Oh dear. Little tear streaming down my face.
The 3dfx Voodoo1
181–190 of 241 posts
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#182I was the lead and pretty much only programmer for the Canopus Pure3D. Ours had 12 RAM chips for 6 MB of memory. 2 MB extra Woo hoo! We also featured a Chrontel chip for composite and S-Video output. I wrote our DirectX driver (performance enhancements) and other sundry software for the Pure3D (pictured) and Pure3D II. Pretty cool to think back on those days.
Neat! Your work brought hours of enjoyment back in college. Very fitting username :)
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#183The Voodoo was, very literally, a game-changer. The difference in quality between Quake and GLQuake was astounding. Just a few seconds of gameplay was enough to get someone to make the purchase.
Same with PC speaker vs SoundBlaster.
I think the equivalent of the Voodoo in the soundcards-space would've been the Gravis Ultrasound. In both the evolutionary and soon-to-be-forgotten sense.
PC Speaker vs. Soundblaster is more EGA vs VGA, something much more profound. And beneficiary to the gaming space, as opposed to early 3D, which basically ruined all the things for quite a while...
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#184It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…
> What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then. Moore's law broke. GHz and those low hanging fruits are gone. I'm using a 2013 MBP. It's a core race now but lots of legacy software that aren't coded for multicore.
Moore's law still applies if you plot computing power/dollar over time (normalized to purchase power). It's just that all the progress is nowadays in parallel computing chips/GPUs.
Here's the progress over 120 years, and spoiler ... 17 orders of magnitude in computing power:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*zWyqQ2EP83gBcLZHG...
A very interesting observation is that the switch to transistors and integrated electronics does not stand out. It is just part of the curve.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#1853dfx had some rather infamous commercials for their Voodoo line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on windows 10 ?
There's plenty of good reasons to bash Microsoft, but 'lack of backwards compatibility' just isn't one of them. If anything, I think their obsession with backwards compatibility drove a lot of compromised design decisions at that company.
History of Microsoft is very long. Backwards compatibility was excellent until windows XP (included). This focus on compatibility has largely disappeared in more recent versions. I am not bashing Microsoft. I love visual studio code. I love the fact that I can edit office documents (powerpoint and word) for free using chrome on ubuntu. Maybe the work Microsoft is doing on Windows Subsystem for Linux will make me come back to windows one day.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Just", as if taking tech from a $4,000 card and making it available for $400 isn't an enormous feat of engineering!
It's not a $4,000 card tho. Full SGI workstations cost from $4000 to $11000 (and this is with a display and software) [1]. This was a primitive texturing accelerator without T&L, without 2D, just a texturing unit. $400 was even a high price for it. [1] https://hsto.org/files/c34/cb5/939/c34cb59393e04c77af072be74...
Yea, it was a hack. A good hack, but a hack.
Speed-wise, 3dfx decimated all but the high-end boards at the time. GLiNT and Intergraphs low-end ards were still $3000-$5000 Those were 'real, workstation-level cards' with accurate rendering and all the OpenGL features. On the highest end were the Intergraph realizm cards which were 2X the price. Then you had the SGI systems that started out at 2x times the price of a loaded Integraph Workstation...
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#188It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…
I've a CPU from 2013 - a Haswell, and I was going to upgrade last year until I realized the performance increase wouldn't justify the price at all. Thinking back to a decade earlier and you'd wait 2 years to upgrade your CPU and it'd be a significant increase. Weird times.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#189It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…
At least the newest better 4 core Macbook Pro 13" are now beating the 2015 15" MBP in raw CPU power. I'm looking at (only) CPU benchmarks the recent years and for me it seems Intel was pretty much sleeping from around 2013-2017... maybe it was also their internal problems with going to 11nm and also lack of competition! I think Intel could have stepped up their no. of cores with low thermal CPUs a lot sooner. The las…
People act like portables are the only machines that exist.
Any Mac user who needed 'real power' moved to an iMac (or even an iMac Pro) when they outgrew their 15" BMP
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I remember a million years ago at an arcade, seeing stand-up pods where you wore a VR headset and could play Duke3D