Finally We Will See The RAMPAGE??????

SO! Nvidia has finally admitted it is ready to pull 3DFX's technology out of the cupboard and whack it on a PCB! How long we have waited for this moment. NV have fed us their own inferior technology until a point has been reached where their competition is getting too close to their heels.... and they KNOW it! It's hard to believe that 3DFX technology could still even be relevent last year, not to mention today, or next year! Yet it seems it is! Technology that is years old is going to be pulled out next year and hailed as a great advance by Nvidia's development team! HAH! Nvidia be DAMNED! In a way, it is cool revenge for 3DFX. Their Technology is going to get the glory it deserved. Some infornmation I have read even suggests that those people who originally worked at 3DFX are working alongside the NV development team to create the NV30. And so it seems that 3DFX graphics is not quite dead. All hail the Voodoo 6! oh... look what I did... I mean Geforce 5... NV30 if you please....

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Originally posted by IRON-PAWW
All hail the Voodoo 6! oh... look what I did... I mean Geforce 5... NV30 if you please....

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Bow before the former king 3DFX. :D

Yeah!

Nice :D

where is this information coming from. i'd like to read about it.

Both Nvidia and 3DFX had excellent technology. They used different methods to achieve the same end. 3DFX was the king of the "smart"way. Finding a cool algorithm or technique to achieve the desired goal. Nvidia was the king of brute force. Faster video = more transistors at higher speed. Neither was superior/inferior all the time, just different. The GF5 will incorporate 3DFX technology - that's been known for a long time. But it will be 3DFX techniques and ideas, not silicon. Rampage, if it had made it to market, would probably be smoked by the GF4 or the 8500. Better RAM, better processing technology, etc, all give the current solutions an edge no matter how good the design. That doesn't mean that the ideas behind rampage are out of date - that is what we will see in GF5. A blend of Nvidia brawn and 3DFX brain. Hope ATI and ArtX come up with something soon...

Sadly this is a rumor.... Just like the ones that stated scott sellers and his band of engineers are making a come back...
nvidia has been firmly entrenched in their views, and this is not about to change. The 3dfx technology is dead and so is the dreams with it.

here is the info you are talking about and a link... :(

There was was supposed to be a type of t&l and bump mapping with the mystery rampage chip set. To bad I didnt save the 3dfx site... it was there.

but here is some of the info i did save and it is also at hard ocp
this may or may not be real...

Entry Level Rampage Configuration:
2 way SLI (1 Rampage chip and 1 T&L unit)
32-512 MB memory support (200MHz DDR)
6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth
4 pixels/clock 800Mpixel fill rate (core clock at 200MHZ)
75 million triangles/polygons per second
AGP4x,
0.18 micron
32 bit rendering
Full DirectX 8.0 Features
Advanced T-buffer, Hardware T&L, Curved Surfaces, Full Pixel Shader, Quad texturing Photorealisitic rendering, Photoshop effects H2 2000
(ECTS at September, available in December)

Middle Level Rampage Configuration:
4 way SLI (2 Rampage chips and 2 T&L units)
32-512 MB memory support (200MHz DDR)
12.8GB/sec memory bandwidth
1.6Gigapixel fill rate (core clock at 200MHZ)
150 million triangles/polygons per second

High End Level Rampage Configuration:
8 way SLI (4 Rampage chips and 4 T&L units)
32-512 MB memory support (200MHz DDR)
25.6GB/sec memory bandwidth
3.2Gigapixel fill rate (core clock at 200MHZ)
300 million triangles/polygons per second

did it exsist maybe...

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/13666

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Originally posted by s1203372
Both Nvidia and 3DFX had excellent technology. They used different methods to achieve the same end. 3DFX was the king of the "smart"way. Finding a cool algorithm or technique to achieve the desired goal. Nvidia was the king of brute force. Faster video = more transistors at higher speed. Neither was superior/inferior all the time, just different.

