Jorpho wrote:

leileilol wrote:

You don't even have to do that. FF7 always used Direct3D when you're using the Riva patch/option or not. There's also Glide support too.

o rly? It seems to me that people were having a lot of problems getting this game running with hardware acceleration. I certainly recall that the official readme only had a very short list of cards.

EDIT: I guess those who reported such problems were unaware of that TNT patch.

I don't even use the TNT patch and I can run the game okay. Nvidia doesn't really like maintaining compatibility with games though so it's not just ff7 that messes up on their geforce cards.

I run a Radeon, and can play FF7 on it.

I messed around with IndyCar 2 and its Verite patch a year ago or so. It actually is very good looking, fast, and uses anti-aliasing for a very clean look. I was very impressed with the anti-aliasing because AA is certainly not something that gets used frequently in games even today.

A couple of years ago I took some screens of VQuake on a V1000. These also use the edge AA these cards could do. 768x576 is the highest resolution the card could do. A catch to edge AA is that it misses intersections between models and the environment.

Here's a link to a Usenet discussion about the development of VQuake.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.p … d9ce71f1e1f6484

I don't have any shots of IndyCar 2. I'm not sure if it has a screenshot-taking capability. Maybe I'll see if it does.

GL1zdA wrote:

S3 S3D

By the way, the only hardware-accelerated version of Terminal Velocity is for the S3 Virge (S3D). It actually runs pretty well, too. So does the Tomb Raider Virge patch actually. Virge can look somewhat better than Voodoo1, believe it or not, because Voodoo1 has a very blurry filtering quality.

i've never seen vquake actually. Is the dynamic light a big orange glowy ball similar to GLQuake?

PNG screenies? It's hard to zoom in and study with the JPG artifacts getting in the way.

leileilol wrote:

i've never seen vquake actually. Is the dynamic light a big orange glowy ball similar to GLQuake?

PNG screenies? It's hard to zoom in and study with the JPG artifacts getting in the way.

WYSIWYG 😀 It's not as good as GLQuake, but is a lot better than plain Quake. No transparent water. You get bilinear filtering, mip mapping, optional edge AA, and a lot more speed.

Maybe I'll get the V2100 rumbling and make more shots of stuff.

ah well maybe it's a case of rose-tinted glasses or dodgy memory at work -but I did have SLI'd Voodoo2's in the same box as the rendition (luckily I didn't give those away!) but I'm sure I always tended to think VQuake looked the better and used that in preference to GLQuake. As I say, maybe a case of RTG and loyalty to my first 3d card, but it seemed sharper, brighter and the lighting was pretty yummy 😀
But then I've a lot fewer braincells than I used to have, so that assertion could either be entirely accurate, somewhat subjective or entirely wrong 😁
Probably I wasn't so bothered about the water on Q1 as my housemate at the time didn't have a 3d card - so it'd have been 'cheating' to be able to see into the water 🤣

IndyCar 2 certainly was great on Rendition, also I had Mechwarrior 2 was it? some robot stompy shooty game anyways!
Although have to say not long after these came Falcon 4.0 using Glide on dual voodoo 2's, that was also pretty sweet to look at what with the cockpit reflection of your own helmet! Then Heretic 2 and Quake 2 (albeit Q2 bit jerky) ... these early 3d accelerators really were a stellar leap forward in visuals compared to games running on the old Trident, Cirrus and other popular 2d video cards of course! like colour compared to black+white tv I suppose!

btw thanks for the rendition ebay links swaaye, sadly though I'm over in England, "on the other side of the pond", so they're a no-go for me... ah well...
I don't suppose you can grab a few swimmy pics from rendition Tomb Raider 1 can you? (or at least tell me if the water isn't as pretty as I seem to remember it 🤣)

hmm just previewed this, and not sure I've used enough smilies!

swaaye wrote:

A catch to edge AA is that it misses intersections between models and the environment

just read that - but wasn't it more a feature rather than a catch of VQuake that you could choose to apply (edge) AA just to the models, the 'world', to particles or to all three. More granularity = better choice of performance vs quality? (r_antialias)

ha, just stumbled over a bit of verite chatter while looking for info on that setting to make sure i wasn't talking complete nonsense... now where have I seen that username before... 😁

samudra wrote:

There was a Vesa Local Bus version as well. It was based around a completely different chipset (3D Labs' Glint 3D). I don't know which API was used.

It would be quite hard to find. But it seems that at least Creative's Verite based PCI cards support it. Maybe it would be possible to trick the game to run through it on non-Creative Verite cards.

swaaye wrote:

Here's a Diamond Stealth II S220 (Verite V2100). BTW, Diamond released a BIOS update for these boards that upped core and RAM clocks to V2200 speed. I bought one brand new back then for $50 when Diamond was trying to dump them.

I already have a Verite V2100 card from #9, but this could be another Diamond in my collection 😀

swaaye wrote:

I have a few Verite cards. Am fascinated by them for some reason. Here are some scans. 😀

Nice!

swaaye wrote:

Oooh, and here's a weird one. Not Verite-related tho.

Yes, I know this one, the Laguna 3D was only on Creative cards (and possibly some OEM's).

What was the #9 Verite card called? I thought they canned that card.

GL1zdA wrote:

Yes, I know this one, the Laguna 3D was only on Creative cards (and possibly some OEM's).

