Number Nine

erek

erek

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
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Just added this to my collection today

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I remember Number Nine - we had one of their old 2D cards in a Dell we had when I was kid.

That's a cool card.
 
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Look at that clean layout - a thing of beauty. Also - made in the USA. 'Member when we used ta make things?

I had a #9, but which one escapes me now. I didn't have enough money to buy this one back then I'm sure.

I love these trips down nostalgia lane.
 
I briefly owned a Number Nine Reality 334 (I recall similar box and artwork like OP's), but immediately took it back to the store in exchange for, what I thought was at the time, a superior Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. The thing I remember the most was the Number 9 was slightly more expensive (like $20+ more). The irony is that they both used the same S3 ViRGE chip, but the Diamond card had 4MB VRAM (vs the Reality 334's 2MB), which clearly made it superior.

I could literally count the # of games they supported on both of my hands. I basically wanted them to play Descent and Mechwarrior 3D accelerated. For whatever reason, the Number 9 couldn't pull it off.

Anyway, once the 3dfx Voodoo 1 came out these 3D "decelerators" were considered junk. I don't miss either of them, honestly.
 
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I'd much rather have an $1,000 card from China that breaks just after the warranty expires thank you.
 
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The Imagine 128 was just a faster Millennium, in a time when 3D was clearly the future.

They're not worth remembering.
 
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jiminator said:
How much did it cost? Are those things actually collectible?
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Originally? OP's is the non-pro. Those ran about $1000 in 1997 dollars. This card was 2d only.

To give perspective, I paid less than $300 at that time for a Matrox Milleneum, considered a pretty good 2D card in its day.
 
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Absalom said:
I briefly owned a Number Nine Reality 334 (I recall similar box and artwork like OP's), but immediately took it back to the store in exchange for, what I thought was at the time, a superior Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. The thing I remember the most was the Number 9 was slightly more expensive (like $20+ more). The irony is that they both used the same S3 ViRGE chip, but the Diamond card had 4MB VRAM (vs the Reality 334's 2MB), which clearly made it superior.

I could literally count the # of games they supported on both of my hands. I basically wanted them to play Descent and Mechwarrior 3D accelerated. For whatever reason, the Number 9 couldn't pull it off.

Anyway, once the 3dfx Voodoo 1 came out these 3D "decelerators" were considered junk. I don't miss either of them, honestly.
Click to expand...
These cards seemed to have had barely any actual hardware acceleration for 3d and Direct3D support was atrocious with important effects like transparency missing. Nnot always but enough to render many games unplayable even when performance was sufficient and even better than software mode.
There was most often an issue with transparent textures like eg. smoke which had black boxes around them.

The best looking game where this card made any sense to be used was Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (and probably Blood 2 which used the same engine) which could do all effects and showed this card had surprisingly good image quality in 16bit mode. It looked better than I saw never Nvidia cards like Riva TNT/2 did XD XD XD Of course performance was terrible and at 320x240 all it could do was few frames per second so not exactly playable. Maybe with proper driver support it could provide decent experience with games, even GLQuake or at least.

By proper drivers I mean approximating and offloading most effect to CPU and ability to disable texture filtering. I suspect filtering killed any residual performance that was on these cards
 
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