It may be for the broken graphic but it's interesting how "fast" the aT3D can be in rendering beside the lack of most features being as said one possible reason.

EDIT: Trying some at3D older driver and in Final Reality things get actually much "better" (but not the audio card sound unfortunately get worse) and actually render more than the latest version at the cost of an even worse filtering (like a nearest filter mode) and some less features too.. 😁! Screenshots soon.. I mean seriously Final Reality finally show many more things in its own confused way.. even if it report Visual appearance of 37% and 2.17 final score, now it can render things that before were not seen at all!

Alliance at3D with an old uncommon driver, still 60Mhz memory clock, with Final Reality which report less features supported but totally better at the end. Those who tried this card will see immediately where are the differences. And the mostly missing Pseudo-Bilinear Filtering is well forgotten! And speed is not really bad like up to 10fps.

at3D and Final Reality first parts. It's impressive how much "better" it got! Of course frame rate suffer the more things it renders. Fraps show frame rate only sometimes.

at3D old driver and Final Reality last moments, even transparencies works!

It is really the at3D rendering all the above! The afternoon was spent on this; at least I suppose the card is not the worst anymore (ok it's still bad anyway) but it is actually trying.

As expected now 3DMark99/2000 graphic is broken. It's also missing some of the rendering features that last driver had.

Alliance did indeed put work in various drivers which are difficult to find. It may have been a sort of ATi Rage driver situation where some version fixed something and breaking somthing else. It should be only used the one without 3dfx support because some of those drivers set memory too fast breaking even the GUI with scary gfx artifacts.

Quake based games still has the white texturing problem but it's fixed the chaos of polygons remaining on-screen when moving and even working with ZBuffer on. Would be nice to force D3D lower resolutions. Imho older drivers were probably more balanced to work with old Direct3D scenarios but maybe upgrading the compatibility to Directx5/6 new problems appeared too. It'd be nice to find at least some of the drivers included in the change logs and I can only find few ones. Maybe there's a single version that might have a bit better balance before the final one. Old drivers seems to have even more problems with audio cards anyway, still trying in the i440 board and like four different audio cards until now.

While searching A LOT for more drivers that seems are mostly lost, I tried an easy way to build a better single aT3D driver package using Voodoo Rush older drivers forced @ 60Mhz installing only the files/registry needed and it actually works from a dual planar board package running both 3DMark99 and Final Reality now with "most" effects and without the chaos of the fake bilinear filtering which may have solved the living polygons too getting crazy most of the time!
3DMark99 score is 598 at 640x480 (3125 CPU went back to a Celeron 333 for a slower not P-II/III config I suppose for this card the older/slower the better for compatibility) and with texturing working as much as latest driver did. 3DMark2000 even if without lights etc.. runs impressively well! (like 5-6fps in games) scores is 300 with Fill Rate 9 / 36MTexel/s single/multi. But the best is the water at the end of the 3DMark2000 demo actually rendering.. 😁
Audio card sound is still a big problem, I'm using again to test it a SB 128 PCI board but not really solves much. I should try again the ALi Socket7 config that it might be better.

Screenshots soon.

Alliance at3D 4MB PCI @ default 60Mhz, mixed driver packages from both old at3D drivers and Voodoo Rush dual planar (of course not existing here) old ones and some help from the latest driver too while following change logs info/notes ideas, forced memory clock at old default, 3DMark2000, Terracide on a Celeron 333 / 128Kb L2, i440BX, 128MB PC100

😀

at3D card with Terracide demo game with Direct3D (works great, great frame rate @ 640x480!)

386SX, these last shots from Alliance AT3D are the best ones I've ever seen from this card. Seems like the situation with this card was bad drivers for not so bad hardware.

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-04-01, 16:47:

386SX, these last shots from Alliance AT3D are the best ones I've ever seen from this card. Seems like the situation with this card was bad drivers for not so bad hardware.

