Why does everyone forget about the PowerVR?? It came out around the same time the Voodoo 1 was introduced and it was as fast, sometimes faster, than the Voodoo 1. The only problem was only a few games at the time used OpenGL and a fewer supported PowerVR's own api. I remember GLQuake supported this card before it supported the Voodoo1!Quote:
Originally posted by Ra\/eN
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.
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/featur...images/nv1.jpg
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..
Jim
