141–150 of 241 posts
The 3dfx Voodoo1 was the first hardware I bought with my own money to put in my 200Mhz AMD K6 machine, which I kept cool with two industrial fans. I paid R450 (~$30) for my Voodoo1 and have fond memories of multiplayer Half-Life 1 and Alien vs. Predator (AVP1) with friends.
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24bit and 32bit both have 8bit per RGB color channel, the extra 8 bit are either alpha (for textures) or padding (for performance). All other things being equal, colors should look the same on both.
Yes, but keep in mind that monitors of the time were analog devices. Matrox was well known for higher quality at the time. It was visible even just with black text on a white background. Basically their implementation of moving from pixels to the analog signal was better. Less artifacts, less shadows, better colors, better frame to frame stability, etc.
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The obvious comparison to the GPU arms race is the VR hardware arms race. Same number of companies rising and falling in about the same period. Carmack is at the forefront of both, too.
The problem is that VR performance is tightly coupled to GPU performance. Currently, adding more pixels requires an equivalent increase in GPU performance to maintain quality. I'm prepared to believe that e.g. foveal rendering will give step-wise improvements without more GPU power, but it's not the same as the years of continual process improvements were for GPUs.
Before that, you could double GPU performance for same price every two years or so, now its about 5 or more years, when looking at GTX 970 vs RTX 2070 for example. In my opinion GPUs speed are at least three years behind trajectory because of this market anomaly. Just hope AI isn't throwing stupid money at GPUs again.
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OpenGL games should run fine, some old games that used static sized buffers to hold extensions (like all Quake/Quake2 games that dump the available extension string to the console and the console having a hardcoded buffer for each line) will crash it because of how long the extension string is nowadays, but most drivers have an option to limit the string size (AFAIK Nvidia and AMD drivers check the executable name an…
Software rendering will only be slow until everyone has manycore processors with SIMD. The die area of threadripper isn’t far from a GPU’s die area.
Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof! I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable. I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn…
GLQuake blew my mind, but I was just trying to get Daggerfall to run acceptable more than anything at that point, and run it did.
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Not sure why you've been so heavily downvoted, perhaps there are a lot of people here working in the field. It definitely seems the case that the average consumer couldn't care less about it, however. VR is the new 3D TV.
People were already trying to play Doom on the first iteractions of VR headsets during the mid-90's. I don't believe it ever become a real thing. AR on the other hand, has quite a few interesting industrial applications.
The biggest issue with VR is that it's by nature not a passive/low energy thing in it's default mode, it's way closer to sports and work than TV, so more niche as a recreational time activity.
In essence VR competes with activites like soccer, badminton, shooting ranges, lasertag, trampolin parks etc. not general purpose home use TV. If you benchmark it against them VR, on it's current trajectory has a place to exist in garages and arcades.
If VR/MR/AR gets away from being marketed as high energy activity there is a future there, if there is found a way to make headset's superficial or significantly lighter and easy to handle at resolution better than TV screens at the equivalent distance. Powerful wireless (standalone) headsets and couch compatible VR might take off.
Then Nnvidia came along, and I remember wishing I had money to invest on it early on. Wished I could go back and do it :D
Ahh man I remember GL quake dropping and before the voodoo, or Riva 128 I had the ... Matrox Mystique 4mb!!! Was amazed and also sorely dissatisfied. Thus began the video card race/upgrade journey. Voodoo, Riva 128, tnt, voodoo2, lol don’t forget that power VR, what an amazing time to live
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What was the 4/5 debacle? Owned a 2 myself, loved it, but then totally drifted out of the PC gaming and graphics card 'scene'.
Didn't coordinate with game developers, and tried to pitch a fixed function effects pipeline (the T buffer) when shaders were coming into existence. Ironically, we've now looped back, and do pretty t-buffer-esque usage with modern DX11/DX12 pipelines. One of the simplest functions of the T-buffer was to do temporal AA using a fixed function supersampler but also do integration over several frames, which didn't come i…