3d technologies that didn't deliver.

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Stoly

Supreme [H]ardness
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Over the course of 3d video card history, manufacturers have developed technologies that changed the way we play games, just take AA and AF for example, both were considered gimmicks when presented but now are de-facto standard.

But what about the 3d technologies that promised but didn't deliver?

These are the ones that come to mind.

- Quadratic Texture Maps
Quadrawhat?? The elders of 3d community may remember nvidias first 3d accelerator, the NV-1 which powered the Diamond EDGE 3D. Before the days of Direct X, the NV-1 used Quadratic Textured maps which rendered smooter objects than using polygons. Unfortunately for nvidia, MS chose polygons as the render primitive for Direct X, a wise choice at the time, as quads had problems with collision detection.

- Tile Based rendering.
This technology basically discarded polygons that were covered by other geometry. PowerVR released several chips using this technology, the most popular card was the Kyro II. At the time it rivaled the geforce 2 and ati radeon but driver and compatibility issues and the lack of a TnL engine were its doom.

- Motion Blur/Depth of field.
First announced by 3dfx as T-buffer technology and appearing on the voodoo5 5500 it promised to deliver hollywood effects to your games, unfortunately the speed was too slow and quality was lacking.

- Voxels.
Short for volumetric pixel, its a rendering primitive like splines, polygons and quadratic texture maps. Voxels represented points in a 3d space much like pixels do it in a 2d space. A few games used it but again lack of support and direct x killed it for gaming.

- 10 bit Color.
Remember the Parhelia? It was one of its main features promising realistic color rendering. Today ATI and nvidia also support 10 bit color but since LCDs are 8bit (even with analog vga) this feature is somewhat of a waste.

- Fragment Anti-aliasing.
Also brought by the Parhelia, this technology only applied AA to edges and used occlusion removal techniques to save bandwidth. Unfortunately many games displayed image artifacts and since Matrox pulled from the gaming scene the technology didn't evolve.

- TripleHead.
Another Parhelia's feature, TripleHead is basically support for three monitors on a single desktop. The concept was great and the games that supported it looked awesome. Not all was good though, it only supported analog vga and since ATI nor nvidia offered similar solutions once matrox pulled from gaming it practically dissapeared.

- Higher Order Surfaces.
Technologies like Displacement Mapping, Truform (n-patches) and Adaptive tessellation promised to deliver high detail models with low polygons, I'm not sure why developers didn't support any of this technologies, probably because nvidia's RT-patches was a complete failure.

- Temporal AA. ATI implemented this mode for the r300 family. The idea was to change the AA pattern every frame so you could get higher AA quality with the speed of a normal AA mode. You eye would not detect the AA patterns and you would percieve higher IQ. nvidia was rumored to have a similar solution based on SLI AA but it never came out.
 
3D-Now!

AMD had a miniGL for quake2 that could use 3dnow, and it showed great promise (I got 25% more FPS with it in q2 on my k6-2 300), but special support for it seemed to disappear of the map almost as fast as it appeared.

Also,

- Temporal AA. ATI implemented this mode for the r300 family. The idea was to change the AA pattern every frame so you could get higher AA quality with the speed of a normal AA mode. You eye would not detect the AA patterns and you would percieve higher IQ. nvidia was rumored to have a similar solution based on SLI AA but it never came out.
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I remember using this mode on 9800 and x800 cards and not noticing much of a difference. It almost seemed to look better when turned off.
 
how's 3dnow different from mmx, which apparently is still supported in most processors. Not sure if it is used much.
 
Isn't 3dNow! just another instruction set extension that any developer can automatically include support for just by ticking a box when they compile their game?

Also Temporal AA is still around
 
I love temporal aa I use it on my 9800pro to save bandwidth and it looks almost as good as regular 4x aa imo
 
Virtual reality, with full immersion. I can still remember playing Doom at some trade show, and having a go of Magic Carpet in VR and being completely blown away...

I'm still highly disappointed that VR never worked out.
 
I miss voxels (aka point sprites). Voxel landscapes were far superior to polygons for creating realistic looking terrain. The landscapes in Outcast look fantastic even today. As did the original Delta Force game. However they may be in for a comeback with Supreme Commander when its released which, i think, uses voxels for the landscapes as Perimeter did a couple of years ago.

The feature i really think could have been really well used was TruForm. Shame only a handful of games supported it.
 
Yashu said:
I remember using this mode on 9800 and x800 cards and not noticing much of a difference. It almost seemed to look better when turned off.
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The reason I never used it was it forced vsynch and killed frame rates if you were used to playign without vsynch.
 
Stoly said:
- Motion Blur/Depth of field.
First announced by 3dfx as T-buffer technology and appearing on the voodoo5 5500 it promised to deliver hollywood effects to your games, unfortunately the speed was too slow and quality was lacking.
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Why do you say this is dead?

