Worse than any nVidiot or Fanatic..

[ChrisRay]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
On that note, are there any figures for how many resources 3dfx used up in their legal battles against NVIDIA?

Which IMO is 3dfx's own fault...they sued NVIDIA and if memory serves correctly NVIDIA just sued them back :p


heh It is not without a sense of irony. 3dfx Sued Nvidia for stealing there Multi texturing technique.

And Nvidia counter suied 3dfx for like 15 different rendering techniques. Nvidia used this counter sue to prove that 3dfx's claim was a joke,.

[ChrisW]

If memory serves me right, 3DFx actually won that law suit. NVidia was ordered to pay 3DFx a lot of money. The only problem was 3DFx went bankrupt fighting that law suit. NVidia only purchased their assets to prevent them from having to pay 3DFx on their claim. Since nVidia now owned what they were fighting over, they did not have to pay 3DFx a dime.

[ChrisRay]

Originally posted by ChrisW
If memory serves me right, 3DFx actually won that law suit. NVidia was ordered to pay 3DFx a lot of money. The only problem was 3DFx went bankrupt fighting that law suit. NVidia only purchased their assets to prevent them from having to pay 3DFx on their claim. Since nVidia now owned what they were fighting over, they did not have to pay 3DFx a dime.

No One one the lawsuit. 3dfx went down before the lawsuit was ever finished.

However, Nvidia was losing the Muli texturing suit. But winning a few of its counter sue suits *shrug*

[sxotty]

Well they did leave the owners out in the cold, but it wasn't their bag baby...

And someone had that trade in deal, to get a cheaper card if you sent in an old 3dfx card.

[ragejg]

GLideForce... heh :p

[bkswaney]

CL just plan out SUCKS a big one.
They killed there only comp and there drivers really sux.

They have done nothing in years now.

I really wish someone would make a run at them. :)

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by bkswaney
CL just plan out SUCKS a big one.
They killed there only comp and there drivers really sux.

They only absorbed Aureal. They still had competition from Voyetra/Turtle Beach and Philips, both of whom voluntarily backed out of the market. There also is M-Audio, but their cards aren't proving to be very good when compared to the Audigy 2. And let's not forget the integrated audio products out there. Even non-Soundstorm solutions are starting to get pretty good, with decent quality and minimal impact on the CPU.

There is competition per-se but when you have name recognition and a solid product (the A2 has made me a believer again) you're going to get the lion's share of the market. Creative is a lot like the Playstation in this regard.

They have done nothing in years now.

I think it's pretty innovative when Creative releases software updates supporting new features (EAX 4) for its original Audigy line so customers aren't forced to upgrade in order to take advantage. That would be like NVIDIA releasing a programmable shader-compliant driver with no performance hit for the GeForce2 line.

I really wish someone would make a run at them. :)

Again, it comes down to name recognition and consumers voting with their dollars. The Audigy 2 has received hardly anything but spectacular reviews all the way around, and you can find great deals on the original Audigy which is still being supported.

There are other products out there, but it's going to be damn near impossible to take on the Creative juggernaut.

[sxotty]

Well I disliked the original audigy and liked the cheaper hercules GTXP better, which btw had pretty much all the same features. I have not tried the A2, and I don't plan to get anything until someone comes out with a soundcard that encodes Dolby digital, I would jump on that though just to get all the nice features I miss from the breakout boxes like adjustable gain, headphone jacks which automatically turn off other outputs and so forth.

[jbirney]

I have to disagree. 3dfx may have been the first in the industry, But starting it? The immersion of other chipset manufacturers was a huge part of the OpenGL and DirectX API.,

The big push for hardware accelerated games started after the public started to by the V1 cards in volume. Yes other companies helped but 3DFX was the driving force back then.

If Anything, Microsoft is the one who has pushed the 3d industry. Not 3dfx. 3dfx Just happened to have the first Viable API. But their pushing of it after the arrival of DirectX is pretty detestable.

Please 3 years ago DX games were a joke. MS was still learning back then and following OpenGL. It took them a few DX versions to get it right.

