11–20 of 108 posts
It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".
Yes. I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hehe, all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. A friend of mine even got a Voodoo 5500 and we tried to get Quake 3 Arena so tuned that we couldn't see any pixels anymore. I was the first one with a GeForce 2MX, which worked quite well and long considering it was the budget version of the gf2. If I look at the performance indexes, the Voodoo 5500 wasn't very much better than the GF2MX.
And there was simple resistor resolder hack to make GeForce 2MX think it is Quadro. It was very useless and very cool at the same time. Few people got into hardware hacking (read electronics engineering) thanks to this little and yet very positive soldering experience.
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…
It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".
Yes. I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…
The thing that bothers me is that if you want a PCI-E card on a consumer system, you only have nVidia/AMD. Intel only does embedded now with none of their offerings on a card (like the only i740). There is no Ryzen 7 with an APU, so if you're building a small developer box, you have to buy a discrete graphics card and can't rely on embedded (unless you want to drop to the Ryzen 5, which was just released with an APU).
There are rumors that Intel might be getting back into this space. If anyone could try to compete with the big two, it's probably them.
It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".
Yes. I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.
The classic combo of Matrox for 2D and 3Dfx for 3D. Surprisingly Matrox still exists.
Still remember enjoying Descent. And how I argued with Commodore staff at conferences on why Amigas didn't move into hardware 3d as it was the clear future to see.
It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".