JustJulião wrote on 2024-03-11, 08:30:

Since it's the very first chip of a huge company now, it's probably a good investment even. Good point if you have a wife.

Works on my wife.

To add something to the topic, how about Millennium and Mystique? These had clock ranges. Fast, at least in some ways. But Millenium supports only like one good game. Mystique is newer, but still has troubles looking better than software.

JustJulião wrote on 2024-03-11, 00:14:

The i740 is newer and actually a good card. If you want to go for it, I'd recommend a Real3D Starfighter for its quirks, since i […]
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386SX wrote on 2024-03-06, 19:52:

Hello, […]
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Hello,

I was looking for info about the fastest and better built worst but also awesome video cards of the usual late PCI early AGP accelerators to test the highest factory clocked ones. Specifically I might look for something like the Alliance aT3D and the Cirrus Logic Laguna3D or the (not that bad) i740 and SiS cards. Beside the not interesting lower clocked versions, which were the absolute fastest and possibly better built chips/cards/brands? I know most of these were built by low end manufacturers but I suppose few ones might have had a good layout and components.
Any suggestions? Some specific chip versions to look for or advice to find the later better clocked ones? I remember the Cirrus Logic having a late C revision that I think it was a lower power version but I don't care about power demand, just want the best/fastest design to test these to the limits as supposed to run at best. I don't want to buy an expensive card that run at the lowest clocks.
Thanks

The i740 is newer and actually a good card. If you want to go for it, I'd recommend a Real3D Starfighter for its quirks, since it has its own (interesting) drivers. It can't be overclocked via software though. You'll have to change the oscillator for that.
The 6326 has very good compatibility but with some visual bugs and usually not fast enough to play in 640x480. But if you want the best version, you can't go wrong with the Diamond one, which is clocked at 100MHz. I have one, 105MHz doesn't make it a good gaming card of the era, but it's enough to have some fun.
The Laguna3D is best in Chaintech version, clocked at 83MHz. I have one too. I remember it to be decent with Forsaken but it's overall poor in 3D. It can be overclocked using a registry key, but not much.
The Alliance is pure trash.
Very interesting alternatives are Verite 1000, especially the Creative version, because it supports both Creative and Speedy 3D APIs.
Even more expensive is the very first nvidia chip, the nv1, which is pretty good for a 1995 card, but not many games support it.
A bit cheaper and good enough to have some fun are the Mpact 2, with its very unusual architecture, and the Number9 revolution3D. Both are okay-ish with a handful of games.

The best "exotic" card to play with might be the PowerVR though, very unusual architecture, can be quite fast with some games and a good CPU. I remember Unreal to be impressive on it. It's good (and fast) on Tomb Raider, even in 1024x768, and it's the best way to play some games with period correct hardware (Mechwarrior 2 and Resident Evil notably).
It has some interesting exclusive games (Virtual On).
It's rare and expensive though.

I've collected and own various of old rare cards but some I never looked for, like the Mpact cards, the Verite etc.. and I'll start now. All those cards look great and as long as they can sort of work in some difficult way to accelerate few titles and benchmarks, I usually like most alternative less known forgotten products. I have the m3D card and definetely has its value also nostalgic being the card I was going to buy new at the shop at like 49$ none seems wanted to buy instead of the much more expensive just released Voodoo3 2000 in that 1998/99.

Putas wrote on 2024-03-11, 12:22:

JustJulião wrote on 2024-03-11, 08:30:

Since it's the very first chip of a huge company now, it's probably a good investment even. Good point if you have a wife.

Works on my wife.

To add something to the topic, how about Millennium and Mystique? These had clock ranges. Fast, at least in some ways. But Millenium supports only like one good game. Mystique is newer, but still has troubles looking better than software.

