Regrettably, there is little to read about the hardware invented around 1996 to improve 3D rendering and in particular id Software’s ground-breaking title. Within the architecture and design of these pieces of silicon lies the story of a technological duel between Rendition’s V1000 and 3dfx Interactive’s Voodoo.
With the release of vQuake in early December 1996, Rendition seemed to have taken the advantage. The V1000 was the first card able to run Quake with an hardware acceleration claiming a 25 Mpixel/s fill-rate. Just in time for Christmas, the marketing coup allowed players to run the game at a higher resolution with a higher framerate and 16-bit colors. But as history would have it, a flaw in the design of the Vérité 1000 was to be deadly for the innovative company.
I had never heard of Rendition or its V1000, and this story illustrates why. An absolutely fascinating and detailed read, and be sure to also read the follow-up article, which dives into the 3Dfx Voodoo 1 and Quake.
Ah, back in the day when there was no standard API used for gaming. OpenGL was a thing only used on the SGI (well and the Amiga where Mesa got it’s start). I recall a friend of mine hating on my 3Dfx Voodoo 1 because Unreal looked wonderful with it. But he kept saying that graphics weren’t everything. Then of course a few years later he said he wouldn’t play some games because the graphics weren’t good enough…
I see no contradiction “saying that graphics weren’t everything […] he wouldn’t play some games because the graphics weren’t good enough”. Of course graphics aren’t everything, but not to break immersion they have to pass a threshold.
Ha, this was the original Unreal when they first had 3D accelerated graphics, he’d said he preferred the software rendering. If you’d ever seen the difference you’d know it was a huge contradiction.
The other one that looked loads better after they added Voodoo (and eventually DirectX) is Ultima IX.
Unreal (and UT) do have quite nice software rendering, with sort of ~dithering and detail textures…
Anyways, in those times I preffered the “rough”/”crude” look of unfiltered PS1 games, looks more pleasing to me than lowres textures turned into soap in PC games from that era.
A standard API for gaming never happened.
The urban myth that OpenGL exists in every platform is just that, a myth.
Game consoles never had support for it.
The only one that got kind of close was the PS3 with the OpenGL ES 1.0 and Cg based shaders, which was largely ignored by every major studio that rather used LibCGM, leading to its deprecation.
Well, that’s certainly false. The official Nintendo 64 SDK used a full OpenGL implementation, and both the Saturn and PS1 had miniGL libraries to help with porting games. Every console from the next gen after that had OpenGL libraries. Granted, that was the older version without shaders, but then those consoles didn’t have shaders in their GPUs anyway.
Well, at least in the US, the multi-year spat between 3DFx, Rendition, and others were well known. The issue was enough in gaming with each game optimizing for one and not the other that when I was first theorizing about Operating Systems I included requirements to try to help resolve the issue (see http://theosproject.sourceforge.net/Requirements/hal.html#Drivers). DirectX and OpenGL kind of solved the issue, but even then there were still issues since most any Windows Game only optimized for Direct-X and everyone else took on OpenGL, which really only matured with Vulcan.
Not really / only more recently on smartphones; consoles always did their own thing (even when sometimes OpenGL was available, almost all devs even then done all in graphics library specific to given machine)
I’ve got an old voodoo 2 card I can’t see myself using again. I’m surprised to find that ebay shows they’re going for $110-150. It’s funny that I end up with people’s old computers that I don’t really have much use for.
Hm, only those that aren’t sold? I checked https://allegro.pl/listing?string=3dfx%20voodoo%202&bmatch=baseline-n-cl-ele-1-4-0329 (our local eBay equivalent), and while there are cards for over 400 PLN (around 100 USD), there are also cards for significantly less, around 40 USD.
Mhm, but, but… Matrox m3d and Number9 Ticket to Ride (Beatles names!)