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Rendition Verite Thread

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First post, by swaaye

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Speedy3D (DOS) / RRedline (Win9x) games:
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

Video and screenshots
V1000 game screens https://www.mediafire.com/folder/2z0yr501x6mt … Rendition_V1000
V2000 game screens https://www.mediafire.com/folder/pa4jop6s7fd3 … Rendition_V2000
YouTube playlist

Info
Renaddiction - old Rendition fan site (Archive.org)
Post on Usenet from a Rendition programmer. Describes VQuake development and issues, V1000 vs V2200, Quake engine workings, etc.

Downloads
https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/

PHOTOS

  • Rendition V1000 Reference PCI 4MB
    48vv85mm43u70nq2g.jpg2chhvuxccczczjg2g.jpg
  • Sierra Screamin' 3D V1000 4MB PCI
    -Sierra the game company. They liked to help push new game tech that they thought was the future.
    -Made by Canopus and possibly Identical to Canopus Total 3D.
    rpw0ovfc9arq3cf2g.jpg
  • Intergraph Reactor / Intense 3D 100 V1000 4MB PCI
    ng9ju1ijlfqdx3g2g.jpg
  • Creative Labs 3D Blaster PCI V1000 4MB PCI
    70nsk391a6ax01y2g.jpg2xp55iiarbuv5d22g.jpg
    ga3i61gcux82u802g.jpg
  • Miro MiroCrystal VRX
    aaugd9sb668eedd5g.jpg
  • V2200 Reference Design 4MB PCI. All the extras.
    w11bxnqi5xbdhch2g.jpgkae72zo6gw1kacq2g.jpg
  • Diamond Stealth II S220 V2100 4MB PCI
    -The only V2100 card. A BIOS update overclocked it to V2200 speeds without issue
    -Sold for $50 direct at the end. First way-cheap 3D card that was usable. :)
    d1t1vzl59gar1ap2g.jpgcv2grnh668bcvnr2g.jpg
  • Genoa V-Raptor PCI
    0cu9in8i3i9sw1z5g.jpg
  • Hercules Thriller 3D V2200 4MB PCI
    hq732douoqdddhe2g.jpg1qthzfubsj6v8h92g.jpg
  • QDI Vision 1 V2200 AGP
    hacre3s002aclnb2g.jpg
  • Jazz Multimedia Bonny & Clyde V2200 AGP & PCI
    ki8v6yt8ma6i86s2g.jpg

Q&A

  • What is unique about Verite graphics chips?
    They are somewhat different in the architectural sense compared to other chips. Their processing is based both on running microcode on an internal MIPS-based RISC processor and on dedicated pixel pipeline hardware. The microcode aspect allowed Rendition to add features (within limits) as realtime 3D developed.

    The chips also support VGA, 2D GUI, and video acceleration although it is not as fast as some other graphics cards of the time. The V1000 cards were the best 2D+3D cards of their time, and the V2x00 cards were very competitive with their peers.

    Oh and V2x00 can output 24-bit color in 3D.
  • What cards competed with V1000? (1995-96)
    Matrox Mystique, ATI 3D Rage I/II, NVIDIA NV1, S3 ViRGE, PowerVR PCX1/2, 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.
  • What cards competed with V2x00? (1997-98)
    Matrox G200, ATI 3D Rage Pro, NVIDIA RIVA 128 / TNT, S3 ViRGE DX/GX, S3 Trio3D, S3 Savage 3D, 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics & Voodoo2.
  • What's the difference between the V1000E and the V1000L?
    The V1000E chip is based upon a 5V process. The V1000L is made with a 3.3V process and hence dissipates less power at a given clock frequency. Therefore it can be clocked at a higher frequency and as a result performs somewhat better. Otherwise, the two chips are identical.

    Benchmark results:
    https://gona.mactar.hu/v1000/
  • Is V1000 faster than Voodoo1? ViRGE?
    V1000 can be faster if the CPU is slow enough. This is because V1000 fully offloads the triangle setup step of the rendering process and it uses DMA transfers, unlike Voodoo1. However, in general, V1000's capabilities are are vastly inferior to Voodoo1 as evidenced by its inability to run most OpenGL and D3D 5+ games.