I've got the Millennium PCI and the Mystique 220 PCI, they had some of the best 2D and signal quality of most cards I've own of that time but never really tested the 3D gaming compatbility beside only Final Reality that I think to remember actually supported the Mystique I think and not really bad. Great cards, maybe the G100/200 would be also some good more common alternative from Matrox even if probably already modern.

386SX wrote on 2024-03-11, 17:14:

I've got the Millennium PCI and the Mystique 220 PCI, they had some of the best 2D and signal quality of most cards of those times but never really went into 3D gaming beside Final Reality that I think to remember actually supported it or at least the Mystique I think. Great cards, maybe the G100/200 would be also some good more common alternative from Matrox.

I have a Matrox Millennium II and its image quality is indeed excellent. My particular card comes with a 250 MHz RAMDAC and produces a very sharp image even when connected to an LCD monitor. These cards also have WRAM which is pretty fast (for the time) and can supposedly accelerate text drawing and such.

The proprietary MSI API which these cards use can deliver decent framerates, but ends up looking kinda ugly because the Mystique/Millennium II cards don't support bilinear filtering. They also use some weird checkerboard pattern for certain transparency effects.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-03-11, 17:29:

I have a Matrox Millennium II and its image quality is indeed excellent. My particular card comes with a 250 MHz RAMDAC and prod […]
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386SX wrote on 2024-03-11, 17:14:

I've got the Millennium PCI and the Mystique 220 PCI, they had some of the best 2D and signal quality of most cards of those times but never really went into 3D gaming beside Final Reality that I think to remember actually supported it or at least the Mystique I think. Great cards, maybe the G100/200 would be also some good more common alternative from Matrox.

I have a Matrox Millennium II and its image quality is indeed excellent. My particular card comes with a 250 MHz RAMDAC and produces a very sharp image even when connected to an LCD monitor. These cards also have WRAM which is pretty fast (for the time) and can supposedly accelerate text drawing and such.

The proprietary MSI API which these cards use can deliver decent framerates, but ends up looking kinda ugly because the Mystique/Millennium II cards don't support bilinear filtering. They also use some weird checkerboard pattern for certain transparency effects.

I think I've the same Millennium card with the WRAM and long PCB, for sure the fastest time correct video card I tested the Pentium 75>120 with Doom. It's an awesome hardware, I wonder how much it cost back at the release. At that time I still had the 80386SX and I could only read about such things. The Mystique can get even better signal quality and a more compact modern card maybe cheaper too but just as good I'd say.
Beside texture filtering I wish they had some more 3D gaming compatibility anyway. I think to remember a friend having one of these running a motorcycle 3D game and the whole missing filtering thing was quite a discussion subject, but I also remember it ran fast instead of the pointless Trio3D I was using in the 1998 that was of course not gaming oriented or didn't have much usage in such late time considering the cheap alternative anyway.

386SX wrote on 2024-03-11, 17:39:

It's an awesome hardware, I wonder how much it cost back at the release.

The original Matrox Millennium cost $948 at launch, according to its page on the VGA Museum. That was probably the top model with 8MB WRAM.

The Millennium II (which I have) was cheaper at $399.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-03-11, 17:48:

386SX wrote on 2024-03-11, 17:39:

It's an awesome hardware, I wonder how much it cost back at the release.

The original Matrox Millennium cost $948 at launch, according to its page on the VGA Museum. That was probably the top model with 8MB WRAM.

The Millennium II (which I have) was cheaper at $399.

So my card is the Millennium (first) 4MB WRAM in line and long PCB. It's really a great card I understand why it cost that much just looking at the PCB quality. Anything from DOS benchmarks and Win GUI usage ran great indeed. I think I tried some 3D acceleration but I suppose only few titles could use it. Wasn't it some car racing game?

