This particular "brand" of 3D has seen its fair share of mention over the past few days, and reminded me of the days when I owned two of these days.
Which video cards have you owned at one time or another? What did you think of them?
Whether a result of the money spent or simply my interest in performance improvements, I can recall fairly clearly the performance of each card that I have owned.
I actually started out with a Matrox Mystique 2mb. It was an OEM card included with the first PC that "I" actually purchased (and, technically, the last...as I built the rest). Absolutely lacking in performance and features to the point where I'd hardly classify it was a 3D card. Well, I could play Mech 2 Mercs in D3D (with no filtering, though) and it looked rather nice. 2mb wasn't enough for most games, though. Tomb Raider 2, for instance, would constantly drop out textures and display white polygons instead (depending on the resolution). At 512x384, the textures remained...by anything higher was a mess.
I'd consider the PowerVR PCX2 to be my first real 3D card, though. It was a Matrox M3D, actually.
http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/m3d/home.cfm
I was sold on the card at a local tradeshow when I witnessed Ultim@te Race running. 640x480, 30 fps, and some impressive lighting and shadows. The card served me well, but simply had too many problems in the end.
D3D support was awful. Games in D3D would often run slowly and exhibited a multitude of rendering flaws. Texture shaking was also rather common on both the PCX2 and Neon 250 when running D3D apps. It would appear as if some of the textures weren't quite attached to anything and would float/pulsate just a tad as you moved over them.
Here a game I enjoyed on the PC (not N64) and an example of D3D flaws...
Turok on Voodoo
Turok on PCX2 (though my framerates were higher)
See that nasty pixelation of the water fall texture was SOOO common in D3D. In fact, this is something occured on the Neon 250 as well. I saw this in a number of Dreamcast games as well. Never did understand why that occured. Also note the alpha texture problems with the sky (looked very bad when moving above the clouds) as well as the missing geometry (mountain cuts off where clouds begin)? Very common problems with D3D games.
OGL support LOOKED incredible (the image quality was really nice), but the actual performance was very slow in most OGL games. Quake 2 often dropped into the teens. The PCX2 taught me how to mouse look, though. I kid you not, but I started using the mouse as a method of looking towards the ground and making smaller movements in order to counter the bad framerate. Looking towards the ground somewhat while walking prevented the game from slowly to a crawl at certain scenes. So, thanks to PowerVR, I discovered mouse look.
To be fair, it turns out that I was short changing the PCX2 by using a K6. Everyone seemed to love the K6, but it had such a slow FPU. Voodoo on a K6? No problem. PVR, though, really ran into issues when games became FPU heavy. A friend of mine had a P200mmx, which handled games like Quake 2 a bit better (though still not that well).
PowerSGL games were excellent looking, though. Well, most of them. Unreal supported SGL, but it did not support all of the features properly on the PCX2 and the SGL version ended up looking vastly inferior to the Glide version.
After dealing with these issues, I decided to jump over to the Glide side of things and bought a Voodoo 1 (Diamond Monster 3D).
Disappointingly, my first Voodoo overheated and died after just 3 days. ONE MONTH LATER when it returned, though, I was back in action. The Voodoo absolutely DESTROYED the PCX2 in terms of performance. The actual image quality wasn't as good (strange band dithering in areas with lots of alpha), but the card was just superior in every other way.
Eventually, I moved onto a Voodoo 2 (12mb) and, from there, dual V2s. When I made the jump to the V2, I also moved up to a P2-450 and an Intel 740 card (dirt cheap). Not impressive in the least. The V2 was a decent step up and would remain in my PC for years to come. I can't actually recall which 3rd party company distributed my particular brand of V2, but that hardly matters.
From there, the next stop was a TNT1.
Awful dithering in 16-bit color aside, the card was very decent. I never found that it could stand up to a V2, though, as its AGP nature seemed to really want more memory and games using this card would constantly page the HDD.
Between the TNT and 250, I used a Voodoo 3 for about 6 months. It was not mine, however. I simply borrowed it. The card was actually very very good. Great performance, incredible 16-bit image quality (nearly on par with the N250), and lots of support.
After the TNT, my next card would be the Neon 250.
I was totally crazy about the DC, so I had to have the hardware that was in the DC in my PC. I used it along with my Voodoo 2 cards.
Many problems were resolved with this card (Unreal now worked properly), but it still did not care for D3D and generally stuck to the V2s (despite inferior image quality). I really ended up switching back and forth between them depending on the game. The most disappointing aspect of this card was its poor anti-aliasing performance. That was such a touted feature prior to release, but it was not usable in most games. It was, however, my first time actually seeing such a feature in action and, to be fair, the 9700 Pro was the very first card I owned where AA became a useful feature.
I kept this in the P2-450, though, and when I moved to a P3-733, I simply bought a GeForce DDR.
It becomes less interesting from here, as I went from GF1 to GF2 to Radeon 8500 to Radeon 9700 Pro to nVidia 6800 series. I also had experience with the final Voodoo cards.
