Now now Hans...just because my 23.11's work great doesn't mean you need to
insult my intelligence...hehe
Now now Hans...just because my 23.11's work great doesn't mean you need to
insult my intelligence...hehe
> "Mark Nusbaum" <mark.nusb...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> sales - in part because people like Tom Pabst tried to pretend it didn't
> > exist or wasn't much of an issue when it still was
> Please note that even though Tom may consider himself influential, he only
> reaches those overclocking geek-ish people that actually spend
considerable
> time reading hardware websites such as his own, and possibly their
friends.
> That's not a very large percentage of the people of planet Earth, you
That's true, but people like that have a ripple effect. If Pabst, Sharky
Ross, Anand Lal Shimpi, et al made certain statements about the benefits and
liabilities of cards, those would get regurgetated in discussion groups and
would seem to be relied upon by more mainstream PC sources such as PC Mag
and PC World, who just take cursory looks at things like graphic cards, and
eventually the word spread and more casual buyers would get the message that
what they said in the beginning was gospel. I think it has a real effect.
There are those you see every day here that were interested in buying a new
card that includes gaming capability, post a general opinion question, get a
reference to a site like Pabst's, go to the article, would have seen things
like UT D3D benchmarks, saw a GeForce running at about the same speed as a
V5, but were never told that running the game in Glide would make it both
faster and better looking on the V5, and anyone owning one would never run
it in D3D. Or they would read that article I cited earlier, would be told in
effect that Glide meant nothing, that Glide games are actually OGL games. I
think it's irrisponsible jourmalism, that it had an impact, and we know who
it helped and hurt.
> Glide WAS limited, it lacked all forms of expandability and had a habit of
> being slightly incompatible even with the extremely minor upgrades (apart
> from speed increases) to their own hardware that 3dfx did release. Had
glide
> been as flexible as the opengl it was based on, and 3dfx actually spent
time
> improving other aspects of their boards than simply speed, then the
> situation might have been different.
The feature set nVidia was praised for in '99 arose out of their 2D AGP
experience, I think. 32-bit color, large textures, high resolutions, AGP
texturing all came out of this. 4mb cards of that day like the Riva 128 were
capable of using 32-bit and 1600x1200 resolution, and needed to use the AGP
bus even in 2D. Some of these cards supported these features in 3D as well -
a Riva 128 or ATi Rage Pro could do 3D at 1600x1200 at 16-bit and even
1280x1024 in 32-bit, I think. At least in theory - if games actually
supported that they would be far too slow to actually play at those
settings. So the nature of the boards that went head-to-head in '99 arose
out of their precursors and the necessities of their roots, and not just
clean-sheet design decisions made just prior to their release. I say it
again - the jump that 3dfx was making from PCI-based 3D-only cards was
tougher than the move to front-line 3D that nVidia was making. nVidia really
just had to get faster, the very thing you criticize 3dfx for focusing on,
and that's the bulk of what they accomplished over the Riva128-TNT-TNT2
period. That Glide was dying and D3D and OpenGL were maturing only served to
help them further in the end.
> As for me personally, the thing that ticked me off about glide was that
> every glide-only game was a game I could not play. I don't like people
that
> makes themselves intentionally incompatible with the rest of the universe
> and then tries to use that incompatibility as an advantage and a
sales-tool.
> Microsoft's behaviour I more or less *had* to accept, but not 3dfx's.
> Glad they're gone.
When I bought my V3 I didn't like the idea that I had to buy a certain brand
in order to play certain games either. But it was a reality, and when I
looked at what I wanted from a card, what games I wanted to play, how much
money I wanted to spend, there was very little question which card to get.
Would I like to have had a card that supported 32-bit color and some of that
other stuff? Sure, why not, but if that meant sacrificing 16-bit speed
and/or image quality, losing the ability to play games I wanted to play, and
paying considerably more money for the card, then I'd pass. And I did.
> Uh, DUHHH. The market is.
> Where would this new miracle Nvidia API come from? Who would support it?
No
> developer in their right mind would support an API that they have to: A -
> learn themselves from the ground up and figure out how to best utilize.
B -
> only runs on one brand's products. C - has zero installed user base at
> launch.
> Nvidia knows this, they're not stupid you know. ;-) That's why they're not
> tried to take over the world with their own API. Besides, it would just
mean
> even more driver development costs for them.
> Except, they'd be slapped with an anti-competition lawsuit in an instant
or
> less. Something like that would definitely not help MS in their ongoing
> battle with the DoJ for example.
> Huh? Hate to jump into this debate but have you ever heard of Direct 3D?