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This wasn't the case AT ALL during the Voodoo3/TNT2 era. The Voodoo3 was all about brute force for 16-bit. All 3Dfx was pushing for was framerates, the magical 60 fps. 3Dfx kept advocating 16-bit, refusing to switch to 32-bit, because THEY believed that there would be too much of a drop in framerate. Low and behold, the TNT2 came out and it was capable of 32-bit colour AND was able to maintain amazing frame-rates.

I'm dissing 3Dfx at all....just that either company had role reversals as well.

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Originally posted by IRON-PAWW
SO! Nvidia has finally admitted it is ready to pull 3DFX's technology out of the cupboard and whack it on a PCB! How long we have waited for this moment. NV have fed us their own inferior technology until a point has been reached where their competition is getting too close to their heels.... and they KNOW it! It's hard to believe that 3DFX technology could still even be relevent last year, not to mention today, or next year! Yet it seems it is! Technology that is years old is going to be pulled out next year and hailed as a great advance by Nvidia's development team! HAH! Nvidia be DAMNED! In a way, it is cool revenge for 3DFX. Their Technology is going to get the glory it deserved. Some infornmation I have read even suggests that those people who originally worked at 3DFX are working alongside the NV development team to create the NV30. And so it seems that 3DFX graphics is not quite dead. All hail the Voodoo 6! oh... look what I did... I mean Geforce 5... NV30 if you please....

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That post just glares "3DFX FANATIC" :rolleyes:

However it is nice to see that nVidia is finally using some of the technology that they acquired from 3dfx :)

With out 3dfx....

we wouldent have games today...
WELL... maybe spider solitare :rolleyes:

nvidia was going to do this sooner or later, they were just waiting until there would be a reason for it. when 3dfx introduced the technology there were still games being made that didnt support fsaa. and so these effects were pointless, but now that you have pixel shaders and other things now you need these things like motion blurring and such to produce some incredible graphics

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Originally posted by Pink Bunny
With out 3dfx....

we wouldent have games today...
WELL... maybe spider solitare :rolleyes:

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Thats a rather idiotic statement considering games have been arond far longer than 3d Accelaration. And yes I do consider 3dFX one of the pioneers of 3d, I don't believe that we wouldn't have 3d if it wasn't for them. Remember they weren't the first 3d accelarated chipset maker (not sure about that last statement but I belive I read somewhere another company came out with it first, someone please cofirm this or me) but they certaintly were and always will be the greatest.

Acctually if it wasn't for a man named Ralph Baer & Willy Higinbotham then we probably wouldn't have video games today. Widely considered father's of video games and a pioneer in this industry. Sure it wasn't much but (basically pong, or then ping pong) but it got the ball rolling. Also I also attribute a lot of the success to a man by the name Nolan Bushnell (If you are a gamer and do not know this name consider yourself a newbie) He was the founder of Atari, and a company originally known as Pizza Time Theater still going strong today as Chuck-E-Cheese. But contrary to popular believe Atari was not the first game console it was actually Magnovox. Ok maybe I am getting to much into the history of games sorry, but 3dfx is a rather small player in the overall scheme of things.

1995- The year after 1994 saw the first entry of 3D cards into the PC market. A whole load of companies came out with their proposals for the ultimate 3D accelerator to go into the beige box. Two of the first companies to announce their cards for fast 3D were in fact nVidia (now called Nvidia) with an alliance with Diamond and GLINT chip by 3D Labs with an alliance with Creative Labs.

https://www.sharkyforums.com/

Even though the GLINT chip was announced in early 1995, it suffered from long delays and did not make its entry until late on the year. ATI announced there Rage3D in 1995 but did not make it until 1996, the Rendition Verite made it at the end of the year and Number Nine floundered with their Imagine 128 Series 2 which was targeted at the professional user and thus had a high price. Let us not forget the amazing attempt by S3 with their '3D Decelerator' the Virge. However, lacking this card was in 3D (it cannot be called a 3D card at all in fact) it sold by the big load to OEMS and was packaged in PC's readily by large manufacturers, they are still around in PCs. 3Dfx, (now known as 3dfx), had their Voodoo on the line and even though this was the most popular card for this generation it was not 3Dfx's year, but they announced an impressive list of developer support.


