[HN Gopher] 3dfx: So powerful it's kind of ridiculous
___________________________________________________________________
3dfx: So powerful it's kind of ridiculous
Author : BirAdam
Score : 547 points
Date : 2023-03-05 04:13 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| userbinator wrote:
| Not too long ago someone recreated a Voodoo5 6000:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960140
|
| The (leaked?) datasheets and miscellaneous information for the
| GPUs seem to be widely available, but that's still quite
| impressive for a single person; on a similar level to making your
| own motherboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829
| ReptileMan wrote:
| And glide is the only 3d accelerator that made diablo 2 look
| good. To this day.
| jvolkman wrote:
| I still remember installing a Voodoo and playing glquake. It was
| so amazing after relative disappointments like the S3 Virge. Lots
| of nostalgia for that period.
|
| The article touches on this a bit, but one of the quirky things
| about the original Voodoo and Voodoo 2 were that they lacked 2D
| entirely. You had to use a short VGA passthrough cable to some
| other 2D card. This also meant that they only supported
| fullscreen 3D, since 2D output was completely bypassed while the
| 3dfx card was in use.
|
| The Voodoo 3 finally came with 2D, but I think I jumped ship to
| Nvidia by then.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I think Voodoo Banshee was a full blown 2d+3d solution that was
| released before Voodoo 3. Don't take my word for it, though
| smcl wrote:
| And the Voodoo Rush was a 2D/3D card that came out a little
| before that (August 1997, compared to the Banshee in
| late-1998). I didn't own either, mind, my only 3dfx card was
| a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI :D
| beebeepka wrote:
| Ah, you're absolutely right. Forgot about the Voodoo Rush.
| I was a poor kid and couldn't afford either.
| smcl wrote:
| Oh me too - my motherboard had no AGP slot (hence the V3
| 2000 PCI). If I was smart I would've saved up for a few
| months, bought a more future-proof motherboard (I was on
| the dying Socket 7 platform, with an AMD K6-2 466MHz) and
| I would've had a nice little setup that would've kept me
| going for a while. But I was an impatient kid, and I
| wanted to play Quake 3 and ended up doing piecemeal
| upgrades over the next few years that ultimately cost me
| more overall :D
| astrostl wrote:
| > You had to use a short VGA passthrough cable to some other 2D
| card
|
| And the lossy, double-clutched analog nature of this crushed 2D
| clarity IME. I could immediately tell the difference just
| looking at a desktop screen. It was by far my biggest grievance
| and resulted in me staying away until fully-integrated
| solutions were available.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Gordon Campbell grew up in Minnesota, and as there wasn't a
| market for technology there at the time, he felt he needed to go
| to Silicon Valley in 1976.
|
| That seems like a bit of anachronistic Silicon Valley mythology.
| Wasn't Minnesota something like the "Silicon Valley" of
| mainframes at the time? There were several then-major computer
| companies there: CDC, Cray, Honeywell, IBM, Univac, etc.
| [deleted]
| carabiner wrote:
| typo: loose/lose
| bentt wrote:
| I loved my 3DFX cards but there was a moment where I realized
| that a Nvidia Riva TNT would properly accelerate OpenGL 3d
| applications (3dsmax in my case) and it was over. 3DFX didn't
| implement OpenGL properly at the time. It always felt like
| something was broken if you were outside of Glide.
| uberduper wrote:
| I worked at 3dfx in their final months. I watched as workers from
| NVIDIA broke down and hauled off a large number of netapp shelves
| (seemingly without labeling them).
|
| 3dfx was run like a frat house. It was fun while I was there, but
| it wasn't a surprise when they announced they were shutting down.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 3dfx is another example of "worse is better" or "slope vs
| intercept". This article doesn't quite spell it out, but as far
| as I can tell, 3dfx had one GPU architecture that was tweaked
| from 1995 till their end. It was much better for a few years than
| what the competitors put out, but the competitors kept iterating.
| nVidia created several generations of GPUs in the same time
| frame. 3dfx started higher but had no slope. Everyone else
| started much lower, but had a lot of slope (nVidia and ATI in
| particular). Two of these went ahead and started creating a new
| "fastest ever GPU" every other year for a quarter century, the
| other tried putting more of the same GPU on bigger boards and
| folded.
| djmips wrote:
| Yes, I agree wholeheartedly
|
| Nvidia had a supercomputer and great hardware design software
| tools that were a trade secret and basically behind an off
| limits curtain in the center of their office and it helped them
| get chips out rapidly and on first turn. First turn means the
| first silicon coming back is good without requiring fixes and
| another costly turn.
|
| I'd say 3dfx weren't poised to industrialize as well as Nvidia
| and they just couldn't keep up in the evolutionary race.
|
| I'm not sure I understand where your worse is better idiom fits
| because 3dfx was better and Nvidia was worse but iterated to
| get better than 3dfx and won the day. Truly if worse was better
| in this case 3Dfx would still be around?
|
| On the other hand triangle based rendering is a case of worse
| is better and Nvidia learned that and switched course from
| their early attempts with nurb based primitives.
| rasz wrote:
| One of my favorite facts is about Nvidia release cycle speed.
| At the peak of nvidia 3dfx war new chips were coming out every
| 6-9 months:
|
| Riva 128 (April 1997) to TNT (June 15, 1998) took 14 months,
| TNT2 (March 15, 1999) 8 month, GF256 (October 11, 1999) 7
| months, GF2 (April 26, 2000) 6 months, | 3dfx dies here |, GF3
| (February 27, 2001) 9 months, GF4 (February 6, 2002) 12 months,
| FX (March 2003) 13 months, etc ...
|
| Nvidia had an army of hardware engineers always working on 2
| future products in parallel, 3dfx had few people in a room.
| quelsolaar wrote:
| This story misses some of the details of how Quake cane to
| support 3Dfx. Carmack had an intrgraph workstation that had
| openGL at the time and had written a version of Quake for it:
| GLQuake. This version was shown to 3Dfx, and 3Dfx realized they
| could imlement a OpenGL drive that only supported the features
| Carmack had used for his Intergraph port. So a "MiniGL" driver
| was boarn. This was a huge deal for 3Dfx, and loats of people got
| their start programing OpenGL using the "MiniGl" subset
| ben7799 wrote:
| Count me in. I was in college when this happened. I remember
| being a Freshman and Sgi had come to campus for recruiting with
| all these amazing demos on 6-figure hardware. Then my junior year
| I had scrounged enough money to get a 3Dfx card and my friends
| and I were all blown away by it. I didn't end up going into
| graphics but remember we did a project for computer graphics and
| I was able to run my code on the 3Dfx.
|
| It was an incredibly exciting time.
| corysama wrote:
| Same. I was fortunate enough to be able to use one of those
| hundred thousand dollar SGI's as a sophomore because of my lab
| job. So, in my dorm I had a Pentium60 capable of running Quake
| at 320x240 software rendered. And, in the lab, I could play at
| 1280x1024(!!!) on the Reality Engine with the same point
| filtered look. But, then I managed to get a Voodoo1 and my
| little PC could run Quake at 640x480 bilinear filtered. It was
| nuts to get such a huge speed up for a fraction of the cost of
| the base machine. Peak "Pop Moore's Law" going on at that time.
| harel wrote:
| I was managing a CD-Rom shop when the Voodoo was a thing. We
| bought one for the store's 486DX computer and I remember the
| before and after shock of playing Tomb Raider and demoing it to
| shoppers. It felt like "The Future"...
| kleer001 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jdboyd wrote:
| On Chrome 110 on Ubuntu 22.04, both arrow keys and page up/down
| work for me.
| saghm wrote:
| They work for me (Firefox on Arch Linux). Maybe they're using
| JavaScript for it somehow, and you have it disabled?
| severino wrote:
| Funny thing, when I heard about those "3d graphics accelerator"
| cards in the late 90s, I just thought they were meant to make
| your 3d games run faster. But Quake II and similar games already
| ran very fast in my machine.
|
| It wasn't until I went to some cybercafe where they had Quake II,
| among others, installed for network play in computers with one of
| those 3dfx cards, that I actually saw what an accelerator card
| could turn a game into, regardless of speed, and I decided that I
| needed one of those.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| That sounds like a really cool experience. Could you expand
| further on the differences you saw?
| corysama wrote:
| Going from low rez, point-sampled to high rez, bilinear
| filtered (+antialiasing if you are lucky) is a huge quality
| leap. Basically PlayStation 1 vs PS2.
| severino wrote:
| Something similar to the first screenshot in the article.
| Until then, Quake II on software graphics was a cool game for
| me but a game where you saw pixels everywhere, like every
| other game at the time. Discrete graphics cards on the other
| side made the game's graphics take a huge leap forward. It
| was a quality (and not just speed) I hadn't seen before, so
| much so that it was almost a different game for me. I guess
| it was 1999 or so.
| stan_kirdey wrote:
| amazing read
| Maxburn wrote:
| My love for the Voodoo 2 knows no bounds, it was the start of a
| beautiful thing for me.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| And then NVIDIA ate everything.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is always funny to read the comments on this site for a
| computer history post, you'll get
|
| 1) I remember buying that card with my first paycheck
|
| 2) Oh yeah, me and/or my buddy worked on that
|
| As someone who was a little kid for most of the 90's, all I can
| say is thanks to everyone who worked on the stuff -- it was a
| truly magical time when every time your dad brought you to the
| computer shops they'd have some new demo set up they could do
| things that simply were not even imaginable a last time. Plus
| since I was not even a teenager yet, I didn't have to learn about
| the battles between which model of rendering was better, it was
| just pure magic.
|
| Hopefully we'll speed things up again soon. I'm worried that
| there may be a generation at some point that doesn't realize
| we're in the future.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Man the first 3dfx was such a mind blowing experience. There was
| nothing like it at them time. Games went from a rough pixelated
| mess to super smooth and sharp. PS1 and N64 had an edge over PC
| graphics in the 90s, 3dfx turned the tables.
| bennysonething wrote:
| This wasn't my experience. I bought a voodoo 3 , playing quake
| 1 and quake 2 was just disappointing, at the time it just felt
| like Goldeneye was next gen compared to those flagship pc
| games. I desperately wanted it to be a step up. It didn't feel
| like it. Also it's sort of odd to me that quake two is seen as
| revolutionary. In my opinion Goldeneye blows it out of the
| water and it was released in the same year.
|
| Edit, obviously this is all subjective, and it's about fond
| memories! :)
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Goldeneye levels are very simple, boxy, and low poly count.
| Quake 1 levels were far more complex and impressive than
| Goldeneye. Though pixelated and low res which is what 3dfx
| revolutionized with their Voodoo 1.
| exabrial wrote:
| 800mb/s 23+ years ago is absolutely bezerk.
|
| I remember being in high school and seeing the butter smooth high
| frame rates (for the time) being like wow.
| Teslazar wrote:
| A few more historical bits that might be interesting.
|
| Brian Hook was the 3dfx engineer who was the original architect
| of Glide. He went on to work for id Software in 1997.
|
| Michael Abrash wrote the first 3d hardware support for Quake,
| while working for id Software, but it wasn't for 3dfx it was for
| the Rendition Verite 1000 and released as vQuake.