But of course it's newer, Of Course its better, Thats the point, Anyone who's seen ATIS AA Quality has to give them a nod too it. It makes 3dfx AA look like a blurry mess. But some people wont give up a Voodoo5 based on them thinking the AA is way better or somethen.

Using the LOD slider to -1 or -1.5 cleared up most of the blurrness. Again with video tech improving every year it took the r300 to final beat the V5 some 2.5 years after the V5 was out. Thats not bad.


Poppy ****...

3dfx did not start the industry. Professional 3d companies did like SGI etc...

Further there were a couple other Companies out there with the First TRue 3d hardware on the market. Like the Rendition Verite 1000. Which I still own and is around my house somewhere.

3DFX was big and Did really push the 3dmarket for Gaming Forward. However the Very First 3dgames out there were games with Verite 1000 support. hell even Quake was first 3d accelerated on a Verite 1000.

HB, we are talking about the consumer 3d card market indsustry which SGI is not a part of (granted most x-SGI people worked at the consumer companies like 3dfx, nv, ATI, matrox, ect). But like it or not the Voodoo cards were the cards to own back in those early days and it was their influence that started the whole 3d consumer craze. The were the first big player.

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by sxotty
Well I disliked the original audigy and liked the cheaper hercules GTXP better, which btw had pretty much all the same features. I have not tried the A2, and I don't plan to get anything until someone comes out with a soundcard that encodes Dolby digital, I would jump on that though just to get all the nice features I miss from the breakout boxes like adjustable gain, headphone jacks which automatically turn off other outputs and so forth.

Good catch. I completely forgot about Hercules. Right now they're about the only legitimate contender left in the market. What's nice about them is that they have sound cards that are packed with lots of features, but are overall quite a bit cheaper than Creative.

I think Hercules needs to do some uber-aggressive marketing to really get their name out more to the average consumer (who otherwise knows nothing other than Creative).

[Edge]

I think it's pretty innovative when Creative releases software updates supporting new features (EAX 4) for its original Audigy line so customers aren't forced to upgrade in order to take advantage. That would be like NVIDIA releasing a programmable shader-compliant driver with no performance hit for the GeForce2 line.

Actually, I think it would be more like Aureal making a driver update that lets A3D 3.0 features run on their A3D 2.0 cards, and that's EXACTLY what they did a few years ago! Also, I think a better analogy would be Nvidia enabling the GFFX AA modes on GF3&4 cards, which you can actually do with tweaking programs.

BTW, were there any games that actually supported A3D 3.0 features? I heard Elite Force did, but I'm not sure what exactly, or if they were just saying it supported the 3.0 API but didn't actually use any of the features (like games that use DX7 running on DX9). I know one of the things that sounded really cool was volumatric sounds (as in, sounds not coming from a single source, but from a general area, like the croud in a sports stadium). Is there anything like that availible with Creative or Hercules cards?

[Gator]

Well, truth is if 3dfx were still alive today, I would own a 3dfx video card. Reason being is Glide would probably still exist and in a newer form as well. 3dfx cards would be desired by many because many games would still be written for Glide. But alas, 3dfx died and so did their propriatary API. I think Glide worked well, but in the end it was a marketing gimic, because 3dfx owned Glide which made it hard for Nvidia or ATI to compete when games like Unreal Tournament were optimized for it. It's better I suppose they died though, so that the OpenGL and Directx standard could finally grow to what it is today. And yes since DX5 things have gotten much more stable. And hell even the old UT has had many newer revisions of the DX and OGL renderer since '99 to help better support non-3dfx cards ;)

But personally, I still have a 3dfx case badge on my main rig, even though I don't even keep my Voodoo2's installed anymore. Why? Maybe for posterity, maybe because UnrealTournament loved Glide and I love UT... I dunno. I have mixed feelings about 3dfx, but I suspect the 3d market is a better place without them and their personal API :rolleyes:

[bloodbob]

The 3dfx AA techinque ran on just about everything which was sweet as unlike alot of stuff these days :/

A3D was far better then EAX and they actaully let everyone use A3D they produced drivers that used Direct Sound + Cpu to do it.