1996 the big year

ATi - 3D Rage supported bi-linear and tri-linear filtered textures and a claimed 575,000 + polygons a Gouraud shaded polygons a second, with z-buffering and custom 2D effects to boot. These are the most amazing and fantastical specs any manufacturer claimed and if this were true it would mean the Rage3D is as powerful as Model 2 this would be a great breakthrough. Obviously it never lived to its over-hyped claims, but is still selling well today.

S3 - Virge/Virge VX a woefully feebly-powered card but at least S3 had the decency not to claim fantastical performance as ATi did. So bad it should not even be here. Be gone Virge.

Yamaha - RPA3 little was known about this chip then and I would be damned if anything is known about it now. It seems it allowed only 16 bit color in Windows and was memory hungry, but if it did ever get released (which I doubt) then if you have one or have had one please let me know.

3Dlabs - Permedia was the third generation chip from this company, following the footsteps of its grand daddy the GLINT chip. It boasted a 25 million texture-mapped pixel fill rate per second and 500'000 small triangle polygons per second. It featured a huge amount of effects.

Rendition - Verite had a 'micro-programmable graphics RISC core and high performance, hardwired pixel engine. The id team stated that the "Verite will be the premier platform for Quake." Sounded good at the time but was another under achiever.


nVidia - nV1 I mentioned this early, if you have forgotten already his is a recap. Used quadratic textures and support for curves allowing textures to be wrapped around curved objects. However no developer apart from Sega used these features and it failed miserably after a good start and initial lead. But nVidia did not rest and were back with the RIVA 128.

The year also saw the release of the first MMX endowed Pentium chip, these 57 new instuctions were added to the Pentium core to speed up certain operations for example the transition from 256 colour to 24 bit colour was greatly reduced. However even though the developers originally loved it these instructionds were mainly based upon integer calculations and not floating point calculation. In fact some MMX operations borrowed FPU registers at some points. After a while the developers complained that it did nothing or very little for games.

from various net sources..

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Originally posted by IRON-PAWW
SO! Nvidia has finally admitted it is ready to pull 3DFX's technology out of the cupboard and whack it on a PCB! How long we have waited for this moment. NV have fed us their own inferior technology until a point has been reached where their competition is getting too close to their heels.... and they KNOW it! It's hard to believe that 3DFX technology could still even be relevent last year, not to mention today, or next year! Yet it seems it is! Technology that is years old is going to be pulled out next year and hailed as a great advance by Nvidia's development team! HAH! Nvidia be DAMNED! In a way, it is cool revenge for 3DFX. Their Technology is going to get the glory it deserved. Some infornmation I have read even suggests that those people who originally worked at 3DFX are working alongside the NV development team to create the NV30. And so it seems that 3DFX graphics is not quite dead. All hail the Voodoo 6! oh... look what I did... I mean Geforce 5... NV30 if you please....

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duh? NVidia fed us inferior technology? inferior to what? Voodoo2/3/4/5/6? i suppose u are still running on V5?? and are getting 50+ FPS in RTCW, Q3A, MoHAA, Max Payne, Comanche4 with pixelshaders at 1280x1024x32 maxxed with AA enabled? Guess what!! I am playing all these games @1280x1024x32 at max texture quality and occasionally FSAAx2 with my inferior GF3 :P

get a life! and stop talking out o your ***!

