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Every GPU That Mattered

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Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#161

Post by jandrese »

flohofwoe wrote: post #119
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 ;)

Matrox was really halfhearted with game support. They seemed far more interested in corporate customers, advertising heavily stuff like "VR" conference calls that nobody wants. They were early with multi-monitor support back when monitors were big, heavy, and expensive. I had a G200 that was the last video card I've ever seen where you could expand the VRAM by slotting in a SODIMM. It also had composite out so you could hook it to a TV. I played a lot of games on it up until Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was almost playable but the low res textures looked real bad and the framerate would precipitously drop at critical times like when a bunch of Nazis rushed into the room and started shooting.

Last time I saw a Matrox chip it was on a server, and somehow they had cut it down even more than the one I had used over a decade earlier. As I recall it couldn't handle a framebuffer larger than 800x600, which was sometimes a problem when people wanted to install and configure Windows Server.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#162

Post by liquid_thyme »

dantillberg wrote: post #152

I don't believe this list was curated as the title suggests. It's just a semi-random list of popular-ish GPUs with LLM-generated descriptions. The site looks nice, which fools us into thinking thought and effort was put into this.

Dystopian future where AI pumps out slop and uses human feedback and comments to correct the output.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#163

Post by jandrese »

hypercube33 wrote: post #108
mrweasel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like virtualized NICs pretending to be an NE2000? That's interesting, do you know why they'd use a G200 and not something like an older ATI chip?

The ATi Rage 128 was used in everything short of toasters for a long time too. I assume that the drivers are part of what made it obsolete.

I remember having a ton of servers with cut down Mach64 chips. They were so bad that you would get horizontal lines flickering across the screen while text was scrolling in an 80x25 text console. I don't know why server manufacturers go to so much effort to make the console as terrible as possible. Are they nostalgic for the 8 bit ISA graphics from the original 5150? They seem offended at the idea that someone might hook a crash cart directly up to their precious hardware.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#164

Post by jandrese »

mrweasel wrote: post #50
formerly_proven wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The G200 mattered to some degree for a long time, because most x86 servers up until a few years ago would ship a G200 implementation or at least something pretending to be a G200 card as part of their BMC for network KVM.

Like virtualized NICs pretending to be an NE2000? That's interesting, do you know why they'd use a G200 and not something like an older ATI chip?

They were probably forced to update when they dropped older busses. Without a PCI or AGP bus on there they have to find something that can hang off of a PCIe lane.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#165

Post by jandrese »

arjie wrote: post #2

Absolute nostalgia fever. About a month ago, I dug up an old desktop in the corner, took the drives out and gave away the machine. It felt like putting a racehorse to pasture: i7-4790k, 1080 Ti. It was my dream machine when I got it. Dual-boot (as we did back in the old days when Proton wasn't here) to Ubuntu, then Elementary, then Arch. By the time I gave it away it wasn't worth the power cost. And that brought to m…

My current machine is an i5-3570k with a 1070Ti...

The old CPU is actually more of an issue. I couldn't run Civ 7 because the game (probably the DRM) uses some instructions that aren't implemented on that CPU. Other than that I bet it would run just fine.

I was just about to upgrade before hardware prices went through the roof. Now I'm just holding on until some semblance of sanity returns, hoping every day that the bubble pops and loads of gently loved hardware starts appearing on the secondary market. Also, the way nVidia has been skimping on memory for all but the most outrageously expensive chips has grated on me. I was really hoping they would buck the trend with the 5xxx generation, but nope, and with RAM prices the way they are I have little hope for the 6xxx generation. My current card is close to a decade old and has 8GB of VRAM. I'm not upgrading to a card with 8GB of VRAM, or ever 12GB. That 8GB was crucial in future proofing the original card, none of its 4GB contemporaries are of much use today.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#166

Post by strictnein »

giobox wrote: post #122
formerly_proven wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used my 1080 Ti for about eight years. The successor GPU is in some ways way faster (raytracing, AI features etc.), but in others really quite stagnant considering the huge stretch of time that passed between them. ~10 years for 2-3x performance in GPUs at higher nominal and real price points shows how slow silicon advances have been compared to the 90s and 2000s. The same period from 2000 to 2010 would've seen 100…

My 1080ti is still working away in my kid's PC. If you connect a 1080p monitor, it will still hit 60fps in mostly everything. The only thing that holds this card back now is a handful of titles that will not run unless ray-tracing support present on card - Indiana Jones and The Great Circle springs to mind etc. I am very likely going to get a decade of use out of it across three different builds, one of the best tech…

It really is an impressive bit of hardware. I finally pulled it out of my last system a year ago, but it was definitely holding its own up until that point.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#167

Post by alentred »

Awwww..., this brings so many memories. I had almost all of the early ones: Voodoo 2, Riva TNT2, then GeForce 3 (I think...). Then I switched to laptops and didn't have a discrete graphics till last year when I started playing with LLMs locally. So basically I jumped from GeForce 3 to RTX 3090 :) Thank you for bringing those memories back!

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#168

Post by MBCook »

xattt wrote: post #160
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.

My contributions: Matrox Parhelia for the first card supporting triple-monitors, and ATI All-in-Wonder which did TV out when media centre TVs weren’t really a thing.

The big feature of the All-in-Wonder was TV in. You could record, in glorious analog detail that could quickly use up your entire hard drive.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#169

Post by MBCook »

pak9rabid wrote: post #140
flohofwoe wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ;)

The only thing the ViRGE was good for was passing through to a Voodoo2

But it WAS ultra popular with OEMs. If you had embedded video there was a huge chance that was it.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#170

Post by specproc »

dantillberg wrote: post #152

I don't believe this list was curated as the title suggests. It's just a semi-random list of popular-ish GPUs with LLM-generated descriptions. The site looks nice, which fools us into thinking thought and effort was put into this.

It does start with the Voodoo, so I got what I came for.
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