okay then, i would post a few of my benchmark results, all on aopen 815e/pentium3s-1.4g/512mb sdram/windows98se platform.
diamond permedia2 agp 8mb canopus riva128zx agp 8mb
3dmark99 1400 1800
3dmark2000 650 1270
glquake640*480 24 64
quake2 crusher 14 35
quake3 18 32
all tests in 800*600*16 mode except glquake.
quake3 graphics option is lightmap/mipcap 2/geometric medium, all effects off.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

On the benchmark scores posted above, I am curious as to what cpu the card is being paired with.

Duron 650

noshutdown wrote:

okay then, i would post a few of my benchmark results, all on aopen 815e/pentium3s-1.4g/512mb sdram/windows98se platform. […]
Show full quote

okay then, i would post a few of my benchmark results, all on aopen 815e/pentium3s-1.4g/512mb sdram/windows98se platform.
diamond permedia2 agp 8mb canopus riva128zx agp 8mb
3dmark99 1400 1800
3dmark2000 650 1270
glquake640*480 24 64
quake2 crusher 14 35
quake3 18 32
all tests in 800*600*16 mode except glquake.
quake3 graphics option is lightmap/mipcap 2/geometric medium, all effects off.

Permedia was never intended to be a gaming card, so these scores compared to a Riva 128 aren't surprising. Permedia was a business class card and performed better in business benchmarks than gaming benchmarks. It also has better image quality than the early nVidia stuff, but still not near the image quality of a Matrox card.

sliderider wrote:

Permedia was never intended to be a gaming card, so these scores compared to a Riva 128 aren't surprising. Permedia was a business class card and performed better in business benchmarks than gaming benchmarks. It also has better image quality than the early nVidia stuff, but still not near the image quality of a Matrox card.

i dont think permedia2 has any 3d image quality to talk about. to my standard, its the most incorrect image ive seen among "real" 3d cards(those capable of both d3d and opengl).
in quake2 it has lightmap(difference in brightness) but lacks colors, in most other tests(3dmark, quake3, glexcess) it has colors but lacks lightmap, that is, every place is of a same brightness with no light/dark difference. ive never seen any other "real" 3d card prone to such problem.
riva128 may have some ugly colors and texture filtering but its not that completely incorrect, and speed is also extremely important.

There must be some serious hardware bug limiting lightmaps to black and white. Common denominator of problematic games is multitexturing support.

noshutdown wrote:

i dont think permedia2 has any 3d image quality to talk about. to my standard, its the most incorrect image ive seen among "real […]
Show full quote

sliderider wrote:

Permedia was never intended to be a gaming card, so these scores compared to a Riva 128 aren't surprising. Permedia was a business class card and performed better in business benchmarks than gaming benchmarks. It also has better image quality than the early nVidia stuff, but still not near the image quality of a Matrox card.

i dont think permedia2 has any 3d image quality to talk about. to my standard, its the most incorrect image ive seen among "real" 3d cards(those capable of both d3d and opengl).
in quake2 it has lightmap(difference in brightness) but lacks colors, in most other tests(3dmark, quake3, glexcess) it has colors but lacks lightmap, that is, every place is of a same brightness with no light/dark difference. ive never seen any other "real" 3d card prone to such problem.
riva128 may have some ugly colors and texture filtering but its not that completely incorrect, and speed is also extremely important.

I didn't say anything about 3D image quality. Notice I compared it to Matrox, the leader in 2D quality. 3D image quality would have been mostly irrelevant in business apps.

Matrox was willing to put together decent analog circuitry (and certainly charge for it), but so were other companies like ATI and Number Nine. Matrox for some reason really fired up journalists.

leileilol wrote:

Quake2. The game was primarily developed on Permedia hardware

According to Carmack's plan they were using Intergraph workstations with RealiZm boards. They used Permedia boards for the Alpha port (scroll down, news from Brian Hook: http://www.quake2.com/oldnews/10-18-97_10-22-97.html) - and it was rather slow - I get a bit more than 10 FPS on my Alpha 21164 533 MHz with a Permedia 2 card (it's even worse on a GLoria XL with the Glint chipset). I still hope I will upgrade it to a Powerstorm (rebadged Intergraph RealiZm).

I would love to see somebody here get some of those workstation 3D cards and play games on them. I am really getting bored of the usual gaming card hardware. 😉

The problem with the early workstation class 3D cards is that they're good at accelerating geometry but have low fillrate or won't do hardware texturing. Carmack summed it up nicely here.

The Voodoo was perfect for games - geometry on a Pentium + texture mapping on a Voodoo and Quake looked great and ran fast.