|
| John Carmack was, of course, the lead programmer of Quake.
|
| Hook, Abrash, and Carmack ended up working at the same company
| again at Oculus VR (and then Meta).
| burnte wrote:
| I BOUGHT a Verite card because of vQuake, and it wasn't worth
| it. When I moved to a Voodoo3 it was amazing.
| js2 wrote:
| 1998 interview with Hook:
|
| https://www.quakewiki.net/profile-retro-interview-brian-hook...
| darkwater wrote:
| Oh, this brings back so many memory from when I actually bought
| and updated PC hardware every time I had some money saved! I
| remember having a Matrox Mystique (the one with a... joker or
| something like that on the box), the 3Dfx Voodoo and also a TNT2.
| I remember moving from the Mystique to the Voodoo playing Quake
| and it was one of the biggest "wow" moment of my childhood.
| drKarl wrote:
| I got the 3dfx Voodoo which required a 2D card! Later on I got a
| Nvidia Riva TNT! It's been a long way, now I have an RTX 4090...
| Seanambers wrote:
| 3DFX was basically the shit in mid late 90s. First time seeing
| Quake in OpenGL was insane - before that all games were rendered
| in software.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nope, the blitter engine on Amiga, tile engine on consoles like
| Nintendo and Sega, the early GPUs on arcades like TMS34010,
| glide on 3Dfx.
|
| Quake used miniGL, not full OpenGL.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I guess they're specifically referring to textured polygon-
| based 3D graphics.
|
| There were a few earlier attempts that failed for one reason
| or another, mostly poor performance. I think there was a
| French accelerator card that I can't remember the name of
| right now.
| anthk wrote:
| Quake had a Glide renderer. But those are examples on 2D
| acceleration. There were equivalents on PC too.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| I just remember glide being that annoying thing you had to wrap
| to get the original n64 emulator working.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Because the original emulator required a 3dfx chip. The N64 was
| based on an SGI chip, which coincidentally was quite similar,
| so it was easy to translate to glide calls.
| ddeck wrote:
| > _On the 15th of December in 2000, NVIDIA announced that they
| would acquire 3dfx Interactive's assets for $70 million
| ($121,613,821.14 in 2023) and 1 million shares of common stock._
|
| Those million shares are worth about $5.7 billion today ($238
| stock, 1:24 cumulative split since then).
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Heh, I owned 3dfx stock when they folded. I saw 0$ of that
| transaction.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Same here! Retail investors got screwed on this deal.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Same here. It was the first and unfortunately last tech stock
| that I took a gamble on because it failed so gloriously and I
| was so sure of it.
| djmips wrote:
| Pretty sneaky huh?
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| What's sneaky? The company was going bankrupt and the deal
| was approved by shareholders. When you go bankrupt or
| dissolve, creditors get paid before shareholders. That
| someone owned shares and saw nothing is how bankruptcy
| works (and should work).
| wildermuthn wrote:
| It feels sneaky because in these deals someone always
| seems to get rich except those who who were teased into
| investing their time (employees with "equity") or
| invested with small-money (stockholders) rather than big-
| money (VCs, banks). I have no idea about the particulars
| of this deal, so maybe no individual got rich off the
| deal, and VCs/banks only recouped a portion of their
| investment. But in my experience, usually a failure still
| sends up as a success for those who are in a position to
| negotiate a deal. In other words, Nvidia didn't do this
| deal out of the kindness of their hearts -- there was
| still something of value to them that they paid for, and
| I'd be quite surprised if the board of 3dfx didn't find a
| way to capture some of that value personally. Saying that
| "creditors get paid before shareholders" doesn't capture
| the full story of most of these sales, where some equity
| owners are special and some aren't.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Common shareholders get peanuts, C-suite gets tens of
| millions in retention incentives. Not saying that's what
| happened here, but that has happened to me in the past.
| As a small time shareholder what do you do? Assuming its
| even mathematically possible to do anything.
| johnny_canuck wrote:
| I love reading about 3dfx as their hardware had a great deal of
| impact on my preteen years (gaming night and day). I'm always
| amazed to read how small some of these 90s tech companies were.
| djmips wrote:
| This is a really great retrospective on 3dfx from four of the
| founders.
|
| 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary
| Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell (Computer History Museum)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU
| hnarayanan wrote:
| This is so very good and even more engaging than the article.
| muro wrote:
| The article has a weird writing style, something is off.
| Maybe it feels like a high school essay?
| minimaul wrote:
| I really recommend sitting down and listening to this - it's a
| very good cover of 3DFX from start to finish (and I feel like
| it was probably one of the primary sources for this article).
| a3w wrote:
| 3dfx Voodoo 3 - ah yes passive cooling, I lost some skin touching
| an aluminium fin. An active cooler was needed, but easily screwed
| on.
| unxdfa wrote:
| I remember these days. I spent a lot of time buying GPUs and
| eating ramen. Unreal Tournament 99 on a Voodoo 3 3000 was the
| peak for me.
|
| Now I have an Intel iGPU and don't care. And I can afford to eat
| better :)
| fho wrote:
| ... that article triggered me hard ... I just hate when the first
| paragraph is interesting and then they start with something
| completely different (ie "the guy that did the interesting
| thing"s life) in the second paragraph ... here ... they just did
| that four times ...
| app4soft wrote:
| > _Voodoo2, Diamond Monster 3D, image from [Russian site]_
|
| Why the heck this image claimed being taken from [Russian site]
| if that image is from _Buyee_?[0]
|
| [0] https://buyee.jp/mercari/item/m78940760663
| Neil44 wrote:
| I remember the audible 'clunk' of the relays snapping in on those
| old pass through cards. Always the sound of a good time. Remember
| seeing a guy at a lan party carrying his whole box by the pass
| through cable one too, that made a few people wince.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| That is wild, but can totally imagine it as the pass thru cable
| was chunky.
| papito wrote:
| Man, I remember I had a crappy Celeron because we were dirt-poor.
| At some point I finally bought a Voodoo 3, popped it in, and
| fired up Tomb Raider. I was blown away. The game went from
| pixelated chop-o-rama to smooth and gorgeous (in those days). I
| could even play combat simulators like European Air War. Good
| Times.
| nix23 wrote:
| Playing Wizardry8 right now (on wine with the glide patches).
| antiterra wrote:
| The 2D/3D Voodoo Rush performed so poorly that there was an offer
| to return the 3D daughterboard in order to get a proper
| standalone Voodoo card. You could still use what remained of the
| card for 2D. I did this and they sent me a retail Diamond Monster
| 3D.
|
| I thought I was buying something better than a Voodoo and got it
| at release before there were any reviews. Lesson learned.
| bitwize wrote:
| Mesa had a trick that let it capture the framebuffer off your
| regular Voodoo card and display it in a window.
|
| I did this with my Voodoo 2. It was like having a Voodoo
| Banshee. Well, maybe not _quite_ like, but my in-window Quake 2
| framerates were quite decent.
| christkv wrote:
| I remembered it being jokingly called the Voodoo Rushed.
| BruceEel wrote:
| Also worth mentioning, the 3dfx Voodoo SDK, docs and examples.
| For those like me (zero previous experience with 3D API's) it was
| a lot of fun to play with.
|
| And! Still available today: DOSBox-X has Voodoo1 support built-in
| (or host pass-through glide support), Open Watcom C++ works well
| in DOSBox and will compile most examples.
| christkv wrote:
| Otherwise pcem also has full voodoo support.
| mikezirak wrote:
| [flagged]
| cronix wrote:
| Nice trip down memory lane. I still remember when I popped the
| 3dfx in and played quake, after playing quake on some ATI or
| Matrox I had (and a hell of a lot of other games before that
| lol). It was a transformative experience. I was stunned at how
| smooth everything was. It was beautiful. It was more incredible
| than going from 320x200x16(colors) to 640x480x256 and then
| 1024x768x16.8M, which were all quite marvelous increments. I
| think Moore's Law was just more visible in the early days. You
| really felt each iterative change. Going from "PC Speaker" to an
| Adlib was also a massive transformation.
| greggsy wrote:
| Interestingly, the transistor density of GPUs has been
| following a roughly logarithmic curve since 2000, compared to
| the linear increase in x86 processors [1].
|
| I totally agree that the incremental innovations observed in
| earlier GPU platforms felt much, much more 'obvious' though.
|
| It's as if the 'wow factor' of graphics hardware doesn't scale
| at the same rate as density.
|
| Or perhaps releases were more spread out than they are today
| (compared to the annual release cycle expected today) making
| the jumps more obvious.
|
| [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparison-of-NVIDIA-
| gra...
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I wonder if part of that is because GPU tasks are
| ridiculously parallelisable?
|
| If you can split the screen into 64 equal chunks, there's
| nothing except silicon real estate stopping you splitting it
| into 128, or 256, or 2048. Think about how SLI worked, in the
| Voodoo II olden days.
| Taniwha wrote:
| I was designing Mac graphics accelerators in the early 90s,
| one thing I learned is that perceived performance follows a
| sort of S curve, there's an area where everything is terribly
| slow and any change is good but it's slow, then you hit the
| curve every performance increase is obvious, wonderful, makes
| new stuff possible - that's where you start selling big if
| you're leading the pack, then you hit an area where
| performance is "good enough", double the performance and the
| perceived increase is far less - now you're fighting for
| "cheapest", not so good for your company.
|
| That was for 2D, bigger faster 3D enables new sorts of games
| so that market has been growing for far longer.
| christkv wrote:
| It feels like we are two or three generations away from
| that in gpus for games.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I admire your optimism but the next big with ray/path
| tracing, voxels and whatnot, I'd say not even ten
| generations away.
|
| Good thing nice graphics do not equal good games. My
| favourite multiplayer FPS games I prefer in glorious
| picmip 5 detail.
| christkv wrote:
| Yeah the amount of sameness open world games is getting
| boring. Seems big budget games are afraid to take risks.
| Maybe generative AI will help smaller teams build bigger
| worlds for us.
| sporkland wrote:
| I had the same experience. Running qw.exe and it just feeling
| substantial and beautiful compared to the software renderer. I
| have been chasing a transformative high like that since. I sat
| out the initial VR iterations hoping for the biggest wow factor
| when I finally strapped on the HTC vive connected to a PC. It
| was great but still not at that level.
|
| One aspect of this story I've never seen covered is how Nvidia
| managed as a quiet dark horse to come from behind and crush
| 3dfx in a few years with the TNT and TNT2. The article talks
| about the GeForce 256, but 3dfx crown was stolen before that.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Adlib forgot it even existed but you are correct. These were
| generational leaps in PC gaming.
| jahnu wrote:
| While I was at university in Derby, England, I got a sneak
| preview of a prototype of the first consumer 3dfx card. This was
| at a gfx card company called DataPath I was doing some contract
| work via another company. The day I saw it working I started
| saving so I could buy one the instant it was available. I had
| quite the advantage at Quake LAN parties for a short while :)
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Voodoo Graphics and GLide were the standard in the PC graphics
| space for a time. 3dfx created an industry that is going strong
| today, and that industry has affected far more than just gaming.
| GPUs now power multiple functions in our computers, and they
| enable AI work as well.
|
| >This tale brings up many "what ifs."
|
| What if 3dfx had realized early on that GPUs were excellent
| general purpose linear algebra computers, and had incorporated
| GPGPU functionality into GLide in the late 90s?
|
| Given its SGI roots, this is not implausible. And given how
| NVidia still has a near stranglehold on the GPGPU market today,
| it's also plausible that this would have kept 3dfx alive.
