Some were highly successful, while others were less so.
But none were quite like Rendition, a pioneer of the 3D gaming industry.
Now that’s a story worth telling!
Not that these were aimed at gaming.
But the graphics card?
However, there were no games on that platform pushing the hardware to its limits.
None of these required powerful graphics cards to run just those that supported 8- or 16-bit color.
Change was on the horizon.
Interest from the old group of graphics companies (ATI, Matrix,S3, etc.)
was slow to develop, leaving plenty of room for fresh blood to enter the field.
Numerous startups emerged, designing new graphics adapters that could take over 3D rendering from the CPU.
Enter stage left, Rendition Inc, co-founded by Jay Eisenlohr andMike Boich, in 1993.
A little Easter egg
Did you know this about TechSpot’s history?
In 2001, the site relaunched under the new domainTechSpot.com.
From there, the site expanded to cover to the entire tech industry.
By that point, TechSpot was attracting around one million visitors each month.
Running at 25 MHz, the chip could perform a single INT32 multiplication in one clock cycle.
However, standard rendering tasks such as texture filtering and depth testing all took multiple cycles to carry out.
But Rendition had a few aces up its sleeve with the first Verite model.
They could take advantage of features likebus masteringand direct memory access (DMA) for extra performance.
These HALs converted instructions from various APIs into code for the chipset.
In theory, this made the Verite graphics card the most widely supported by software at the time.
In the original version of the game, all 3D rendering was handled by the CPU.
However, programmersJohn CarmackandMichael Abrashrewrote large parts of the code to take advantage of the Verite’s capabilities.
Still, the question remains: why wasn’t the performance even better?
For a first attempt at a graphics accelerator, the Rendition Verite V1000 was impressive.
In the end, it was this weakness in OpenGL that ultimately defined the product’s legacy.
Like Rendition, 3Dfx developed its own software, called Glide, to program the accelerator.
GLQuakewas developed because John Carmack didn’t enjoy working with proprietary software.
3Dfx’s MiniGL driver converted OpenGL instructions into Glide ones, allowing theVoodoo Graphicschipset to fully support GLQuake.
However, it still lagged behind 3Dfx’s offering.
The reason was simple they could charge a lot more for it.
As successors to the V1000, these new chips were clear, if understated, improvements.
However, not everything was going smoothly at Rendition.
Lacking its own fabrication plants, most of Rendition’s processor testing was done via software.
Despite these challenges, Rendition’s engineering efforts garnered enough interest to attract further investment from other companies.
Micron’s bosses decided to pull the plug, and the V3000 was abandoned.
However, Micron wasn’t targeting consoles or discrete graphics cards.
Ultimately, it was not to be.
The project was abandonedover concernsthat the single chip would have been far too large over 125 million transistors.
For comparison, AMD’s Athlon 1200 CPU from the same period comprised just 37 million transistors.
An ignominious end
As for Rendition and its graphics processors, it was all over.
Though long gone, Rendition it’s not forgotten.
We cover the most prominent part of their history, innovations, successes and controversies.
