Fantastic article, I like it very much. My first 3d card was a s3 virge.
Thank you very much.

Good write up. Since the Trio 3D is just renamed ViRGE, why not finish the story with it and how it fixed the blend mode problems/etc?

furan wrote on 2021-04-15, 00:30:

Good write up. Since the Trio 3D is just renamed ViRGE, why not finish the story with it and how it fixed the blend mode problems/etc?

It didn't?

Putas wrote on 2021-04-15, 02:41:

It didn't?

Here is a link to you saying it did:
Re: S3 Trio3D/2x - is this just a rebadged ViRGE or more?

Heh, a quick look at my screenshots, and I knew better in 2011. Many blending errors were fixed indeed.

Putas wrote on 2021-04-15, 18:08:

Heh, a quick look at my screenshots, and I knew better in 2011. Many blending errors were fixed indeed.

My memory does this too. I would really like to try one out, maybe see if I can patch S3D stuff to work with it.

My Toshiba Tecra 550CDT laptop has an integrated S3 Virge. In my experience games that worked correctly without distracting transparency glitches did generally run a bit better than software rendering, but not by too much and rarely can I afford to put the resolution higher than 240p. The forced dither pattern especially at low resolutions can also look pretty bad at times.

Though, there are games like Resident Evil 1 at 240p that run well, so that's cool. 480p in that game is playable but noticeably choppier.

Any idea where the name ViRGE comes from?

Virtual Reality Graphics Engine aka ViRGE

matze79 wrote on 2021-04-16, 07:23:

Virtual Reality Graphics Engine aka ViRGE

Ah thanks. Searching for that, apparently it's on the ViRGE Wikipedia page, I assumed it was something obscure.

S3 Virge is up to 2x-3x times faster than PMMX 200 when rendering 3D with identical settings (16-bit color, filtering, etc).