There's Creative 3D Blaster PCI that uses Rendition Verite, and there's also Creative Graphic Blaster 3D that uses Cirrus Logic Laguna. It was kinda confusing at that time, and I almost mistakenly bought the latter while looking for the former.

Yeah you really don't want the Graphics Blaster 3D for anything. 😀

BUMP!
Can someone give me some more information on the Cirrus Logic Laguna card? Did it support Direct 3D or Open GL at all? How well did it fare performance wise ( 3D)?

...I have a feeling that it was terrible 🤣

Yeah most probably 😜
Something just doesn't make sense, my first PC ever, a Pentium 133 with 64MB RAM and an S3 Virge used to play MDK 2 and ONI. I remember running them (albeit DOGSLOW), but as far as I know S3 Virge never supported Open GL (these games only use Open GL) so it must have been another card. While searching through some floppy disks I found a lot of them with Cirrus Logic drivers. So I came to the conclusion that maybe I had one of these.

Screaming 2D performance. Unbelievable 3D acceleration. Liquid smooth video playback. With Creative's Graphics Blaster™ 3D, you […]
Show full quote

Screaming 2D performance. Unbelievable 3D acceleration. Liquid smooth video playback. With Creative's Graphics Blaster™ 3D, you get it all. It's the Windows 95 accelerator you need to fully power your multimedia PC. Powered by a supercharged 2D/3D/video acclerator, 4MB of state-of-the-art Rambus memory, and a 230MHz DAC, Creative's Graphics Blaster™ 3D gives you the speed for serious work and serious fun.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS
* High performance graphics engine with Advanced 3D features
* Whopping 4MB of Rambus(RDRAM) memory resulting in high bandwidth at a low cost with fully featured 3D support.
* Screen resolution of up to 1600 x 1200 for a really large work space
* Color depths of up to 24-bit true color (16.7 million colors)
* Vertical Refresh rates of up to 150Hz
* Supports Plug and Play standards for fast, easy installation
* VESA DDC1 and 2B compliant monitor connector enables it to recognize 'plug and play' monitors
* Full support for DPMS and low power modes saves energy in compliance with EPA green PC standards
* High performance drivers for Windows95 (including DirectDraw, Direct3D and DirectVideo), Windows NT, AutoCAD and 3D Studio.
* Software MPEG player capable of up to 30 frames per second playback on high end Pentium systems
* Supports all popular video formats, including Indeo, Cinepak, MS-Video 1, AVI, CD-i, Video CD 1.0, Video CD 1.1, Video CD 2.0 and CD-Karaoke

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
* IBM PC-compatible
* PCI bus slot
* Windows95, or Windows NT 3.51
* Supports all standard VGA and multi frequency monitors

GRAPHICS BLASTER 3D REFRESH RATES

All standard VGA modes are available. The following extended video modes are also available:
Max. Vertical Refresh rates*(HZ) Colors
Resolution 256 64k 16.8 million
640x480 60-150 60-150 60-150
800x600 56-120 56-120 56-120
1024x768 43-100 43-100 43-85
1280x1024 60-85 43-85
1600x1200 48-60
*Refresh rates shown are the highest obtainable and are monitor-dependent. Resolutions, pixel depths and refresh rates are driver-dependent and may not be available in all applications or operating systems

BUNDLED SOFTWARE

VREAM™ WIRL 3D Web-Browser
VREAM: WIRL VREAM's WIRL lets you navigate, explore and interact with 3D VRML worlds on the web. Play virtual slot machines, fly helicoptors, watch 3D logos spin and more - all on the Web. WIRL will simply amaze you!

Microsoft™ Interactive CD sampler
CD sampler Try out the latest DirectX games! This Interactive CD sampler from Microsoft contains 17 trial versions of software including Hellbender, Monster Truck Madness (trial versions) and 15 other hot 2D and 3D titles!

I remember the reviews being less than positive about the card.

So it supports Direct 3D huh? How about OpenGL?
4MB RDRAM? Seriously? Talk about a waste...

About the only cards with usable OpenGL back then were professional cards and 3dfx. I'm sure this thing was barely functional even with D3D. That's what I remember reading in reviews.

swaaye wrote:

Screaming swears at screen 2D performance. Unbelievably slow 3D deceleration. Liquid smooth molasses video playback. With Creative's Graphics Blaster™ 3D, you get it all. It's the Windows 95 deccelerator you need to fully depower your multimedia PC. Powered by a superdischarged 2D/3D/video acclerator, 4MB of state-of-the-art-for-1993 Rambus memory, and a 230MHz DAC that doesn't do anything, Creative's Graphics Blaster™ 3D gives you the speed for serious wait and serious coffee.

I remember the reviews being less than positive about the card.

FIXED!

Just wanted to add some more info regarding games supporting S3's S3D API. According to the now gone S3 Planet page, there are also S3D versions of:
- Actua Soccer (it mentions the OEM semi-final version, there was no full game patch. Never saw this).
- POD (I have this myself. POD Gold came with the game and all the different executables for all the different API's).
- Terracide DEMO (Again, never saw it).
- Time Warriors (Again, never saw it).
Also, over the years, for me it has been impossible to reach or find the S3 ViRGE edition of Mechwarrior 2 (someone have it ?). If anyone knows or has some info about the Actua Soccer OEM, Terracide or Time Warriors, please share your info!

All I know about Time Warriors is that you can get your very own nice minty copy for $15 at http://www.cdaccess.com/html/quick/timewarrpr.htm .