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

Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be tredging through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today, the same ones that wouldn't be possible on a CPU alone. Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that where once handled by the CPU.

It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgiac ride you don't want to miss!

S3 ViRGE

A virgin in the 3D graphics arena, S3 in 1995 thrust itself into this new territory with its ViRGE graphics series. Playing on the hype surrounding virtual reality a decade and a half ago, ViRGE stood for Virtual Reality Graphics Engine and was one of the first 3D GPUs to take aim at the mainstream consumer. While nothing compared to today’s offerings, early 64-bit ViRGE cards came with up to 4MB of onboard memory, and core and memory clockspeeds of up to 66MHz. It also supported such features as Bilinear and Trilinear texture filtering, MIP mapping, alpha blending, video texturing mapping, Z-buffering, and other 3D texture mapping goodies.

Ironically, those same ‘cutting edge’ features took a toll on the ViRGE silicon resulting in underwhelming 3D performance. In some cases, performance was so bad that users could obtain better results with the CPU, causing the ViRGE to be unaffectionate dubbed the first 3D decelerator. Ouch.

Fun Fact: Just how far has graphic cards come in the past 15 years? Enough so that we've seen the S3 ViRGE selling for as little as $0.45 in the second-hand market.

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:

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