A3D actually calculated reflection and stuff from the levels walls ( different walls had different reverbs and stuff too ) in real time where as EAX uses a predefined value of reverb ect for each room/area.

My creative SBPCI 128 (mine was the first model) never got support for EAX ( card has EAX 1.0 ) in diablo 2 as well as having problems just about everywhere it only ever had one driver update and creative just refused to fix any of the other problems.

I used to use A3D in HL 1 instead of EAX even though I had hardware acceleration of EAX.

[Drumphil]

sigh.. what year is it?? and we're still talking about this??

[Joe DeFuria]

Originally posted by Sledge
My Riva128 supported OpenGL. I'm fairly sure the Rage3D chip also supported OpenGL because I used CAD/solid modeling software on a computer with an ATI card.

Neither had any GL support until well after 3dfx had GL support for Quake. In fact, I don't believe nVidia had GL support until sometime after Quake2 shipped.

In other words, yes, they supported GL, but not until well after 3dfx had hardware acceleration for titels with either Glide or their mini-GL driver.

[Joe DeFuria]

Originally posted by ChrisRay
Bump Mapping or Enviromental Bump Mapping? IIRC the Geforce 3 was


Well the big difference between Software and Glide Mode back then was pretty much The Use of Billinear Filtering. I mean Billinear filtering was a huge step above software rendering, Which was impractical for CPU at the time because it created a ton of overhead (IE unusable)

It was also resolution. Glide allowed for bilinerarly filtered at 640x480 with playable rates (30 FPS+). Software had point sampled, and usually half the resolution to get the same frame rates....if you had a beefy CPU.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Drumphil
sigh.. what year is it?? and we're still talking about this??

Good point. Are there really any 3dfx fanboys left? Anyone who worships a dead company obviously has some unresolved issues as 3dfx is gone and is never coming back. Time to move on.

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
Good point. Are there really any 3dfx fanboys left? Anyone who worships a dead company obviously has some unresolved issues as 3dfx is gone and is never coming back. Time to move on.

I think we can put them into one specific category - Voodoo5 FSAA fanboys. That's about the only talk of 3dfx that still remains.

[Lecram25]

Originally posted by Gator
Well, truth is if 3dfx were still alive today, I would own a 3dfx video card. Reason being is Glide would probably still exist and in a newer form as well. 3dfx cards would be desired by many because many games would still be written for Glide. But alas, 3dfx died and so did their propriatary API. I think Glide worked well, but in the end it was a marketing gimic, because 3dfx owned Glide which made it hard for Nvidia or ATI to compete when games like Unreal Tournament were optimized for it. It's better I suppose they died though, so that the OpenGL and Directx standard could finally grow to what it is today. And yes since DX5 things have gotten much more stable. And hell even the old UT has had many newer revisions of the DX and OGL renderer since '99 to help better support non-3dfx cards ;)

But personally, I still have a 3dfx case badge on my main rig, even though I don't even keep my Voodoo2's installed anymore. Why? Maybe for posterity, maybe because UnrealTournament loved Glide and I love UT... I dunno. I have mixed feelings about 3dfx, but I suspect the 3d market is a better place without them and their personal API :rolleyes:

Nope, Glide would have been nonexistent...Rampage, the next chip which would have had nothing to do with the Voodoo architecture, would have done Glide in software. 3dfx was moving away from Glide and gearing towards dx and ogl...3dfx never really did any "real" ogl...all ogl calls get wrapped around glide3x, but the Voodoo 5 can do ogl in hardware, up to ogl 1.2 to be exact...but it's just lacking in drivers...

And yes, the Voodoo 5's AA is better than the R300, i.e. the VSA 100's 4xAA vs R300's 6xAA...I'm talking about AA quality, not the overall IQ. Sure it blurs the textures, due to the lack of AF, but it does a better job at AA than the R300; especially on those alpha textures, or anything that's not a polygon...also, let's not forget the Voodoo 5 6000, which does 8xAA ;)

Ok, here are some Rampage pictures...these babies were released a couple of months ago...apparently, there are only two prototypes, and only one working sample...

