Reply 20 of 46, by VivienM
winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:54:Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:47:Hey in the ISA era most of us had somekind of cheap clone sound. Or a Vibra16. In post ISA era most had integrated sound. In pre 3D most had just a VLB/PCI dumb framebuffer. Lucky ones had a S3 Trio or Cirrus CL-GD. Unlucy ones had somethin bizare or little incompatible or slow in some modes. Post 3D every "real gamer" had a Voodoo. But after Riva TNT wiped all up. And rest is history.
yeah the way i understand it, you were lucky if you had a s3 trio or something of that sort 93-95, 3dfx voodoo graphics then came along and blew everything out of the water in 96-97 but not too long after, nvidia came in the later half of the 90's 98-99, and the wiped slate clean with their riva tnt and tnt2 cards.
I would note one important thing: in the mid-1990s, large OEM PCs tended to have soldered (discrete) graphics, while white box AT clones (and built-to-order machines from the likes of Dell/Gateway/Micron) had VLB and then PCI and then AGP cards.
That's the world in which the Voodoo came out, and why I think the Voodoo's 'add-in' nature was so important. You could take a random Packard Hell or HP or Compaq with soldered graphics, put a Voodoo in the PCI slot, and off you go... (and unlike trying to add a PCI 2D video card, you wouldn't need to worry about whether you could properly disable the soldered graphics, etc.)
By the time NVIDIA came along and started to recombine 2D + 3D acceleration, they were lucky that the market was moving away from 'go with your parents to the big computer store and buy a Compaq or AST' and so you had a lot of machines with AGP slots which were ideally suited for those kinds of cards. And a 20 year old gamer, unlike a 12 year old, has a lot more ability to buy a decent motherboard with AGP while the 12 year old is far more stuck...