From Voodoo to GeForce: The Awesome History of 3D Graphics

MaximumPC ^ | 05/19/09 at 10:30:00 AM | Paul Lilly

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I go back to those days....I wrote a fortran program for an IBM 650 at Hercules ,,,doing the 3rd stage of the minuteman,...I think...the 650 had a rotating drum for memory...

My program kept it very busy.

They bought a newer faster computer...which was the point I think.

[SunkenCiv]

Wow, that haircut you had really sucked. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

The GPUs do the calcs for Folding@Home (among others) much faster than anything else out there, and do them in the background, I guess without interfering with ordinary graphic operations at all. Would have to be shut off while gaming I suppose. ;’)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

My hair was lighter...

[texas booster]

The GPUs are fantastic specialty engines. Stanford University hosts the Folding@home project, the current version of Genome@home from the 90’s.

Free Republic has has a team for years and we now rank #71 out of 500,000 teams.

Please join if you can. Team 36120 would love to have you!

[PhilDragoo]

I interviewed with IBM in 1970. It was like a Warhol happening or Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man".

Regarding this line of the article excerpt above:

nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions

one friend who passed through last year played this video game with friends and recorded them--much interunit shouting--quite interactive--

and, yes, he's been over in Iraq and will be returning, probably to Shariastan.

From my grandfather's grandfather's stereopticon, to my grandfather's punched cards to:

ATI Radeon R520

ATI had come a long way since the days of 3D Rage, and the biggest shift was yet to come. ATI's engineers had gone back to the drawing board, and what they came up with was the R520, a completely new architecture that was unlike anything that had been done before. Serving as the backbone for the new design was what ATI called an "Ultra-Threading Dispatch Processor." Like a foreman, the UTDP was responsible for telling its workers what to do, and when to do it. In this case, the 'workers' were four groups of four pixel shaders, 16 in all. This technique proved highly efficient and allowed ATI to get away with utilizing less pixel shaders than the 24 employed by the competition.

The R520 also had a redesigned memory controller. The new controller used a weighting system responsible for prioritizing which clients needed access to data the quickest.

Several other advancements had been made, most of which focused on efficiency. Image quality was better, full High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting was implemented for the first time, and better DVD decoding were among the improvements that had been made.

The Seventh Century narcissist attempts to return us to the stone age savagery of Clark's "The Portable Phonograph"--

IBM said: Machines should work; men should think--

--but with Agent Hussein, men should not think, only work for the machine--

Let the irrepressible creativity exemplified in the GPU history prevail over the authoritarian psychopathy:

[Marine_Uncle]

Work used to be fun!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

OH...that is ominous....and so is this:

# # Microsoft’s Patent on Restricting Functionality Of Your PC

[IDFbunny]

Compared to Far Cry, one of the best games ever, it did have a weak plot.

[humblegunner]

Halo2 is still kicking my butt.