-TT-

My G400MAX kicked the TNT Ultra's and Geforce 256's Asses :p

Sadly that didn't last too long ;)

Instead of ranting we should all be happy a strong firm bought 3DFX and not some loser firm like oh say ATI :p J/K

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Originally posted by Wurm
My G400MAX kicked the TNT Ultra's and Geforce 256's Asses :p

Sadly that didn't last too long ;)

Instead of ranting we should all be happy a strong firm bought 3DFX and not some loser firm like oh say ATI :p J/K

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Word up!

-TT-

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Originally posted by Wurm
My G400MAX kicked the TNT Ultra's and Geforce 256's Asses :p

Sadly that didn't last too long ;)

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I wonder when Matrox will roll out a card like the G400...?

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Originally posted by s1203372
Both Nvidia and 3DFX had excellent technology. They used different methods to achieve the same end. 3DFX was the king of the "smart"way. Finding a cool algorithm or technique to achieve the desired goal. Nvidia was the king of brute force. Faster video = more transistors at higher speed. Neither was superior/inferior all the time, just different. The GF5 will incorporate 3DFX technology - that's been known for a long time. But it will be 3DFX techniques and ideas, not silicon. Rampage, if it had made it to market, would probably be smoked by the GF4 or the 8500. Better RAM, better processing technology, etc, all give the current solutions an edge no matter how good the design. That doesn't mean that the ideas behind rampage are out of date - that is what we will see in GF5. A blend of Nvidia brawn and 3DFX brain. Hope ATI and ArtX come up with something soon...

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Rampage would not be smoked by anything , Rampage would smoke everything Nvidia and ATI could bring out until now.

3DFX worked more then 30 months on Rampage and they invested 50% of their money and 50% of their engineers on the chip, Rampage would have been an awseome chip if it had ever come out.

In the numbers that Raven posted you can see that the medium level rampage would have 12.8 gb/s memory bandwidth, that is about as much as the Geforce4 Ti4600.

Why do you think people talk so much about Rampage, and if you have not noticed that i will tell you that people that know about videochips and have been following Rampage know that Rampage is one hell of a chip, it is very very dangerous in the hands of Nvidia especially combined with Gigapixel technology and employees.

Rampage was going to be introduced in Spectre series of cards:
Spectre 1000
1x Rampage rasterizer, 32mb 200/250mhz DDR-SDRAM

Spectre 2000
1x Rampage rasterizer, 1x SAGE T&L unit, 64mb DDR-SDRAM

Spectre 3000
2x Rampage rasterizers in SLI, 1x SAGE T&L unit, 128mb DDR-SDRAM

other specs:
12.8GB/sec memory bandwith
32-bit output, 52-bit internal precision (13-bits per RGBA component)
SAGE supports 25 hardware lights


anyway, I think NV30 (NV30 is designed by ex-3dfx engineers mostly) is going to much like 3dfx Mojo would have been. (Spectre Jan 2001, Fear Fall 2001, Mojo early 2002 propably).
If it'll be anything like Mojo, it'll use GigaPixel TBR technology..

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Originally posted by Sparky_D
3Dfx kept advocating 16-bit, refusing to switch to 32-bit, because THEY believed that there would be too much of a drop in framerate. Low and behold, the TNT2 came out and it was capable of 32-bit colour AND was able to maintain amazing frame-rates.

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Voodoo3's 22bit postfiltering gives u lot nicer pic than TNT2 32bit. (I've tested this one with few my buddies, all agreed (and i was only one with 3dfx card in my comp).

And you have to remember, that Voodoo3 (and VSA-100 (V4/5)) was something 3dfx had to release, 'cause Spectre (Rampage (later Rampage+SAGE)) was late.. Spectre was intented to be released before V3 came out.


