Reply 40 of 185, by kool kitty89
wrote:wrote:Excellent videos! We need more old graphics hardware captured on video!
How about some of the early (or late) ATi Rage cards?I have a ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra card. That's the second generation Rage 128 chip.
I have a Rage Pro PCI card I could test at some point, and Rage II PCI cards are very common/cheap around here (probably on Ebay too, but Weird Stuff has a ton of them -probably the most common PCI accelerator after ViRGE based stuff), so I might pick up one of those eventually to try out. (if I get around to it, don't expect any results particularly soon though 😉)
From personal experience playing games on a K6-2 300 and 500 with the Rage Pro, it tended to work quite well for late 90s games (Rogue Squadron, X-Wing Alliance, and Episode 1 Racer all ran decent to good iirc).
wrote:What model ViRGE chipset was used for that? The S3 games look quite good, at least compared to the poor reputation that card has. (a bit framey, but with full effects/filtering/perspective correction on and what looks like 640x480 res . . . so a playable framerate with visual quality miles better than the software renderer or Playstation -or Saturn- versions)
Yeah the image quality is very good and the framerate is adequate for the time. The card is a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 with 4MB EDO DRAM. I also have a STB Nitro 3D (Virge GX with 4MB EDO) that I plan to try out with these S3D games.
How many games allowed custom detail adjustment for ViRGE? With detail turned down to near-Matrox levels, it should have been much faster. (this was also applicable to RAGE chips since the fillrate dramatically increased with filtering disabled) -And aside from speed, the option to disable dithered shading/blending would be nice too. (some people prefer the posterized look over dithered graininess -a different case than the Matrox dithering mind-you)
Even without filtering, you'd still have nicer shading/color than software rendering, and obviously the difference would be far more substantial with slower CPUs. (the likes of the ViRGE should be much more fillrate limited and less CPU-speed limited, so slower CPUs that struggle with software rendering could see a dramatic improvement in speed even with full effects enabled, whereas a fast CPU could be faster in software)
Is the Direct3D support for ViRGE as poor as many reviews/articles imply, or is that exaggerated too? (I see similar comments about the RAGE chips, but I never experienced those problems myself -then again, I had my dad's help with tweaking the system)