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Early 3dfx cards did not do any linear algebra or even 3D
| rendering. They accelerated triangle rasterization in screen
| coordinates, everything else was done by the CPU. So, 2.5D at
| most really.
| aldrich wrote:
| History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a
| company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some
| Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of
| graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable
| pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years
| before the first commercial shader capable card was released.
|
| Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are
| prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these
| cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel
| shaders, notably:
|
| - The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet:
| http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tr2520...
|
| - The pitch deck:
| http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tritec...
|
| - The hardware reference manual:
| http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/vs203_...
| (shows even more internals!)
|
| (As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys
| Oy were all related here.)
|
| They unfortunately busted before they could release anything,
| due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and
| letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of
| money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets
| were bought by ATI.
|
| As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral
| History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key
| people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it
| shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever
| engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and
| data buses.
|
| It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about
| squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making
| sacrifices (quality, programmability) there, which made sense
| at the time. I do think they would've been pretty late to
| switch to the whole programmable pipeline show, for to that
| reason alone. But who knows!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU
| monocasa wrote:
| I don't think so. Part of what made consumer GPUs viable at
| that gate count was their laser like precision on their
| specific rasterization workloads. More general linear algebra
| solutions wouldn't have been viable on the marketplace. You
| wouldn't see the viability of more general hardware until the
| bro layer 90s advent of register combiner hardware.
| Genbox wrote:
| Back in the day I bought a Savage 3D graphics card (1998) over
| the Voodoo 2 Banshee because the price vs. value was much better.
| At that time, 3Dfx was known for it's 3D performance, but was
| still clunky on the 2D part, especially considering the Matrox
| G400 GPU which had dual VGA, amazing color correction and
| software support everywhere.
|
| It went so fast going from having no 3D acceleration to having
| more 3D accelleration than you could imagine. It died fast too
| when ATI and NVIDIA became the only ones left, which is still
| true to this day.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| The retail box design [1] of the Voodoo 3 2000 is still burned
| into my memory even after 23 years. The purple woman's face, 6
| million triangles per second... just, sold. 1999 was just an
| amazing time.
|
| [1]:
| https://archive.ph/BNLiX/f3757388e1ee7008f0bad22261c625f1dcf...
| egeozcan wrote:
| My brand-new Voodoo graphics card in its shiny package was the
| only thing I took with me as a teenager when I was leaving the
| flat in a hurry after the big earthquake in 1999[0]. I remember
| noticing the missing silhouettes of distant buildings with some
| fires burning behind where they used to stand and thinking, oh
| boy we surely won't have electricity soon.
|
| You tend to have _different_ priorities in those ages, I guess.
|
| It's a dark memory, sure, but probably the packaging somehow
| made me get attached to a "stupid computer part" (not my words)
| and that's interesting.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake
| user_named wrote:
| Same
| rayiner wrote:
| 1999 was such a good tech year.
| alexwasserman wrote:
| I had a PowerMac 6500/300 back in my mid-teens as my first
| computer.
|
| To play games I later bought a PC Voodoo 3 which you could flash
| with a Mac-version ROM. Much cheaper than buying an actual Max
| version.
|
| Unreal was incredible. The whole card was incredible.
|
| Later I put a Linux distro on the computer too, and I needed a
| custom patch to the kernel (2.2.18, I think) to get the Voodoo
| drivers working for accelerated 2D and 3D rather than the
| software frame buffer. It was incredible to see a Gnome 1.4 or
| KDE 2 desktop in high res perform really well.
|
| It was also pretty buggy. Due to experimental drivers in both
| Linux and Mac, I assume. The weirdest was that sometimes a bug in
| Linux would dump whatever was in memory on the screen, which
| softly after booting from Mac to Linux could result in Mac OS 9
| windows appearing on a Linux desktop. You obviously couldn't
| interact, it would happen in a kernel panic type event where the
| computer would freeze with an odd mix of stuff on the screen.
|
| Was a fun intro to Linux, not getting a nice windowing
| environment till after I'd learnt to patch and compile a kernel.
|
| Back then it was normal to play with more OSs it seems like. That
| computer had Mac, Linux, BeOS and more on it.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| In 1998, Tom's Hardware had a long article on "NVIDIA vs 3DFX -
| The Wind Of Change"
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html
|
| It's a great article that predicted a lot of things.
|
| Side note: love that an article 25-years old is still accessible.
| wolpoli wrote:
| >Interestingly, 20 years later, the 3dfx Rampage was tested and
| found lacking against the NVIDIA GeForce 256 which would have
| been its competition had the Rampage been released.
|
| Does anyone know where I could find out more about this? The
| prevailing narrative for many years has been that the Rampage GPU
| would have provided a technological edge for a few years.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I also found that part interesting. Last time I read about the
| rampage was about a decade ago, I even saw a video showing the
| prototype, but just the card itself because "nobody has any
| drivers for it". Apparently they must have been found somewhere
| by now. Some fun stuff to research for a Sunday I guess. :-)
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| A quick web search finds: https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-
| rampage-gpu-performance-re...
|
| But you could argue that the Rampage drivers weren't optimized.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Thanks! I would argue that the drivers weren't optimized
| because the specification on the Spectre 1000 (Rampage) is
| roughly at the GeForce 2 GTS level.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| > The company endured litigation for securities fraud for quite
| sometime, declared bankruptcy in December of 1994, and became
| Aureal Semiconductor Inc on the 9th of September in 1995. This
| company would also go bankrupt and later be acquired by Creative.
|
| Aureal produced revolutionary audio cards, with real 3D audio -
| and I mean real. Close your eyes and you would track the sounds
| in the space around you with your eyes, from your hearing. It
| changed everything. I played HL with this, and CS too.
|
| I may be wrong, but my understanding is Creative sued them into
| bankruptcy, bought what remained, and never used that technology.
| I have never forgiven Creative for this.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| I remember it like that, too. It wasn't a product war, it was a
| war of court battles. Creative had more money and was able to
| chip away at Aureal through litigation and caused their
| collapse.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I think what really did it for me and my friends at that time was
| we could have a better graphics at home that what was available
| at most arcades at the time. Need for Speed 3 was the killer app
| for us, Playing over a DB9 serial link or directly calling each
| others house (and arguing about who was going to call who because
| the ringers were still on in the parents bedroom and the pickup
| was after the 1st ring).
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| The one game that always puzzled me what Diablo 2. I never saw it
| run better than on a Voodoo 2. It was butter smooth. I compared
| it to a TNT2Ultra and maybe an ATI Rage 128 and none of these
| came even close.
|
| To this day, this remains a mystery.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend
| of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were
| going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a
| sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and
| it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with
| development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my
| programs ever worked on it.
|
| Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it
| was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day
| thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot
| of fun.
|
| In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well
| supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to
| kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program
| games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had
| reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing"
| dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of
| the work.
|
| Sigh.
| rabf wrote:
| Part of the success of directx over opengl was that very few
| graphics card companies seemed capable of producing a fully
| functional opengl driver, for the longest time Nvidia was the
| only option.
|
| I recall ATI and Matrox both failing in this regard despite
| repeated promises.
| avereveard wrote:
| Fully functional opengl was not exactly the issue, or not the
| only one
|
| Opengl was stagnating at the time vendors started a feature
| wars. On opengl you can have vendor specific extensions,
| because it was meant for tightly integrated hardware and
| software. Vendors started leaning heavily on extensions to
| one up each other.
|
| The cronus group took ages to get up and standardize modern
| features
|
| By that time gl_ext checks became nightmarishly complicated
| and cross compatibility was further damaged by vendors lying
| about their actual gl_ext support, where drivers started
| claiming support for things the hardware could do, but using
| the ext causes the scene to not look right or outright crash
|
| Developers looked at that and no wonder they didn't want to
| take part in any of it
|
| This all beautifully exploded a few year later when compiz
| started taking a foothold which required this or that gl_ext
| and finally caused enough rage to get cronus working at
| bringing back under control the mess
|
| By that time ms were already at directx 9, you could use xlna
| to target different architectures, and it brought networking
| and io libraries with it making it a very convenient
| development environment
|
| *this is all a recollection from the late nineties early 2k
| and it's by now a bit blurred, it's hard to fill in the
| details on the specific exts Nvidia was the one producing the
| most but it's not like the blame is on them, Maxtor and ATI
| wonky support to play catch up was overall more damaging. Ms
| didn't need to really do much to win hearts with dx.
| moring wrote:
| How did Microsoft solve the "extensions problem"? Did they
| publish standardized APIs in time so vendors wouldn't come
| up with any extensions? Even then, how did MS prevent them
| from having the driver lie about the card's features to
| make it look better than it is?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| MS had a rigorous certification and internal testing
| process, new D3D versions came out quickly to support new
| hardware features, and through the Xbox Microsoft had
| more real world experience for what games actually need
| than the GPU vendors themselves, which probably helped to
| rein in some of the more bizarre ideas of the GPU
| designers.
|
| I don't know how the D3D design process worked in detail,
| but it is obvious that Microsoft had a 'guiding hand' (or
| maybe rather 'iron fist') to harmonize new hardware
| features across GPU vendors.
|
| Over time there have been a handful of 'sanctioned'
| extensions that had to be activated with magic fourcc
| codes, but those were soon integrated into the core API
| (IIRC hardware instancing started like this).
|
| Also, one at the time controversial decision which worked
| really well in hindsight was that D3D was an entirely new
| API in each new major version, which allowed to leave
| historical baggage behind quickly and keep the API clean
| (while still supporting those 'frozen' old D3D versions
| in new Windows versions).
| moring wrote:
| > Also, one at the time controversial decision which
| worked really well in hindsight was that D3D was an
| entirely new API in each new major version, which allowed
| to leave historical baggage behind quickly and keep the
| API clean (while still supporting those 'frozen' old D3D
| versions in new Windows versions).
|
| This is interesting. I have always wondered if that is a
| viable approach to API evolution, so it is good to know
| that it worked for MS. We will probably add a (possibly
| public) REST API to a service at work in the near future,
| and versioning / evolution is certainly going to be an
| issue there. Thanks!
| becurious wrote:
| It's a COM based API and so everything is an interface
| described via an IDL. You add a new member or change the
| parameters to a method, you must create a new version of
| the interface with a new GUID descriptor. You can query
| any interface for other interfaces it supports, so it's
| easy for clients to check for newer functionality on
| incremental versions of DirectX.
|
| In practice for DirectX you just use the header files
| that are in the SDK.
| moth-fuzz wrote:
| At the time Microsoft worked directly with vendors to
| have many of what would be vendor extension on OpenGL
| become cross-vendor core DirectX features.
