Loads of games from the era roundtripped their textures through lossy S3/DXT compression and then stored them as uncompressed RGB or RGBA.
I know this because I wrote a Unreal Engine texture repacking tool with a "DXT detection" feature so that I wouldn't be responsible for losing DXT compression on a texture which had already paid the price, only to find that this situation was already hyperabundant in the ecosystem.
Many Unreal Engine games of the day could have their size robotically halved just by re-enabling DXT compression in any case where this would cause zero pixel difference. This was at a time before Steam, when game downloads routinely took a day, so I was very excited about this discovery. Unfortunately, the first few developers I emailed all reacted with hostility to an unsolicited tip from what I'm sure they saw as a hacker, so I lost interest in pushing and it went nowhere. Ah well.
The article blew a huge opportunity to showcase the great diversity of “Pioneering Era” 3D accelerators (they weren’t called GPUs until later). But instead they just pretended it was always NVIDIA vs ATI, and threw in a few Voodoos.
It was only 3dfx and NVIDIA (since the TNT) that mattered in the 1990s though. All the other 3D accelerators were only barely better than software rasterization, if at all.
Seeing Quake II run butter smooth on a Riva TNT at 1024x768 for the first time was like witnessing the second coming of Christ ;)
Before that, you could even run Quake with anti-aliasing on one of those "barely better than software rasterization" cards, couldn't even be done on the first Voodoo cards.
The G200 mattered to some degree for a long time, because most x86 servers up until a few years ago would ship a G200 implementation or at least something pretending to be a G200 card as part of their BMC for network KVM.
Probably started out as a real G200 chip which might’ve been the cheapest and easiest to integrate in the 2000s? Or it had the needed I/O features to support KVM (since this would’ve involved reading the framebuffer from the BMC side), or matrox was amenable to adding that.
I remember having a ton of servers with cut down Mach64 chips. They were so bad that you would get horizontal lines flickering across the screen while text was scrolling in an 80x25 text console. I don't know why server manufacturers go to so much effort to make the console as terrible as possible. Are they nostalgic for the 8 bit ISA graphics from the original 5150? They seem offended at the idea that someone might hook a crash cart directly up to their precious hardware.
They were probably forced to update when they dropped older busses. Without a PCI or AGP bus on there they have to find something that can hang off of a PCIe lane.
Even current Dell servers less than a year old ship with G200 graphics. If it works, why change it? A 1998 ASIC can be put in the corner of a modern chipset for pennies or less.
My contributions: Matrox Parhelia for the first card supporting triple-monitors, and ATI All-in-Wonder which did TV out when media centre TVs weren’t really a thing.
I remember there was a kernel module for the Matrox/MPlayer combination. You get a new device that MPlayer could use. You did get -vo mga for the console and -vo xmga for X11; you couldn't tell the difference, and both produced high-quality hardware YUV output.
Recency bias probably, Iirc I think the 3000 and 4000 series did make significant improvements on RTX performance so compared to the 2000 series it's far more useful today.
4000 certainly did, the "shader execution reordering" gave an meaningful uplift to tasks that "underutilized warp units due to scattered useful pixels".
Matrox was really halfhearted with game support. They seemed far more interested in corporate customers, advertising heavily stuff like "VR" conference calls that nobody wants. They were early with multi-monitor support back when monitors were big, heavy, and expensive. I had a G200 that was the last video card I've ever seen where you could expand the VRAM by slotting in a SODIMM. It also had composite out so you could hook it to a TV. I played a lot of games on it up until Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was almost playable but the low res textures looked real bad and the framerate would precipitously drop at critical times like when a bunch of Nazis rushed into the room and started shooting.
Last time I saw a Matrox chip it was on a server, and somehow they had cut it down even more than the one I had used over a decade earlier. As I recall it couldn't handle a framebuffer larger than 800x600, which was sometimes a problem when people wanted to install and configure Windows Server.
because it never got opengl driver? Because it was 2x slower than even Savage3D? Nvidia TNT released a month later offering 2x the speed at lower price
Nvidia 6xxx series, which was the first card to support SLI. I remember my gaming pc in college with 6x series card, and being able to get another card and use and SLI bridge that increased performance in some games.
Nvidia GeForce 900 series, which had the Titan with 12gb, first card iirc to able to support larger resolution gaming.
Nvidia RXT series which started with 20xx i think, first card to come with 24gb of ram.
And then the modern 4xxx series which used to fry power cables.
A lot of GPUs in this list are basically just previous GPU but faster or more RAM. I kind of thought it was going to focus on interesting new architecture innovations.
I think pairing RX 5700 XT with Control as the "defining game" is an interesting choice, considering the facts 1. AMD cards were incapable of RT at the time and 2. Control was basically the first game with a good, comprehensive RT implementation that had a massive positive impact on the graphics.
Absolute nostalgia fever. About a month ago, I dug up an old desktop in the corner, took the drives out and gave away the machine. It felt like putting a racehorse to pasture: i7-4790k, 1080 Ti. It was my dream machine when I got it. Dual-boot (as we did back in the old days when Proton wasn't here) to Ubuntu, then Elementary, then Arch. By the time I gave it away it wasn't worth the power cost.