I seem to recall several games that use this effect very well, games like max payne/2 and a few even newer titles.
 
mavalpha said:
3Dc, AFAIK. Does anyone still use this?
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Edit: I was wrong...Doom3 engine uses it as well as many other games that use normal maps.
 
Stoly said:
- Temporal AA. ATI implemented this mode for the r300 family. The idea was to change the AA pattern every frame so you could get higher AA quality with the speed of a normal AA mode. You eye would not detect the AA patterns and you would percieve higher IQ. nvidia was rumored to have a similar solution based on SLI AA but it never came out.
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Thanks, I've always wondered what that was. I just assumed it was meant to be a solution to temporal aliasing, and nearly had an aneurysm trying to figure out how the fuck they'd pull it off...
 
Stoly said:
- 10 bit Color.
Remember the Parhelia? It was one of its main features promising realistic color rendering. Today ATI and nvidia also support 10 bit color but since LCDs are 8bit (even with analog vga) this feature is somewhat of a waste.
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I think there are a few people who use 10 bit color but it's on a professional level with really expensive monitors that support it.

It's not dead, more monitor support will show up in due time. Just wait for SED monitors to be common, 10 bit will seem ...lacking.
 
What about S3TC (I think it was short for S3 texture compression) I heard o lot about it in my Savage 4 days, but not really much about it afterwards.
 
Stoly...reading your initial post again, it sounds like trying to throw in things that are still relevent with things that really are history.

You are trying to document or speak with authority yet your specifics do not support it, which makes the post misleading.
 
ryan_975 said:
What about S3TC (I think it was short for S3 texture compression) I heard o lot about it in my Savage 4 days, but not really much about it afterwards.
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I think that was what migrated to 3Dc because it was released as a free standard, much like EAX was released.

Come to think of it, anything using 3D Texture compression uses this algorithym, and it is definitely NOT dead.
 
ryan_975 said:
What about S3TC (I think it was short for S3 texture compression) I heard o lot about it in my Savage 4 days, but not really much about it afterwards.
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I think that was what migrated to 3Dc except 3dc took ti a step further by compressing normal maps, not only textures.

It's still a big thing as far as I know. Doom3 engine uses it.
 
BBA said:
I think that was what migrated to 3Dc except 3dc took ti a step further by compressing normal maps, not only textures.

It's still a big thing as far as I know. Doom3 engine uses it.
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Oh okay, I've been out of the loop for a while.
 
alan.p said:
Virtual reality, with full immersion. I can still remember playing Doom at some trade show, and having a go of Magic Carpet in VR and being completely blown away...

I'm still highly disappointed that VR never worked out.
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Yea I played doom on one of those. You stood in like a circle cage type thing and had headgear on. It was pretty cool. I think with nintendo really pusing the wii controller and sony having a motion controller it is comming back though. Sony's reminds me too much of the old ms and logitech pc controllers but the wii remote is real interesting. Hell that little speaker on it really helps add to the play.

I would love to see the headgear come back though(smaller, lighter, cheaper) but I think we are still a long ways off.
 
ryan_975 said:
What about S3TC (I think it was short for S3 texture compression) I heard o lot about it in my Savage 4 days, but not really much about it afterwards.
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It was released into DirectX 6.1 as an open standard. It is now called DirectX Texture Compression. After it gained traction in Direct3D games, Nvidia and ATI bought OpenGL licenses for it.

ID Software took advantage of the situation, and released Quake III with full support (all textures are available pre-compressed). Imagine that - the world's most popular benchmark supported S3TC, so if you wanted to take the performance crown, EVERYONE had to support it.

Most games today use texture compression - either S3TC, or some extension of it like 3Dc. This is what games mean when they have options enabling texture compression. And let me tell you, this is a good thing: texture compression saves you 3-4x the memory bandwidth, while providing almost the same fidelity as the original. Without compression, we would have hit the memory bandwidth wall long ago.

Everyone here remembers Doom 3 Ultra Quality, and how it raped video cards. What was so special? Ultra Quality used uncompressed textures. But you go ahead and try to tell the difference between Ultra and High Quality. Now that compression tools have matured, it's hard to spot any artifacts.
 
Stoly said:
- Tile Based rendering.
This technology basically discarded polygons that were covered by other geometry. PowerVR released several chips using this technology, the most popular card was the Kyro II. At the time it rivaled the geforce 2 and ati radeon but driver and compatibility issues and the lack of a TnL engine were its doom.
Click to expand...

Tile-based rendering was essentially advanced Z-buffer compression algorithms, plus an on-chip cache large enough to store the data required to describe a tile. Thus, you could do depth testing without going to off-chip memory, and the chip only textured visible pixels.