If anyone wants the high res scans, just ask...

http://my.fit.edu/~mmichael/Rampy/rampy_s.jpg

http://my.fit.edu/~mmichael/Rampy/rampy2s.jpg


I also have some 8xAA screenies...



http://member.netmagic.net.au/tony/glide_20030707_222853.jpg

http://member.netmagic.net.au/tony/glide_20030707_223006.jpg

http://member.netmagic.net.au/tony/glide_20030707_223108.jpg

http://member.netmagic.net.au/tony/glide_20030707_222839.jpg


Good point. Are there really any 3dfx fanboys left? Anyone who worships a dead company obviously has some unresolved issues as 3dfx is gone and is never coming back. Time to move on.

To answer your question...yes there are a few fanboys out there :)

[Edge]

Jesus, that Rampage card is huge. Makes that quad-GPU enabled 9800 card look small (well, OK, maybe it's not THAT big)! Though this does actually interest and confuse me...I thought the Rampage was nowhere near completion, it was my understanding that it was still very early in development. The fact that they had working prototypes, or at least the technology to make them, is a very suprising, since that means they probably could've released it before the Geforce 3. If the Rampage was really as powerful as the specs I saw indicate, we could've had a Geforce 4-speed card out before the GF3 was released. That's actually one of the reasons I thought 3dfx died at the worst possible time: they had already decided to abandon the Voodoo chipsets and start from scratch. Hopefully Nvidia will do that as well, their GeforceFX technology is based pretty much on the Geforce 3 except with modifications to the AA engine (which is basiclly what the Voodoo 5 was, a fast version of a Voodoo 3 with an enhanced AA engine...hmm...it's almost like it parallels Nvidia's current system).

I think they probably would've made a Glide Wrapper for the Rampage to allow it to work with older Glide-based games, but it did sound like it was focusing mainly on D3D and OpenGL. Would've been an interesting twist, since they had promoted it so heavilly in the Voodoo 3 days (and not so much in the Voodoo 5 days).

Oh, and those 8xAA screenies are damn pretty. Looks even prettier then 6xAA on ATI cards, from what I've seen of them. You'd probably need 8x or 12x AA on one of those uber-9800 cards to match up to that. Would like to know what the performance hit of it would be though, since it's super-sampling that would theoreticlly cut your framerate down to 1/8th:eek:. Well, I guess when you've got horsepower to spare you might as well use it! BTW, what Anisotropy levels were the Rampage supposed to support? I can't imagine that it would be very fast with it (since fast Aniso methods weren't really perfected until the 9700 cards), but since they made 8x AA availible I could see them offering somewhere around lvl16 or lvl32 aniso.

Oh btw, I heard from someone that officially, 3dfx still has an office somewhere. But I can't understand why, they obviously don't do or make anything, so why would they still be renting office space:confused:
Ahh well, one of the great mysteries of the universe.

[Lecram25]

Yeah, it was official, Rampage would have done Glide via a software implementation...
And yes, something that powerful would have come out before the Geforce 3, infact, ogl was working and dx8 was fully functional; they had a working sample just 2 weeks before 3dfxdeclared bankruptcy...
Here's a little interesting powerpoint you might like (http://my.fit.edu/~mmichael/Rampy/Rampage_Q3D_083199.ppt)
* right click and "Save Target As..." *

Here's the Rampage preview from the italian site: linkage (http://my.fit.edu/~mmichael/Rampy/Rampage Preview.doc)
* "Save Target As..." *

And here are the specs:


