swaaye wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

Did you have the DDR2 variant by any chance? I had one and, yes, that thing is pretty slow. The true non-cheapo 8600 with GDDR3 memory was supposed to be decent, but I never had one of those.

The problem was NV initially wanted $250+ for these chips that were about 1/4 an 8800GTX. The initial D3D10 midrange chips were just a rip off. Radeon HD 3800 and GeForce 9600 were much better.

True. The 8600 were not the great mid-range parts that the 6600GT and 7600GS/GT were. 7600 GT was usually faster or on par with the 6800GT AFAIR, 8600GT couldn't touch the 7800GT, let alone the 7800GTX/7900GT/GTX.
The 9600 GT was really nice, fast and inexpensive, I upgraded a friend's Core2Duo at the time, he really wanted to play Call of Duty 4 and 5 and the 9600GT was a great deal for my budget-minded friend.

Nvidia nv1

HighTreason wrote:

Whatever that SiS thing was in the SiS 530 chipset. Often throws a fit when asked to do anything at all. I didn't mind the 6326 though, that had a purpose at least and was dirt cheap.

That is funny, I believe that the 530 integrates 6326 with bigger texture cache, were there other differences?

You sure? If so, I am probably getting mixed up with a different chipset. Whatever it was, it was made by SiS and it was common in Time systems on the ECS boards they had. Of course, it is also possible that they were just a 6326 in a crappy configuration but I am sure they needed different drivers and I guarantee the performance was lower because I upgraded on to a PCI 6326 card years back which improved performance dramatically.

Davros wrote:

Nvidia nv1

Again... why?

Maybe it's such a bad card that does not need explanations, but I'd like to know your reasons.

The worst one ive used was probably the original S3 Virge . Slow 3D , average 2D , and what I would consider to be sub par image quality (maybe I was spoiled by the Matrox , ATI and 3DFX cards).

Zup wrote:

Davros wrote:

Nvidia nv1

Again... why?

Maybe it's such a bad card that does not need explanations, but I'd like to know your reasons.

I guess it was a 'useless' card more than anything. Its unique rendering method meant that it couldn't really handle conventional triangle workloads from D3D or OGL very well.
When you had games that were specifically developed for the NV1's rendering method (mostly ports from Sega Saturn, which uses a similar approach), I don't think it was all that bad. But the rest of the world went in another direction, leaving the NV1 high and dry. I think nVidia recovered quite well though 😉
Nice video covering the stuff: https://youtu.be/jChtlWNIAL4

The NV1 doesn't make my list for various reasons. The main one being the same reason several other cards aren't on my list; it was a first attempt, so it was allowed to fail. nVidia learned quickly and replaced it with a decent card two years later - though we did nearly get an NV2.

HighTreason wrote:

it was a first attempt, so it was allowed to fail.

Well, I have somewhat of a soft spot for stuff that may have been a commercial failure, but wasn't a technical failure. The Commodore Amiga for example. As for 3d accelerators, I've always liked the PowerVR chips as well, with their innovative tile-based deferred rendering. They had problems similar to the NV1: their rendering method had some idiosyncracies that made it difficult to run D3D/OGL code properly. Although not as badly as the NV1, it was mostly a case of code being written in a sloppy way so the driver's heuristics could not determine the beginning and end of a frame properly. Which is something that is required for deferred rendering to work properly: you need to know when to defer, and when to render 😀

One thing I always found interesting about the SiS 6326 is despite being "crappy", it had excellent driver support! Full support for stuff like OS/2, DOS AutoCAD, and even Windows 3.1x. The VGA BIOS even claims to support VBE 3.0 too.

6326 also has MPEG 2 decode hardware. I don't know if it's any good though.

swaaye wrote:

6326 also has MPEG 2 decode hardware.

Only motion compensation right?

By the way when I tested this card (PCI) I was also quiet impressed by drivers and general compatibility. Obviously for the time it was intended.

Surprised no one mentioned two cards that became very hyped but failed helplessly; SiS Xabre and S3 Chrome-series.

After a few years ATI and nvidia had played around the scene, these two were about to do a sprakling comeback. I remember especially the S3 Deltachrome that was going to perform as the top ATI/nvidia cards at a much less price.

I think the failure of SiS and S3 had a lot to do with poor drivers. They probable didn't realize that 3D-gaming was at least as much software as hardware

Marquzz wrote:

Surprised no one mentioned two cards that became very hyped but failed helplessly; SiS Xabre and S3 Chrome-series.

Haha, perhaps because nobody had those 😀
I can also recall the Volari cards. Never seen one of those either.

I like the DDR3 8600gt because people toss them all of the time and they make great Aero cards for a Vista or 7 machines with crappy GMA graphics.

I has 8600GTS from Gigabyte and I played Gothic 3 even in FullHD, also Serious Sam 3 was playable on that card on medium. But that card died few days ago and I must use GT210 which is very slow card even aero in 7 slowed down a bit compairing to 8600GTS and I don`t like that card. In my opinion GT210 is a bad card and worst is GeForce 4MX440, slow, without shaders, card for nothing, even Radeon 9200 or 9000 are far better.

Scali wrote:

Marquzz wrote:

Surprised no one mentioned two cards that became very hyped but failed helplessly; SiS Xabre and S3 Chrome-series.

Haha, perhaps because nobody had those 😀
I can also recall the Volari cards. Never seen one of those either.

That's true 😀 Everyone was like "yes yes yes...reviews...no."

Volari, yea, they were more or less a paperlaunch that never saw retail. At least not in Europe.

Darkman wrote:

The worst one ive used was probably the original S3 Virge . Slow 3D , average 2D , and what I would consider to be sub par image quality (maybe I was spoiled by the Matrox , ATI and 3DFX cards).

Strongly disagree with you here. While there are indeed S3 Virge cards with horrible output quality (cheap brands like colormate) a proper specimen made by a reputable graphics company has great output quality. My ELSA (Winner 3000) and Diamond (Stealth 2000) S3 Virge cards look as good as a Millennium II all the way up to 800x600 / 32. Maybe even 1024x768 / 32. At 320x240 or 640x480 the S3 wins hands down due to better compatibility. The problem with Trio and Virge cards is finding a good one, as 70% of the cards out there are pure cheap crap.

I do agree that 3D is crap, but the millennium isn't much better.

I had an XGI Volari V3.
It had pretty good picture quality/sharpness.

I guess that on 3d it'd suck, but the "competitive" FX5200 and Ati Radeon 9200 also did not exactly stand out... 😜

I had trouble finding appropriate drivers though.

Well if you should consider the "hype" factor, well the list would be much longer. 😁