ATI and Nvidia have kept this idea alive. The success of tile-based rendeing encouraged ATI and Nvidia to develop new Z-buffer compression algorithms of their own, like ATI's Hyper-Z and Nvidia's Lightspeed Memory Architecture. You can also thank PowerrVR for encouraging both ATI and Nvidia to develop incredibly complex memory controllers and caching hiearchies.

- Motion Blur/Depth of field.
First announced by 3dfx as T-buffer technology and appearing on the voodoo5 5500 it promised to deliver hollywood effects to your games, unfortunately the speed was too slow and quality was lacking.
Click to expand...

We always had these features. OpenGL supported an accumulation buffer well before 3dfx made a big deal of it. The reason 3dfx touted it was because their dual-chip, dual framebuffer memory setup meant you finally had beefy hardware to back up these effects.

And look today - Battlefield 2 (just one example) uses motion blur and depth-of-field...so do many other games. I wouldn't call that dead technology.

- Fragment Anti-aliasing.
Also brought by the Parhelia, this technology only applied AA to edges and used occlusion removal techniques to save bandwidth. Unfortunately many games displayed image artifacts and since Matrox pulled from the gaming scene the technology didn't evolve.
Click to expand...

Matrox's fragment AA concept failed because it left pixels aliased every time it encountered a sencil buffer test, which was pretty often (especially in games that used shadows). When combined with the overall poor performance of the Parhelia, it looked like an attempt to polish a turd.

However, even fragment AA is not dead. Nvidia has revived the concept with their 8800-series. They call it Coverage Sample AA. The difference? Well, this time it's attached to a video card that actually performs well. That, and when it encounters a stencil buffer test, it falls back to 4x MSAA. Thus, you get image quality somewhere between 4xAA and 16xAA for about the same performance hit as 4xAA.
 
Aaahh, now I remember Voxels. If I recall correctly, the main limitation of Voxels in the early days was that they were unable to be rendered hardware. It was all done on the CPU. This lead to demanding system requirements to get any kind of decent performance out of it, but there is one thing Voxels did amazingly well, and that's landscapes. One of the later Delta Force finally achieved hardware supported Voxels, but it was too late in the game for developers to pick up on it. Voxels had already earned its reputation.

DirectX adopted S3TC into DXTC, but if I remember right, didn't 3dfx have a superior texture compression during the Voodoo5 days?
 
I remember the original Delta Force. Extremely large landscapes... even software rendered it was very impressive to me at the time.

I do hope they make a comeback.
 
BBA said:
Stoly...reading your initial post again, it sounds like trying to throw in things that are still relevent with things that really are history.

You are trying to document or speak with authority yet your specifics do not support it, which makes the post misleading.
Click to expand...

I was not implying that the all of those technologies are dead, only that many of them promised results that were not delivered when introduced. Some of them were too early for their time and it took years for them to get done properly. For example the geforce3 was supposed to support adaptive tessellation, but we will finally see it implemented with DX10, 7 years later.

Technologies like 10 bit color have lived in the professional market for years, but it returned to the gamer market early this year with ATI and this month on nvidia.
 
defaultluser said:
Tile-based rendering was essentially advanced Z-buffer compression algorithms, plus an on-chip cache large enough to store the data required to describe a tile. Thus, you could do depth testing without going to off-chip memory, and the chip only textured visible pixels.
Click to expand...

Sorry if the explanation was too simplistic, I wanted to put more detailed information but then the post would have been quite large.
 
Ranari said:
DirectX adopted S3TC into DXTC, but if I remember right, didn't 3dfx have a superior texture compression during the Voodoo5 days?
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Well, they called it superior. FXT1 turned out to be a real dog (see a direct comparison here). It had a better compression ratio than S3TC, but it mangled images and produced visible artifacts more often than S3TC.

3dfx tried to save FXT1 by making it an open standard, but it was too late.
 
This one is software not hardware. It was the Ellipsoid 3d engine, and the game was Ecstatica. Looked good for the time, and I thought it had a future. Especially considering even modern games known for their graphics, like Doom 3, everything still looks too square and pointy.
 
Yashu said:
I remember the original Delta Force. Extremely large landscapes... even software rendered it was very impressive to me at the time.

I do hope they make a comeback.
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The series took a dive after #2. It never produced a truly terrible title to my knowledge, but Land Warrior was thoroughly mediocre and reviews indicated that Black Hawk Down was too. Might be no coincidence that the latter two ditched the Voxel engine.

The only game to continue in Delta Force's footsteps was Operation Flashpoint, whose spinoff (Armed Assault) will be released soon. So check those out if you like Delta Force's gameplay and haven't heard of them.
 
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