Rampage

Next Generation Rendering Engine (VTA)
Next Generation Video Engine
16M tri/sec, 800MP/sec, Single textured.
Programmable Shading
Higher quality filtering
T-buffer based AA
AA With 2 textures and Anisotropic with no performance hit.
AA With 4 textures with no performance hit
Scalable Architecture
Integrated Bridge functionality
Full AGP Support in SLI
Two recursion modes
Before and after W divide
Applicable for bump mapping and procedural textures
Risc-like address op instruction model
Cubic Environment Mapping
Texture Compression
DirectX/DXT ,FXT1 compressed textures
YUV Texture formats
Massive Multitexturing: 8 textures each with different
filtering: point, bilinear, trilinear, anisotropic (up to 128-tap).
Massive Iterators: 8 ARGBSTW iterators: one per texture.
Texture Recursion (Address ops) : recursion in parallel or series on up to 4 textures
Any combination of 4 recursions on the 8 available textures Recursion allows one texture to perturb the values of another texture
Texture Computer (Pixel Shader)
Massive flexible math capability
texture combine unit: (a+b)*c+d feeding...
...color combine unit: (A+B)*C+D where each abcd and ABCD can be:
from any of iterator, texture, previous, registered and constant values.
manipulated independently with: x, -x, 1-x and x-0.5.
Compare based multiplexing:
texture and color: combine unit: (a-b)? c:d and
texture combine unit output summing
R+G+B may feed
color combine unit: .(a+b)*c+d, alpha and/or color channels Useful for intensity ops, dot products.
Register based combiners
Larger color component precision
13 bits per component
Precision maintained through alpha blenders.
Alpha Blender Logic Ops
Quad pixel pipeline
4 pixels-per-clock single textured (per chip)
4/N pixels per clock for N textures (per chip)
Scalable rendering: Up to four chips ganged together. No bridge chip required.
Optimized Geometry Pipeline.
Viewport Transforms and efficient host/graphics IO yield optimum performance
Works with (or without) Sage geometry co-processor
Larger color component precision
13 bits per component
Precision maintained through alpha blenders.
Alpha Blender Logic Ops
Quad pixel pipeline
4 pixels-per-clock single textured (per chip)
4/N pixels per clock for N textures (per chip)
Scalable rendering: Up to four chips ganged together. No bridge chip required.
Optimized Geometry Pipeline.
Viewport Transforms and efficient host/graphics IO yield optimum performance
Works with (or without) Sage geometry co-processor

ecc...


Here's from another site:

'Rampage' was 0.18um, it contained 30 Million transistors in a core area of 10.6*10.6cm's. The total die was 11.44*11.47cm's. Within this area was 18 clock domains, 14 core blocks, and 8 pad ring blocks. It was designed for UMC's process, then changed in the last few months to TSMC. Sage was 25 million transistors using the same process. Rampage would've been clocked from 200-250mhz
It utilized AGP 4X, SAGE was the Busmaster, with each 'Rampage' having AGP functionality built in.
12.8GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
32-bit output, 52-bit internal precision (13-bits per RGBA component).
SAGE supported 25 hardware lights.
3D Texture support.
Windowed AA (not confirmed)
160hz at 640x480. 1600x1200 at 100hz.
'M-Buffer' (ie. Multisample-Buffer that was used on R4, also had T-Buffer support) M-Buffer allowed for 4 samples per clock to be generated at NO pixel rate loss, unlike the 4X hit taken by VSA-100 and T-Buffer. The Downside is that MS takes the same texel coordinates and jitters them, thus there's no texture clean up. 3dfx implimented the advanced Anisotopic filtering to remedy this once and for all.
Quad texturing. In 1 clock. 8 Layers in 2 clocks, 1 pass. It's hard to describe 'Rampage's texturing abilities due to the flexibility. Actually, when using Quad-texturing, 'Rampage' could achieve 'free' RGMS Anti-Aliasing.

Normal rendering:
1 texture per pixel: 800Mpps / 800Mtps
2 textures per pixel: 400Mpps / 800Mtps
3 textures per pixel: 200Mpps / 800Mtps
4 textures per pixel: 200Mpps / 800Mtps
5-8 textures per pixel: 100Mpps / 800 Mps (two clocks required)

Multisample AA - 800M samples per second:
4 textures, Free MS AA
2 textures + Anisotropic, free MS AA.
With 4X MSAA enabled an entire Rampage chip would have effectively been one GeForce 4 pipeline, but with twice the texture rate. It has mroe bandwidth than the GeForce 4, and wouldn't have to waste its bandwidth on geometry.
4 GSamples/s for 8x MSAA. There were 4 pipes that were either pixel pipes or 4X MSAA pipes.
tr> Hardware supported HSR. Not completey done in hardware, but it eliminates a 30-50% overdraw with a 1% visual error. This technology was from Gigapixel. (Thanks Tag)
quad texturing= 4xRGMS/noAF small performance drop
dual texturing= 2xRGMS/4xAF small performance drop
Trilinear filtered texture per tick per TCU.
Up to 128 tap adaptive Anisotropic Filtering(per 8 ticks maximum)
Non-Photorealistic Rendering (from 3dfx's Immersion 2000 release) This is an extention of the VTA.