| avereveard wrote:
| Directx api, and driver certification program
| qwertox wrote:
| Plus MS was also trying to offer more than just graphics by
| adding audio and networking to the stack which kind of
| started to make the whole ecosystem attractive, even if it
| was painful to program against.
|
| I had my share of fun with DirectMusic.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They haven't learn much from it, see how many Vulkan
| extensions exist already.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant
| rendering model_
|
| Wow, this sounds like those little cases where a few different
| decisions could have easily led us down into an alternate
| parallel world :)
|
| Can someone expand on why NURBs didn't/don't win out against
| polygons?
|
| Could this be like AI/ML/VR/Functional Programming, where the
| idea had been around for decades but could only be practically
| implemented now after we had sufficient hardware and advances
| in other fields?
| jmiskovic wrote:
| NURBs are more high-level compared to triangles. Single
| triangle primitive cannot be ill-defined and is much easier
| to rasterize. There are other high level contenders - for
| example SDFs and voxels. Instead of branching out the HW to
| offer acceleration for each of these, they can all be reduced
| to triangles and made to fit in modern graphics pipeline.
|
| It's like having a basic VM, high-level languages are
| compiled to the intermediate representation where things are
| simpler and various optimizations can be applied.
| rektide wrote:
| Because it's exactly like the parent said: Nvidia has always
| Nvidia & always has been, a tightfisted tightwad that makes
| everything they do ultra-proprietary. Nvidia never creates
| standards or participates.
|
| Sometimes, like with CUDA, they just have an early enough
| lead that they entrench.
|
| Vile player. They're worse than IBM. Soulless & domineering
| to the max, to every extent possible. What a sad story.
| rabf wrote:
| Nvidia has had driver parity for linux, freebsd and windows
| for many many years. No other graphics card manufacturer
| has come close to the quality of their software stack
| accross platforms. For that they have my gratitude.
| foxhill wrote:
| DLSS was windows only for some time.
|
| linux's amdgpu is far better than the nvidia-driver.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Except it doesn't do GPU compute stuff, so it's no use
| for anything except games.
| foxhill wrote:
| it doesn't do CUDA, but it does do opencl, and vulkan
| compute
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Maybe, but nothing really uses that, at least for video.
| rabf wrote:
| ATI drivers were a horror show for the longest time on
| windows never mind linux. What Nvidia did was have have
| basically the same driver code for all operating systems
| with a compatibility shim. If you were using any sort of
| professioinal 3d software over the previous 2 decades
| Nvidia were the only viable solution.
|
| Source: Was burned by ATI, Matrox, 3dlabs before finallly
| coughing up the cash for Nvidia.
| nick__m wrote:
| I was a big Matrox fan, mostly because I knew someone
| there, and was able to upgrade their products at a
| significant discount. This was important for me as a
| teenager whose only source of income was power washing
| eighteen-wheelers and their associated semi-trailers. It
| was a dirty and somewhat dangerous job, but I fondly
| remember my first job. Anyway, I digress, so let's get
| back to the topic of Matrox cards.
|
| The MGA Millennium had unprecedented image quality, and
| its RAMDAC was in a league of its own. The G200 had the
| best 3D image quality when it was released, but it was
| really slow and somewhat buggy outside of Direct3D where
| it shined. However, even with my significant discount and
| my fanboyism, when the G400 was released, I defected to
| NVIDIA since its relative performance was abysmal.
| antod wrote:
| One usecase Matrox kept doing well was X11 multimonitor
| desktops. The G400 era was about the time I was drifting
| away from games and moving to full time Linux, so they
| suited me at least.
| foxhill wrote:
| yes, i am very familiar with that pain. fglrx was hell
| compared to nvidia.
|
| nvidia being the only viable solution for 3d on linux is
| a bit of an exaggeration imo (source: i did it for 5
| years), but that was a long time ago: we have amdgpu,
| which is far superior to nvidia's closed source driver.
| alanfranz wrote:
| amdgpu is better now. But was terrible for years,
| probably 2000-2015. That's what gp is saying.
| hulitu wrote:
| Huh ? Compared to open source nvidia driver which could
| do nothing ?
|
| I had a Riva TNT 2 card. The only "accelerated" thing it
| could do in X was DGA (direct graphics access). Switched
| to Ati and never looked back. Of course you could use the
| proprietary driver. If you had enough time to solve
| instalation problems and didn't mind frequent crashes.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > Compared to open source nvidia driver which could do
| nothing ?
|
| Compared to the official Nvidia driver.
|
| > If you had enough time to solve instalation problems
| and didn't mind frequent crashes
|
| I used Nvidia GPUs from ~2001 to ~2018 on various
| machines with various GPUs and i never had any such
| issues on Linux. I always used the official driver
| installer and it worked perfectly fine.
| onphonenow wrote:
| Did people not try the nvidia driver back then? Even as a
| casual user at the time it was miles ahead - but it
| wasn't open source
| anthk wrote:
| DGA and later XV.
| foxhill wrote:
| amdgpu is new. you may be thinking about fglrx: a true
| hell.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| How is NVIDIA different from Apple?
| verall wrote:
| Nvidia makes superior graphics cards which are for dirty
| gamers while Apple makes superior webshit development
| machines.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Some say the nurbs model was also not fit with culture at
| the time and not supported either on modeling tools or
| texturing. Game dev would get faster results with triangles
| than with nurbs. Not sure who should have footed the bill,
| game studios or nvidia.
| jemmyw wrote:
| I think any company who feels they are in the lead with
| something competitive would do the same. The ones who open
| their standards were behind to begin with and that's their
| way of combating the proprietary competition.
| rektide wrote:
| Belief in your own technology, even if it is good, as it
| turns out, is often insufficient to really win. At some
| point, in computing, you need some ecosystem buy in, and
| you almost certainly will not be able to go it alone.
|
| Nvidia seems utterly disinterested in learning these
| lessons, decades in now: they just gets more and more
| competitive, less and less participatory. It wild. On the
| one hand they do a great job maintaining products like
| the Nvidia Shield TV. On the other hand, if you try
| anything other than Linux4Tegra (l4t) on most of their
| products (the Android devices wont work at all for
| anything but Android btw) it probably wont work at all or
| will be miserable.
|
| Nvidia has one of the weirdest moats, of being open
| source like & providing ok-ish open source mini-worlds,
| but you have to stay within 100m of the keep or it all
| falls apart. And yea, a lot of people simply dont notice.
| Nvidia has attracted a large camp-followers group, semi-
| tech folk, that they enable, but who dont really grasp
| the weird limited context they are reserved on.
| bsder wrote:
| As much as I hate Nvidia, AMD and Intel have done
| themselves _zero_ favors in the space.
|
| It's not that hard--you _must_ provide a way to use CUDA
| on your hardware. Either support it directly,
| transcompile it, emulate it, provide shims, _anything_.
| After _that_ , you can provide your own APIs that take
| advantage of every extra molecule of performance.
|
| And neither AMD nor Intel have thrown down the money to
| do it. That's all it is. Money. You have an army of folks
| in the space who would love to use _anything_ other than
| Nvidia who would do all the work if you _just threw them
| money_.
| fud101 wrote:
| What do they get right with shield?
| mschuetz wrote:
| > Sometimes, like with CUDA, they just have an early enough
| lead that they entrench.
|
| The problem in case of CUDA isn't just that NVIDIA was
| there early, it's that AMD and Khronos still offer no
| viable alternative after more than a decade. I've switched
| to CUDA half a year ago after trying to avoid it for years
| due to being proprietary. Unfortunately I discovered that
| CUDA is absolutely amazing - It's easy to get started,
| developer friendly in that it "just works" (which is never
| the case for Khronos APIs and environments), and it's
| incredibly powerful, kind of like programming C++17 for 80
| x 128 SIMD processors. I wish there was a platform
| independent alternative, but OpenCL, Sycl, ROCm aren't it.
| ribs wrote:
| I keep hearing that ROCm is DOA, but there's a lot of
| supercomputing labs that are heavily investing in it,
| with engineers who are quite in favor of it.
| doikor wrote:
| With supercomputers you write your code for that specific
| supercomputer. In such an environment ROCm works ok.
| Trying to make a piece of ROCm code work on different
| cards/setups is real pain (and not that easy with CUDA
| either if you want good performance)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Some random HPC lab with weight to have a AMD team drop
| by isn't the same thing as average joe and jane
| developer.
| pixelesque wrote:
| If you want to run compute on AMD GPU hardware on Linux,
| it does work - however it's not as portable as CUDA as
| you practically have to compile your code for every AMD
| GPU architecture, whereas with CUDA the nvidia drivers
| give you an abstraction layer (ish, it's really PTX which
| provides it, but...) which is forwards and backwards
| compatible, which makes it trivial to support new cards /
| generations of cards without recompiling anything.
| mschuetz wrote:
| I hope it takes off, a platform independent alternative
| to CUDA would be great. But if they want it to be
| successfully outside of supercomputing labs, it needs to
| be as easy to use as CUDA. And I'd say being successfull
| outside of supercomputer labs is important for overall
| adoption and success. For me personally, it would also
| need fast runtime compilation so that you can modify and
| hot-reload ROCm programs at runtime.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Given the available resources today it should be possible to
| create a NURB based renderer on something like the ECP5 FPGA.
| Not a project I have time for but something to think about.
| [deleted]
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| Nah, NURBS are a dead end. They are difficult to model with
| and difficult to animate and render. Polygon-based
| subdivision surfaces entirely replaced NURBS as soon as the
| Pixar Renderman patents on subdivision surfaces expired.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Was it NURBs or quads? Maybe both.
| adastra22 wrote:
| How do you direct render a curved surface? The most
| straightforward, most flexible way is to convert it into a
| polygon mesh.
|
| I suppose you could direct rasterize a projected 3D curved
| surface, but the math for doing so is hideously complicated,
| and it is not at all obvious it'd be faster.
| somat wrote:
| I think the idea is that polygon meshes are the only way
| things are done on all existing graphics cards and as such
| that is the only primitive used and that is the only
| primitive optimized for. Personally I suspect that triangle
| meshes were the correct way to go. but you can imagine an
| alternate past where we optimized for csg style solid
| primitives(pov-ray), or perhaps we optimized for drawing
| point clouds(voxels), or perhaps spline based
| patches(nurbs). just figure out how to draw the primitive
| and build hardware that is good at it. right now the
| hardware is good at drawing triangle meshes so that is the
| algorithm used.
| adastra22 wrote:
| So just for the record, I've actually written a software
| 3D rasterizer for a video game back in the 90's, and did
| a first pass at porting the engine to Glide using the
| Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 hardware. I'm pulling on decades-
| old knowledge, but it was a formative time and I am
| pretty sure my memory here is accurate.
|
| At the point of rasterization in the pipeline you need
| some way to turn your 3D surface into actual pixels on
| the screen. What actual pixels do you fill in, and with
| what color values? For a triangle this is pretty trivial:
| project the three points to screen-space, then calculate
| the slope between the points (as seen on the 2D screen),
| and then run down the scanlines from top to bottom
| incrementing or decrementing the horizontal start/top
| pixels for each scanline by those slope values. Super
| easy stuff. The only hard part is that to get the
| colors/texture coords right you need to apply a nonlinear
| correction factor. This is what "perspective-correct
| texturing" is, support for which was one of 3dfx's
| marketing points. Technically this approach scales to any
| planar polygon as well, but you can also break a polygon
| into triangles and then the hardware only has to
| understand triangles, which is simpler.
