Old School Question

[AltTabbins]

Remember the days when games didn't need a high-end card to run? The only think you had to look at when buying a game was processor speed and amount of ram..

Anyways, I was having a nostalgic moment when I saw a few ads for a Voodo2 card and Diamond 3d "graphics accelerator". My question is where they actually videocards back then? Or did they just help your processor out with the graphics load?

I remember that having MMX was a huge deal too and that my friends could run Tomb Raider better with it and their Monster 3dfx card.. The water looked so real! lol..

 

[vivi]

i like 3dfx and voodoo.
but i have never used these cards.
what a pity!

 

[geekcomputing]

the voodoo 2 was a graphics accelerator and ran a custom API called glide.
for its time it was revolutionary.

i had a s3 virge dx which was total garbage but hey, it ran syndicate wars.

 

[AltTabbins]

Its the only way I could run Alien vs Preditor too.. I remember being hardbroken when my friend told me the bad new and I had to either go buy the card or not play the game.

 

[BBA]

The old days when games didnt need a good card died when GL-Quake hit the scene.

I was one of those with a video decellerator (S3) card back then. I added a Voodoo2 before anyone on the block did...let me tell you, that was the shizzle, then my friend bought one...so I stole it for a while and ran SLI...oh man I could have charged admission for folks to watch Quake2 timedemo's.

The Voodoo series were fill rate hardware machines, and were very CPU dependant but it was the fastest going for a long time.

Then nVidia came out with the TNT series and changed everything.

 

[The Resident]

Voodoo 1 and 2 were both actual video cards, but they operated only in "accelerated" mode; You still needed a normal 2D "unaccelerated" video card for everything else.

The Voodoos came with a video pass-through cable - you connected the normal video card's output to the Voodoo's input, and then connected the Voodoo's output to your monitor. When you fired up a Glide application, the Voodoo would "take over" the video signal. Of course that meant fullscreen-only acceleration.

I don't know about Voodoo 3 and up, but 1 and 2 weren't actually GPUs. As BBA said, all they did was rasterize 2D polygons. They offloaded the work of actually physically drawing the screen, but the actual 3D projections and geometry still had to be calculated by the CPU, making the acceleration pretty CPU-dependent. (Although a far cry from T&L, didn't they get triange strip and fan acceleration at some point?)

 

[Scali]

(Although a far cry from T&L, didn't they get triange strip and fan acceleration at some point?)

Yes, the progress from 2d rasterization to full T&L went quite gracefully. At first the cards were nothing more than a 2d rasterizer that could only rasterize trapezoids (a triangle is divided into an upper and lower trapezoid along the scanline with the 'middle' (vertical) vertex) . Then they gradually started taking tasks off the CPU, like calcing gradients, and taking entire triangles rather than trapezoids. T&L was just the last step, where you no longer sent 2d projected triangles, but actual 3d triangles.
We're talking TNT-era cards then, I believe.

By the way, I'm not sure what people mean by a 'videocard', but if it means 'to output a video signal', then the PowerVR cards don't qualify. They are more like a coprocessor, and they don't actually generate an image, but they rasterize the triangles, and then copy the resulting framebuffer to the backbuffer of the videocard via the PCI bus. A very interesting solution, which didn't have the problem of image quality loss that the Voodoos had with their cable setup.