I have a very old Dynamic Pictures Oxygen V192 but it's not worth testing it with games. If I ever boot my old AXPpci 33 motherboard it will be used with this card - it's one of the few boards with Alpha NT drivers.

I also have one of these 3DPro boards with the Mitsubishi chipset, but it came without texture memory - apparently most recyclers take it out, because they think it's a common DIMM.

The early Intergraph cards were used almost exclusively for Intergraph workstations that's why they are so rare. And the later ones (Wildcat) were not fast enough for games (even Carmack recommended at some point a TNT over workstation class hardware). The SGI Visual Workstation 320/540 were probably the last wintel (although their chipset resembles the SGI O2, they're not just PCs) workstations which were faster then the contemporary consumer hardware (and didn't use derivatives of consumer chips like Quadro or ATI FireGL).

I have an Indigo 2 and Octane with Impact boards, but they don't have texture memory. At least I can run Quake 3: Arena on my SGI Fuel with a V10 card.

Putas wrote:

There must be some serious hardware bug limiting lightmaps to black and white. Common denominator of problematic games is multitexturing support.

No, it's because the Permedia doesn't support vertex color modulation, so for Quake2 they force the lightmaps to monochrome for consistency. Curiously, they didn't implement colored lighting until much later so this wasn't even considered a 'problem' for id during most of Q2's development.

Yeah I know that many workstation cards are worthless for games. I still have an interest in them though, just like with some of the early GUI co-processor boards which are pretty boring in practice too.

I wonder what a game designed for a geometry-heavy but texture-incapable board would look like. Maybe similar to early Gouraud shaded DOS games but with gobs of geometric complexity? Lots of wild color lighting too, to fit in with the 90s? 😉

swaaye wrote:

I wonder what a game designed for a geometry-heavy but texture-incapable board would look like. Maybe similar to early Gouraud shaded DOS games but with gobs of geometric complexity? Lots of wild color lighting too, to fit in with the 90s? 😉

For that, take a look at Sega Model 1 games. It's an example of early arcade 3D hardware without texture mapping.

Virtua Racing still looks amazing to my eyes.
Did you know there was a port for the MD? Very impressive technically, but I wouldn't want to play it again 😜

I've played the Virtua Racing cart for Genesis. With the SVT chip. The game cost something like $90 new. It was amazing for Genesis indeed. I also played and liked Stunt Race FX which was Nintendo's SuperFX2 chip polygon racer for SNES. But the framerate is barely tolerable these days. The framerate may be awful but compared to the ridiculous console 2D racers back then these games were astonishing.

Of course a 486 PC could do these sort of racers without coprocessor help.

Obviously, any 486 is a lot faster than any 68000, not to mention the RAM and Graphics Card differences 😜
I only played Virtua Racing on my MegaDrive a couple of years ago and it's amazing for the system. Kinda like Doom and Starfox on the SNES. Sure, these games are barely tolerable today (with the exception of Starfox maybe), but they're still very impressive!
A shame the SVP chip was never used for any other game though. Would have been really cool to see other games taking advantage of it!

swaaye wrote:

I still have an interest in them though, just like with some of the early GUI co-processor boards which are pretty boring in practice too.

I just received another HD63484 based card and a Matrox MG-108 is on the way... I guess I will have to build a 486 just for AutoCAD 😉

GL1zdA wrote:

I guess I will have to build a 486 just for AutoCAD 😉

Now this is sure to be riveting. 🤣

GL1zdA wrote:

The problem with the early workstation class 3D cards is that they're good at accelerating geometry but have low fillrate or won […]
Show full quote

The problem with the early workstation class 3D cards is that they're good at accelerating geometry but have low fillrate or won't do hardware texturing. Carmack summed it up nicely here.

The Voodoo was perfect for games - geometry on a Pentium + texture mapping on a Voodoo and Quake looked great and ran fast.

I have a very old Dynamic Pictures Oxygen V192 but it's not worth testing it with games. If I ever boot my old AXPpci 33 motherboard it will be used with this card - it's one of the few boards with Alpha NT drivers.

I also have one of these 3DPro boards with the Mitsubishi chipset, but it came without texture memory - apparently most recyclers take it out, because they think it's a common DIMM.

The early Intergraph cards were used almost exclusively for Intergraph workstations that's why they are so rare. And the later ones (Wildcat) were not fast enough for games (even Carmack recommended at some point a TNT over workstation class hardware). The SGI Visual Workstation 320/540 were probably the last wintel (although their chipset resembles the SGI O2, they're not just PCs) workstations which were faster then the contemporary consumer hardware (and didn't use derivatives of consumer chips like Quadro or ATI FireGL).

