The Rendition cards were a joint venture between Sierra and someone else I seem to recall.
However, there was a Rendition version of CART Racing (aka IndyCar Racing 2) which added filtering and improved graphics to (some but not all I *think*) tracks. That'd be nice to experience!
Unlikely to experience it though...!
Ice
I've always been curious about Rendition but I never had a chance to try it out. A few others that I know about but never owned are S3 Metal, RRedline, and a really obscure one from ATi called CIF. I actually have a game that uses that but I have never had any way to play it. I once tried copying the ati3dcif.dll file to my system directory, but apparently ATi cards no longer supported it by that time (I had a Rage 128). Never tried it with my Radeon 8500 but I'm sure it would be pointless.
According to ATI (http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/3023.html):
The ATI3DCIF.DLL is supported by ATI's ATI 3D RAGE I, 3D RAGE II, 3D RAGE II+, 3D RAGE IIC, 3D RAGE PRO, and 3D RAGE LT PRO based products. This DLL is not supported or used by non-3D RAGE products or ATI's RAGE 128 based cards.
Matrox also had their own API a while back (came out with a version of the Millenium). I remember they bundled a couple of games that had specific support for it! Funny, reading PC games reviews (think it was PC Format) at the time and looking to see if the 3D support included my card. There were a few options back then - thank god that 'episode' is long since consigned to the crap ideas pile! Mind you, are things 'that' much better now?
Yeah back then everyone had their own standard. Matrox started with the Matrox Mystique hardware for 3D games.
PowerVR, 3Dfx, Matrox, Rendition, 3D Blaster... all had specific standards. Sadly I went for PowerVR in my old PC then found that whilst specific PowerVR games were nice, hardly any basic Direct3D would work!
3Dfx won the war overall though... until Nvidia destroyed them commercially (3Dfx made too many business errors).
And now it's Nvidia vs ATI... but which you buy is hardly important any more as they're pretty evenly matched.
Ice
I think Microsoft did more damage to 3dfx than anything when everyone went to Direct3D instead of Glide. Ironically they almost killed nVidia also, because the NV1 didn't do things "Microsoft's way". Still 3dfx goofed up many times, so there's really no one to blame but themselves.
A Rendition wrapper would be awesome!
I still have a Rendition video card in my machine (as a second card) just to play ICR2. I still have a gameport-based wheel just for it, too. I don't play it very often, especially not now that all my hard drive partitions are NTFS, but I still have my old drive that has it installed in a FAT partition. I just can't quite seem to let go of it 😊
With all the add-ons that people continued to make, it's still a very solid game. To answer VirtualIceMan's question, a few of the tracks were enhanced out of the box, but fans soon came up with updates to the rest. More recently, the carbody shapes have been reworked to bring them more up to date (2000 or 2001 I think, which is fine considering the chassis have been basically frozen since then except for small tweaks).