> You do know that all 3Dfx cards are D3D compatible right?
> Nobody shoved Glide down anybody's throat. YOU and I had a choice and
those
> of us that chose a Glide card or Glide compatible game did so out of
> consideration of performance vs cost. No *** there.
Glide is 3dfx's attempt to be similar to OpenGL.
3dfx was really ahead of its time, back years ago, but the problem is,
they never advanced forward and lead the pack. Instead, everyone else moved
ahead of them in capability. Cheers to the now deceased 3dfx for them being the
first to make the first low cost, feasable textured triangle engine (as that's all
it is, is a perspective correct textured triangle engine which 3dfx made which had nothing
really to do with 3D graphics).
The only time 3D chips started to do real 3D is when Nvidia came out with the T&L engine.
The T in T&L means transform as in the movement and rotation of objects in 3D space.
Allot of people aren't aware that the Transform engines in today's video chips, actually
can grab their own chunks of vertices and treat it as entire objects and the Transform engine
sees these blocks of vertices as objects and moves them around in the 3D world which is also recognized
as a global object that the Transform engine has a pointer to. This all means that indeed, the matrix multiplication,
and the 3D to 2D conversion need to project 3D images on 2D CRT's is now done not in the game's engine, but in the CPU's
hardware! This is great when using simple to program for graphics languages like OpenGL! In Direct3D though, it's a living
hell to program for as D3D is a living hell in general. That's why you see your fancy, very powerful, and very capable engines
which use your hardware as your 3D engine, is always programmed in OpenGL. Also, you can make DOS Command like OpenGL programs
which run completely accelerated under Windows, unlike D3D programs which have to be dependant on Windows handles and tons of code
just to setup it's rendering engine instead of a single function call which OpenGL requires.
Anyhow, 3dfx was the first but they fell behind. Frankly, the founder of 3dfx became very arrogant. He thought that what he did
5 years ago, was still the greatest thing now. So he rested on his laurals and gloated about his ancient technology and all he did
is increase the clock rate, and tack on some extra features but it was the same ancient core when needed to be completely redone.
3dfx instead of waking up and seeing that they were falling behind, decided to gloat and rest on it's laurals like it's founder
and by the time they saw that they had a problem, their income was not big enough to completely develop a chip from scratch which
would bust everyone's ass. Also, 3dfx's last creations were absolutely jokes. They made a chip which is again, the updated core
of their ancient technology and suggested using 4,8,16 and even 32 of these chips running together! When people found out that
their best boards required their own separate power supplies and realized that even with 32frigging 3dfx chips still wouldn't give
the public the features everyone else had in features, 3dfx was a laughing stock and everyone was just rolling on the floor and couldn't
stop laughing. 3dfx's customers, the deaf, dumb, blind kids I always referred to for even thinking 3dfx was still competitive, were even
starting to see what a joke 3dfx had become. 3dfx finally gave up the Ghost when they were seen as the silly company who fell behind and
were trying to flounder and stay alive by their silly, monster creations which still lacked what a single chip by Nvidia could beat in features
and sometimes in speed. 3dfx had become and old, tiring, joke.
> > 3DFX tried to make effective 3D a private fiefdom much as DOS-era
> > sound was for Creative's "Sound Blaster". Any fallout from this would
> > be richly deserved, IMO - that the PC dominates personal computing is
> > more through a revulsion of proprietary lock-in than inherent beauty.
>
> Huh? Hate to jump into this debate but have you ever heard of Direct 3D?
> You do know that all 3Dfx cards are D3D compatible right?
>
> Nobody shoved Glide down anybody's throat. YOU and I had a choice and
those
> of us that chose a Glide card or Glide compatible game did so out of
> consideration of performance vs cost. No *** there.
>
What he said made perfect sense. 3DFX *tried* to get a lock on 3D, but
didn't succeed. He is apparently suggesting that if they had their way that
Glide would have produced "prettier" games. I doubt that. Probably would
have produced less choice and more expensive graphics boards.
Now they are, yes. D3D did to Glide and OpenGL what DirectX did to
"Sound Blaster Compatibility"; buldozed away a niche and levelled the
playing field. 3DFX came in (from arcade hardware, as I recall) and
made 3D something one could take seriously; prior to that were all
those hopeless ATi Rage and S3 ViRGE stuff that simply didn't make
enough difference over software 3D to bother with, IMO.
3DFX tried to use Glide as a lever to make themselves indispensible,
and it worked... for a while.
Memes don't exist - pass it on
Again, there was no *** by 3Dfx to take over the world with Glide.