|
| But how do you rasterize a Bezier curve or NURBS surface?
| How do you project the surface parameters to screen-space
| in a way that doesn't distort the shape of the curve,
| then interpolate that curve down scanlines? If you pick a
| specific curve type of small enough order it is doable,
| but good god is it complicated. Check out the code
| attached the main answer of this stack overflow question:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31757501/pixel-by-
| pixel-...
|
| I'm not sure that monstrosity of an algorithm gets
| perspective correct texturing right, which is a whole
| other complication on top.
|
| On the other hand, breaking these curved surfaces into
| discrete linear approximations (aka triangles) is exactly
| what the representation of these curves is designed
| around. Just keep recursively sampling the curve at its
| midpoint to create a new vertex, splitting the curve into
| two parts. Keep doing this until each curve is small
| enough (in the case of Pixar's Reyes renderer used for
| Toy Story, they keep splitting until the distance between
| vertices is less than 1/2 pixel). Then join the vertices,
| forming a triangle mesh. Simple, simple, simple.
|
| To use an analogy from a different field, we could design
| our supercomputer hardware around solving complex non-
| linear equations directly. But we don't. We instead
| optimize for solving linear equations (e.g. BLAS,
| LINPACK) _only_. We then approximate non-linear equations
| as a whole lot of many-weighted linear equations, and
| solve those. Why? Because it is a way easier, way
| simpler, way more general method that is easier to
| parallelize in hardware, and gets the same results.
|
| This isn't an accidental historical design choice that
| could have easily gone a different way, like the QWERTY
| keyboard. Rendering complex surfaces as triangles is
| really the only viable way to achieve performance and
| parallelism, so long as rasterization is the method for
| interpolating pixel values. (If we switch to ray tracing
| instead of rasterization, a different set of tradeoffs
| come into play and we will want to minimize geometry
| then, but that's a separate issue.)
| pixelesque wrote:
| You'd probably convert it to bicubic patches or something,
| and then rasterise/ray-intersect those...
|
| I'm not really convinced curves are that useful as a
| modelling scheme for non-CAD/design stuff (i.e. games and
| VFX/CG): while you can essentially evaluate the limit
| surface, it's not really worth it once you start needing
| things like displacement that actually moves points around,
| and short of doing things like SDF modulations (which is
| probably possible, but not really artist-friendly in terms
| of driving things with texture maps), keeping things as
| micropolygons is what we do in the VFX industry and it
| seems that's what game engines are looking at as well
| (Nanite).
| flohofwoe wrote:
| My guess is: 'brute force and fast' always wins against
| 'elegant but slow'. And both the 3dfx products and triangle
| rasterization in general were 'brute force and fast'. Early
| 3D accelerator cards of different vendors were full of such
| weird ideas to differentiate themselves from the competitors,
| thankfully all went the way of the Dodo (because for game
| devs it was a PITA to support such non-standard features).
|
| Another reason might have been: early 3D games usually
| implemented a software rasterization fallback. Much easier
| and faster to do for triangles than nurbs.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| My guess is that it's much harder to develop rendering
| algorithms (e.g. shaders) for NURBSes. It's easy and
| efficient to compute and interpolate surface normals for
| polygons (the Phong shader is dead simple [0], and thus easy
| to extend). Basic shading algorithms are much more
| complicated for a NURBS [1], and thus sufficiently
| computationally inefficient that you might as well discretize
| the NURBS to a polygonal mesh (indeed, this is what 3D
| modeling programs do). At that point, you might as well model
| the polygonal mesh directly; I don't think NURBS-based
| modeling is significantly easier than mesh-based modeling for
| the 3D artist.
|
| [0]
| https://cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2005ugrad/phong.html
|
| [1] https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/public_user/lessig/talks/talk
| _al...
| api wrote:
| > a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me
| that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since
| you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles
| needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so
| tight fisted with development details and all their "secret
| sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it.
|
| (1) Someone designs something clearly superior to other
| technology on the market.
|
| (2) They reason that they have a market advantage because it's
| superior and they're worried that people will just copy it, so
| they hold it close to the chest.
|
| (3) Inferior technologies are free or cheap and easy to copy so
| they win out.
|
| (4) We get crap.
|
| ... or the alternate scenario:
|
| (1) Someone designs something clearly superior to other
| technology on the market.
|
| (2) They understand that only things that are more open and
| unencumbered win out, so they release it liberally.
|
| (3) Large corporations take their work and outcompete them with
| superior marketing.
|
| (4) We get superior technology, the original inventors get
| screwed.
|
| So either free wins and we lose or free wins and the developers
| lose.
|
| Is there a scenario where the original inventors get a good
| deal _and_ we get good technology in the end?
| codeflo wrote:
| Good point. In this context, it wasn't even superior though,
| at least not in the long run. Memory got bigger so that
| storing more triangles wasn't a problem anymore, it's more
| about computational resources. There, NURBS are only clearly
| better for very smooth surfaces (like the mentioned sphere),
| which are rare in natural shapes. For everything else, you
| get more details per FLOP by just using more triangles, which
| is where the industry went.
| svachalek wrote:
| This is what patents are for, but in the real world that gets
| complicated too.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. _
|
| False, 3dfx killed themselves. Their graphics chips and their
| architecture became quickly outdated compared to the
| competition. Their latest efforts towards the end of their life
| resorted to simply putting more of the same outdated and
| inefficient chip designs on the same board leading to
| monstrosities GPUs with 4 chips that came with their own power
| supply. Nvidia and ATI were already eating their lunch.
|
| Also, their decision to build and sell graphics cars themselves
| directly to consumers, instead of focusing on the chips and
| letting board partners build and sell the cards was another
| reason for their fall.
|
| Their Glide API alone would not be enough to save them from so
| many terrible business and engineering decisions.
|
| _> OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft
| was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL _
|
| Again, false. OpenGL kinda kiled itself on the Windows gaming
| scene. Microsoft didn't do anything to kill OpenGL on Windows.
| Windows 95 supported OpenGL just fine, as a first class citizen
| just like Direct3D, but Direct3D was easier to use and had more
| features for windows game dev, meaning quicker time to market
| and less dev effort, while OpenGL drivers from the big GPU
| makers still had big quality issues back then and OpenGL
| progress was stagnating.
|
| DirectX won because it was objectively better than OpenGL for
| Windows game dev, not because Microsoft somehow gimped OpenGL
| on Windows, which they didn't.
| usefulcat wrote:
| > Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL ...
| After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature
| parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars
| Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the
| work.
|
| I was acutely aware of the various 3D API issues during this
| time and this rings very true.
| wazoox wrote:
| Yup, remember when they "teamed up" with SGI to create
| "Farenheit"? Embrace, extend, extinguish...
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I have the beta cds here.. Fahrenheit / XSG. One disk died
| though
| pjmlp wrote:
| As if SGI didn't had their share in Farenheit's failure.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API)
| wazoox wrote:
| Holy cow I found a nest of Microsoft fans. From your
| link:
|
| > _By 1999 it was clear that Microsoft had no intention
| of delivering Low Level; although officially working on
| it, almost no resources were dedicated to actually
| producing code._
|
| No kidding...
|
| Also the CEO of SGI in the late 90s was an ex-Microsoft
| and bet heavily on weird technical choices (remember the
| SGI 320 / 540? I do) that played no small role in sinking
| the boat. Extremely similar to the infamous Nokia suicide
| in the 2010s under another Microsoft alumni. I think the
| similarity isn't due to chance.
| nix23 wrote:
| > Holy cow I found a nest of Microsoft fans. From your
| link:
|
| It's not a nest, he's is mostly the only one.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Don't attribute to malice that which can be can be
| attributed to stupidity.
|
| My current employer has fairly recently hired a ton of
| ex-Google/Microsoft into upper management. They're
| universally clueless about our business, spending most of
| their time trying to shiv one another for power.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| >infamous Nokia suicide
|
| Nokia would had killed itself either way, with Elop it
| still tried to flop.
|
| Every Nokia fanboy cries about EEE, but blissfully
| forgets what a turd was 5800 Xpress Music, which came
| half a year later than iPhone _3G_.
| Nursie wrote:
| Nokia was massive outside of the US, it had name
| recognition bigger than apple in Europe even in 2009 and
| still pumped out some gems like the N900.
|
| Yes it had huge systemic issues. Structural problems, too
| many departments pumping out too many phones with
| overlapping feature sets, and an incoherent platform
| strategy.
|
| But Elop flat-out murdered it with his burning platforms
| memo and then flogged the scraps to the mothership. It
| came across as a stitch-up from the word go.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| By 2009 writing was on the wall and it wasn't 'Nokia'.
|
| You know why it was 'Xpress Music'? Because Nokia was
| years late for a 'music phone'. Even Moto had E398 and SE
| had both music _and_ photo. By 2009 Nokia had a cheap
| line-up for the brand zealots (eaten up by Moto C-series
| and everyone else), a couple of fetishist 's phones
| (remember those with floral pattern and 8800?) and..
| overpriced 'commucators' with subpar internals (hell,
| late PDAs on Xscale had more RAM and CPU power) and
| incompatible with anything, including themselves, mess of
| Symbian.
|
| Elop not only allowed MS to try the waters with mobiles,
| but actually saved many, _many_ workplaces for years.
| Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around
| 2013.
| to11mtm wrote:
| I'm a Nokia fanboy and will sadly admit that you're
| right.
|
| They made a -lot- of stupid decisions, both in sticking
| to 'what they knew' and bad decisions with cutting-edge
| tech (N900 comes to mind, you couldn't get one in the
| states with the right bands for 3G).
|
| I will always love the Lumia cameras however, even their
| shit tier models had great image quality.
| dagmx wrote:
| Yeah, definitely agreed.
|
| RiM basically killed off a big chunk of the Nokia market,
| as it did for Windows CE as well.
|
| By the time the original iPhone came out, Nokia hadn't
| really put out anything to capture the mindshare in a
| while. They were severely hampered by the split of their
| Symbian lineup (S30,40,60,90) and unable to adapt to the
| newest iteration of smartphones.
|
| They'd never have been able to adapt to compete without
| throwing out Symbian, which they held on to and tried to
| reinvent. Then there was the failure of MeeGo.
|
| Nokia would have been in the same spot they're in today
| regardless of Microsoft. They'd be just another (sadly)
| washed up Android phone brand. Just like their biggest
| competitors at the time: Sony Ericsson and Motorola.
|
| But at least we got a lot of Qt development out of it.
| Keyframe wrote:
| TBH SGI 320/540, well namely Cobalt were rather
| interesting tech-wise. Not sure if they could've gone
| against Microsoft at the time (NT/Softimage for example)
| and rise of OpenGL2 (with 3dlabs and all).