    V1000 and Virge may be somewhat similar but I think V1000 is generally superior. Neither is particularly good with Direct3D or OpenGL games, but like V1000, Virge had its own 3D API called S3D and games that used this ran pretty well.
  • Is V2x00 faster than Voodoo1?
    Yes it is faster and it can produce superior image quality due to sharper texture filtering and the ability to use 24-bit color depth. But driver bugs frequently put a damper on V2000's quality.
  • How much faster is V2x00 compared to V1000?
    Over twice as fast. It has over twice the fillrate and additional effects don't have the same performance impact.
  • Are the V2x00 boards compatible with games written for the V1000?
    Some early Speedy3D (DOS) games will only recognize V1000 and need a patch. There is a utility called V2DOSFIX to fix games that were never patched. link
  • Is AGP beneficial with V2x00?
    The chips only use AGP as a 66 MHz PCI bus, just like 3dfx cards.
  • Is 8MB tangibly better for V2x00?
    Yes because it allows for higher resolutions in both 2D and 3D (if performance allows).
  • Is VQuake superior to GLQuake?
    No. VQ has a few interesting advantages such as anti-aliasing, but the overall visual quality is lower and there is no support for transparent water. VQ came first, however. Also, obviously GLQuake is free for everyone to support while VQuake is proprietary for Rendition.
  • How is DOS VGA support?
    VESA support is good and performs quite well. Plain VGA modes are, however, very slow. There is a utility called "RenUtil" which remaps regular VGA to a VESA mode, but this doesn't work for ModeX (like lots of DOS FPS games).
  • How is Windows GUI speed?
    It's ok. It's accelerated but not as fast as the fastest competitors of the time. V2x00 is faster but still rather slow compared to say Matrox G200 or NVIDIA TNT.
  • How is the output signal quality?
    It varies but unfortunately these cards will typically get fuzzy at resolutions above 1024x768. Their typical 4MB RAM limits them to around 1024x768 for good color depth anyway.
  • How is OpenGL support?
    Not great, as with most vendors back then. Rendition did eventually release a functional MiniGL for Quake and Quake descended games (i.e. Half Life). A full OpenGL ICD is also available but it is slow and buggy. The lack of per-pixel mip mapping is unfortunate. Also, V1000 is not well suited to OpenGL in general.
  • How is D3D support?
    V1000 was actually sort of a reference model for MS when designing D3D. It was the first consumer hardware that could render D3D's feature set. At one point, requesting information about D3D driver development would get you V1000 source code. But there are some issues with V1000 and D3D regardless of this.

    Very old D3D games don't work well with DMA, and this cripples V1000 because processing parallelism breaks down. Also since D3D and drivers for it were rapidly evolving, new bugs would appear and they would also break features that worked previously. This was just part of the fun with all hardware back then.
  • How do I play Unreal?
    You should use the OpenGL renderer included with later versions of the game. This renderer was built with V2200 in mind.
  • Is there 3DNow! support?
    The OpenGL ICD readme mentions some 3DNow! support but there's no info on how thorough it is.
Last edited by swaaye on 2022-08-03, 20:53. Edited 60 times in total.

Reply 2 of 746, by Amigaz

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Superb post 😀

Been looking for these gfx cards for ages...stumbled upon a Hercules Thriller some time ago on ebay.de but the seller refused to ship outside Germany 😜

My retro computer stuff: https://lychee.jjserver.net/#16136303902327

Reply 3 of 746, by Old Thrashbarg

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It's a little rich for me, but just a heads up if anyone's interested, I ran across one of those Stealth II 220 cards on eBay. Still in the sealed box, no less.

He doesn't ship internationally, though...

Reply 4 of 746, by swaaye

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retro games 100 wrote:

Another excellent post swaaye. I had no idea this hardware existed, until a short time ago.

Rendition never had the hype that 3Dfx had. They coexisted for a long time.

3Dfx really got lucky early on because their speed essentially separated them from all other 3D hardware players. But V1000 came before Voodoo Graphics and V2200 was prettier, somewhat faster than Voodoo1, but buggy. Oh and you aren't limited to 640x480 with any Verite card, unlike Voodoo1.

V3000 was hyped and rumored for years, and then V4400 was too, but neither came out probably because NVIDIA just blew past everyone else.

Last edited by swaaye on 2009-10-04, 16:56. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 5 of 746, by swaaye

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Old Thrashbarg wrote:

It's a little rich for me, but just a heads up if anyone's interested, I ran across one of those Stealth II 220 cards on eBay. Still in the sealed box, no less.

