The History of the Modern Graphics Processor
The Mach64 also ushered in ATI’s first pro graphics cards, the 3D Pro Turbo and 3D Pro Turbo+PC2TV, priced at a cool $599 for the 2MB option and $899 for the 4MB.
ATI Mach64 VT with support for TV tuner
The following month saw a technology start-up called 3DLabs rise onto the scene, born when DuPont’s Pixel graphics division bought the subsidiary from its parent company, along with the GLINT 300SX processor capable of OpenGL rendering, fragment processing and rasterisation. Due to their high price the company's cards were initially aimed at the professional market. The Fujitsu Sapphire2SX 4MB retailed for $1600-$2000, while an 8MB ELSA GLoria 8 was $2600-$2850. The 300SX, however, was intended for the gaming market.
S3 seemed to be everywhere at that time. The high-end OEM marked was dominated by the company's Trio64 chipsets that integrated DAC, a graphics controller, and clock synthesiser into a single chip.
The Gaming GLINT 300SX of 1995 featured a much-reduced 2MB of memory. It used 1MB for textures and Z-buffer and the other for frame buffer, but came with an option to increase the VRAM for Direct3D compatibility for another $50 over the $349 base price. The card failed to make headway in an already crowded marketplace, but 3DLabs was already working on a successor in the Permedia series.
S3 seemed to be everywhere at that time. The high-end OEM marked was dominated by the company's Trio64 chipsets that integrated DAC, a graphics controller, and clock synthesiser into a single chip. They also utilized a unified frame buffer and supported hardware video overlay (a dedicated portion of graphics memory for rendering video as the application requires). The Trio64 and its 32-bit memory bus sibling, the Trio32, were available as OEM units and standalone cards from vendors such as Diamond, ELSA, Sparkle, STB, Orchid, Hercules and Number Nine. Diamond Multimedia’s prices ranged from $169 for a ViRGE based card, to $569 for a Trio64+ based Diamond Stealth64 Video with 4MB of VRAM.
The mainstream end of the market also included offerings from Trident, a long time OEM supplier of no-frills 2D graphics adapters who had recently added the 9680 chip to its line-up. The chip boasted most of the features of the Trio64 and the boards were generally priced around the $170-200 mark. They offered acceptable 3D performance in that bracket, with good video playback capability.
Other newcomers in the mainstream market included Weitek’s Power Player 9130, and Alliance Semiconductor’s ProMotion 6410 (usually seen as the Alaris Matinee or FIS’s OptiViewPro). Both offered excellent scaling with CPU speed, while the latter combined the strong scaling engine with antiblocking circuitry to obtain smooth video playback, which was much better than in previous chips such as the ATI Mach64, Matrox MGA 2064W and S3 Vision968.
Nvidia launched their first graphics chip, the NV1, in May, and became the first commercial graphics processor capable of 3D rendering, video acceleration, and integrated GUI acceleration.
They partnered with ST Microelectronic to produce the chip on their 500nm process and the latter also promoted the STG2000 version of the chip. Although it was not a huge success, it did represent the first financial return for the company. Unfortunately for Nvidia, just as the first vendor boards started shipping (notably the Diamond Edge 3D) in September, Microsoft finalized and released DirectX 1.0.
The D3D graphics API confirmed that it relied upon rendering triangular polygons, where the NV1 used quad texture mapping. Limited D3D compatibility was added via driver to wrap triangles as quadratic surfaces, but a lack of games tailored for the NV1doomed the card as a jack of all trades, master of none.
Most of the games were ported from the Sega Saturn. A 4MB NV1 with integrated Saturn ports (two per expansion bracket connected to the card via ribbon cable), retailed for around $450 in September 1995.
Microsoft’s late changes and launch of the DirectX SDK left board manufacturers unable to directly access hardware for digital video playback. This meant that virtually all discrete graphics cards had functionality issues in Windows 95. Drivers under Win 3.1 from a variety of companies were generally faultless by contrast.
ATI announced their first 3D accelerator chip, the 3D Rage (also known as the Mach 64 GT), in November 1995.
The first public demonstration of it came at the E3 video game conference held in Los Angeles in May the following year. The card itself became available a month later. The 3D Rage merged the 2D core of the Mach64 with 3D capability.
Late revisions to the DirectX specification meant that the 3D Rage had compatibility problems with many games that used the API -- mainly the lack of depth buffering. With an on-board 2MB EDO RAM frame buffer, 3D modality was limited to 640x480x16-bit or 400x300x32-bit. Attempting 32-bit color at 600x480 generally resulted in onscreen color corruption, and 2D resolution peaked at 1280x1024. If gaming performance was mediocre, the full screen MPEG playback ability at least went some way in balancing the feature set.
The performance race was over before it had started, with the 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics effectively annihilating all competition.
ATI reworked the chip, and in September the Rage II launched. It rectified the D3DX issues of the first chip in addition to adding MPEG2 playback support. Initial cards, however, still shipped with 2MB of memory, hampering performance and having issues with perspective/geometry transform, As the series was expanded to include the Rage II+DVD and 3D Xpression+, memory capacity options grew to 8MB.
While ATI was first to market with a 3D graphics solution, it didn’t take too long for other competitors with differing ideas of 3D implementation to arrive on the scene. Namely, 3dfx, Rendition, and VideoLogic.
In the race to release new products into the marketplace, 3Dfx Interactive won over Rendition and VideoLogic. The performance race, however, was over before it had started, with the 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics effectively annihilating all competition.
This article is the first installment on a series of four. If you enjoyed this, make sure to join us next week as we take a stroll down memory lane to the heyday of 3Dfx, Rendition, Matrox and young company called Nvidia.
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