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I remember selling a a bunch of them at a computer trade show
| the computer shop I worked at in my teens. In probably best
| marketing idea I've had to date, I installed tomb raider on two
| basically identical computers, except one had a 3dfx card. As
| soon as we started running that the cards basically sold
| themselves.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Wasn't MS on the openGL board at one point ? they even bought
| softimage for a while. They seemed to be interested in the
| whole 3d space.
|
| ps: the nv1 "mis-step" was really interesting. They somehow
| quickly realigned with the nv3, which was quite a success IIRC.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Like everything else, Khronos did not need help from Microsoft
| to mess up OpenGL, with its spaghetti soup and lack of tooling,
| that makes every graphics programming newbie start by hunting
| and building from scratch, the infrastructure to make a
| rendering engine.
|
| Vulkan is just as bad into this regard, with complexity turned
| to eleven. No wonder people call it a GPU hardware abstraction
| API, not a graphics API.
|
| And on the Web they couldn't have better idea than throw away
| all the existing GLSL, to replace it with a Rust inspired
| shading language.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > No wonder people call it a GPU hardware abstraction API,
| not a graphics API.
|
| The entire point of Vulkan is that it's a hardware
| abstraction. It was invented to offer an API around low level
| hardware operations rather than the typical approach of
| graphics libraries which come from the opposite direction.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And with it turned everyone into a device driver developer,
| no wonder it isn't taking off as much as desired, outside
| Android and GNU/Linux.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| But it was never intended to be a general purpose
| graphics SDK.
|
| The way 3D rendering is done these days is drastically
| different from the days of OpenGL. The hardware is
| architecturally different, the approach people take to
| writing engines is different.
|
| Also most people don't even target the graphics API
| directly these days and instead use off the shelf 3D
| engines.
|
| Vulkan was always intended to be low level. You have
| plenty of other APIs around still if you want something a
| little more abstracted.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Metal and DirectX12 (if I'm remembering my version
| numbers correctly) are very very similar to Vulkan so I'm
| not really sure what point you're trying to make.
| dagmx wrote:
| They're similar to Vulkan in being low level.
|
| But they're significantly easier to target (less feature
| splitting) and much more ergonomic to develop with.
| bsder wrote:
| > And with it turned everyone into a device driver
| developer
|
| Which is what graphics developers _wanted_.
|
| The problems with OpenGL and DirectX 11 were that you had
| to fight the device drivers to find the "happy path" that
| would allow you the maximum performance. And you had
| _zero_ hope of doing solid concurrency.
|
| Vulkan and DirectX 12 directly expose the happy path and
| are incresingly exposing the vector units. If you want
| higher level, you use an engine.
|
| For game developers, this is a much better world. The big
| problem is that if you happen to be an _application_
| developer, this new world sucks. There is nowhere near
| the amount of money sloshing around to produce a decent
| "application engine" like there are "game engines".
| filmor wrote:
| Khronos is only responsible for OpenGL since 2006
| (essentially 3.0), DirectX 8 came out in 2000. In the
| relevant timeframe for the OP, the ARB was responsible, which
| has nothing to do with Vulkan.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Around the Long Peaks debacle ARB became Khronos, it was
| basically a renaming, most of the people stayed the same.
|
| It has everything to do with Vulkan, givent that the same
| organisation is handling it, and had it not been for AMD's
| Mantle, they would probably be discussing what OpenGL vNext
| should look like.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Microsoft pushing D3D was a _good_ thing, OpenGL drivers were
| an even bigger mess back then than today, and drivers for
| popular 3D accelerators only implemented the 'happy path'
| needed for running GLQuake but were either very slow or
| sloppily implemented for the rest of the API.
|
| D3D was a terribly designed API in the beginning, but it caught
| up fast and starting at around DX7 was the objectively better
| API, and Microsoft forced GPU vendors to actually provide
| conforming and performant drivers.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well, Microsoft kind of deceived sgi during Fahrenheit
| pjmlp wrote:
| Mostly, SGI also did their own part of the overall failure.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Even today, DirectX has stricter quality/precision/behaviour
| requirements for hardware. On the other hand Vulkan is a lot
| better specified in other areas and thus better documented.
| So even if a vendor doesn't officially support one or the
| other, they will care about both...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Kind of, not only Vulkan keeps trailing behind DirectX,
| where vendors collaborate with Microsoft on DirectX, and
| eventually they might come to Vulkan.
|
| There is also the issues of development experience in
| provided SDKs versus what others provide, and apparently
| now Khronos rather adopt HLSL than trying to improve GLSL.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I see it a bit differently, but there is a lesson in here.
|
| Microsoft pushed D3D to support their own self interest
| (which is totally an expected/okay thing for them to do), the
| _way_ they evolved it made it both Windows only and
| ultimately incredibly complex (a lot of underlying GPU design
| leaks through the API into user code (or it did, I haven 't
| written D3D code since DX10).
|
| The lesson though, is that APIs "succeed", no matter what the
| quality, based on how many engineers are invested in having
| them succeed. Microsoft created a system whereby not only
| could a GPU vendor create a new feature in their GPU, they
| could get Microsoft to make it part of the "standard" (See
| the discussion of the GeForce drivers elsewhere) and that
| incentivizes the manufacturers to both continue to write
| drivers for Microsoft's standard, and to push developers to
| use that standard which keeps their product in demand.
|
| This is an old lesson (think Rail Gauge standards as a means
| of preferentially making one company's locomotives the
| "right" one to buy) and we see it repeated often. One of the
| places "Open Source" could make a huge impact on the world
| would be in "standards." It isn't quite there yet but I can
| see inklings of people who are coming around to that point of
| view.
| taeric wrote:
| This implies that they could not have pushed OpenGL to be
| less of a mess. Feels bad faith to argue, when you consider
| how bad all drivers were back then.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Everybody wanted this. There was even an attempt at this,
| called "Long's Peak", that was ultimately voted down by the
| OpenGL committee after a long development road. Nobody else
| needed to sabotage OpenGL, Khronos was more than happy to
| do it themselves.
| BearOso wrote:
| I agree. D3D7 was the first version actually widely used, and
| it came about as a glut of 3D card manufacturers appeared.
| Microsoft was willing to change it drastically to appease
| developers. OpenGL is _still_ held back by the CAD companies.
| We 're lucky Vulkan is here as an alternative now.
| nekoashide wrote:
| It wasn't just graphics, it was audio as well. People have it
| nice now but back then you were still fighting audio driver
| issues. AC'97 support made that situation livable but it took
| forever for everyone to support it.
| rodgerd wrote:
| My opinion on this one, for games authors anyway, was
| changed by reading an early 2000s piece by someone
| rebutting a lot of the noise Carmack was making on the
| topic, focusing on exactly this point: by DirectX 6, you
| got an API that was a suite which gave you, yes, the
| graphics, but also the sound, the input handling, media
| streaming for cutscenes and so on. OpenGL vs Direct3D was a
| sideshow at that point for most developers: it was "solves
| one part of their problem" vs "solves all of their
| problems". And no-one involved in OpenGL showed any sign of
| being interested in those other problems.
| samstave wrote:
| Don't forget the co-marketing from Intel's DRG (dev relations
| group) (the group I worked in) which started in ~1995 or so for
| game optimization dev on SIMD and, later AGP, openGL and unreal
| engine (our lab had some of the very first iterations of this -
| and NURBs were a major topic in the lab especially for OpenGL
| render tests etc. (if you recall the NURBs Dolphin
| benchmark/demo)
|
| Intel would offer upto(?) (cant recall if it base, set, or
| upto) $1 million in marketing funds if me and my buddy did our
| objective and subjective gaming tests between the two looking
| for a _subjective_ feel that the games ran better on Intel.
|
| The objective tests were to determine if the games were
| actually _using_ the SIMD instructions...
| oppositelock wrote:
| I was directly involved in graphics during this time, and was
| also a tech lead at an Activision studio during these times of
| Direct3D vs OpenGL battle, and it's not that simple.
|
| OpenGL was the nicer API to use, on all platforms, because it
| hid all the nasty business of graphics buffer and context
| management, but in those days, it was also targeted much more
| at CAD/CAM and other professional use. The games industry
| wasn't really a factor in road maps and features. Since OpenGL
| did so much in the driver for you, you were dependent on driver
| support for all kinds of use cases. Different hardware had
| different capabilities and GL's extension system was used to
| discover what was available, but it wasn't uncommon to have to
| write radically different code paths for some rendering
| features based on the cababilities present. These capabilities
| could change across driver versions, so your game could break
| when the user updated their drivers. The main issue here was
| quite sloppy support from driver vendors.
|
| DirectX was disgusting to work with. All the buffer management
| that OpenGL hid was now your responsibility, as was resource
| management for textures and vertex arrays. In DirectX, if some
| other 3D app was running at the same time, your textures and
| vertex buffers would be lost every frame, and you're have to
| reconstruct everything. OpenGL did that automatically behind
| the scenes. this is just one example. What DirectX did have,
| though was some form of certification, eg, "Direct X9", which
| guaranteed some level of features, so if you wrote your code to
| a DX spec, it was likely to work on lots of computers, because
| Microsoft did some thorough verification of drivers, and pushed
| manufacturers to do better. Windows was the most popular home
| OS, and MacOS was insignificant. OpenGL ruled on IRIX,
| SunOS/Solaris, HP/UX, etc, basically along the home/industry
| split, and that's where engineering effort went.
|
| So, we game developers targeted the best supported API on
| Windows, and that was DX, despite having to hold your nose to
| use it. It didn't hurt that Microsoft provided great compilers
| and debuggers, and when XBox came out, which used the same
| toolchain, that finally cinched DX's complete victory, because
| you could debug console apps in the same way you did desktop
| apps, making the dev cycle so much easier. The PS1/PS2 and
| GameCube were really annoying to work with from an API
| standpoint.
|
| Microsoft did kill OpenGL, but it was mainly because they
| provided a better alternative. They also did sabotage OpenGL
| directly, by limiting the DLL's shipped with windows to OpenGL
| 1.2, so you ended up having to work around this by poking into
| you driver vendor's OpenGL DLL and looking up symbols by name
| before you could use them. Anticompetitive as they were
| technically, though, they did provide better tools.
| pandaman wrote:
| I was also involved in game graphics at that time (preceding
| DirectX) and do not quite remember that as you do. Debugging
| graphics on PC was a pain, you had to either use WinDbg
| remote mode (which was a pain to set up to get source
| symbols) or SoftICE and an MDA monitor. That's just for the
| regular CPU debugger because of the fullscreen mode. There
| had not been a graphics debugger until DX9. Meanwhile all
| consoles could be debugged from the same dev machine, and
| starting from PS2 we had graphics debuggers and profilers.
| Even the OG xbox had PIX, which introduced pixel debugging
| (though was a bit of a pain to set up and needed the game to
| submit each frame twice).
|
| HW OpenGL was not available on the consumer machines (Win95,
| Win2K) at all, GLQuake used so-called "mini-driver" which was
| just a wrapper around few Glide APIs and was a way to
| circumvent id's contract with Rendition, which forbade them
| from using any proprietary APIs other than Verite (the first
| HW accelerated game they released had been VQuake), by the
| time the full consumer HW OpenGL drivers became available
| circa OpenGL 2.0 time, DirectX 9 already reigned supreme. You
| can tell by the number of OpenGL games released after 2004
| (mobile games did not use OpenGL but the OpenGL ES, which is
| a different API).