They simply gave us a better solution than the (then) buggy and slow D3D and
customers simply chose the better solution. Again, all 3Dfx cards are and
were able to do D3D at any time and 3Dfx did not force anyone to use Glide.
We did it simply because it was better at the time and some may still argue
that it still is. You act as though 3Dfx put guns to our heads. Nothing
could be further from the truth. They gave us real 3D when there was
nothing else and we still had the choice of D3D and OpenGL on whatever other
inferior card we wanted to buy.
I think you are getting some misinformation from somewhere and spreading it
around. Where are you getting this from?
> >> 3DFX tried to make effective 3D a private fiefdom much as DOS-era
> >> sound was for Creative's "Sound Blaster". Any fallout from this would
> >> be richly deserved, IMO - that the PC dominates personal computing is
> >> more through a revulsion of proprietary lock-in than inherent beauty.
> >Huh? Hate to jump into this debate but have you ever heard of Direct 3D?
> Yep. It came later, though... "in the long run, we're all dead"
> >You do know that all 3Dfx cards are D3D compatible right?
> Now they are, yes. D3D did to Glide and OpenGL what DirectX did to
> "Sound Blaster Compatibility"; buldozed away a niche and levelled the
> playing field. 3DFX came in (from arcade hardware, as I recall) and
> made 3D something one could take seriously; prior to that were all
> those hopeless ATi Rage and S3 ViRGE stuff that simply didn't make
> enough difference over software 3D to bother with, IMO.
> >Nobody shoved Glide down anybody's throat.
> 3DFX tried to use Glide as a lever to make themselves indispensible,
> and it worked... for a while.
> >--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -
> Memes don't exist - pass it on
> >--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -
How so?
No they didn't. The choice of D3D and OpenGL and alternate hardware were
always there and ALL 3Dfx cards ran D3D and OpenGL so how could they have
gotten a lock on anything.
I don't doubt it at all. I still prefer the look of UT on my V3 over my
Radeon even considering the fact that Glide is now old. Im sure 3Dfx would
have advanced Glide way past what MS or OpenGL has today but that's just my
opinion and speculation, not that it matters anymore anyway.
boards.
How could it have when D3D and OpenGL were available to everyone? I will
agree that D3D and OpenGL are a better more universal API but if you think
about it, D3D itself is Proprietary to the Microsoft platform only whereas
OpenGL is a crossplatform API. Ask any Linux gamer what API they think is
better. AFAICR, Glide was even available to Linux but I could be wrong.
All 3Dfx was guilty of IMO is giving us all another choice and nothing more.
Saying that 3Dfx was trying to take over the API and 3D card industry is
like trying to say that Redhat Linux was trying to take over the OS
industry. The exact opposit is true IMO.
FYI, I'm not the only one having poor performance in that title with the
23.11:s.
Now, I hope you realize I didn't.
I never said you were stupid, Zod.
If you can't see the difference between 'xx is smarter than yy', and 'xx is
a dumbass', then I guess you really ARE a dumbass! ;-)
Bye!
/HB.
Hehe....
The little lost angel & her featherhead's 2 cents worth of dreaminess.
At the time, D3D was pretty whiffy and not that widely used; i.e.
hadn't emerged as the no-brainder choice it may be now. So it was
either that or OpenGL, or Glide, or program the 3D hardware directly
on a per-chipset basis.
Glide was an abstration of the last approach and as such made it
easier to write for 3DFX cards than other vendors', but it wasn't a
playing-field-levelling standard in the sense that D3D or OpenGL were
or would grow to become in time. It could have been, if Glide
wrappers were permitted, but 3DFX chose to play the petty zero-sum
game and crunch such attempts rather than see value in growing
everyone's market that a wider standard may have done.
It is at this point I would consider Glide an attempt at brand lock-in
that might ultimately be at the user's expense. The happy ending for
3DFX would have been if game developers adopted Glide as the de-facto
standard and turned away from D3D and OpenGL. This would nullify the
Windows concept of "any hardware as long as it has drivers will work
with any Windows program", and re-create the Sound Blaster effect.
3DFX's niche could only hope to have lasted for a while anyway, just
as Matrox's niche as being the best way to get fast 2D. As hware
capabilities and speed improved, so it was that just about anything
was adequate for 2D speed, and there are few who would buy Matrox for
that reason alone today - now it would be for image quality on large
monitors, or multi-monitor display management.
So it is going with 3D; the days of having to spend motherboard-money
to enjoy tolerable 3D *** are over. A combination of improved
DirectX and processing power can make even software rendering
acceptable to the occasional gamer; I was amazed at how playable Clive
Barker's Undying was with DirectX 8.1, Celeron-1000 and S3 ViRGE !
