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Every GPU That Mattered

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Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#181

Post by ChrisClark »

flohofwoe wrote: post #120
ryandrake wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Before that, you could even run Quake with anti-aliasing on one of those "barely better than software rasterization" cards, couldn't even be done on the first Voodoo cards.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#182

Post by ChrisClark »

djmips wrote: post #134
flohofwoe wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Rendition's VQuake was actually pretty good, more than barely better than software rasterization.

Edge anti-aliased polygons!

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#183

Post by cubefox »

john_strinlai wrote: post #176
cubefox wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an ad from viral marketing company and everyone here is falling for it.

> This is an ad from viral marketing company they arent a marketing company: " Dashboards, CRMs, automations. We're a small consulting team that turns your messy spreadsheets into systems that run your business. "

They are: https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#184

Post by somat »

paddy_m wrote: post #147

I'd be really interested to see SGI on this chart. When did consumer hardware exceed what you could do on an SGI box? I think Sun and HP had some 3d capabilities, but it was mostly aimed at engineering/CAD

The sgi stuff was also engineering focused. The net result was it was not really that fast, powerful sure, but my understanding is the early consumer cards(voodoo) could run rings around them. The game cards did not have the z-buffer depth, fill rate, 3d texture support, line drawing, that sgi's had(cad features), but they could keep the frame rates high and had more features that made the games look pretty.

My personal favorite sgi from the mid 90's was the o2. It had a unified memory model so it was the slow red headed step child of the sgi ecosystem. But because of that unified memory you could effectively pack it with close to a gigabyte of texture memory, whatever the OS and app did not need. This was an obscene amount in 1996. For comparison the top of the line sgi desktop system at the time had 8 mb of texture memory. It does not hurt that the o2 was probably the best designed and engineered computer I have ever seen.

https://computers.popcorn.cx/sgi/o2/o2-05.jpg

https://computers.popcorn.cx/sgi/o2/

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#185

Post by addaon »

liquid_thyme wrote: post #162
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.

Isn’t this a bit like spell-checking a Nigerian Prince email? The valuable eyeballs are the ones that don’t notice or don’t care.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#187

Post by ActorNightly »

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.

From memory the cards that stood out were

Nvidia 6xxx series, which was the first card to support SLI. I remember my gaming pc in college with 6x series card, and being able to get another card and use and SLI bridge that increased performance in some games.

Nvidia GeForce 900 series, which had the Titan with 12gb, first card iirc to able to support larger resolution gaming.

Nvidia RXT series which started with 20xx i think, first card to come with 24gb of ram.

And then the modern 4xxx series which used to fry power cables.

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#188

Post by Lammy »

> Apple chose the Rage 128 [Pro] for the original iMac G3, making it the most popular Mac GPU of its era.

This is misleadingly-worded because the original iMac had a 3D RAGE ⅡC, the five-colors models had 3D RAGE Pro, and the slot-loading models had the earlier RAGE 128 VR.

Yes those are all confusingly named by ATi :p

But based on the timeline and features mentioned, they're specifically talking about this one and not any of the earlier chips in the RAGE family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Rage#Rage_128_Pro_/_Rage_F...

iMacs didn't ship with RAGE 128 Pro until the year-2000 Indigo & DV models, by which time the RAGE 128 Pro was already 11 months old: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac//faq/imac-g3-video-p...

Re: Every GPU That Mattered

#190

Post by john_strinlai »

cubefox wrote: post #183
john_strinlai wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an ad from viral marketing company they arent a marketing company: " Dashboards, CRMs, automations. We're a small consulting team that turns your messy spreadsheets into systems that run your business. "

They are: https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire

huh, my mistake, you are correct. they apparently do offer marketing visualizations, they just dont mention it anywhere on their home page apparently.
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