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Fall of Voodoo

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Re: Fall of Voodoo

#71

Post by paulbennett »

_noqo wrote: post #61

I remember those days vividly. I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97, I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer. But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram (3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the…

> I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.

I think NFS2SE had transparent glass if you had a 3DFX card, or maybe that was NFS3, I remember wishing I had one either way!

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#72

Post by mortenjorck »

blue11 wrote: post #64
jwilk wrote: post #3

It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.

If I recall correctly, "GPU" was attached to the GeForce 3, which introduced programmable pixel and vertex shaders (planting the seeds for later, general-purpose processing developments like CUDA and eventually cryptocurrency mining).

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#73

Post by oldcynic »

dogprez wrote: post #19
Gogogogirl wrote: post #7

Still remember enjoying Descent. And how I argued with Commodore staff at conferences on why Amigas didn't move into hardware 3d as it was the clear future to see.

I love Amigas but seems like their fate was sealed by then. By the release of Doom in 1993 it was over for sure. Their whole shtick was that they had special hardware that let them do things PCs couldn't. Doom proved them wrong.

Pretty much on the money. The hardware guys tried though. Management delayed and delayed until they'd blown all the money.

In 90-91 ish they had a prototype AAA architecture and the specs were great. (3000+). PC's had caught up some way.

Instead management pushed a cheap, horrible, slower machine with none of the features, no SCSI II but CPU driven IDE and AGA in place of AAA. No DSP or voice recognition. No 16 bit Paula. That was A4000.

Then in 93(?) there was the planned 3D PowerPC reboot as PCs had finally caught up with AAA! Then they were no more.

Was really depressing going to DevCons and getting all the NDA info in this period.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#74

Post by blue11 »

mortenjorck wrote: post #72
blue11 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.

If I recall correctly, "GPU" was attached to the GeForce 3, which introduced programmable pixel and vertex shaders (planting the seeds for later, general-purpose processing developments like CUDA and eventually cryptocurrency mining).

Frankly, I don't remember with certainty. But Wikipedia seems to agree with what my memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

" The term GPU was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as "the world's first GPU", or Graphics Processing Unit,[2] although the term had been in use since at least the 1980s.[3] It was presented as a "single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines".[4] Rival ATI Technologies coined the term "visual processing unit" or VPU with the release of the Radeon 9700 in 2002.[5] "

I had forgotten that ATI initially tried to push the term VPU instead of accepting NVIDIA's terminology. The goal of both companies's marketing teams was the same--to convince the market that GPUs were as indispensable as CPUs and not just optional accelerators.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#75

Post by mattnewport »

djsumdog wrote: post #16
rayiner wrote: post #4

The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…

Most of the other companies are still there though. PowerVR still makes 3D chips, but only for the embedded market (e.g. Android phones). Matrox gave up on 3D and now only makes specialized cards for 8 and 16+ monitor displays (airports, kiosks). IIRC, even Trident switched to embedded graphics. The thing that bothers me is that if you want a PCI-E card on a consumer system, you only have nVidia/AMD. Intel only does…

I'm not sure what rumors you've heard but what's not a rumor is that Intel is releasing CPUs with integrated AMD GPUs: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12207/intel-with-radeon-rx-ve...

That suggests Intel isn't going to be competitive in the graphics space in the near future

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#76

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

TDFX shareholders got screwed when they were "acquired" by nVidia. I suppose that was a good thing, it made be skeptical of crummy companies during the dot com days.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#77

Post by mattnewport »

k__ wrote: post #6
jwilk wrote: post #3

It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

Yes. I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.

That's nothing, I remember the need for 4, a 2D card, two Voodoo 2s in SLI and a dedicated hardware DVD decoder card :-)

The picture quality was terrible with multiple pass through analog VGA cables...

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#78

Post by rdtsc »

_noqo wrote: post #61

I remember those days vividly. I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97, I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer. But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram (3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the…

> I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the future,

Yes! It was 1998 or 1999. I remember coming home from Micro Center, installing the Diamond Voodoo2 card and trying Descent Freespace on it. I think it came with it as a demo or even a full version. Then lots of hours playing NFS as well. It was the future.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#80

Post by Nition »

paulbennett wrote: post #71
_noqo wrote: post #61

I remember those days vividly. I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97, I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer. But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram (3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the…

> I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features. I think NFS2SE had transparent glass if you had a 3D…

I remember playing Need for Speed: High Stakes with a 4MB Permedia 2 card, and the game was clearly supposed to have alpha-transparent textures on some lights, but my card couldn't handle it and I got opaque textures with big black borders around all the streetlight lens flares etc.

The worst was the Dolphin Cove track where beautiful shafts of sunlight were meant to lazily filter through the tree canopy onto the road. On my screen, they appeared as fully opaque walls blocking any view of the track ahead.

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