my 9070 XT made the list; I've been quite happy with it, great performance with paying the Nvidia tax.

RIP my Radeon 7500 from high school though, that was always a budget card, and we all had them but wanted the 9700. Couldn't beat the box are from that era though: https://www.ebay.com/itm/206159283550

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#118

Post by kllrnohj »

Lwrless wrote: post #56

I don't see my first GPU on there, it was the humble GeForce4 MX440. It could run almost any game I cared about for a surprisingly long time, even if it's not a true modern card. These days almost all my machines are on iGPUs baked into the CPU. There's way less fun for me, but they are a lot more compact at least.

The GeForce 4 generation as a whole, while being solid enough cards, were historically not interesting. They were just basic spec bumps over the GeForce 3. No new features or similar. And, critically, the 9700 Pro released the same year as the GeForce 4 and absolutely smoked the living shit out of it.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#119

Post by flohofwoe »

mrweasel wrote: post #35

It's probably just me being out of touch, but I don't think the GeForce RTX 4000 or 5000 series really mattered/matters that much. At the same time I'd add the S3 ViRGE and the Matrox G200. Both mattered a lot at the time, but not long term.

> S3 ViRGE and the Matrox G200

Both were only really famous for how terrible they were though. I think the S3 Virge might even qualify as 3D decelerator ;)

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#120

Post by flohofwoe »

ryandrake wrote: post #111
mizzack wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the S3 Savage3D, which, while being inferior to the TNT2, pioneered texture compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

The article blew a huge opportunity to showcase the great diversity of “Pioneering Era” 3D accelerators (they weren’t called GPUs until later). But instead they just pretended it was always NVIDIA vs ATI, and threw in a few Voodoos.

It was only 3dfx and NVIDIA (since the TNT) that mattered in the 1990s though. All the other 3D accelerators were only barely better than software rasterization, if at all.

Seeing Quake II run butter smooth on a Riva TNT at 1024x768 for the first time was like witnessing the second coming of Christ ;)

Post reply on HN