[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

*********************** This is an Excerpt*******************************

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[ShadowAce]

[BJClinton]

tredging through the jungles of Crysis

Is it just me or did the plot really fall apart at the end of that? Excellent game engine though.

[Bigh4u2]

“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.”

Hell. I’ve got one I’ll GIVE away!

[Signalman]

My first 3d video card was a Voodoo II, circa 1998 or 1999 and used the, now-extinct, glide api. It was an “add-on” card and only did 3d graphics. You still had to have a separate 2D card for non-3D display. It only had 12MB of VRAM but was quite fast in it’s day. Worked like a charm with Need For Speed III.

[VanillaBlizzard]

HAHA reminded me of your AGP that your STILL using!

Great stuff though. Talked about a lot of technology that my generation missed out on...

[M203M4]

GPUs (which do not try to be a jack-of-all-trades like CPUs) are now being used as the core (or as co) processing (not simply visualization) units in a growing number of physics, chemistry, and engineering computational applications (in areas like material science, biomolecules, medical physics etc) which involve particular calculations the chips happen to be optimized for.

I don't know if this aspect is covered in the article (I'll read it later), but the GPU architecture has been found to be so amenable to so many academic, defense, and industrial computational endeavors that at least two GPU manufacturers (nvidia and ati) are now developing (minor revisions of their exisitng) chips specifically for the scientific computation market.

Just another example of supposedly "useless technology" eventually bearing gifts thanks to the twin engines of genuine human progress: science and the free market!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[rahbert]

Pity I threw out all my Accelgraphics boards.

Anyone remember the flaming A?

[Domandred]

Company I worked for in the 90’s got a PCMag Editor’s choice award by being the only computer in the line that included the Diamond S3 cards. Everyone else was still using plain video graphics cards.

We had a lot of customers calling and claiming we cheated the benchmark system by putting in a better video card. Now 15 years later those same customers demand it.

[dan1123]

Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU.

It would look something like this:

[antiRepublicrat]

My first was a Diamond Viper VLB with 4 MB!! The computer itself only had 8 MB. DOS performance sucked, but Windows-based games rocked.

[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. ;’)

[humblegunner]

Halo2 is still kicking my butt.