The 3dfx Voodoo1 • Hacker News Board

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#191

Post by ernst_klim » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #187

ernst_klim wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

Never heard of these, but matrox impression plus could full 3D for serious CADs (tho without textures I think) for $700.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#192

Post by bunderbunder » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #162

userbinator wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As manufacturers continue to make increasingly questionable design choices, it's natural that users will become hesitant. You can get a possibly not-that-much-faster system, at the risk of losing functionality that has worked for a long time. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. ...and most if not all of your existing hardware and software would continue to work unchanged, i…

> and most if not all of your existing hardware and software would continue to work unchanged It’s funny how backwards compatibility back then allowed us to have massive progress, by making gradual steps forward possible. These days, where we are seeing less and less real progress, we now hear many programmers claiming we have to sacrifice and shed backwards compatibility if we want further progress. (I’m looking at…

It's an industry-wide Duke Nukem Forever situation.

If you keep re-laying your foundation, then you're also going to have to keep re-building whatever was built on top of it, and that's just a huge time suck.

We have accomplished the ideal of "wei wu wei" to an exquisite degree, but, unfortunately, we got our wei and our wei mixed up.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#193

Post by tabs_masterrace » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #119

santoshalper wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR has been a wet fart compared to 3d graphics. Tons of hype but very little progress and almost no broader impact on the technology or games industry.

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.

I don't think VR utopia is going to start anytime soon (that will be a slow generational shift), but VR already has sparked the interest of a lot of consumers, that are holding of for now. I wouldn't be surprised though, if one of the next headsets, i.e. Valve Index, if prices reasonably, suddenly showed unexpected high demand and sold out. There are tons of people, who want to try it, even if its just a gimmick for now. We've seen things like the Nintendo Wii selling tens of millions of units based on a gimmick. At that point the average consumer might become more aware of VR, and things might start picking up on the software-side.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#194

Post by gok » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:27 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #16

It’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…

Eh, outside of desktop CPUs things have continued to move pretty quickly.

Looking at GPUs, the Voodoo3 came out in 1999 and had a fillrate of around 150 MPixels/sec. Today's GPUs have a fill rate of around 300 times that, which gives an annualized increase of over 30%, for 20 years. This doesn't even consider the fact that GPUs went from highly specialized parts to general purpose compute chips.

Lower power CPUs are also impressive. 20 years ago the state of the art was the DEC/Intel StrongARM. A modern smartphone SOC is around 50x faster than that per watt. If you look at floating point stuff it's more like 1000x faster.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#195

Post by rasz » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

Zardoz84 wrote: post #85

rasz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik there is no CPU where software Quake would run faster at same resolution as GLQuake on 3dfx.

and an actual CPU ? I think that running at 3 GHz would help a lot.

/period correct/

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#196

Post by sneakernets » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #189

therealmarv wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aren't those still glorified laptops in another form factor?

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#197

Post by ben7799 » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

Fond memories of these cards for me.

I bought one my junior year of college as a CS major. I had some good internships and that year I had some money. Instead of a car I had built a Pentium MMX 200Mhz box with Diamond Stealth card & 16MB ram. Pretty hot machine among my friends at that time... when the Voodoo 1 became available I was able to get one and it's performance was mind blowing at the time, even though I had access to SGI machines and such on campus that had way more impressive demos on them.

My senior year of college I took an Open GL course and did a bunch of my projects in linux with the Voodoo 3D drivers. Cool stuff. Played a lot of quake too, I remember writing a program to render the quake characters on my own as one of my projects. The data model formats were open source IIRC so it wasn't too hard to read in the data. Very cool since we didn't have any good 3D tools to build our own models.

I remember playing AH-64 Longbow or something on it too.. some of the flight sims were amazing at that point right before flight sim popularity tanked at the same time the remaining programs got unbelievably complex.

Voodoo was kind of a pain the neck in day to day usage. In 1999 I built a new machine and went to an NVIDIA Riva TNT and then later that year got a GeForce 256 when those came out.

Kind of the end of my heyday of PC gaming.. the combination of working on computers all day + games at the time still requiring a lot of debugging to get them to work well wore me out.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#198

Post by CoryOndrejka » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

Oh, memories. We built a custom arcade board based on SLI Voodoo1, mips r5k, and custom jpeg decompression in hardware to do Magic the Gathering: Armageddon. https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss We wanted to run at highrez (640x480 vga) at 60hz with tons of animating sprites on screen and realized nothing had the fill rate we needed. Rather than changing the game design, we kept looking and met the 3Dfx team when they had barely taped out the Voodoo1. We gambled that SLI would work and started designing the hardware and adapting the game to an early alpha of Glide. We prototyped on SLI cards running on Windows NT and pentium pros. In parallel, Atari Ganes built Voodoo1-based hardware to replace Zoid. Mace and War shipped on that hardware.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#199

Post by Zenst » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

michaelgrafl wrote: post #93

bla3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I remember correctly Matrox cards had the best video output quality through D-Sub at that time, which might be what your post's parent might have referred to.

Yes, I was trying to quantify it from experience over just saying it was the best. They sure was and some would say, still has an edge, though some still prefer CRT's as well.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#200

Post by zanny » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #188

rayiner wrote: post #16

It’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.

It wasn't until consumer 8 core / 16 thread chips started entering mainstream that I even started thinking about upgrading.

And even then its generally meh with how much software is single thread bottlenecked. Meltdown and spectre didn't help things - after they were published I definitely intended to wait for architectures mitigating them before upgrading again.

Heres hoping AMD can keep pushing the envelope this year. A consumer 10+ core chip would definitely have my interest. Not so much to necessarily buy myself, but to drop the floor of the high end even further.