Today's question is (for me); does ATi's Raedon kick 3D ***enough to
use as an alternative to TNT2 or GeForce, given the OEM swing in
progress from TNT2 to Raedon at reasonable pricing? Can one have
ATi's traditionally better video/TV interactivity with nVidia-level
*** without being hosed by bad drivers? Dual head support?
Soon, budget buyers will need to buy SVGA/3D cards again, as they move
off i815e to P4 motherboards (in-built SVGA without AGP slot is
unsellable by my criteria). For most ocasional gamers, i815e's 3D was
OK; only about 20% clients showed interest in add-on cards for better
*** 3D, in my experience here, generally going TNT2 or GeForce.
That window of opportunity may in turn close mid-2002 when Intel
brings out an i845 variant with built-in SVGA/3D. But ATi could enjoy
a very nice half-year if they get thier timing right.
I know there are other mobo chipsets with built-in SVGA/3D, but I
avoid those. UIDE life *** is too precious to pump through
beta-of-the-week 4-in-1 drivers IMO.
Memes don't exist - pass it on
The difference between 3Dfx, Rendition and nVidia is really not that
big, they all conglomerated from SGI dust. Just different
implementations, even nVidia had its own API in 1996: That one failed
miserably because it was really weird, feed your preferred search
machine "NV1" and "NV2". IMO it is really strange that nVidia could
recover from that total failure so fast. The only real alternative to
SGI renderers was and still is PowerVR (which BTW is english, not US).
Remember 1997, the nVidia Riva 128. Georgeous reviews, as print press
parroted "fastest DX3 rendering", "superb 2D-3D combinition", etc.. In
reality it costed at minimum like a Voodoo Graphics and sucked big
time because DX and nVidia drivers were total crap, and the hardware
wasnt much more powerful than a V1 either if any. 3Dfx saw that the
pres was unfair, saw that it got no OEM contracts, saw that the V2 was
discredited by MS DX because DX ignores the second pixel chip. So 3Dfx
began to aggressively protect their IP and to bark at anyone who came
along the way - in D we have the saying "the scary dog barks the
most".
nVidia has never produced good hardware or software, that is because
nVidia has been risen as a warrior of the dark sides. The PC game
branche is the rudest and most superficial of them all, wonder why?
Think about texture compression which has great impact on performance
(memory bandwidth savings) and saves memory. Which manufacturer didnt
implement it at all and then implemented it so badly that this feature
was even discredited?
nVidia suscessfully promoted 32bit, but on that way to market
*** and beyond no consumer was informed of what 16 vs 32bit
really means technologically. Any reasonable man would admit that
32bit linear (integer) is bandwidth waste, therefore 32bit colors
should be used in conjunction with texture and framebuffer
compression, e.g. the V3 used framebuffer compression and had working
TC. Any reasonable man would admit that raw textures dont need 32bit,
as the bottleneck for visual quality is not textures but framebuffer
access.
Cut short that there is real technology to be implemented, not a few
superficial marketing terms. Or take nVidias implementation of T&L, we
could rip that apart just as easily, see also
http://www.racesimcentral.net/!
Grasso
--
------- http://www.racesimcentral.net/ -------
------ http://www.racesimcentral.net/ -----
....... grasso at telebel.de ........
Perhaps I should mention my build choice history at this point.
Where *** not an issue, has been:
S3 Trio32, Tseng ET4000 W32P
S3 Trio64, ATi Rage, S3 ViRGE, Tseng ET6000
S3 Trio3D, ATi Rage II, i740
i815e
Where *** was an issue, has been:
3DFX Voodoo and Voodoo 2
3DFx Banshee
nVidia TNT2, Vanta
nVidia GeForce or TNT2
"I've looked at cards from both sides now"
>> The difference between 3Dfx, Rendition and nVidia is really not that
>> big, they all conglomerated from SGI dust.
Never did nVidia at all until TNT2 dropped below Banshee pricing and
appeared to give better performance.
Our senses are our UI to reality
>There's something to be said for this, but the problem is that I don't like
>having to pay for them, particularly ones that have absolutely no
>application whatsoever. I simply don't want to pay my money for cards that
>include stuff that may or may not be at all usable down the road on that
>card, or that may not ever be of any use on any card. *** isn't some
>charity. So I'd like a choice between spending a shitload of money on a card
>that includes this stuff and considerably less for a card that may or may
>not age quite as gracefully, may or may not contribute to the greater good
>of the future of *** in some way, but just does the best job on the stuff
>that's out there to play.
The high-end of anything, whether graphics cards or CPU's, is a bad
value.