The Big 3D Fight
Written: 11/10/99
Written by: Jellebee
   
Introduction
It
was all so simple back ‘when I were a lad’. You young 'uns don't even know you
are born. If you had a PC and you wanted to show off to your mates about how your PC could
do all them new 3D effects just like in the arcades all you had to do was pick up a 3DFX
Voodoo card.
The
only other competitors to the Voodoo card was the PowerVR and RIVA128 but no one could
match the excellence of all that was Voodoo and GLIDE. 3DFX later tightened its
stranglehold on the market with the introduction of the ever so lovely Voodoo2. The top
end Voodoo2 cost a mere £250 when it reached these British shores but many loved it and
it loved them too, showing its affection by enabling the fastest, biggest smoothest 3D
this side of reality. You could even 'mate' your card with another Voodoo2 resulting in
the legendary SLI setup. But lets get serious for une
momento. . .it was 3DFX who claimed proudly that, to be ahead of the rest (and they
were ahead of anything else by quite a margin) they would release a new 3D card every six
months. So what happened?
Back
in 1998 things began to hot up, S3 was even trying it hands at 3D again after the infamous
ViRGE. And a nice move forward it was - shame about the terrible Savage drivers (terrible?
nay, evil). As mighty as S3 were once it was not they who heralded the beginning of a new
revolution. Nor was it indeed Matrox with their lovely G200.
That
accolade must surely belong to NVIDIA and its TwiN Texel chip. Ahhh, I remember the day I
was reading about the wild beast. . .a full 16 MB of SDRAM, more speed than the Voodoo2,
32 bit colour, 2k x 2k texture size etc, etc, etc. With a recently acquitted student loan
and the need for a new graphics card to add to my 'new' PC I bought one, jumping on the
TNT bandwagon. Unfortunately for me I had an AMD K6-2 processor and the initial drivers
lacked 3dNOW! support so the performance wasn’t all that was initially hyped, but I
was happy anyway safe knowing I had made the right choice.
At
this stage it was still 3DFX who were the kings of the hill. . .S3 and Savage3D flopped,
ATi had the Fury but it wasn't so popular even though it was fast, it lacked decent
OpenGL. . .Matrox who were the first of this 2nd generation of 3D cards (with all their
AGPx2 glory) were a little too early and the performance of the G200 wasn't too good in 3D
games and they had NO OpenGL drivers at that time. . .NEC and Videologic were getting in
bed with Sega with their lovely PowerVR2 (and indeed they stayed in bed, had a cigarette
or two afterwards and forgot about their first love the PC market. . . alas, it is so
difficult to please everyone all the time. . .but I digress).
What
was notable on the internet, particularly, was the fact that many interviews held with
games developers, developers would say, “best
performance to play this game, you will need a PII 350 and a Voodoo2”, changed
to, “best performance for playing this game
you are gonna really need a PII 400 with a TNT”. These same developers still talk
in much the same way now about their babies, which have the longest pregnancy period of
anything known to man - ranging, from 18 months to 3 years and sometimes even longer,
painful, eh? would now say “Well matee you are
gonna need an Athlon 600 to play my game - oh and one of them new-fangled GeStrings that I
have but you don't so there!”
Next
page: And So It Goes On And On. . .
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