revolstar wrote on 2024-04-02, 09:00:
This! I would've played the first TR with the s3 Virge patch had I known that one existed!
funny thing about Tomb Raider s3 Virge patch - it was done wrong :] company doing the conversion received source code to 3dfx version with removed software rendering optimized path. It relied on Z-buffer instead of sorted triangles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6fk_iarL-8&l … Dfunb2V14AaABAg
@andrewpomianowski5190 :
"2 years ago (edited)
This brings back memories. I wrote the back-end driver for the Argonaut titles on the Virge (used in Fx Fighter and Croc) - it my first job out of University back in the day when I joined Argonaut's technology team. It was really crazy back then with every video card needing a different customized back-end implementation - as I recall I had to do ATI Rage and some other cards as well. Later, after I left and formed my own company we also did the port of Tomb Raider for the Virge, although that was mostly done by a friend of mine. The Virge was an interesting card - it did pretty much everything right in terms of image quality features, but basically every effect you turned on halved the fillrate. Want perspective correct textures? Fillrate halves. Want depth buffering? Fillrate halves again. And so on. It was a real art trying to extract performance.
When we did the port of Tomb Raider we were working from the version of the back end renderer of the engine that had been used for 3DFX's Voodoo graphics. One thing we didn't realize at the time was that it had been converted to use depth buffering, but the original engine version (software renderer) used a depth-sorting algorithm. If we had obtained that version from Eidos we probably could have got twice the frame rate, but we didn't realize that was an option in the engine at the time and just worked from what we got. I think we did use some of the Virge's more funky features though, like a pseudo-bilinear mode that only filtered in one direction but was faster. You had to calculate when you could use this instead of true bilinear filtering without losing too much image quality."
Btw Linkedin tells me dude did all right after Virge, ended up AMD Fellow, CVP Radeon Product Architect