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Around 1999 we had a PC with both a Riva TNT and a Voodoo 2.
| The main games I played were Half Life and Unreal 1 (in
| addition to various games that came bundled with hardware like
| Monster truck madness and Urban Assault). I found the Riva TNT
| to work much better than the Voodoo 2 for the main games I
| played (e.g. when choosing in the game options, the D3D or
| OpenGL options had less glitches, better looking translucency
| in Unreal, etc..., than the options that used the voodoo card),
| and in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the
| Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward
| passthrough.
|
| Maybe being 1999 it was just a little bit too late to still
| fully appreciate 3dfx and modern day D3D and OpenGL took over
| around that time, so I just missed the proper Voodoo era by a
| hair.
|
| Note that by OpenGL here I meant OpenGL using the Riva TNT (I
| assume the Voodoo card drivers must have been called Glide or
| 3DFx in the settings). I've always seen D3D and OpenGL existing
| side by side, performing very similarly in most games I played,
| and supporting the same cards, with GeForce cards etc that came
| later. I mainly game using Wine/Proton on Linux now by the way.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The pass-through was _really_ awkward. Depending on the exact
| board implementation it either looked perfect or terrible,
| and you couldn't trust the reviewers because they were all
| blind, using awful monitors, and tended to focus on the game
| performance instead of whether it looked like trash the other
| 90% of the time you spent looking at the display.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Ha, I had a Riva TNT in my forst own PC! Totally forgot about
| that, and just how great Half Life was back the day, and
| still is IMHO.
| kodt wrote:
| A Voodoo 2 was kind of old and slow for 1999. A Voodoo 3 was
| a good card then, but the TNT2 did eclipse it in several
| games. Only a handful of games where still better in Glide.
| selimnairb wrote:
| I had a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2. Running Quake with the GLide
| renderer for the first time was life changing. However, the
| pass through of the 2D card always felt like a hack. It also
| led to a noticeable reduction in 2D video quality. It always
| pained me to have to pass the beautiful output from my Matrox
| Millennium through the Voodoo.
| rasz wrote:
| > in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the
| Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward
| passthrough.
|
| 32bit on TNT at half the framerate, performance hit was
| brutal. 16bit on TNT was ugly AF due to bad internal
| precision while 3dfx did some dithering ~22bit magic
|
| "Voodoo2 Graphics uses a programmable color lookup table to
| allow for programmable gamma correction. The 16-bit dithered
| color data from the frame buffer is used an an index into the
| gamma-correction color table -- the 24-bit output of the
| gamma-correction color table is then fed to the monitor or
| Television."
| to11mtm wrote:
| I was never a fan of the 3dfx dithering/filtering,
| personally. Things usually looked just a bit too muddled
| for my taste in most games. It wasn't as bad as others (I
| remember the Matrox M3D having some very interesting
| features, but Image quality was definitely worse than
| Voodoo. Marginally better than a Virge at least, lol.)
|
| 16 bit on TNT was fine for most of what I played at the
| time, although at the time it was mostly Quake/Quake2 and a
| few other games. Admittedly I was much more into 2d
| (especially strategy) games at the time, so 2d perf (and
| good VESA compat for dos trash and emulators) was more
| important to me for the most part.
|
| I think 3dfx had a good product but lost the plot somewhere
| in between/combination of their cutting 3rd parties out of
| the market, and not deeply integrating as quickly vs
| considering binning. VSA-100 was a good idea in theory but
| the idea they could make a working board with 4 chips in
| sync at an affordable cost was too bold, and probably a
| sign they needed to do some soul seeking before going down
| that path.
|
| Now, it's possible that comment is only discernable in
| hindsight only. After all, these folks had seemed like
| engineering geniuses with what they had already pulled off.
| OTOH, when we consider the cost jump of a '1 to 2 to 4 CPU'
| system back then... maybe everyone was a bit too
| optimistic.
| time0ut wrote:
| I fondly remember the K6-2 system I had with a Voodoo 2 and
| 192MB of RAM. It was the first PC that was all mine. I also
| played HL1 and Unreal Tournament 1. The big games though were
| the HL mods TFC and Counter-Strike. I dragged that thing to
| so many LAN parties. A true golden age.
|
| It was also the first PC I ever installed Linux on. My dad
| would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting
| Linux on the family computer. I don't even remember what
| distro at this point.
| metadat wrote:
| "Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting
| "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a
| borked software change wasn't google-able.
|
| Edit: @throwawayx38: I 100% agree with you! Thanks for your
| reply.
| time0ut wrote:
| Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought
| it was too risky.
| metadat wrote:
| I understand, that's what I found amusing. It's easy to
| imagine a dad in the 90s, when computers were much more
| costly, being like "hell no you aren't doing that to the
| family computer!" :)
|
| Maybe I'm still misinterpreting, but this was where my
| mind went. Man, I wish I could've appreciated how
| distinct the 90s were as a kid, but I was too young and
| dumb to have a shred of hope of being that aware!
| to11mtm wrote:
| In the era of that kind of PC, I remember the boot
| loaders being a bit more touchy.
|
| I never 'totally borked' a PC with LILO but definitely
| had to fix some things at least once, and that was with a
| nice thick Slackware 7.1 book to guide me.
|
| GRUB, IIRC, vastly improved things but took a little
| while to get there and truly 'easy-peasy'
| throwawayx38 wrote:
| To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself
| that was risky.
|
| Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also
| need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a
| couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a
| certain risk.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Urban Assault was such a cool game, what a shame it never
| caught on.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| It was a gem! It came bundled with the Sidewinder Force
| Feedback Pro joystick
| erikw wrote:
| I reached out to Microsoft to try to buy the rights to it
| several years ago. They referred me to the original
| developer in Germany, but they either weren't interested,
| or the ownership was too complicated. I'd love a modern
| version of Urban Assault, although the original is still
| completely playable. I'm not aware of any other game that
| managed so well to combine RTS and FPS.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| How much could the rights to a game like that cost?
| Depending on whether it's in range of the average
| person's disposable income, this could be a cool thing to
| do as a preservationist.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Yep, as soon as the TNT came out it was pretty much over for
| 3dfx. Quake II on a Riva TNT running in 1024x768 was a sight
| to behold.
| smcl wrote:
| I feel like 3dfx still had a slight edge until the tail end
| of the Voodoo3 era (when the GF256 came out and blew
| everything away). But I think it depends what you
| prioritise.
|
| Like here, the V3 seems to have a pretty handy lead in most
| cases https://www.anandtech.com/show/288/14 - but that's a
| TNT2 (not TNT2 Ultra) and it's all in 16 bit colour depth
| (not supported by the V3).
|
| It was certainly an interesting time, and as a V3 owner I
| did envy that 32 bit colour depth on the TNT2 and the G400
| MAX's gorgeous bump mapping :D
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 3D gaming at 1024x768 in 1998 would be like 8K gaming
| today.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Exactly. But now we are drowning in overhead
| Maursault wrote:
| > 3D gaming at 1024x768 in 1998 would be like 8K gaming
| today.
|
| Whatever. In late 1996, I got a PowerMac 8500/180DP
| (PowerPC 604e) and a 1024x768 monitor. The 8500 _didn 't
| even have a graphics card_, but had integrated/dedicated
| graphics on the motherboard with 4MB VRAM (also S-video
| and composite video in and out). It came bundled with
| Bungie's Marathon[1] (1994) which filled the screen in
| 16-bit color.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)
| kodt wrote:
| I would say 4K, as it was the resolution those with a
| powerful PC could handle.
|
| Everyone had monitors that could do 1024x768 (usually up
| to 1600x1200) where as 8K monitors are much less
| ubiquitous today in comparison.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| More like 4K gaming today. PII 450MHz + Riva 128ZX or TNT
| easily ran Half-Life at 1152x864. (FPS expectations were
| also lower, however - nobody expected 100fps+ like we do
| today)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > nobody expected 100fps+
|
| Not for the games framerates indeed, but I did set my CRT
| monitor at 120 Hz to avoid eyestrain. You could
| effortlessly switch between many framerates from 60 Hz to
| 160 Hz or so on those monitors and it was just a simple
| setting.
|
| Today it seems there now exist LCD monitors that can do
| (much) more than 60 Hz, but somehow it has to have all
| those vendor lock in sounding brandnames that makes it
| all sound a bit unreliable [in the sense of
| overcomplicated and vendor dependent] compared to back
| then, when it was just a number you could configure that
| was just a logical part of how the stuff worked.
| rasz wrote:
| >nobody expected 100fps+
|
| but thats exactly what you got on Voodoo2 with P2 450
| back then in 640x480
| https://www.bluesnews.com/benchmarks/081598.html
| eecc wrote:
| I had a Riva 128 and it was garbage, I was constantly
| kicking myself for cheaping out and not getting a Voodoo2
| anthk wrote:
| No, 4K. 1280x720 would be 640x480, the minimum usable for
| a Windows 95/98 desktop and most multimedia based
| software. Today that resolution it's almost the minimum
| for 720p video and modern gaming.
|
| 1920x1080 would be 800x600 back in the day, something
| everyone used for a _viable_ (not just usable) desktop in
| order to be confortable with daily tasks such as browing
| and using a word processor. Not top-end, but most games
| would look nice enough, such as Unreal, Deus Ex and Max
| Payne at 800x600, which looked great.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I had a Rage 128 in 1999 and easily gamed at 1024x768 -
| and ran Windows 98 at 1600x1200!
|
| For years it was so hard to find LCDs that came close to
| the resolution I had on my CRT for a reasonable price.
| doubled112 wrote:
| And the LCDs of the day really struggled with contrast
| ratios and ghosting.
| rasz wrote:
| >Quake II on a Riva TNT running in 1024x768
|
| 40 fps, 70 fps on V2 sli
|
| https://www.bluesnews.com/benchmarks/081598.html
| jasode wrote:
| _> In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was
| well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined
| to kill anyone using OpenGL_
|
| I don't know the details myself but as a FYI... this famous
| answer covering the OpenGL vs DirectX history from
| StackExchange disagrees with your opinion and says OpenGL
| didn't keep up (ARB committee). It also mentions that the
| OpenGL implementation in Voodoo cards was incomplete and only
| enough to run Quake:
|
| https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6054...
|
| The author of that answer is active on HN so maybe he'll chime
| in.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > It also mentions that the OpenGL implementation in Voodoo
| cards was incomplete and only enough to run Quake
|
| That brings back some memories... I remember having to pick
| the rendering pipeline on some games, like Quake.
|
| I also remember the days of having to route the video cable
| from my graphics card to my 3dfx card then to my monitor.
| mepian wrote:
| >I remember having to pick the rendering pipeline on some
| games, like Quake.
|
| You can still do that in some recent games, e.g. Doom 2016
| and Half-Life: Alyx.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Important puzzle piece in all that is also Microsoft's
| Fahrenheit diversion.
| [deleted]
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| "OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards "
|
| Definitely not the case.
|
| Voodoo cards were notorious for _not_ supporting OpenGL
| properly. They supported GLide instead.