3DMark2000 looked good even with latest driver that seems breaking older rendering unfortunately, beside there're of course many gfx errors too with older drivers. Terracide seems the best looking game tried until now. Half Life still has the usual Quake engine not-texturing problem but you can sort of fix it with console tweaks and polygons are more stable.

My opinion is that while the hardware may have not been able to render all the late 1997/98 features, they may have focused more on the 2D capabilities for the 3dfx collaboration but until some time they tried to keep that 3D engine updated. Maybe the same ATi Tech driver coding investment would have kept this chip alive on a Rage II/C or Trident 9750 level and I'd imagine it could and let me hope.. even faster. It looks like the classic situation where a proprietary accelerator may have needed specific programming to better use it beside the whole Directx3 (later 5) compatibility.

386SX wrote on 2024-03-31, 18:59:

Alliance at3D with an old uncommon driver

Do you have a link to this "uncommon" driver? Any version information?

I searched all the versions I could find and there are few 04.3.203x ones which was a good start, I don't have links. It would be interesting to find archived official pages that should even have that .2039 that was not archived from the company webpage. The Voodoo Rush road seems the easy one to find more files to work with.

That mixed driver seems to give at least an acceptable result in which the image is distinguished, not like before, if it is playable, Terracide has its charm in the AT3D. But it seems that according to FRAPS, it cannot reach 25 FPS, if it does with the overclock, I find it interesting to play it with that appearance that may be unique to the AT3D.
Forsaken could be an interesting comparison against Terracide.

386SX wrote on 2024-04-01, 16:35:

at3D card with Terracide demo game with Direct3D (works great, great frame rate @ 640x480!)

Wow I'm impressed.
Which CPU?
Can you post the driver? You'd just have to pack it in an archive if you don't have the links.
You made me want to try this card ignoring that boring chips on the top.

386SX wrote on 2024-04-02, 09:38:

I searched all the versions I could find and there are few 04.30.203x ones which was a good start, I don't have links. It would be interesting to find archived official pages that should even have that .2039 that was not archived from the company webpage. The Voodoo Rush road seems the easy one to find more files to work with.

Latest Voodoo Rush drivers are known to overclock the AT3D to an extent that many cards show artifacts even on the desktop! Mine supports the frequency (72MHz, I think). It shows that there was at least a minimal effort to improve the chip's performance late on its life. You are right, it could be interesting to dig.

JustJulião, I'm not 100% sure, but as far as I know the AT25 chip is cut-down version of AT3D and it lacks 3D functionalities.

Hoping wrote on 2024-04-02, 17:34:

That mixed driver seems to give at least an acceptable result in which the image is distinguished, not like before, if it is playable, Terracide has its charm in the AT3D. But it seems that according to FRAPS, it cannot reach 25 FPS, if it does with the overclock, I find it interesting to play it with that appearance that may be unique to the AT3D.
Forsaken could be an interesting comparison against Terracide.

Overclocking this chip just like some Voodoo Rush, make it very unstable more than it is probably; maybe the RAM modules are the limitation there. I've found problems in the GUI even with few Mhz changes trying some Voodoo Rush drivers that were set @ default to 66Mhz or 72Mhz. I'm going to try Forsaken; Terracide is indeed the best looking game I've seen so far with the lowest gfx error and interesting accuracy. I'd imagine the game has been tested on this card during driverss evolution to run that well. Frame rate while closer to 20 fps at best, still is impressive considering the usual expectations.

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-04-02, 18:04:

JustJulião, I'm not 100% sure, but as far as I know the AT25 chip is cut-down version of AT3D and it lacks 3D functionalities.

I don't have the AT25 to test that should in fact be the 2D part of the aT3D chip but I'd not be suprised if it was the same rebranded chip with just a driver modification. But of course it might have been a different core at first or maybe later during late 1997 production.

386SX wrote on 2024-04-02, 18:09:

I don't have the AT25 to test that should in fact be the 2D part of the aT3D chip but I'd not be suprised if it was the same rebranded chip with just a driver modification.

Well, I've never tried one of these, but this is also possible.