Old School Monday: 3D Cards of Champions
Old School Monday: 3D Cards of Champions
Posted 08/30/2010 at 3:32pm
| by Andrew Sanchez
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Time for another Old School Monday - this week, Online Reviews Editor Michael Brown takes us back to boot May 1998's cover story, 3D Cards of Champions:
This article is about 3D graphics cards, circa 1998, but it also shows boot Senior Editor Andrew Sanchez at the height of his editorial powers. No one could have guessed that Andrew would tragically leave this world less than a year after this story hit newsstands.
As for the 3D cards of that era (we didn’t call them videocards back then), 3Dfx was the undisputed king of the market; but since their Voodoo 2 chipset was 3D-only, you had to buy a second card for everything other than games.
Rendition took second place in this roundup, but the innovative company flamed out a year later and was purchased by Micron (where the company’s third-generation product—the V3300—was promptly cancelled). 3Dfx went bust in 2000 and Nvidia (whose Riva 128 didn’t do all that well in this story) picked up the pieces.
Take a look at the feature chart in this story: Most of the cards in the roundup had only 8MB frame buffers, and the maximum supported video resolution was 1,280x1,024 pixels. ATI’s All-in-Wonder Pro took first place in terms of features by virtue of having a strong 2D/3D chip (the 3D Rage Pro) and an excellent TV tuner on the same card. AMD acquired ATI in 2006 and announced today its decision to retire the ATI brand altogether.
Intel hoped its i740 processor would convince graphics-card manufacturers to switch to AGP from the PCI bus. AGP would eventually have its day in the sun, but when it came to the i740, Intel had effectively turned left as the rest of the industry turned right: Game developers began producing games that relied on very large textures. Since the i740 stored textures in system—versus local—memory, as the competition’s 3D accelerators did, the i740 delivered extremely poorly benchmark performance.
Meanwhile, 3DLabs was probably wondering why it even decided to enter this market: The Permedia 2 chipset on the company’s FireGL 1000 Pro card finished last in each of Andrew’s benchmarks. 3DLabs sold its FireGL product line to ATI in 2001, and Creative Labs bought the rest of the company the following year.
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roleki
August 31, 2010 at 8:35am
Even though it was a generation older, the 6MB Canopus Pure3D was as good or better than most of the parts in that review. That was such a great piece of hardware, it's too bad they bowed out when they did.
Thoren
August 31, 2010 at 5:21am
But can anyone tell me where I can find the answers?
Seriously, we can haz spam filters?
Keith E. Whisman
August 30, 2010 at 10:31pm
The ATI 3D Rage Fury Pro dual processor video card, was my first ATI card and it kicked ass all over the place. The bad thing about that card is that you had to hunt down different drivers for each game. ATI optimized drivers for different games and instead of having it all in one single driver file for all games you had to install a different one for each game. That sucks and what was really hard was trying to figure out the ATI website. It wasn't at all easy finding the drivers you needed at the ATI website.
I also had the 2MB Matrox Mystique 220 and the Voodoo 2000 from I think Creative, it was a Creative branded Voodoo card and if I remember right I got it because it was a PCI card, I didn't have AGP, it was a cheap walmart HP that I put in my Tractor Trailer when I was a trucker. It had a 500mhz Celeron with 64MB of ram and that Voodoo 2000 PCI card and Intel Extreme Graphics. All of my games worked great on that little machine. Most of my games were more GPU and memory limited.
Thanks for the article. I think I still have this issue sitting around some where if I haven't lost it in some bathroom some where and that's where I would lose it because MaximumPC magazine is the bathroom magazine that sits by the throne exclusively.
Metalmorphasis
August 30, 2010 at 10:28pm
The days of my Packard Bell, 486sx, 4mb ram, 170mb hard drive, doing the upgrades and all the way up to loading Windows 98 on it. (Although 98 was an improvement!) Those were the dark ages, IRQ's, Config.sys,etc. Oh-boy, I may get night-mares tonight!
The_Dez
August 30, 2010 at 8:21pm
My first 3D card was a TNT. I spent the longest time trying to decide between that and a Banshee.
Morpheous416
August 30, 2010 at 7:53pm
When I first custom built my PC, it included a Voodoo 3, 3000. 16MB card, which what pretty much all we talked about in those days. The name, and how much memory it had onboard.
It was awesome!! To finally go from what was even then, the weakest of onboard graphics to something that could finally handle the games we were playing on them...
Was a great time in computer history.
My specs were:
P3 @ 500Mhz, 384MB of system RAM, 40GB drive, 24x CD/CDRW, Voodoo 3.. was a nice machine, and it even ran Windows XP just fine. Had it with Win 98SE for three years.
Metalmorphasis
August 30, 2010 at 6:39pm
This is like going back in time and bumping in to all your old girlfriends!
No, OK, This is better!
Severian
August 30, 2010 at 5:59pm
I still have a copy of this one! I've been going back and reading through my old boot/MaxPC mags. I love Old School Mondays!
NakedFable
August 30, 2010 at 4:22pm
I've still got a Win 98 machine that I use for old flight sims that consists of an Nvidia Riva TNT with twin Voodoo2s running in SLI!
Funny thing is, I can not get those games to run on my Win XP machine to save my life, and if they do...they just don't look as good on D3D graphics. 3DFX Glide FTW!
Jstrick9
August 30, 2010 at 3:56pm
Its amazing how computer technology changes so dramatically, yet at the same time, doesn't really change at all.
The hardware featured in this column feels like something we would read today - but simply 'updated'.
WikingTOR
August 30, 2010 at 3:50pm
Ha , I remember reading that issue several times to decide what 3dcard to get!
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