And that brought to mind my older dream machine, an 8800 GT from generations past, before which we made do with a Via Unichrome that worked sufficiently enough on the OpenChrome driver that I could edit open software (Freespace only needed a few constants changed) so it would render (though some of the image was smeared and so on I could play!).
This is a wonderful-looking infographic, but I truly don't think there are 49 GPUs that mattered in the PC gaming hardware space - let alone all of computer graphics. Call it recency bias, but after the Pascal cards it feels like maybe one or two more entrants actually mattered?
The 8800 GT is easily the most impactful GPU in my mind. The combination of that video card with valve's Orange Box was insane value proposition at the time.
I'd put the 5700xt at #2 for being the longest lived GPU I've owned by a very wide margin. It's still in use today.
If I can at least tell myself that our technological achievements come with efficiency gains instead of just apeing power throughput, I can rest a little better
I don't think much of the "defining game" thing. Many of them feel like they're just thrown in as a big game at the time - Diablo 2 is an amazing game, and was very popular, but it wasn't fully 3D and the resolution was so limited I don't think there was usually a need to buy a new video card to play it (in fact I think it might have been just fine in software most of the time).
> Apple chose the Rage 128 [Pro] for the original iMac G3, making it the most popular Mac GPU of its era.
This is misleadingly-worded because the original iMac had a 3D RAGE ⅡC, the five-colors models had 3D RAGE Pro, and the slot-loading models had the earlier RAGE 128 VR.
Well my 9070 XT made the list; I've been quite happy with it, great performance with paying the Nvidia tax.
RIP my Radeon 7500 from high school though, that was always a budget card, and we all had them but wanted the 9700. Couldn't beat the box are from that era though: https://www.ebay.com/itm/206159283550
Rx580 is on there, but not the R9 290. I’m not sure where the Rx500 series actually pushed technology forward. They always seemed like the AMD budget line. And if 580 is important, why not the 590 or the 570?
Few of the “pre-GPU” graphics accelerators that seem to have mattered are here. The ViRGE. The Mach32 and Mach64. The Trident cards, like the TGUI9440. Yet the Voodoo often isn’t considered a GPU and is on the list.
We had the Riva TNT2 in our family computer, so that was fun to see that again, I think it was paired with an AMD K6-2 chip.
One day one of my friends from school wanted to optimize airflow in our computer, and re-did the cabling, but he managed to block the CPU-fan from spinning. I am not sure how, but we didn't realise it for a couple of months.
When I got my own PC, it had an AMD Barton chip, and it allowed me to play Half-Life 2.
Awwww..., this brings so many memories. I had almost all of the early ones: Voodoo 2, Riva TNT2, then GeForce 3 (I think...). Then I switched to laptops and didn't have a discrete graphics till last year when I started playing with LLMs locally. So basically I jumped from GeForce 3 to RTX 3090 :) Thank you for bringing those memories back!
I had the Voodoo 1 with VGA passthrough from the 2D card. When you loaded a game you'd head a little clunk from a relay on the Voodoo taking over the VGA signal and you knew you were about to have a good time. Doesn't seem that long ago!
This brings so many memories. I remember how badly I wanted an GeForce 6800 Sadly, I was never able to justify spending this much money on a GPU. Still holds true, even today.
I think it's a terrible UI - requires 3 different things to see the GPUS: scrolling vertically down to see the Era buttons which then scrolls up and hides the Era buttons even if you have enough vertical screen space, clicking on the Era buttons, clicking < > buttons to see the GPUs of an Era.
I can't remember last time I've seen such a confused design.
Compute stopped behaving like a consumer good and started behaving like an infrastructure; the prices went from competitive cycles to higher while the performance kept compounding and that’s usually what happens when something becomes a bottleneck for entire industries and not just for end users so the gap between what people use and what’s at the frontier says it all.
I have fond memories of lending a Voodoo 2 from a friend when I was moving from a 486 to a K6 based system component by component. At that time I was still using my old ISA VGA card, which meant 2D performance was horrible, and I couldn't really watch videos on that thing - but thanks to the Voodoo I could play Unreal Tournament without problems.
I don't see my first GPU on there, it was the humble GeForce4 MX440. It could run almost any game I cared about for a surprisingly long time, even if it's not a true modern card.
These days almost all my machines are on iGPUs baked into the CPU. There's way less fun for me, but they are a lot more compact at least.
Ah I was just trying to remember the model names last week and this website pops up like magic, weird how the internet works sometimes. The 560 Ti was a dream for teenage me and most of my friends back then, but I must say my Radeon HD 4870 game powered most of my favourite Team Fortress 2 years.
I wouldn't call a card like the 5080 important. It was incremental compared to the previous generation, a poor value for money, and was awkwardly placed - being very cut down compared to the 90 class of that generation - significantly more than earlier generations.
The 9400 GT mattered to me as it was my first gpu. Had bought NFS Carbon only to find that the home pc only had a CD drive not DVD lol, so finally with that drive upgrade also came the 9400 GT and fun ensued.