I remember that box. That's the real thing alright. Price is $20 less than the $50 I paid for the card in 1998. 😀 You can find the Stealth II S220 on ebay fairly often. I bought a trio of them for cheap years back in unopened OEM static bags. They are some of the nicer V2x00 boards and offer performance identical to the V2200 4MB PCI cards once you flash the BIOS.

There are also AGP V2200s, but they are like 3Dfx AGP cards and don't use any AGP features beyond the effective 66MHz bus clock. So PCI is just as good in the end.

I've always wanted to get my hands on an 8MB V2200. I've never run across one.

Reply 8 of 746, by swaaye

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GL1zdA wrote:

Are the V2x00 boards compatible with games written for the V1000?

I want to say yes but I'm a little fuzzy here for some reason. I know that V2x00 works with VQuake. But I also know that there are patches to add V2x00 support to some games that had V1000 support.

Reply 9 of 746, by bushwack

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Was gonna take some pics of my V1000s (I gots boxes too) but all my batteries are dead. 🙁

Funny thing about vQuake, the game runs the same speed on the V1000 as it does the v2100. Here's a chart from cards I've been benchmarking for my website.

You can run the V1000 at 512x384 to get a more playable 31.2fps, and Quake still looks pretty darn good.

Note: The Rendition cards (Screamin' 3D and Stealth 220) are running vQuake and not GLQuake.
glquake_p200.jpg

Last edited by bushwack on 2009-10-08, 01:12. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 10 of 746, by Old Thrashbarg

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A little off the original topic, but what's the story on the Apocalypse 3dx? That's a PowerVR chip, right? Just looking at the performance numbers, it seems to be pwning all, but judging by its lack of popularity, there must have been some catch to it.

Reply 13 of 746, by swaaye

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Bushwack, what CPU you running for those tests?

edit: oooh perty Tomb Raider shots. Thanks for saving me the work! 😀 You should take a bunch of shots and make a Imageshack Album for me to post!

I'm trying to figure out how to take shots in Fatal Racing but I think it lacks screenshot support.

Reply 14 of 746, by bushwack

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swaaye wrote:

Bushwack, what CPU you running for those tests?

edit: oooh perty Tomb Raider shots. Thanks for saving me the work! 😀 You should take a bunch of shots and make a Imageshack Album for me to post!

I'm trying to figure out how to take shots in Fatal Racing but I think it lacks screenshot support.

I ran them with a Pentium MMX running stock 200 (see top of chart 😉 ) That was a typical gaming CPU during 1997, sure the PII came out the second half but how many gamers were plunking down close to a grand for a P2 300?

I actually cheated on the TR pics, I shot them from my monitor and not in game. But I did take the time to take a few good shots. 😉 I did notice the FOV is a little off but thats from the software's 320x200 resolution compared to the Rendition's 680x480 if im not mistaken.

Reply 15 of 746, by swaaye

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The reason I ask about CPU is cuz it's possible that's the reason the V1000 and V2100 are scoring the same. P200 isn't fast enough to max out a Voodoo1 or V2100. So your results might be showing that Rendition's drivers had a lot of CPU overhead.

I'm running the V1000 with a Tualeron 1.2GHz. How many could afford that in 1996? 😁 😁

Reply 16 of 746, by leileilol

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Yay another PCX2 owner on the board! I should note the PCX2 performance depends heavily on the host's FPU more than any other card at the time, so the results would be largely different on this whole chart if you were to use a Cyrix or K6.

Is that Monster 3D 320x200 result accurate? IIRC it was a Voodoo Graphics and those don't go any lower than 512x384

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 17 of 746, by bushwack

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leileilol wrote:

Is that Monster 3D 320x200 result accurate? IIRC it was a Voodoo Graphics and those don't go any lower than 512x384

The numbers are right although you wouldn't want to play the game like that. Unless you were hard core and stretched and centered the screen for better fps. maybe.

3dfx320.jpg

Reply 18 of 746, by HunterZ

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I thought Tomb Raider could run at higher resolutions than that in software mode? Would be interesting to see a high-res software mode shot compared to a same-res Rendition shot.

Reply 19 of 746, by bushwack

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HunterZ wrote:

I thought Tomb Raider could run at higher resolutions than that in software mode? Would be interesting to see a high-res software mode shot compared to a same-res Rendition shot.

You can run TR at 640x480 in SW but it's gonna be unplayable with the CPUs of the time. Software would look somewhat the same just no texture filtering or texture perspective correction.