From the early VGA days to the modern GPU.
The history and evolution of the chip that came to dominate gaming, and later AI and compute.
The cards were sold by a large number of companies.
Later revisions utilized solid-state relays in line with the rest of the vendors.
The 3D landscape in 1996 favoured S3 with around 50% of the market.
That was to change soon, however.
This way only a bare minimum of calculation was required.
The PCX1 and PCX2 followed as OEM parts.
The 3D landscape in 1996 favoured S3 with around 50% of the market.
That was to change soon, however.
The processor was responsible for triangle setup and organizing workload for the pipelines.
Game developers, however, shied away from the DMA transfer model all too soon for Rendition’s liking.
Like 1996, 1997 proved to be another busy year in the consumer graphics industry.
Much of this success came from OEM contracts, integration on consumer and server motherboards, and mobile variants.
The 16MB edition would exceed $400.
They settled out of court for $10.5 million a year later.
The Dreamcast “Black Belt” project was just one facet of a busy year for 3Dfx Interactive.
Quantum3D was spun off from 3Dfx on March 31, 1997.
SLI also increased maximum screen resolution from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768 pixels.
Did you know?TechSpot was Julio’s personal project (a tech blog, circa 1998).
The sitewas named “PURE Rendition"dedicated to report on the latest news aboutRendition Verite 3D chips.
Sunnyvale-based Rendition released the Verite V2100 and V2200 shortly after the Voodoo Rush launched.
Cirrus Logic left the graphics industry fairly quickly after the Laguna3D launched.
The 9750 was a PCI or AGP 1x card and had a variety of graphics quality and rendering issues.
The 9850 had remedied some of the quirks, but texture filtering was still a hit-or-miss proposition.
The card offered good image quality and outperformed many other budget cards.
The much-hyped project was a combined effort by Silicon VLSI Solutions Oy, TriTech and BitBoys.
Bitboys would go on to announce a second design, the Glaze3D chip, on May 15, 1998.
They promised class-leading performance and a planned release by the end of 1999.
Once again, bug-hunting and manufacturing problems led to the project’s cancelation.
The company was making a reputation for itself missing release dates and essentially producing nothing but vapourware.
Glaze3D was later redesigned under the codename Axe, catching up to the competition with support for DirectX 8.1.
Lacking a manufacturing partner Bitboys finally gave up on desktop graphics and instead focused on mobile graphics IP.
Soon after, ATI and Nokia entered into a long term strategic partnership.
The project was repurposed by Lockheed-Martin as Real3D for professional graphics products, notably the Real3D/100 and the Real3D/Pro-1000.
TheSega Model 3 arcade boardfeatured two of the Pro-1000 graphics systems.
Lockheed-Martin then formed a joint project with Intel and Chips and Technologies, named Project Aurora.
Intel bought 20 per cent of Real3D in January, a month before the i740 launched.
By this stage Intel had already purchased a 100 per cent of Chips and Technologies in July 1997.
Performance and image quality were acceptable, with performance roughly matching high-end offerings of the previous year.
At $119 for the 4MB model and $149 for 8MB, pricing reflected Intel’s aggressive marketing.
The i740 was sold either as Intel branded cards, Real3D StarFighter, or the Diamond Stealth II G450.
Lockheed-Martin closed down Real3D in October 1999, with the related IP being sold to Intel.
Many of the staff subsequently moved over to Intel or ATI.
There waslittle else to itexcept a price tag bumped to $449.
Drivers from beta2 onwards improved gaming performance.
In the end, insurmountable software issues doomed the company to a four-year lifespan.
Like its predecessor, it was a 3D only solution, and while impressive it represented a complex system.
The Voodoo Banshee was announced in June 1998 but it didn’t hit retail for another three months.
The revolution that 3dfx had ushered in three years earlier was now passing it by.
In raw 3D performance, the Voodoo 2 had no equal, but the competition was gaining ground fast.
Nor could it compete with ATI’s Taiwanese foundry partner UMC.
Many of 3dfx’s former partners formed ties with Nvidia instead.
Even with the reduced specification, the TNT was an impressive card.
This was a huge improvement over the Voodoo 2’s 16-bit color support and 16-bit Z-buffer.
The card didn’t ship in any meaningful quantities until September.
Not everything was going Nvidia’s way, at least not initially.
SGIfiled a lawsuitagainst them on April 9 alleging patent infringement over texture mapping.
On June 16, Number Nine launched their Revolution IV card.
The 17.3” SGI 1600SW (1600x1024) plus Revolution IV-FP package initially retailed for $2795.
This was Number Nine’s last homemade card as they went back to selling S3 and Nvidia products.
The penalty for the speedy introduction was half-baked drivers, however.
Between 1997 and 1998 the number of graphics vendors who left the industry rose.
The gulf between the have’s and have not’s became even more obvious in 1999.
January saw the release of the SiS 300, a budget business-machine graphics card.
A single pixel pipeline saw to that.
Performance was generally in the region of a GeForce 2 MX200.
Besides SiS' offerings, the budget-minded continued to have a substantial range of offerings to choose from.
But Trident’s 3D developments were happening at a much slower pace than the market in general.
Trident’s graphics division was sold to SiS’s XGI subsidiary in June 2003.
The S3 Savage4 was a step up in performance from the SiS and Trident offerings.
This cycle was repeated at the end of the year when the Savage 2000 launched.
It comprehensively outperformed the Voodoo 3, the only exceptions were applications utilizing AMD’s 3DNow!
CPU instruction extension in conjunction with OpenGL.
Keeping up with with 3dfx and Matrox, the TNT2 included DVI output for flat panel displays.
The secondary monitor in this case was limited to 1280x1024 resolution.
The G400 also introduced Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM), which provided better texture representation.
The card had been announced months ago and was targeted at the professional user with an interest in gaming.
ATI’s strides had been somewhat incremental since the Rage 128’s debut.
The latter was only slightly more expensive at $279 versus ATI’s $249.
It would be the first card to use this form of RAM.
None of these achieved commercial functionality, however.
The cards leveraged SGI’s graphics technology Nvidia had gained access to through across-license agreement signed in July 1999.