I have an Indigo 2 and Octane with Impact boards, but they don't have texture memory. At least I can run Quake 3: Arena on my SGI Fuel with a V10 card.

Yeah especially early workstation cards had no hardware texture mapping capabilities whatsoever - therefore running anything textured would seriously slow down the system. Even earlier SGI systems (pre-IMPACT) lacked hardware texture mapping (with the exception of extremely expensive systems that used RealityEngine such as the IRIS Crimson), but then again, these were designed mainly for CAD/solid modeling so it makes sense. Also yeah you must have gotten the Solid/Killer Impact card. I've been looking around for a High or Max. Impact but these are incredibly rare and my guess is that they would fetch quite a huge premium (especially the texture RAM modules). Even then, a High Impact with only 1 MB texture RAM will still suffer in the Quake games unless you run at low res.

swaaye wrote:

I would love to see somebody here get some of those workstation 3D cards and play games on them. I am really getting bored of the usual gaming card hardware. 😉

I can't really get any playable frame rates out of Quake 2 and Q3A on my SGI O2 workstation (unless I run Q2 at 640x480 or something like that), but then again, these are native x86 games ported over to the MIPS architecture, so performance isn't really optimized. By my estimate the graphics capabilities of this thing are on par with that of a TNT2 (it has hardware texture mapping but no hardware geometry/lighting acceleration), thus using a faster CPU may give better frame rates. In any case, in terms of graphics quality, it looks just as nice as running on any modern graphics card, sans AA, AF, all that fancy junk. Q3A though, seems like it can only get acceptable performance with a higher-end workstation (e.g. an Indigo2 equipped with Max. Impact or an Octane with a Max. Impact or VPro graphics card). But as mentioned, performance would be a lot better if these are native MIPS games.

Still want to see how those Intergraph cards fare in such games though, since most of those workstations are x86-based. Anyone with an SGI Visual Workstation 320 or 540 wanna give Q3A a shot? 🤣

swaaye wrote:

I wonder what a game designed for a geometry-heavy but texture-incapable board would look like. Maybe similar to early Gouraud shaded DOS games but with gobs of geometric complexity? Lots of wild color lighting too, to fit in with the 90s? 😉

One example was a fighting game (actually it might have been more of a tech demo) that came with the Matrox MGA Impression cards. Of course, this probably isn't the best example but was probably one of the few games that worked with that Matrox card. The name escapes my head at the moment; I remember it began with "S" though.

Also SGI at one point did port a 3D graphics card over to the x86 PC in the early 1990s - it was called IrisVision, and was very similar to the higher-end graphics options used in their Personal IRIS line of workstations. There are AutoCAD and Win 3.1 drivers floating around for it, but since it lacks hardware texture mapping, it's unsuitable for gaming. Its geometry capabilities were pretty much unmatched for its time though (at least on the x86 PC).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IrisVision

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

swaaye wrote:

I would love to see somebody here get some of those workstation 3D cards and play games on them. I am really getting bored of the usual gaming card hardware. 😉

I can't really get any playable frame rates out of Quake 2 and Q3A on my SGI O2 workstation (unless I run Q2 at 640x480 or something like that), but then again, these are native x86 games ported over to the MIPS architecture, so performance isn't really optimized. By my estimate the graphics capabilities of this thing are on par with that of a TNT2 (it has hardware texture mapping but no hardware geometry/lighting acceleration), thus using a faster CPU may give better frame rates. In any case, in terms of graphics quality, it looks just as nice as running on any modern graphics card, sans AA, AF, all that fancy junk. Q3A though, seems like it can only get acceptable performance with a higher-end workstation (e.g. an Indigo2 equipped with Max. Impact or an Octane with a Max. Impact or VPro graphics card). But as mentioned, performance would be a lot better if these are native MIPS games.

Here are Ian's benchmark results (both software renderer and hardware accelerated renderer) - it seems one would need an InfiniteReality system or a quite modern VPro system to run Quake at acceptable framerate:
SGI Quake1 Benchmark Results
SGI Quake2 Benchmark Results

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

Also SGI at one point did port a 3D graphics card over to the x86 PC in the early 1990s - it was called IrisVision, and was very similar to the higher-end graphics options used in their Personal IRIS line of workstations. There are AutoCAD and Win 3.1 drivers floating around for it, but since it lacks hardware texture mapping, it's unsuitable for gaming. Its geometry capabilities were pretty much unmatched for its time though (at least on the x86 PC).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IrisVision

There was at least one similar, large graphics subsystem for the PC called Real World Graphics:
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/liter … /gn/p016.htm#s7
If I had a nice 486/33 with an IrisVision it would be my ultimate RetroPC.