Old school 3D accelerators are so charming due to their simplicity. No multiple cores, no schedulers, no programable shaders, just a basic fixed length predictable geometry and texture pipeline made of of vector processors, that's it.<p>They were simple enough that the system integrators or board partners would actually be the ones writing the drivers for them as the company was just selling them the chips with the datasheets and manuals with instructions on how to interface with them via PCI and how to program them, that's it.<p>NVidia were famous for being the first to in-house the driver development themselves instead of their board partners which gave them the edge on driver quality and performance.
I find it interesting they had an explicit "flat trapezoid" primitive (slide 14). By flat, I mean it only supports trapezoids where the top and bottom edges are flat, aligned with the y grid.<p>I'm not aware of any GPU that explicitly supported such primitives, but you actually get these flat trapezoid for free with certain designs of a triangle rasteriser. A triangle is rasterised with 3 edge equations, and it's useful to explicitly define a start and finish y position. A flat trapezoid is just two edge equations with the same start and finish y positions (and I assume their line primitive is the same thing, a but with a single edge equation)<p>While I'm not aware of any GPU with explicit support for these flat trapezoids, the Nintendo 64's RDP takes edge equations directly (usually generated by the RSP microcode), and if you feed it malformed edge equations, it can render certain non-triangle polygons, though most of them aren't useful.<p>But one of the malformed polygons are the same flat trapezoid primitive. And while playing around and attempting to design a better RSP microcode, I discovered that these flat trapezoids appear to be useful for a fast polygon clipping algorithm. My goal was to replace the N64's slow depth buffering with portal-based clipping on the RSP, but there is no way to check if it's faster without an actual RSP implementation.
There were many semi-affordable graphics cards in the late 1990s. At various times I had cards from Matrox, Dynamic Pictures, and a Fujitsu prototype. These were all "pro" cards, and those products were wiped out when gamer cards came along and made GPUs a mass market product. So was SGI, of course.<p>"The list price for the (Dynamic Pictures) Oxygen 102 was $1495 in 1996, later reduced to $399."
At a time Bitboys (Oy) tech was this great vaporware that every once in a while came out with these amazing screenshots that blew out of the water everything we saw from 3d accelerators out there with a perpetual "soon"/"just you wait". I guess they never found the funds for it.. and googling I see Nokia bought into it which is straight to grave move even back then.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I followed the PC demoscene casually from afar back in the early 90s. I remember rumblings about Future Crew being involved in some kind of hardware development. Apparently this processor is related.<p>This article is a bit disjointed in places but helps fill in my understanding: <a href="https://hardforum.com/threads/bitboys.1973024/" rel="nofollow">https://hardforum.com/threads/bitboys.1973024/</a>
I remember this chip - flaky drivers but the dev board we got did work. We ended up just using Voodoo something or other, and then the first GeForce boards came out a year or two later.
TFW I didn't pull the trigger on a Pyramid3D TR25202 listing on ebay several months ago. These cards are truly rare when you are collecting mid 90s to early 2000s graphic accelerators.
Local coverage:<p><a href="https://www.ourmidland.com/news/police_and_courts/article/woman-makes-grocery-store-sign-home-trespassed-19446632.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.ourmidland.com/news/police_and_courts/article/wo...</a>