Let's hop in the time machine and look at John Carmack's .plan<p><i>Intel i740
—-
Good throughput, good fillrate, good quality, good features.
A very competent chip. I wish intel great success with the 740. I think that it firmly establishes the baseline that other companies (especially the ones that didn’t even make this list) will be forced to come up to.<p>Voodoo rendering quality, better than voodoo1 performance, good 3D on a desktop integration, and all textures come from AGP memory so there is no texture swapping at all.<p>Lack of 24 bit rendering is the only negative of any kind I can think of.<p>Their current MCD OpenGL on NT runs quake 2 pretty well. I have seen their ICD driver on ’95 running quake 2, and it seems to be progressing well. The chip has the potential to outperform voodoo 1 across the board, but 3DFX has more highly tuned drivers right now, giving it a performance
edge. I expect intel will get the performance up before releasing the ICD.<p>It is worth mentioning that of all the drivers we have tested, intel’s MCD was the only driver that did absolutely everything flawlessly. I hope that their ICD has a similar level of quality (it’s a MUCH bigger job).<p>An 8mb i740 will be a very good setup for 3D development work.</i>
All the names and terminology, MMX CPU, 3Dfx Voodoo, VideoLogic PowerVR, AGP, i740, Cyrix 6×86, AMD K6, ALi Aladdin, Super Socket 7, 440BX.... etc. It just put a smile on my face. :) And I have <i>every single</i> one of them somewhere in my house.<p>But it didn't touch on the real reason why i740 failed. It was Drivers.<p>Intel fail to invest enough resource to catch up in Driver quality. The constant rendering bug, crash, and performance on non-optimised Games were dismal. ( Games that were not on Review Benchmarks list )<p>That is why I am sceptical of Intel re-entering the GPU space. This time around they do have their iGPU marketshare as test bed and foundation to built on, but driver quality will continue to dictate Gaming performance. Even AMD barely manage to get ~15% discrete market GPU.<p>And as a side note. Nvidia market cap at ~$630B is now worth <i>three</i> times more than Intel. I am wondering if Nvidia could be another trillion dollar company.
Yeah, around that time there were quite a few "hopeful" 3D cards/chips that ultimately didn't quite cut it. I couldn't spare the cash for a 3dfx card at the time, but I wanted a 3D card, so I got an S3 ViRGE-based one. That chip later became infamous as a "3D decelerator" because with hardware 3D rendering most games were <i>slower</i> on a decent PC (albeit a little prettier) than with software rendering. The only game I ever played on it with 3D enabled was the bundled copy of Descent...
I worked on the 740, under Tom Piazza (RIP) from Real3D when Intel acquired them.<p>Fun project. Uncompetitive before it even shipped.<p>Got questions? Ask away! It was a very simple pipeline.
I assume one of the reason Intel could never develop it's own graphics adapter business is that any proper GPU would initially decrease the load on the CPU, partly reducing the justification for more expensive versions of their main product. Marketing-driven tunnel vision and all that.
I remember those early days of 3D accelerators...<p>When the 3dfx Voodoo came out, I really wanted one so I could run all the games written using the Glide API. I asked for one for Christmas, and my dad got me a Rendition 2200. I was actually pretty upset, because so many games were written using Glide, which was a 3dfx-proprietary API. GLQuake existed and used OpenGL, but OpenGL drivers were either non-existent or didn't work, I don't remember.<p>I ended up hating 3dfx for how they had ruled the 3D accelerator market for a short period of time. I was glad when the Voodoo 5 was a failure and AMD and NVIDIA ended up taking over.
>> Lockheed Martin created a spin-off dedicated to consumer 3D graphics tech called Real3D, mostly using employees from GE Aerospace.<p>Imagine aerospace trying to compete with startups like NVIDIA and 3Dfx
Wohaa!! I had one of those. Those were my first few years with computers and I was just learning with a friend of mine how to build and tune them to support better Doom, Quake and all the games we were playing at the time. I think this stuff was the ignition of my profession.<p>So many good memories. I feel old :-s.
I've got somewhat fond memories of that card.
I think it sat between my m3d and my first nvidia card (TNT?)
I remember it being incredibly cheap - and with DirectX support my first card out of the years of the dark proprietary wilderness.