[HN Gopher] Pyramid3D Real-time Graphics Processor (1997) [pdf]
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Pyramid3D Real-time Graphics Processor (1997) [pdf]
Author : luu
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-05-10 06:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (vgamuseum.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (vgamuseum.info)
| Keyframe wrote:
| At a time Bitboys (Oy) tech was this great vaporware that every
| once in a while came out with these amazing screenshots that blew
| out of the water everything we saw from 3d accelerators out there
| with a perpetual "soon"/"just you wait". I guess they never found
| the funds for it.. and googling I see Nokia bought into it which
| is straight to grave move even back then.
| aappleby wrote:
| I think the Bitboys chip was something different, the game
| studio I was at at the time did get actual test hardware for
| the Pyramid3D.
| pavlov wrote:
| Bitboys was acquired for $44 million by ATI in 2006.
|
| The tech was real, they just had bad luck with manufacturing
| partners. Eventually they pivoted to 2D graphics accelerators
| and that became the successful business. ATI later sold it to
| Qualcomm, I think, where it became part of their mobile
| graphics stack.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Yeah, the BitBoys team was merged into the Imageon team,
| which evolved into Adreno when ATI/AMD spun it off to
| Qualcomm.
| aappleby wrote:
| I remember this chip - flaky drivers but the dev board we got did
| work. We ended up just using Voodoo something or other, and then
| the first GeForce boards came out a year or two later.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Old school 3D accelerators are so charming due to their
| simplicity. No multiple cores, no schedulers, no programable
| shaders, just a basic fixed length predictable geometry and
| texture pipeline made of of vector processors, that's it.
|
| They were simple enough that the system integrators or board
| partners would actually be the ones writing the drivers for them
| as the company was just selling them the chips with the
| datasheets and manuals with instructions on how to interface with
| them via PCI and how to program them, that's it.
|
| NVidia were famous for being the first to in-house the driver
| development themselves instead of their board partners which gave
| them the edge on driver quality and performance.
| gregw2 wrote:
| I think the 3d chip makers at least still provided reference
| driver implementations to the board makers. Well, I remember
| that with 3dlabs at least...
| momocowcow wrote:
| Future Crew working on a 3d accelerator? To demosceners at the
| time, it was obvious this would become the winning offering in
| the video card world :))
| macawfish wrote:
| 1 million triangles/second!
| qingcharles wrote:
| That was a LOT. I mean a real LOT. I think I was hitting
| 64K/tris/s in software on a 486DX266 at the time. (can't
| remember if that was just Gouraud shaded or with t-mapping)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I followed the PC
| demoscene casually from afar back in the early 90s. I remember
| rumblings about Future Crew being involved in some kind of
| hardware development. Apparently this processor is related.
|
| This article is a bit disjointed in places but helps fill in my
| understanding: https://hardforum.com/threads/bitboys.1973024/
| Animats wrote:
| There were many semi-affordable graphics cards in the late 1990s.
| At various times I had cards from Matrox, Dynamic Pictures, and a
| Fujitsu prototype. These were all "pro" cards, and those products
| were wiped out when gamer cards came along and made GPUs a mass
| market product. So was SGI, of course.
|
| "The list price for the (Dynamic Pictures) Oxygen 102 was $1495
| in 1996, later reduced to $399."
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(page generated 2024-05-11 23:00 UTC)