Introduction
If you look back many years to the dawn of 3D acceleration, you can't help but be amazed at how far the technology has progressed. Back in the "Glide-only-days" of NHL 98, Need for Speed 1 & 2 SE, and the plethora of other "3D accelerated" games, the 3dfx Voodoo was king and a user with one was a god.
Now, I could look back really far into the introduction of EGA, CGA, VGA, yada yada yada; but really, that's just boring. Perhaps some of you are interested in how I had an ancient 512kb Trident video card that could only do 16 colours and 640x480, but I'm the one that wrote this, so I get to decide. :-)
3dfx's Voodoo Graphics Chip
At first, 3D acceleration was primarily used in big, symmetric-multiprocessor machines like SGI boxes; i.e. Onyx and Indigo. They were exceedingly expensive and pale in comparison to the raw, unrelenting, polygon crunching power of today's video cards. That in itself is amazing, isn't it?
Loaded with games, this was packed with the Monster 3D.
The first really useful commercial 3D acceleration was from 3dfx -- they virtually started the whole video card race as we know it. Its flagship chip, the Voodoo Graphics Chip, was the king of the hill for a long time. This baby featured a whopping 4mb of on-board memory in most configurations, and had some mind blowing features like bilinear filtering and alpha transparency. I was pretty envious when I first saw one of these things in action.
3dfx didn't produce consumer video boards at first, only chipsets; much like Nvidia does today. Because of this, it was up to manufacturers to make quality cards. The best Voodoo card was the Diamond Monster 3D, at least for single chip boards. There were other boards that were great in comparison, such as the Canopus Pure3D, but these weren't as easy to obtain as the Monster 3D, which was on-shelf in virtually every computer store. The Monster 3D received rave reviews everywhere, and basically brought Diamond back from the dead. (According to some people. :)) Here are a few quotes from the July 1997 issue of PC Gamer:
... In performance terms, this board is really a Monster. Running GLQuake – A 3d accelerated version of Quake that's compatible with 3Dfx boards – on our reference 200MHz MMX machine, it scored very respectable 31.9 frames per second at 640x480 resolution...
... supporting bilinear filtering; anti-aliasing; Gouraud shading; MIP Mapping (which eliminates that annoying "sparkling" effect you sometimes see on texture-mapped graphics); perspective correction; texture modulation (for smoother lighting effects); per-pixel alpha blending (more realistic fog effects)...
During the time of that review, the Diamond Monster 3D cost $199.95. It was one of the fastest cards around. Today, the fastest cards for gaming are priced upwards of $400. Ouch!
 A tiny pic of the Monster 3D box.
The Competition Strikes Back
From 3dfx's success came competition. Nvidia with its popular Riva 128 chip, Rendition, PowerVR, 3DLabs, and others quickly set up shop in the commercial arena. None of them really took off to the extent 3dfx had, however. One of the Power VR offerings was the Apocalypse 5D from VideoLogic. This card had 8mb of ram, and many of the same features that the Voodoo did, which are common place today. Unlike the Monster 3D, this card was 2D and 3D. It was actually quite a fast card for its time. At last, users didn't need to buy a 2D card then add a second card and pass-through cable to get screaming fast 3D.
My 3D Experience
My first 3D accelerator was a PowerVR card. It was a Matrox M3D, which had a PowerVR PCX2 controller; the second generation PowerVR. Quite honestly, when I picked it up for about $100 at my local hose-you retailer, I was totally impressed by the box. If you want to see what it had to offer, check here. I installed it, then tried out Quake. (Not GL) I was really confused, I didn't see any difference, then I remembered GL Quake and got that, and clumsily set it up and got it working. It ran so slowly on my 486 33 MHz box that it wasn't even funny. I gave up on it and tried the two full games it came with: Hexen II and Ultimate race. Hexen II, being of the Quake engine, ran worse than Quake. But Ultimate Race actually ran quite well, since it was fully optimized for the PowerVR chip. I was pretty blown away at the quality, but that soon faded and I took it out. :)
Return of 3dfx
The next big jump in 3d acceleration was once again from 3dfx in the form of SLI, and their Voodoo 2 chip. I'm sure most of you know what SLI is, but for the few that don't; I will give a basic explanation. SLI, which stands for Scan-Line Interleave, is a method hooking two of the same video cards together so they share the video load with each other, each rendering half of the screen (in an interlaced fashion). This was some cool technology, and allowed for some massive frame rates at high resolution (1024x768 with most Voodoo2s in SLI mode).
  Two Voodoo2s. Left: Metabyte's Wicked3D; right: Diamond's Monster3D II.
According to an Anandtech review (and many, many more who pretty much got the same results as Anandtech), on their test machine, (K6-3D 300MHz, 64mb Ram and Pentium II 300) the cards in SLI didn't go under 40 FPS at 640x480 in Quake 2, Turok, or Forsaken. That is quite impressive, quite a jump from the Voodoo Graphics Chip.
More from the Competition
All the while, other companies like Matrox, ATI, S3, and Nvidia were pumping out their chips and the whole 3D acceleration thing has officially turned into war. Now it seems all the manufacturers had their own chipsets in development. Rendition was busy with their V2200, 3dfx had the Voodoo rush and Voodoo 2, and S3 had the Savage 3D and Virge line, to name a few.
Along with all those power house chipsets, AGP was also around now, replacing the aged PCI with more bandwidth and all the other jargon once again adding a big 'ol bucket of gasoline to the already raging 3D acceleration fire.
  Two TNTs. Left: Canopus' Spectra 2500; right: STB's Velocity 4400.
With more and more cards around, the competition became more focused on frame rates. When the Riva TNT debuted (during the Voodoo2's reign), it boasted frame rates above significantly in a single-card solution, which it delivered along with great image quality, features, and stability (for the most part). The TNT (and TNT2) line of cards introduced powerful OpenGL, and helped in the expansion of alternative API's to Glide... primarily Direct3D.
 The awesome (and expensive) Matrox G200 TV.
Later came the G200, TNT 2 / Ultra, Voodoo 3... then even later, the G400, then GeForce, then GeForce 2 and Voodoo 4/5... which like basically all new high-end video cards, offered greater speed, image quality, and features. You probably know this part of the story, because you've most likely witnessed it all.
Conclusion
I really hope you gained something from this article, and I didn't waste time writing it. You better have! But really, how could you not just sit in awe at the whole 3D acceleration craze? It's amazing. The next time you bitch about your GeForce going too slowly, think about what it would be like with out 3D acceleration, you ungrateful brat! Erk, thanks for reading!
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comment form