From Monochrome to Multitouch: A History of PC Displays

Posted 10/21/2010 at 3:40pm | by Mark Edward Soper

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The Analog Revolution – 1987 and beyond

Although IBM’s MicroChannel bus, introduced in 1987, was a short-lived flop, the Video Graphics Array (VGA) standard IBM launched at the same time has endured to the present day. Even the most powerful graphics cards still support VGA standard resolutions (640x480 graphics, 720x400 text). Although VGA uses analog signaling, enabling original versions to display 256 colors at the maximum resolution from a total color palette of over 262,000 (256K) colors, it also supports earlier CGA and EGA standards and quickly replaced EGA.

ATI launched its VGA Wonder “Any Monitor, Any Software, Any Time” card in 1988 to help users transition to VGA. It used a DB9F connector for the older display standards, and a DB15F connector for VGA; this author used a card like the one shown to make the move to VGA in stages by first using the card with an EGA monitor, and then switching to a VGA monitor. This card uses the 16-bit version of the ISA bus.

Image Source: VGA Legacy

The next big jump in resolution was 1999’s XGA (Xtended Graphics Array), which supported up to 1024x768 resolution. This is also the recommended minimum for Windows 7.

Bus Wars: PCI, VL-Bus, AGP, and PCI Express

In 1993, Intel began replacing the ISA bus with the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus version 2. The PCI bus supports 32-bit data and runs at 33MHz, twice the speed of 16-bit ISA. PCI was a particularly good match for the first Pentium processors introduced in 1993.

The rival VESA local bus (VL-Bus) was a 32-bit extension of ISA used for video as well as ATA/IDE hard disk interfaces on 486 and later some Pentium computers. VL-Bus’s reliability and timing shortcomings led to a short operational life. VL-Bus cards were much longer than PCI cards because of the extra connector, as in this comparison of an ATI Mach 64 card using VL-Bus and a Rage128 GL card using the PCI bus.

Image Source: Wikipedia 

Bus Wars Part II began in mid-1997, when Intel rolled out the Accelerated Graphics Port. AGP quickly became the preferred video card slot type for systems with Intel or AMD processors. AGP 1x was twice as fast as PCI and eventually ran at speeds up to 533MHz (AGP 8x).

Image Source: author's hardware collection

Bus Wars Part III began in 2004, when the first PCI Express (PCIe) x16 video cards arrived. PCIe v1 provides about twice the bandwidth of AGP 8x (4Gbps versus 2.13Gbps), and PCIe v2, introduced in 2007, provides twice the bandwidth of PCIe v1. By 2006, most high-performance PCs included PCIe x16 support. 

Image Source: Maximum PC

The 3D Revolution

For the first nine years of the VGA era, graphics were strictly a 2-D affair. 3dfx's Voodoo changed that in 1996. By connecting to an existing PCI graphics card and performing 3D rendering, it made 2D-only graphics cards seem rather...flat. A successor, the Voodoo 2, supported a new feature called Scan Line Interfacing (SLI). SLI used two Voodoo 2 cards to alternatively render even and odd-numbered scan lines on a single display. As this diagram shows, a Voodoo 2 SLI setup used three cards: one PCI or AGP for 2D, and two Voodoo 2 cards for 3D.

Image Source: The 3dfx Help Page

Although Voodoo 2's SLI was praised for smooth 3D, users wanted a single-card solution for 2D and 3D operations. Early 3dfx single-card 3D models included the Voodoo Banshee and the Voodoo 3, with ATI countering with its Rage Pro and NVIDIA offering its RIVA TNT and TNT2. The subsequent NVIDIA GeForce 256 provided much better performance than 3dfx's Voodoo 3, and in 2002 NVIDIA would gain much of 3dfx's intellectual property as 3dfx went bankrupt.

NVIDIA versus ATI

NVIDIA and ATI (now part of AMD) have battled for 3D mastery for over a decade, introducing new GPUs as new versions of Microsoft's DirectX 3D API were introduced. Some of the rival products from 1999-2004 included:

DirectX 7: NVIDIA GeForce 256 and ATI Radeon 7xxx series

DirectX 8: NVIDIA GeForce 3, GeForce 4 Ti and ATI Radeon 8500/9000 (DirectX 8.1)

DirectX 9: NVIDIA GeForce FX and ATI Radeon 9700/9800

Multi-GPU Wars: NVIDIA SLI versus ATI CrossFire

In 2004, NVIDIA brought back the SLI acronym for a new method of dual-GPU 3D rendering it called Scalable Link Interface. In 2005, ATI introduced its own dual-GPU 3D rendering technology called CrossFire. Initially, SLI provided a cleaner connection (see photo) than CrossFire's bulky external cables. However, ATI also uses its own type of bridge board in its more recent CrossFire and all CrossFire X implementations. NVIDIA SLI now supports up to three GPUs, while ATI's newest Eyefinity surround 3D technology supports up to six GPUs.

Image source:  asisupport.com