|
| 3dfx also provided a "minigl" which implemented the bare
| minimum functions designed around particular games (like Quake)
| -- because they did not provide a proper OpenGL driver.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniGL
| secalex wrote:
| I can still hear the clunk of the relay switching over to 3D
| (versus 2D pass-thru) when booting Wing Commander.
| rl3 wrote:
| I'm just here to post old 3dfx commercials:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOYoZGoXsw
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43qp2TUNEFY
|
| The print ads were similarly incredible:
|
| http://www.x86-secret.com/pics/divers/v56k/histo/1999/commer...
|
| https://www.purepc.pl/files/Image/artykul_zdjecia/2012/3DFX_...
|
| https://fcdn.me/813/97f/3d-pc-accelerators-blow-dryer-ee8eb6...
| balaji1 wrote:
| Most of the upvotes to the original post seem to nostalgic
| reactions to 3dfx just based on the title.
|
| Because the article is kinda hard to follow for the
| uninitiated. Heavy name and jargon dropping haha
| x86x87 wrote:
| 100% if you didn't experience the delta between software
| rendered and 3dfx hardware accelerated live as it unfolded
| 3dfx does not tell you anything.
| ngcazz wrote:
| I liked the first advert. The world hunger one though really
| rubbed me the wrong way.
| rl3 wrote:
| Well, I think it was taking a swipe at a particular brand of
| insincere feel-good corporate bullshit marketing that was
| fairly prevalent at the time. Faceless conglomerates trying
| to manage their image such that they appeared to be
| benevolent world citizens--not ruthless plunderers.
|
| That is opposed to say, today's brand of insincere feel-good
| corporate bullshit marketing.
| [deleted]
| echeese wrote:
| 100 billion operations per second, what are we at now, 100
| trillion?
| tysam_and wrote:
| We are in the 4 Petaflops on a single card age currently, my
| friend: https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-tensor-
| core/nvidia-tensor...
|
| It is quite insane. Now, getting to use all of them is
| difficult, but certainly possible with some clever planning.
| Hopefully as the tech matures we'll see higher and higher
| utilization rates (I think we're moving as fast as we were in
| the 90's in some ways, but some parts of how big the industry
| is hides the absolutely insane rate of progress. Also, scale,
| I suppose).
|
| I remember George Hotz nearly falling out of his chair for
| example at a project that was running some deep learning
| computations at 50% peak GPU efficiency (i.e. used flops vs
| possible flops) (locally, one GPU, with some other
| interesting constraints). I hadn't personally realized how
| hard that is apparently to hit, for some things, though I
| guess it makes sense as there are few efficient applications
| that _also_ use every single available computing unit on a
| GPU.
|
| And FP8 should be very usable too in the right circumstances.
| I myself am very much looking forward to using it at some
| point in the future once proper support gets released for it.
| :)))) :3 :3 :3 :))))
| dahart wrote:
| > We are in the 4 Petaflops on a single card age currently
|
| FP8 is really only useful for machine learning, which is
| why it is stuck inside tensor cores. FP8 is not useful for
| graphics, even FP16 is hard to use for anything general.
| I'd say 100 Tflops is more accurate as a summary without
| needing qualification. Calling it "4 petaflops" without
| saying FP8 in the same sentence could be pretty misleading,
| I think you should say "4 FP8 Petaflops".
| tysam_and wrote:
| I did mention it, at the end! That's why I made the
| qualification, it is an important difference.
|
| Though as the other commenter noted, NVIDIA does like
| getting their money's worth out of the tensor cores, and
| FP8 will likely be a large part of what they're doing
| with it. Crazy stuff. Especially since the temporal
| domain is so darn exploitable when covering for
| precision/noise issues -- they seem to be stretching
| things a lot further than I would have expected.
|
| In any case -- crazy times.
| startupsfail wrote:
| At 1080p yes, tensor cores are not used. But at 4k
| majority of the pixels are filled by tensor cores (DLSS),
| so these FP8 ops are used.
|
| Of course the card linked above is a server card, not a
| desktop or workstation card optimized for rendering.
|
| What is that Megatron chat in the advertisement? Does it
| refer to a loser earth destroying character from
| Transformers? Rockfart?
| dahart wrote:
| Oh yeah excellent point, I should not draw lines between
| graphics and ML -- graphics has will continue to see more
| and more ML applications. I hope none of my coworkers see
| this.
|
| I guess Megatron is a language model framework
| https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/announcing-megatron-
| for-tr...
| pentagrama wrote:
| Oh, I remember installing my Diamond Monster 2 video card as a
| kid, with high expectations of this thing called 3dfx and the
| Voodoo chip built in.
|
| The first game that I launched was Need for Speed 2 SE, who
| supported 3dfx, and oh boy o boy, the difference was night and
| day, it blew my mind at the time. The textures, shadows, look and
| feel overall was the best thing that I ever seen. It also has
| exclusive features for 3dfx like bugs splatters on the screen in
| some parts.
|
| A leap forward on gaming to my teenager eyes at the end of the
| 90s.
| christkv wrote:
| I could not afford the Voodoo card so I had to settle for a
| verite based card. In retrospect that chip architecture was way
| before its time being a risc architecture. To bad it could not
| compete on raw performance but at least Quake ran great on it.
| djmips wrote:
| Yes it was intriguing. It was a programmable GPU in a sense.
| The drivers downloaded micro code for the triangle shading.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| My first card was a Voodoo 1 - for the Mac. The difference it
| made to Quake was dramatic.
|
| When the Voodoo 2 came out, I couldn't find a vendor selling them
| for the Mac. I'm not even sure anyone did.
|
| I bought a Voodoo 2 card that worked with a patched version of
| Mesa but it was slow.
|
| I managed to find a driver on some peer sharing thing
| (Hotline??). I've no idea of its origin but it worked fine.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| I remember getting my first Voodoo card. After playing games, I
| couldn't stand software rendering anymore. Purchased a Voodoo 2
| when they came out. Reminds me of Unreal, Shogo: Mobile Armor
| Division, Thief, Mechwarrior 2 - so many fun older games! My next
| card was a nvidia tnt2. I've owned nvidia cards ever since.
| ErneX wrote:
| I had one the 1st Voodoo cards, it was a Diamond. When you ran a
| game that supported it you could hear the mechanical relay
| switching from the regular video card to the Voodoo.
| M4v3R wrote:
| I have fond memories of playing Quake 2 for some time and then
| buying a Voodoo card. It suddenly looked like a totally different
| game. It wasn't just the resolution and texture filtering - Quake
| 2 in GL mode used a totally different, dynamic lightning system
| and back then it was simply stunning.
|
| Comparison pics:
| https://www.marky.ca/3d/quake2/compare/content.html
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I loved being able to play Diablo 2 with my Voodoo 5. There
| could be 100 mobs, plus shitloads of fog effects and fire on
| screen, and I'd still get like 60 fps.
| Aeolos wrote:
| Diablo 2 was actually programmed to run at 25 fps.
|
| Diablo 2: Resurrected allows you to switch between the new
| 4k60fps graphics and the original - it's fascinating to see
| the difference.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| I remember playing Quake 2 and colored lighting followed your
| bullets! I was floored.
| russdill wrote:
| I really liked that the Pure3D card [1] had a composite video
| output which allowed me to play Quake2 on my Apple //c monitor.
| Very bizarre retro future feel.
|
| 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-accelerator-card-
| rev...
| deanCommie wrote:
| I...totally prefer the SVGA "lower resolution" version, and I
| remember feeling like that at the time too.
|
| The problem was the 3D version looked/looks just plain BLURRY.
|
| Something about my brain is able to understand when they see a
| pixelated video game that it's an artifice, and give it a ton
| of benefit of the doubt.
|
| I can't say it is in any way more realistic, but it feels more
| IMMERSIVE.
|
| Whereas with the higher resolution one, it's an uncanny valley.
| Everything is too smooth and Barbara Walters-y.
|
| Again, this is my memory of how I perceived it at the time,
| this isn't modern rose coloured glasses because obviously
| technology has improved dramatically.
| TOGoS wrote:
| Same. I have fond memories of first playing Doom on a 386
| with the resolution set to extra low (approximately halving
| 320x200). The space between the pixels gives your imagination
| something to do. Sort of like how you can make a room look
| better by turning off the ceiling lights and just having a
| small lamp on your desk. I kind of think even if we get
| 120fps perfectly raytraced VR, it'll never be able to quite
| achieve the big pixel immersion experience.
| doubled112 wrote:
| This is one of the reasons Quakespasm is my favourite Quake
| source port.
|
| I can run on a modern system at modern resolutions but it
| still looks like it did back in the day.
|
| Sometimes adding effects and filtering gives a strange broken
| feeling where the art on the screen no longer matches what is
| in my head or something.
|
| I can't handle upscaling old console games either. Something
| is always weird.
| anthk wrote:
| On 'modern' games, Max Payne 1/2 and Alan Wake didn't look
| "smooth and clean" like Unreal Engine based games, but crisp
| and "real world" like.
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| People were already having this debate back in the 90's with
| Playstation vs. Nintendo 64. PSX was too pixelated while the
| N64 was too blurry.
| snek_case wrote:
| Probably because the textures were just too low resolution.
| You add bilinear filtering to low-res textures, you get
| something that looks blurry.
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, the texture memory was anemic. 4KB total. If you
| had mipmapping on, that ate half leaving you with 2KB
| which is only enough to fit a single 32x32 pixel texture
| at 16-bit color.
| sedatk wrote:
| Yes, I had to play Quake 2 on 320x240 due to low performance of
| my S3 Virge, but still got floored by the lighting.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| I was trying to remember the first hardware acceleration I
| saw - it was the S3 Virge.
| muro wrote:
| Die it do anything? I remember S3 cards saying you would
| get HW acceleration, but it was impossible to tell a
| difference to software rendering.
| rasz wrote:
| Virge provided hardware path at the approximate speed of
| Pentium 100 rendering 320x200 in software. If your CPU
| was faster switching to Virge was a speed downgrade.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| It worked at very low frames-per-second. Edges and
| textures were more well-defined. I was very disappointed.
| I picked up a Voodoo card soon after. S3 made a major
| mistake releasing unusable 3d acceleration.
| bberrry wrote:
| I was quite into QWTF (the original Team Fortress) and being
| able to use OpenGL allowed you to have gorgeous see-through
| water. This was a massive advantage because players tried to
| avoid snipers by going through the water. Also super useful on
| well6 in the flag room. Ah, the nostalgia.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Yes, day and night. I specifically bought my 3dfx accelerator
| card to boost Psygnosis Formula 1. Adding the card was like
| switching from C64 to an future PC monster.
|
| I never again experienced such a phenomenal gap in visible
| performance. Happy times.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| personally I like the SVGA screenshots much better
| 10729287 wrote:
| Probably because it looks way different than what we play
| today while the open gl is more similar to modern fps, just
| not as polished. But back in the days open gl Q2 was an out
| of this world experience.
| M4v3R wrote:
| Like the sibling comment said it looked way more impressive
| back in the day. Plus it looks better when in motion
| precisely because of the dynamic lightning.
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