The Serpent Rider wrote:It was a flawed GPU from the beginning which was not designed for games. Excessive 4 TMUs per pixel pipe, low clock speed, poor vertex shader performance and lack of any HSR and Z-buffer compression.
The low clock speed was most definitely not designed, it was supposed to be launched with 50% higher clock speed. The lack of advanced features was supposed to be compensated by raw bandwidth - which is a valid strategy. Of course, if your yields are crap and you can't launch at anything near the expected speeds, this strategy totally backfires.
It was the G400 all over again
Not really. G400 was clearly designed with gaming in mind and comparable to it's competitors. Drivers were somewhat lacking, but hardware potential was there.
In terms of performance vs the rest of the market is was in a very similar position. The causes for disappointing performance compared to expectation were different though.
Spot-on timing given this topic: yesterday I *finally* (after over a month of frustrating haggling and miscommunications) managed to reach an agreement with someone selling a pile of AGP cards - including a beautiful Parhelia 512 128MB. It should arrive on Saturday or so - although I won't be able to even open the package until a week later, and won't have time to do anything with it for another week. Too much travel. But if it works it's getting pride of place in one of my systems - the great thing about retro computing is that you don't need to care about price/performance ratio as when new 😉