If video cards / chip didnt exist

TheBuzzer

TheBuzzer

HACK THE WORLD!
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Aug 15, 2005
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what games do you think we would be playing by now?

what games could run smoothy with just the cpu now?
 
Video cards exist because there is a market for them. Asking the question "what if they didn't exist" would mean either they are about to exist very shortly, or there is no market for them. If there was no market for them, there would be no computer games.
 
Every computer has a video card. Thats how graphics are displayed on a monitor. You cannot have a computer displayed on a monitor without a video card. Either by dedicated graphics processor or integrated into the chipset.
 
Voxel based 3D games?

Were you playing 3D games back when they were CPU based before "Video Accelerators"? Circa 1995...
 
Many "chips" can be used to output video, a GPU or dedicated or specially designed chip does not have to be used, (correction?). I guess if you get down to nuts and bolts of thigs, aren't RAMDACs basically a main key to getting an image out to a screen?
 
I think many of you are misreading the question...or maybe my imagination just has a more fanciful take on it.

It's easy to imagine a parallel universe where for some reason, Intel or even IBM back in the day developed a cartel or monopoly over the PC business and forbade 3rd party manufacturers from creating addon expansions like videocards for computers. We had to live with the OEM solutions which were business based and unified with CPUs and math-coprocessors designed to crunch numbers for spreadsheets and science...No dedicated 3D hardware acceleration or any real hardware or software designed for fancy things such as texture filtering, environment/bump mapping, level of detail, transform and lighting, shaders, etc. all the stuff we take for granted. Any real 3D hardware, due to the lack of R&D money - because companies like S3, PowerVR, Rendition, Matrox, 3DFx, ATi, Nvidia, etc. either never existed or were never allowed to operate a profitable consumer business - is very primitive and expensive. Costs and size never came down and they are still relegated to tens of thousands of dollar equipment for the entertainment business, 3D modelling for scientific research, or even arcade cabinets...Nothing was ever developed for the home market as no company had the money or R&D to shrink them down to home sizes and pricepoints for either PCs or consoles.

What would games look like now? How many people remember PC gaming before 3D acceleration took over in the market? There were a lot of innovative solutions but mostly it was very low resolution, low texture size, low poly count, and there were some interesting designs like voxel based games.

If we assume however that CPU processing has advanced just as well in that universe...then perhaps we don't use raster 3D graphics anymore. Maybe in that universe, we're already playing ray-traced games coming off immensly powerful CPUs.

Or maybe the home market is just stuck playing flash games or this
delta_force_2_3.jpg

nfs2-screenshot.jpg


And everybody is still hanging out at Arcades which is still the only venue that can afford expensive hardware.

arcade2.1.jpg

arcade9.1.jpg


I still really miss arcades, and I blame the rise (and fall of prices) of 3D gaming hardware for the home for their demise.
 
Evolution? The human race's constant urge to improve themselves?
I don't know, quite a large topic to discuss 'simply'.
 
Some of us still play a lot of games that don't really need a graphics card, or should I say 3D acceleration. 2D shooters and fighters, for example.

All MAME emulated games don't use any kind of graphics acceleration, they are entirely CPU rendered.
 
2D games would have hung around longer. By now we'd probably have 3D games running off Intel multi-core CPUs and I'm guessing they'd look like the games of 3 or 4 years ago.
 
mojo-chan said:
Some of us still play a lot of games that don't really need a graphics card, or should I say 3D acceleration. 2D shooters and fighters, for example.

All MAME emulated games don't use any kind of graphics acceleration, they are entirely CPU rendered.
Click to expand...

Umm actually...newsflash, MAME uses DirectX to process almost all of the games running under it. It uses the 3D frame buffer to render, emulate, scale, etc. all those old games...and there are plenty of 3D arcade games emulated also.

Even the Nintendo DS emulators for many old 2D systems use the DS's 3D hardware to actually emulate games and scale them to screen.
 
TheBuzzer said:
what games do you think we would be playing by now?

what games could run smoothy with just the cpu now?
Click to expand...

A) Someone would have said "Hey, a general purpose CPU just can't do what we want it to do"

B) Someone would have said "Hey let's make the CPU more powerful so that we can do more things with it

C) A combination of both A and B

I'd imagine our Q6600's would have 3 billion transistors and 512MB of backside high speed ram.
 
Maybe RPGs and Flight Sims would still be the kings of PC gaming.

I remember a time when SSI, Sri-Tech, New World Computing, Sierra, Origin, and Novalogic ruled the PC. Not EA, Atari, and Ubisoft.

We would be playing:
Ultima 22
Phantasie IV
Wing Commander 6
New SSI AD&D Gold Box games.
The Bard's Tale 5
Commanche 7
King's Quest XXII
Red Baron IV
Microsoft Flight Sim 10 (oh....wait....)
 
Knyte said:
Maybe RPGs and Flight Sims would still be the kings of PC gaming.

I remember a time when SSI, Sri-Tech, New World Computing, Sierra, Origin, and Novalogic ruled the PC. Not EA, Atari, and Ubisoft.

We would be playing:
Ultima 22
Phantasie IV
Wing Commander 6
New SSI AD&D Gold Box games.
The Bard's Tale 5
Commanche 7
King's Quest XXII
Red Baron IV
Microsoft Flight Sim 10 (oh....wait....)
Click to expand...

Comanche was so ahead of its time. I played the heck out of Comanche 3, especially blowing up cows, quite fun. What sucks is they never really updated their graphics engine, it was amazing back in 98, but practically stayed the same in Comanche 4, etc.
 
Actually, we would probably have pretty decent 3D software engines. Back in the day when Intel released MMX, one of the selling points was real-time bilinear filtering. Of course, they botched this by making MMX use the same registers as floating-point, making it difficult to use both at once.

Once 3D accelerators became affordable, the market for SIMD-accelerated 3D features faded. But it was certainly on the table at one point in time.
 
The thing is, if video cards didn't exist in the form we see today, they would have existed some way else, ala Software Render based, or physical hardware attached to the cpu, oh wait, we seem to be going that way anyhow, so lawls.

But yea, humans like shiny pretty things, so It was bound to happen. If it didn't exist as stand alone cards, most likely it would be like arcades were back in them day, embedded dedicated systems.
 
pc1x1 said:
Novalogic used to kick so much ass :(
Click to expand...

Yeah... delta force was awesome. It used to be all the rage at lan parties back then. Along with quake 3 and half life

And bot... I agree we'd be using software rendering. We'd maybe have wound up with multi-core cpus that combined different types or cores, kind of like AMD's fusion.
 
If graphic cards didn't exist, there would be a comgraphic. Today you would have an nvidia 6200 comgaphic. tutorials on how to mount a graphics card would say ..grab you comgraphic and plug it on the comgraphic UCB 4.0 entrance (that's for universal comgraphic bus and it run's at many many GBit's/s). :F

..man, it's hard to imagine a world without graphic cards.. are we so close minded? or we just don't have any control on were we're actually going? oO
 
Dual core processors would have come sooner, and graphics would have more coding on the processor much like SSE/MMX/etc. The graphics processing would have been done no matter what even if not on a separate video card.
 
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