At that time I fell into the advertising of the Mystique 220 and used it for a couple of years, I played some games with it, the one I remember most is Redline Racer, on an MMX200 it was very fluid, I remember the great feeling of speed it offered, The Mystique was quite fast, but even without much knowledge, the difference between what I saw and what was seen in the screenshots in the magazines of the time was noticeable. Mystique lacked many features, the most striking was the reflections of the sun, quite unpleasant to look at, this was also very noticeable in Motorhead which had many light reflections, the only game that did not notice anything strange It was the version of DD2 with MSI.
In short, the Mystique was pretty fast but the lack of features made it less useful then and uninteresting today.
Although I still have it.

Hoping wrote on 2024-03-11, 17:58:

At that time I fell into the advertising of the Mystique 220 and used it for a couple of years, I played some games with it, the one I remember most is Redline Racer, on an MMX200 it was very fluid, I remember the great feeling of speed it offered, The Mystique was quite fast, but even without much knowledge, the difference between what I saw and what was seen in the screenshots in the magazines of the time was noticeable. Mystique lacked many features, the most striking was the reflections of the sun, quite unpleasant to look at, this was also very noticeable in Motorhead which had many light reflections, the only game that did not notice anything strange It was the version of DD2 with MSI.
In short, the Mystique was pretty fast but the lack of features made it less useful then and uninteresting today.
Although I still have it.

I think my friend was playing another game that was like in closed circuits. I don't remember well but wasn't that motorcycles game that ran usually advertised with the Voodoo2 (and awesome indeed for rendering quality not sure if was with Glide API) running also on the Mystique engine too without filtering? Anyway I think I'll add again these Matrox cards to the list of things to test.

About advertising anyway I was going to fell before the whole Voodoo3 choice I wish I didn't take, for the G200 ones; they were really good in papers and reviews and I still think for its time they did a good job with it.

JustJulião wrote on 2024-03-11, 08:30:

I'm pretty sure that a lucky owner of the card on Vogons would happily share the games with you if you provide a proof of owners […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-11, 02:25:

JustJulião wrote on 2024-03-11, 00:14:

The i740 is newer and actually a good card. If you want to go for it, I'd recommend a Real3D Starfighter for its quirks, since i […]
Show full quote

The i740 is newer and actually a good card. If you want to go for it, I'd recommend a Real3D Starfighter for its quirks, since it has its own (interesting) drivers. It can't be overclocked via software though. You'll have to change the oscillator for that.
The 6326 has very good compatibility but with some visual bugs and usually not fast enough to play in 640x480. But if you want the best version, you can't go wrong with the Diamond one, which is clocked at 100MHz. I have one, 105MHz doesn't make it a good gaming card of the era, but it's enough to have some fun.
The Laguna3D is best in Chaintech version, clocked at 83MHz. I have one too. I remember it to be decent with Forsaken but it's overall poor in 3D. It can be overclocked using a registry key, but not much.
The Alliance is pure trash.
Very interesting alternatives are Verite 1000, especially the Creative version, because it supports both Creative and Speedy 3D APIs.
Even more expensive is the very first nvidia chip, the nv1, which is pretty good for a 1995 card, but not many games support it.
A bit cheaper and good enough to have some fun are the Mpact 2, with its very unusual architecture, and the Number9 revolution3D. Both are good enough to have some fun too.

The best "exotic" card to play with might be the PowerVR though, very unusual architecture, can be quite fast with some games and a good CPU. I remember Unreal to be impressive on it. It's good (and fast) on Tomb Raider, even in 1024x768, and it's the best way to play some games with period correct hardware (Mechwarrior 2 and Resident Evil notably).
It has some interesting exclusive games (Virtual On).
It's rare and expensive though.

There are two versions of the NV1, one with fixed Vram and the other with upgradeable Vram, one is substantially more expensive than the other and I have yet to see the upgradeable one even hit any markets. For games there is about 7 IIRC that support its quad rendering engine and most of them can be hard to find unless you go sailing the seas.

