[HN Gopher] Remembering Intel 740
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Remembering Intel 740
Author : pmarin
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-10-27 07:37 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raspberrypi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raspberrypi.com)
| bluedino wrote:
| >> Lockheed Martin created a spin-off dedicated to consumer 3D
| graphics tech called Real3D, mostly using employees from GE
| Aerospace.
|
| Imagine aerospace trying to compete with startups like NVIDIA and
| 3Dfx
| fredoralive wrote:
| Well, they did have decades of experience with real time 3D
| from flight simulators, so what could some johnny-come-lately's
| really do, especially when paired with the mightly Intel?
| (Well, didn't work out...[1])
|
| I suppose if the chip hadn't been a stinker I suspect Real3D
| would've ended up being spun out of Lockheed Martin somehow as
| it doesn't seem a great fit for the rest of the business.
| Presumably the spinoff would have less embarrasing way of being
| sold to Intel on the cheap and having the tech used for
| (motherboard) intergrated "Intel Extreme"(ly bad) graphics.
|
| [1] Although ATI wasn't exactly a startup by the 3D era, and
| 3DFX crashed and burned, so it wasn't quite "startups win".
| pengaru wrote:
| Skunkworks
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I worked on the 740, under Tom Piazza (RIP) from Real3D when
| Intel acquired them.
|
| Fun project. Uncompetitive before it even shipped.
|
| Got questions? Ask away! It was a very simple pipeline.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Why was the decision made to use system memory as vram instead
| of shipping more on the card? It seems like a cost cutting
| measure, but had an outsized effect on performance.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| AGP was designed to allow faster access to memory because
| VRAM was expensive. There was just enough for the
| framebuffers. Texture size was known to be huge, which would
| live in RDRAM b/c VRAM would have been crazy expensive (I
| think the dual 3DFx at the time was like $1k). Also Intel was
| investing heavily in RDRAM (remember that?). The idea of
| integrating graphics and southbridge was on the long-term
| roadmap, which would use UMA (unified memory architecture) to
| make cheap mobos, which board vendors were begging for. So
| this also figured into the decision: it wasn't about the
| graphics crown, it was about selling CPUs. These became the
| 810 and 815, which the game developers HATED because it held
| back progress for years: the 810 was the most common graphics
| chipset by I believe more than one order of magnitude.
|
| So yes, cost cutting due to the desire to dominate the
| motherboard market, which they did, which led to even more
| market for their CPUs. Even at the expense of overall
| graphics software performance for years.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I remember when AGP came out and it was advertised as
| making it possible to store textures in RAM, requiring your
| GPU to only have enough VRAM to act as a cache and frame
| buffer.
|
| It quickly became apparent that AGP, even as AGP 8x became
| a thing, wasn't fast enough to do the job, as every GPU
| still had tons of VRAM.
| speed_spread wrote:
| I assume one of the reason Intel could never develop it's own
| graphics adapter business is that any proper GPU would initially
| decrease the load on the CPU, partly reducing the justification
| for more expensive versions of their main product. Marketing-
| driven tunnel vision and all that.
| bluedino wrote:
| Just 1 year later they released the i810 which was Intel first
| attempt of integrating their own GPU on the motherboard
| chipset. They didn't get into 'Intel HD graphics', integrated
| into the CPU for almost another 10 years.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yeah, around that time there were quite a few "hopeful" 3D
| cards/chips that ultimately didn't quite cut it. I couldn't spare
| the cash for a 3dfx card at the time, but I wanted a 3D card, so
| I got an S3 ViRGE-based one. That chip later became infamous as a
| "3D decelerator" because with hardware 3D rendering most games
| were _slower_ on a decent PC (albeit a little prettier) than with
| software rendering. The only game I ever played on it with 3D
| enabled was the bundled copy of Descent...
| eliasmacpherson wrote:
| I got a version of Tomb Raider to run on the S3 decelerator
| also, not sure if it was the first, the sequel or both.
| Eventually a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee saved the day.
|
| Intel's Iris Xe DG1 desktop card was not very performant
| either. Curious that they decide to build DG2 Arc/Alchemist 6nm
| Graphics cards at TSMC... I wonder why they chose not to build
| a CPU instead - an area where they are actually competitive.
|
| Here's some nostalgia - https://ctrl-alt-
| rees.com/2020-12-06-s3-virge-officially-sup...
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I think that Intel is using TSMC because Intel having issues
| with their smaller process nodes. It probably helps that
| their lead GPU guy, Raja Koduri[0], worked at ATI (later
| AMD), so he's familiar with how TSMC does things (because
| TSMC has manufactured all of ATI/AMD's GPUs).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Koduri
| belval wrote:
| And you get a nice bonus that every wafer Intel buys can't
| be used by AMD/Nvidia.
| Svperstar wrote:
| In 1996 I had got my first PC, I wanted a 3D card but didn't
| have the technical knowledge to understand the difference
| between cards. I got a Matrox Mystique. It ran a couple of
| games well that it came with. It was completely incapable of
| playing GLQuake or any other titles I was interested in.
|
| Sad thing is a salesmen had tried to convince me to get a 3dfx
| Monster3D, but I thought the passthrough dongle thing was
| trashy and cheap looking. Learned my lesson hard. To this day I
| research the crap out of anything I buy in the PC space before
| buying it.
| goldcd wrote:
| That's the one I got for my first PC as well. I managed to
| out-do myself my pairing it with a Cyrix 686+. So not only
| did I have an unsupported gaming card, I had a CPU that
| didn't like doing floating point and ran quake like
| powerpoint. ...as you said,you learn from your mistakes.
| Svperstar wrote:
| I emailed Matrox and asked if support for GLQuake was
| coming and they emailed me back and said "We are currently
| working on the drivers" Total lie. The Mystique was
| completely incapable of supporting GLQuake. Live and learn.