Well, gee, that was a somewhat pointless post. Still, let's hear some other "old videocard" tales.
Which video cards have you owned at one time or another? What did you think of them?
Whether a result of the money spent or simply my interest in performance improvements, I can recall fairly clearly the performance of each card that I have owned.
I actually started out with a Matrox Mystique 2mb. It was an OEM card included with the first PC that "I" actually purchased (and, technically, the last...as I built the rest). Absolutely lacking in performance and features to the point where I'd hardly classify it was a 3D card. Well, I could play Mech 2 Mercs in D3D (with no filtering, though) and it looked rather nice. 2mb wasn't enough for most games, though. Tomb Raider 2, for instance, would constantly drop out textures and display white polygons instead (depending on the resolution). At 512x384, the textures remained...by anything higher was a mess.
I'd consider the PowerVR PCX2 to be my first real 3D card, though. It was a Matrox M3D, actually.
http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/m3d/home.cfm
I was sold on the card at a local tradeshow when I witnessed Ultim@te Race running. 640x480, 30 fps, and some impressive lighting and shadows. The card served me well, but simply had too many problems in the end.
D3D support was awful. Games in D3D would often run slowly and exhibited a multitude of rendering flaws. Texture shaking was also rather common on both the PCX2 and Neon 250 when running D3D apps. It would appear as if some of the textures weren't quite attached to anything and would float/pulsate just a tad as you moved over them.
Here a game I enjoyed on the PC (not N64) and an example of D3D flaws...
Turok on Voodoo
Turok on PCX2 (though my framerates were higher)
See that nasty pixelation of the water fall texture was SOOO common in D3D. In fact, this is something occured on the Neon 250 as well. I saw this in a number of Dreamcast games as well. Never did understand why that occured. Also note the alpha texture problems with the sky (looked very bad when moving above the clouds) as well as the missing geometry (mountain cuts off where clouds begin)? Very common problems with D3D games.
OGL support LOOKED incredible (the image quality was really nice), but the actual performance was very slow in most OGL games. Quake 2 often dropped into the teens. The PCX2 taught me how to mouse look, though. I kid you not, but I started using the mouse as a method of looking towards the ground and making smaller movements in order to counter the bad framerate. Looking towards the ground somewhat while walking prevented the game from slowly to a crawl at certain scenes. So, thanks to PowerVR, I discovered mouse look.
To be fair, it turns out that I was short changing the PCX2 by using a K6. Everyone seemed to love the K6, but it had such a slow FPU. Voodoo on a K6? No problem. PVR, though, really ran into issues when games became FPU heavy. A friend of mine had a P200mmx, which handled games like Quake 2 a bit better (though still not that well).
PowerSGL games were excellent looking, though. Well, most of them. Unreal supported SGL, but it did not support all of the features properly on the PCX2 and the SGL version ended up looking vastly inferior to the Glide version.
After dealing with these issues, I decided to jump over to the Glide side of things and bought a Voodoo 1 (Diamond Monster 3D).
Disappointingly, my first Voodoo overheated and died after just 3 days. ONE MONTH LATER when it returned, though, I was back in action. The Voodoo absolutely DESTROYED the PCX2 in terms of performance. The actual image quality wasn't as good (strange band dithering in areas with lots of alpha), but the card was just superior in every other way.
Eventually, I moved onto a Voodoo 2 (12mb) and, from there, dual V2s. When I made the jump to the V2, I also moved up to a P2-450 and an Intel 740 card (dirt cheap). Not impressive in the least. The V2 was a decent step up and would remain in my PC for years to come. I can't actually recall which 3rd party company distributed my particular brand of V2, but that hardly matters.
From there, the next stop was a TNT1.
Awful dithering in 16-bit color aside, the card was very decent. I never found that it could stand up to a V2, though, as its AGP nature seemed to really want more memory and games using this card would constantly page the HDD.
Between the TNT and 250, I used a Voodoo 3 for about 6 months. It was not mine, however. I simply borrowed it. The card was actually very very good. Great performance, incredible 16-bit image quality (nearly on par with the N250), and lots of support.
After the TNT, my next card would be the Neon 250.
I was totally crazy about the DC, so I had to have the hardware that was in the DC in my PC. I used it along with my Voodoo 2 cards.
Many problems were resolved with this card (Unreal now worked properly), but it still did not care for D3D and generally stuck to the V2s (despite inferior image quality). I really ended up switching back and forth between them depending on the game. The most disappointing aspect of this card was its poor anti-aliasing performance. That was such a touted feature prior to release, but it was not usable in most games. It was, however, my first time actually seeing such a feature in action and, to be fair, the 9700 Pro was the very first card I owned where AA became a useful feature.
I kept this in the P2-450, though, and when I moved to a P3-733, I simply bought a GeForce DDR.
It becomes less interesting from here, as I went from GF1 to GF2 to Radeon 8500 to Radeon 9700 Pro to nVidia 6800 series. I also had experience with the final Voodoo cards.
Well, gee, that was a somewhat pointless post. Still, let's hear some other "old videocard" tales.