VTAi (i = 0..3) VTAi-1 * (1-Alpha) + VTAi * Alpha
C0 = Alpha
TCU: (A+B)*C + D
A: Zero
B: Texture (Paint#Brush)
C: C0 (Alpha)
D: Zero
CCU: (A+B)*C + D
A: Zero
B: Previous VTA
C: 1 - C0 (1 - Alpha)
D: TCU out
'NPR' (Photoshop effects). Better known as 'Toon Shading'. Was an awsome and powerful specification of 'Rampage', an artists dream.
Entry level:
1 'Rampage', 32meg 200/250mhz DDR-SDRAM

MidRange:
1 'Rampage', 1 'SAGE', 64meg DDR-SDRAM

HighEnd:
2 'Rampage' in SLI, 1 'SAGE', 128meg DDR-SDRAM

2 Sages were supported, but it wouldve never made it into production due to 1 Sage being powerful enough for the time.


What a shame....
But regarding the Voodoo 5 6000, I would imagine that 8xAA would give the same hit as 4xAA on the Voodoo 5 5500...I remember that hit; in 16-bit, it was somewhat playable, but in 32-bit...MURDER! So in essence, 4xAA on the 6k is playable, and looks damn good; I know, I have/had (sitting in the closet) at Voodoo 5 5500, and now I have a 9500...I compare the AA all the time, and b*tch and moan :D

Oh btw, I heard from someone that officially, 3dfx still has an office somewhere. But I can't understand why, they obviously don't do or make anything, so why would they still be renting office space
Ahh well, one of the great mysteries of the universe.

That's news to me...hmmm, wonder what they're doing...:confused:

[Edge]

Holy crap, 12.8 gigabyte memory bandwidth? Isn't that higher then a TI4600? And the amazing thing is that it actually says the high-end card would have TWO chips on it in SLI mode! Man, even if the thing cost $600, there would've still been people willing to buy it back then. A shame it never made it to market, it would've been a nice alternative to the 8500.

I must say, I don't remember the specs for Rampage being that high. Was that claim about free AA/aniso really true? If so they were certainly ahead of their time, and it almost sounds like it had an AA method you'd expect to find in the NEXT generation of cards (the ones that haven't been released yet). Hell, the XGI Volari only supports plain super-sample AA!

And yeah, the V5 6000 was basicly just a double-speed V5 5500 (since it has 4 of everything hooked up in SLI mode, as opposed to 2 of everything in the 5500). So 4x AA on the 6000 would've been as fast as 2x AA on the 5500, etc. Though I'm not sure how good THAT card would've done in the market, it was going to be $600 but unlike the Rampage it didn't really bring anything new to the table: just a faster version of a card that was already out (though that tactic seems to be working good for ATI and Nvidia!).

[Gator]

Lecram25, that information is facinating! I never knew all that about the Rampage? I didn't know 3dfx was gonna move away from glide, and that 12.8gig mem bandwidth... amazing for its time! Ok, I'm gonna advertise my 3dfx case badge with pride then, that card looks terrific, and clearly I would have a 3dfx card if they were alive today. It sounds like they really did have a handle on things, and I suppose that makes me a 3dfx fan boy too (may they R.I.P.). Sweet pics too, I never saw a real Rampage board before, I got the impression no prototypes were ever completed. WOW! :eek:

I might just have to save this post w/ images on my hard drive :cool:

Lecram25 - where did you find all this wonderful info? Are you a former 3dfx employee! (Gator pays homage to Lecram) :D

I hope you don't mind but I've copied much of your post to http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33726388

[Unit01]

When i first read the thread title i thought he would mention guru3d

[StealthHawk]

You guys are assuming 3dfx could have delivered it on time. And that all those specs are correct.

Rampage will always be the holy grail of 3d graphics.