vetz wrote on 2012-09-20, 04:17:

Original Rendition site is lost forever due to robots.txt. So here are two OEM webpages: Intergraph Intense 3D 100 - Creative 3D Blaster PCI

not entirely lost some files and pages available http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.rendition.com/* clic on urls

Great found!
http://web.archive.org/web/19970605063404/htt … m:80/v1000.html
http://web.archive.org/web/19981205151647/htt … m:80/v2000.html
(I also have found other pages on archive.org that earlier said that "due robot.txt" but now available.)

Yeah I have an off brand rendition card and the drivers were lost to time unfortunately so I just used rendtions reference ones , its a bit alarming how much information and files have been lost from the internet for good , so i have to give thanks to everyone out there thats archiving anything they can. We are well and truly into the era of software archaeology.

Hy there
Someone isnt have diamond nv1 version of descent destination saturn?

envagyok wrote on 2024-01-25, 15:58:

Hy there
Someone isnt have diamond nv1 version of descent destination saturn?

I have sent you a link.

Thank you

I think when Nvidia listed "Mixman - Spin Control" as an NV1 accelerated title, they meant accelerated audio, not video. The Mixman software has had barely any graphics in any version. But what it had was DirectSound acceleration since the Win95 versions.
The archived Mixman site also links to Nvidia - under the "Sound Cards and Multimedia Speakers" section...

So, I had a really stupid idea today and figured that this thread was a good place to post it (don't take that the wrong way! 😁).

I was looking at some early 3D accelerators and thinking about how they gave them these exciting sounding names(Laguna3D, Tasmania3D, Virge etc.), but realistically there was no way that most of these early products would ever actually be useful for 3D games before they were made obsolete... things were moving incredibly fast back then. BUT... without the constraints of trying to make a competitive product on a tight schedule, what would they have been capable of? Look at the amazing things that have been done with old hardware over the years, like the 8088mph demos for example.

My idea is this: are any of the very early 3D accelerators documented well enough (maybe even with source code for drivers, APIs, etc.) for some hobbyists to make them live up to their flashy names, or to achieve some of what the manufacturers originally promised? What if one of these early cards could be used alongside a much faster CPU (let the fast CPU do what it does better) and a proper driver to far exceed what it was originally capable of?

Yes, this is really pretty pointless other than to simply test the limits of some very obscure and obsolete hardware, but I think it would be interesting. Obviously the teams behind "decelerators" like the Laguna3D, Tasmania 3D and Virge were VERY short on time and funding for them to have performed so poorly or had so little software support. It'd be interesting to see what a modern look at 3D graphics programming could do with cards like these.

Possible candidates not mentioned above: Chromatic Mpact! series, early Matrox cards, Trident 3Dimage\Blade3D, NumberNine Revolution series, 3DLabs Glint or Permedia etc...

Maybe it's more feasible with something slightly less obscure? Perhaps expanding the usefulness of early PowerVR, ATi or Intel graphics chips...

Disclaimer: I am just thinking out loud. I have no graphics or driver programming experience.

Laguna3D was not that early. And is d3d compatible just like Virge, which has it's S3d library on top. So I don't know what you mean by little software support.

I see signs of excellence before Voodoo Graphics. Like 3D Blaster VLB pushing 800x600, Ultimate Race on Midas3, or VQuake.

RReady Rendition Verite wrapper in development, stable release at Microsoft Store

p.s. ALSO Formula 1 can run now on v2200 and v2100 , previously only worked on v1000 Test: Running Formula 1 on a Rendition Verité V2200: Works (fully functional)

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2024-03-13, 08:48:

RReady Rendition Verite wrapper in development, stable release at Microsoft Store

This is great, but I think Ozzuneoj was meant new and better drivers and API libraries for some of the first 3D accelerator videocards (known as "decelerators"), not a DirectX/OpenGL wrapper for some proprietary API.

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-03-13, 14:50:

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2024-03-13, 08:48:

RReady Rendition Verite wrapper in development, stable release at Microsoft Store

This is great, but I think Ozzuneoj was meant new and better drivers and API libraries for some of the first 3D accelerator videocards (known as "decelerators"), not a DirectX/OpenGL wrapper for some proprietary API.

Yes, this is what I meant.

And I guess "early" was the wrong thing to focus on. I was referring more to the devices that were borderline useless as 3D accelerators and yet were marketed as having such features. Regarding support, I meant from the manufacturer as well as game developers. When they are supported (being Direct3D compatible for example) there still tend to be a lot of graphical problems and the performance tends to be lower than using software mode with a 2-3 year newer CPU.

I just wonder if any of these devices had someone putting in some hours to squashing driver bugs and optimizing things (especially to make use of the massive improvements in CPU performance from ~1995-1999) if they could actually be more useful.

Most of those chips were just BAD and no amount of software polish is going to rescue them.

Most of the chips of the early 3D consumer videocards are not much worse than Voodoo1 add-on 3D card on paper, but 3dfx turned out to have the best drivers and support in win9x and games.

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-03-14, 03:20:

Most of the chips of the early 3D consumer videocards are not much worse than Voodoo1 add-on 3D card on paper, but 3dfx turned out to have the best drivers and support in win9x and games.

This is pretty much what I was thinking. They were all really weak, but some were actually usable like the Voodoo 1. It really came down to software support, which can be said of any graphics card. How much better would those cards be if 25-30 more years of knowledge of real time 3D graphics were applied over time to the drivers? Coming from SGI, the people behind 3dfx had about as much experience in that field as anyone could have possibly had at the time and look at the difference it made when combined with support from game developers.

These days lots of old games have source code available to help with direct optimization from that end, so it really comes down to whether the resources exist to either reverse engineer or work from source code to build better drivers for some cards. If a tiny driver team only had 6 months to a year to work on the 3D portion of a graphics driver AND communicate with game developers before they had to move on to the next thing it seems logical that over a longer period of time (a year or more), one or two hobbyists could understand that device better than the original developers ever had an opportunity to.

Theoretically, a Mystique could be best very suitable for any SEGA Model1/2 arcade port for performance and visual reasons (the only card in town with stippled alpha). One little known advantage of the OG Mystique is the large texture support so there wouldn't be much compromise in that area.

PowerVR had a lot of time to cook - founded in 1992, demo'd in 1995 (with the intent for arcades) but switched gears to PC into the next year and they've always done things their own funny (and very patented) way.

Two of 3dfx's early products also suffered from compatibility issues, bad support and drivers and they're hated no less than other non-3dfx "3D decelerators" of the time - Voodoo Rush and Voodoo Banshee.

yes with optimized drivers they can perform much better, low level assembly optimization etc.
any way emulating them or have wrappers is more practical, to make games playable again, to save software, or even enhance them by forcing resolution, and forcing other enhancements like 32 bit color, texture filtering, could be very interesting to force texture filtering in wrapper of MSI.

Or there is other interesting way, if those cards get produced nowadays again by fans like Anthony XCL* doing. They now rare except s3 virge, ati 3d rage...

P.S. Verite even have low consumption AA and shaders Re: Test: Running Formula 1 on a Rendition Verité V2200

Wrappers and emulations are OK for newer (current) hardware. Personally I'm not a fan of emulations/virtualizations and I prefer original hardware.

The most coolest dream is to have newly made video card which is:
Creative 3D Blaster PCI
PowerVR
3dfx Voodoo
Paradise Tasmania 3D

The ultimate API master)