| I had Voodoo 2 SLI like a year and a half later.
| ksec wrote:
| All the names and terminology, MMX CPU, 3Dfx Voodoo, VideoLogic
| PowerVR, AGP, i740, Cyrix 6x86, AMD K6, ALi Aladdin, Super Socket
| 7, 440BX.... etc. It just put a smile on my face. :) And I have
| _every single_ one of them somewhere in my house.
|
| But it didn't touch on the real reason why i740 failed. It was
| Drivers.
|
| Intel fail to invest enough resource to catch up in Driver
| quality. The constant rendering bug, crash, and performance on
| non-optimised Games were dismal. ( Games that were not on Review
| Benchmarks list )
|
| That is why I am sceptical of Intel re-entering the GPU space.
| This time around they do have their iGPU marketshare as test bed
| and foundation to built on, but driver quality will continue to
| dictate Gaming performance. Even AMD barely manage to get ~15%
| discrete market GPU.
|
| And as a side note. Nvidia market cap at ~$630B is now worth
| _three_ times more than Intel. I am wondering if Nvidia could be
| another trillion dollar company.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I disagree. The 740 didn't have the triangle pipeline speed
| that competitors had as poly counts went up.
|
| It had great memory and rasterizer bandwidth, it was just
| starved by transformation. The pipeline was balanced for
| polycounts that came before it, not what was to come.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Even far after the 740, with relatively recent iGPUs, Intel's
| drivers leave something to be desired. I've worked on codebases
| that had plenty of specific Intel GPU driver versions called
| out as buggy. This has gotten better over time, but I think
| you're right to have this concern.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is always lack of execution, I was on the Larrabee session
| at GDCE 2009, and wow it was going to take over the gaming
| world, history followed another path as we all know.
|
| On a similar note, Solaris has successfully used memory tagging
| with SPARC ADI, ARM is following along with MTE, meanwhile
| Intel removed the buggy MPX from their chips.
|
| Then we have the whole StrongArm or Edison boards.
|
| NVidia is very strong in tooling, documentation and being open
| to polyglot programming on their GPUs, to a level that Intel
| and AMD keep failing at.
| beezle wrote:
| And yet INTC net income is 3x NVDA, 21B vs 7B
| goldcd wrote:
| I've got somewhat fond memories of that card. I think it sat
| between my m3d and my first nvidia card (TNT?) I remember it
| being incredibly cheap - and with DirectX support my first card
| out of the years of the dark proprietary wilderness.
| filiperui wrote:
| This! The i740 was my first "real" 3D graphics card - I
| remember running the Final Reality benchmark on it and feeling
| genuinely excited with the purchase.
|
| After that I got the Riva TNT (Diamond Viper V550 iirc) which
| changed everything from a consumer point of view. Good times.
| bluedino wrote:
| Let's hop in the time machine and look at John Carmack's .plan
|
| _Intel i740 --- Good throughput, good fillrate, good quality,
| good features. A very competent chip. I wish intel great success
| with the 740. I think that it firmly establishes the baseline
| that other companies (especially the ones that didn't even make
| this list) will be forced to come up to.
|
| Voodoo rendering quality, better than voodoo1 performance, good
| 3D on a desktop integration, and all textures come from AGP
| memory so there is no texture swapping at all.
|
| Lack of 24 bit rendering is the only negative of any kind I can
| think of.
|
| Their current MCD OpenGL on NT runs quake 2 pretty well. I have
| seen their ICD driver on '95 running quake 2, and it seems to be
| progressing well. The chip has the potential to outperform voodoo
| 1 across the board, but 3DFX has more highly tuned drivers right
| now, giving it a performance edge. I expect intel will get the
| performance up before releasing the ICD.
|
| It is worth mentioning that of all the drivers we have tested,
| intel's MCD was the only driver that did absolutely everything
| flawlessly. I hope that their ICD has a similar level of quality
| (it's a MUCH bigger job).
|
| An 8mb i740 will be a very good setup for 3D development work._
| the-dude wrote:
| Quite an odd article for raspberrypi.com
|
| While I am not a reader of the site, why would this be of
| interest to a Raspberry PI enthousiast?
| giantrobot wrote:
| They apparently sell a Custom PC magazine through the site.
| Other articles are nominally about the Raspberry Pi but then
| some are PC focused. It's very confusing.
|
| The article is interesting but the site is confusing.
| tpmx wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_PC_(magazine)
|
| _In February 2019 the magazine, along with Digital SLR
| Photography Magazine, was sold to Raspberry Pi Trading, a
| subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation._
| midrus wrote:
| Wohaa!! I had one of those. Those were my first few years with
| computers and I was just learning with a friend of mine how to
| build and tune them to support better Doom, Quake and all the
| games we were playing at the time. I think this stuff was the
| ignition of my profession.
|
| So many good memories. I feel old :-s.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I remember those early days of 3D accelerators...
|
| When the 3dfx Voodoo came out, I really wanted one so I could run
| all the games written using the Glide API. I asked for one for
| Christmas, and my dad got me a Rendition 2200. I was actually
| pretty upset, because so many games were written using Glide,
| which was a 3dfx-proprietary API. GLQuake existed and used
| OpenGL, but OpenGL drivers were either non-existent or didn't
| work, I don't remember.
|
| I ended up hating 3dfx for how they had ruled the 3D accelerator
| market for a short period of time. I was glad when the Voodoo 5
| was a failure and AMD and NVIDIA ended up taking over.
| _joel wrote:
| Brings back fond memories of computing at the time. I remember
| saving up for a 3dfx card and being amazed at how much of an
| improvement there was.
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