DON'T CALL RAMPAGE+SAGE VOODOO6, IT WAS SPECTRE, NOT BASED ON VOODOO ARCHITECHTURE

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Originally posted by Kaaos
Rampage was going to be introduced in Spectre series of cards:
Spectre 1000
1x Rampage rasterizer, 32mb 200/250mhz DDR-SDRAM

Spectre 2000
1x Rampage rasterizer, 1x SAGE T&L unit, 64mb DDR-SDRAM

Spectre 3000
2x Rampage rasterizers in SLI, 1x SAGE T&L unit, 128mb DDR-SDRAM

other specs:
12.8GB/sec memory bandwith
32-bit output, 52-bit internal precision (13-bits per RGBA component)
SAGE supports 25 hardware lights


anyway, I think NV30 (NV30 is designed by ex-3dfx engineers mostly) is going to much like 3dfx Mojo would have been. (Spectre Jan 2001, Fear Fall 2001, Mojo early 2002 propably).
If it'll be anything like Mojo, it'll use GigaPixel TBR technology..

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*Sigh*

Tis really a shame they couldn't pull this card off before they died. It was sure to bring them back on top spectators said. Just think this card would have been release 6 - 8 months ago and even now that would kill a NV30 specs. GeForce4 only has 8GB of bandwidth!

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Originally posted by Snoop Dogg
*Sigh*

Tis really a shame they couldn't pull this card off before they died. It was sure to bring them back on top spectators said. Just think this card would have been release 6 - 8 months ago and even now that would kill a NV30 specs. GeForce4 only has 8GB of bandwidth!

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if we presume that they were on schedule, and if they wouldn't had to sell everything to nVidia, Spectre would have released January 2001, before GF3 came out.

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Originally posted by Kaaos


Voodoo3's 22bit postfiltering gives u lot nicer pic than TNT2 32bit. (I've tested this one with few my buddies, all agreed (and i was only one with 3dfx card in my comp).

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Woah, absolutely NOT. Just try playing Quake III on a Voodoo3. Fire off a rocket launcher. See the smoke? Wow, I've never seen such bad PURPLE dithered smoke in my life. This is only one example of COUNTLESS others.

I've got both Voodoo3 and TNT2. I've played extensively with both. Voodoo3 was faster framerates in lower res. TNT2 looked far superior. Don't give this garbage about 22-bit post-filtering. It was innovative, but it was not as good as 32-bit colour.

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Originally posted by Pink Bunny
With out 3dfx....

we wouldent have games today...
WELL... maybe spider solitare :rolleyes:

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Not really true. Yes they did have awesome products and did bring "mass 3d gaming" to the PC, but Nvidia, 3D Labs, S3, Matrox, NEC (PowerVR), and ATi were all working, or had, 3D chips on the market. ATi had the Rage3D (Mach64) chipset, Nvidia had the NV1, 3D labs had the permedia chips, S3 had the Trio64, Matrox had the G100, and NEC, as stated, had the PowerVR chipset. Yes all of the above were slower, with the exception of PowerVR. They actually had a chip that competed pretty well with 3Dfx and used OpenGL, but no one was adapting to their technology. I feel if 3Dfx would of never hit the market then maybe NEC, Nvidia, 3D Labs, or ATi would of built up the 3D gaming with NEC leading the market. It was bound to happen. The market wanted it and everyone was fighting to deliver it.

Jim

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Originally posted by Sparky_D


Woah, absolutely NOT. Just try playing Quake III on a Voodoo3. Fire off a rocket launcher. See the smoke? Wow, I've never seen such bad PURPLE dithered smoke in my life. This is only one example of COUNTLESS others.

I've got both Voodoo3 and TNT2. I've played extensively with both. Voodoo3 was faster framerates in lower res. TNT2 looked far superior. Don't give this garbage about 22-bit post-filtering. It was innovative, but it was not as good as 32-bit colour.

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It depends.. maybe you can see difference in newer games and some older games (like Q3), but if you look at games of V3-TNT2 era with 32bit colours, you'd definately say that V3 22bit post-filtering looks far better than TNT2 32bit.. (or is there so much lower 32bit quality in TNT2 M64? i thought it just lot slower due it's slower memory-whatever (don't really know that word in english :( ))