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At the same time I'd add the S3 ViRGE and the Matrox G200. Both mattered a lot at the time, but not long term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression
I know this because I wrote a Unreal Engine texture repacking tool with a "DXT detection" feature so that I wouldn't be responsible for losing DXT compression on a texture which had already paid the price, only to find that this situation was already hyperabundant in the ecosystem.
Many Unreal Engine games of the day could have their size robotically halved just by re-enabling DXT compression in any case where this would cause zero pixel difference. This was at a time before Steam, when game downloads routinely took a day, so I was very excited about this discovery. Unfortunately, the first few developers I emailed all reacted with hostility to an unsolicited tip from what I'm sure they saw as a hacker, so I lost interest in pushing and it went nowhere. Ah well.
Seeing Quake II run butter smooth on a Riva TNT at 1024x768 for the first time was like witnessing the second coming of Christ ;)
-vo mgafor the console and-vo xmgafor X11; you couldn't tell the difference, and both produced high-quality hardware YUV output.it seems to have helped path tracing by a lot.
> S3 ViRGE and the Matrox G200
Both were only really famous for how terrible they were though. I think the S3 Virge might even qualify as 3D decelerator ;)
Last time I saw a Matrox chip it was on a server, and somehow they had cut it down even more than the one I had used over a decade earlier. As I recall it couldn't handle a framebuffer larger than 800x600, which was sometimes a problem when people wanted to install and configure Windows Server.
>S3 ViRGE
decelerator?
>Matrox G200
because it never got opengl driver? Because it was 2x slower than even Savage3D? Nvidia TNT released a month later offering 2x the speed at lower price
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-chips,83-7.html
truly a graphic card that mattered! :)
>
This is an ad from viral marketing companythey arent a marketing company:
"Dashboards, CRMs, automations. We're a small consulting team that turns your messy spreadsheets into systems that run your business."
Nvidia 6xxx series, which was the first card to support SLI. I remember my gaming pc in college with 6x series card, and being able to get another card and use and SLI bridge that increased performance in some games.
Nvidia GeForce 900 series, which had the Titan with 12gb, first card iirc to able to support larger resolution gaming.
Nvidia RXT series which started with 20xx i think, first card to come with 24gb of ram.
And then the modern 4xxx series which used to fry power cables.
> RTX 4000 and 5000
These GPUs have made DLSS and frame generation usable technologies, getting you reasonable 4k gaming on a budget.
It’s not perfect yet, but almost all new games support it and despite the widespread complaints, very few people actually disable these features.
The site looks nice, which fools us into thinking thought and effort was put into this.
Released before the Voodoo 1 with glquake and gl support for Tomb Raider.
And that brought to mind my older dream machine, an 8800 GT from generations past, before which we made do with a Via Unichrome that worked sufficiently enough on the OpenChrome driver that I could edit open software (Freespace only needed a few constants changed) so it would render (though some of the image was smeared and so on I could play!).
I'd put the 5700xt at #2 for being the longest lived GPU I've owned by a very wide margin. It's still in use today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010
If I can at least tell myself that our technological achievements come with efficiency gains instead of just apeing power throughput, I can rest a little better
> Apple chose the Rage 128 [Pro] for the original iMac G3, making it the most popular Mac GPU of its era.
This is misleadingly-worded because the original iMac had a 3D RAGE ⅡC, the five-colors models had 3D RAGE Pro, and the slot-loading models had the earlier RAGE 128 VR.
Yes those are all confusingly named by ATi :p
But based on the timeline and features mentioned, they're specifically talking about this one and not any of the earlier chips in the RAGE family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Rage#Rage_128_Pro_/_Rage_F...
iMacs didn't ship with RAGE 128 Pro until the year-2000 Indigo & DV models, by which time the RAGE 128 Pro was already 11 months old: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac//faq/imac-g3-video-p...
RIP my Radeon 7500 from high school though, that was always a budget card, and we all had them but wanted the 9700. Couldn't beat the box are from that era though: https://www.ebay.com/itm/206159283550
Few of the “pre-GPU” graphics accelerators that seem to have mattered are here. The ViRGE. The Mach32 and Mach64. The Trident cards, like the TGUI9440. Yet the Voodoo often isn’t considered a GPU and is on the list.
One day one of my friends from school wanted to optimize airflow in our computer, and re-did the cabling, but he managed to block the CPU-fan from spinning. I am not sure how, but we didn't realise it for a couple of months.
When I got my own PC, it had an AMD Barton chip, and it allowed me to play Half-Life 2.
I think Sun and HP had some 3d capabilities, but it was mostly aimed at engineering/CAD
I can't remember last time I've seen such a confused design.
I'd say Voodoo 3 mattered because it killed 3dfx.
And the Matrox Parhelia mattered for much the same reason.
> We build visual stories like this for companies
Combined with the color scheme of this site, this might be a cleverly disguised Nvidia ad.
Edit: Clicking through to their main page [1]: yeah, that's definitely an Nvidia ad.
1: https://sheets.works/data-viz/hire
also, the gpu did not exist until 1999
looks like this was created for engagement