I'm pretty sure that a lucky owner of the card on Vogons would happily share the games with you if you provide a proof of ownership, since they were all bundled with cards, they didn't hit the market "by themselves". The games alone are probably rarer than the card they would be bundled with.
There are more versions than that, because some have Vram and others have Dram. I know about the two versions with Vram but I don't know if there are two versions with Dram too.
All of this is for Diamond cards, which are something like 95% of nV1 cards, but there were other makers, some are obscure and others aren't : Aztech (card named Galaxy3D), Yuan, Core Dynamics, Focus, Genoa, Leadtek, Jazz multimedia... Damn, I'd spend crazy amount of money for one of these non-Diamond bundle. Maybe it has different software bundle ? Different frequency ? Tuned drivers ?

Since it's the very first chip of a huge company now, it's probably a good investment even. Good point if you have a wife.

There were only a limited number of games that supported quad rendering mostly from Sega, there were a bunch of demos that also supported it, I would be more interested in the demos over the games as all the games got ported over to triangle based rendering in any case.

The demos though, especially the tech ones, now they would be fun to toy with and decompile.

The i740 is actually pretty decent.
It has good Drivers.

The PowerVR PCX1/2 also supported quads and "n-sided polygons" in SGL, but no one ever used them to my knowledge. 🙁

leileilol wrote on 2024-03-12, 02:16:

The PowerVR PCX1/2 also supported quads and "n-sided polygons" in SGL, but no one ever used them to my knowledge. 🙁

Triangles are cheaper to process and render so pretty much every man and his dog just went with that, even modern GPUs simply break quads down into triangles if asked to render them.

I must have been testing my HOT-158 i740 on the wrong stuff, all I remember was it underwhelmed me.

For what it's worth, i740 was a decent card. Very good rendering quality and speed, compared to all garbage that was released only one year prior. It also had pretty decent market penetration.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-14, 21:06:

For what it's worth, i740 was a decent card. Very good rendering quality and speed, compared to all garbage that was released only one year prior. It also had pretty decent market penetration.

Which was the better built and/or fastest board using the i740?

386SX wrote on 2024-03-15, 06:04:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-14, 21:06:

For what it's worth, i740 was a decent card. Very good rendering quality and speed, compared to all garbage that was released only one year prior. It also had pretty decent market penetration.

Which was the better built and/or fastest board using the i740?

All AGP cards have the same clock. PCI cards are special, but slower.

386SX wrote on 2024-03-15, 06:04:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-14, 21:06:

For what it's worth, i740 was a decent card. Very good rendering quality and speed, compared to all garbage that was released only one year prior. It also had pretty decent market penetration.

Which was the better built and/or fastest board using the i740?

Intel branded 740 cards are always solid choices, IIRC hercules and ELSA also made versions as did Creative.

I have the creative model and its a solid i740 but really they are all pretty much the same.

If you want something a little special you can also look for a Real3D Starfighter 8/12Mb or 16/24Mb i740 PCI, be warned these are expensive models to pursue.

When i740 came out drivers werent all that great. Afair it took Intel a ~year to make it usable with local ram and improved drivers, just in time to cancel whole project 😀.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-03-15, 07:47:

Intel branded 740 cards are always solid choices, IIRC hercules and ELSA also made versions as did Creative. […]
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386SX wrote on 2024-03-15, 06:04:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-03-14, 21:06:

For what it's worth, i740 was a decent card. Very good rendering quality and speed, compared to all garbage that was released only one year prior. It also had pretty decent market penetration.

Which was the better built and/or fastest board using the i740?

Intel branded 740 cards are always solid choices, IIRC hercules and ELSA also made versions as did Creative.

I have the creative model and its a solid i740 but really they are all pretty much the same.

If you want something a little special you can also look for a Real3D Starfighter 8/12Mb or 16/24Mb i740 PCI, be warned these are expensive models to pursue.

I didn't remember such PCI versions at all. Interesting. This is a video chip/card I wish I had back in those days. I think to remember Intel was pushing quite a lot the whole AGP thing as the next generation feature.