I worked for a computer manufacturer who was a very early partner with Nvidia, I remember we got access to and employee pricing on the very first Geforce 256 SDR cards for personal purchase in 1999. Feels like an eternity ago. Kinda wish I still had all the memorabilia and swag from back then, especially the 3Dfx stuff.
I also purchased the GeForce 256 back in 99. it was a awesome card. Had a few issues with compatibility with my motherboard at the time. Had to purchase another to get it to work. Can not remember the exact chipset that was the issue now
I owned a RIVA 128. It had awful graphical glitches and lackluster 3D performance, but as the first real contender at an all-in-one 2D/3D card, it was worth owning at the time. Loved it.
Sold them at the Electronics Boutique I worked at, I got one for my 2nd gaming PC, for my roommate. I was a 3DFX fan boy and had their card in my machine.
I had the riva 128 too, the 4mb pci version. It was decent. My friends had s3 virge and s3 savage 32mb cards and my riva 128 was the fastest (sport car gt, fifa 2000, f1 2000, tomb raider 1, 2 run fine). The fifa 2000 had very smooth graphics with this card. And the driver had a lot of tweaking options. The card almost had an xp driver too, but after a beta release it was gone and never found it on the internet. There is just a basic directdraw driver left on the internet without 3d support
Wasnt the 128 competitive with the voodoo in speed (with much better visuals and bit depth) after some driver updates? I remember the TNT was as fast as the voodoo 2 after some driver updates. All the voodoo fanboys used to laugh at me, until they saw it in action then were like.. hmm, maybe youre onto something here.
There's an additional subtlety with the rendering of quads in that they were basically a 3d bodge/evolution of the sprite 2d. The same concept that allows easy rendering of textures without warping also messes up transparency. Each quad is essentially just a sprite warped as necessary, every 'texel' of the sprite is drawn even if the warping is such that multiple texels of the sprite now occupy a single pixel of screen space. Thus if the sprite/quad is drawn with transparency, this transparency reduces for the pixels with multiple underlying texels as the opacity essentially stacks up. Hence the saturn using dithered transparency for 3d objects. Unfortunately this works better on a fuzzy tv screen than a crisp monitor. This contrasts to the triangle method where, for each screen pixel, a texture value is determined by computing the part of the texture that it's covered by that pixel and sampling it to arrive at a single value, avoiding the alpha value stacking in the same way. Obviously this could have been worked around but doing so would have removed much of the benefit of quads anyway.
drawing quads in general doesn't mess up transparencies, just a quirk of that architecture. more importantly, it made traditional UV mapping methods useless. death sentence.
I still have a couple of NV1s somewhere in the attic. Here in the UK they came in prebuilts made by Daewoo. Virtua Fighter ran pretty well on it, and it was a time before emulators were really a thing, so I had a few confused friends who couldn't work out how it was all happening.
The only major disagreement I have is the notion that the Sega Saturn failed due to third party developers not supporting it because of quads. Saturn in Japan has major third party development support, with some of the best games of the generation being left over seas.
Bernie Stolar was the one who ruined the console with his 3D only obsession. Not to mention the fact they forced an early release when it barely had any games. If not for him, Sega would probably still make consoles.
Topic suggestion: why heat is bad for components. We always hear that colder is better, but never why (except catastrophic failures when chips go over 100°C or something)
The CPU can only do so many operations at a given speed because each one generates heat. To be the most efficient as possible, the CPU runs as hot as it's able without overheating. Cooler CPU = more operations = faster computer.
To add to the actually legitimate answer, heat also causes increased resistance, and this causes efficiency to go down, so it uses more energy to do the same work even as it gets slower. Heat also causes quantum tunnelling to get worse I believe, which means errors or degradation gets worse the higher the temperature. How much any of this matters is dependent on the specifics of the chip and the speed and power consumption of it (among other things) so how much you need to worry can vary between not at all for low power devices, to you absolutely must run active cooling or the chip dies very quickly for a desktop GPU for example.
Colder is not always better, because if it's extremely cold, the electrons will slow down and eventually stop. I believe it also affect silicon, but I'm not sure what, something about the crystal lattice, especially doped silicon.
I actually owned a Riva 128 back in the day -- I remember it being the first 3D card I owned that did *not* need a separate 2D card and a short VGA cable to connect to that card as a passthrough. I thought that was a very neat concept at the time. 🙂
This takes me back down memory lane. I didn't get my first PC till 2001 and I had it coupled with an SiS card in it. I soon swapped that out for a GeForce 2 MX with what was an astounding-to-me-at-the-time 64MB of VRAM.
Same. My first graphics card was from an Acer Aspire prebuilt which contained SiS graphics, however, when it was time to upgrade, I wanted the GeForce 4 but my mother did not trust the technicians since they couldn't get the SDRAM working, so we went to the store that originally sold the prebuilt, but they only had the ASUS Geforce 2 which was more expensive than the Inno3D Geforce 4, but it was fanless and had plenty of space. Though, I felt cheated but I was a kid back then and not in control of our finances. It will take a while before I develop my skill in building computers.
My first real 3D video card was a 3Dfx Voodoo Rush. I was still young enough that my parents bought it for me from EB Games. This was in the US before they became the store we all know and love, GameStop! It wasn't until the geFORCE 3 did I get my first nVIDIA card. (P.S. geFORCE and nVIDIA was the proper way to write those names back then)
Nice! Thanks for covering this. I have one of these. One of the launch titles, NASCAR Racing, supported this card, the Creative VLB and Matrox MGA. Literally the first gaming title, I think, accelerated by that many GPUs.
I owned that first Nvidia graphics card. Back in that time, I was more concerned with Doom and Mortal Kombat performance over polygons. This card played both games very well!
Diamond Viper V330 was my first GPU and it had a Riva 128 on it, it came bundled with Star Wars Jedi Knight ...i think i still got a Viper V770 with a Riva TNT chip somewhere. The real star was of course 3Dfx at the time, i wanted a Diamond Monster 3D but it was all sold out so the Viper V330 was the 2nd best choice, i still got my 3Dfx GPU a few years later with the Voodoo3 2000 ...which i also will never let go off. Some day i'll build a proper Retro PC with 3Dfx Glide and Creative EAX audio on a CRT screen again. (i have most of the parts here, i just don't have the Desk space.)
First 3D graphics card that was actually mine was an ELSA Gladiac TNT2 Ultra - so freaking cool it had an S-Video out and I remember playing Half-Life on our 32” Sony Trinitron with 5.1 surround over SPDIF. Crazy times
Was it terrible though? You said that in the days when this came out the standard of triangles for 3D rendering wasn't fully set, amd that it's "all in one" wasn't that good. But when it allowed you to play full feature packed 3D games, with a controller, and offering sound through a single connector without the need of any pass-throughs it was pretty ahead of its time. We are talking a time when 3D cards required a seperate video card to be passed through to get the full image, where you also needed a seperate card for audio and then you have to make sure that they aren't conflicting by setting up their addresses... Its easy to look back and see the flaws in the hardware but when it was relevant it was pretty decent.
Diamond Edge 3D, Rendition V1000 (Creative 3D Blaster), RIVA128 (nv3), Voodoo/Voodoo2, TNT/TNT2 Ultra (nv5), GeForce256 (nv10). 90's GPU dawn was glorious, loved them all. Sure slag it off now but at the time being able to play Sega rally, daytona, virtua fighter, panzer dragoon orta was cool. NV1 was the dawn of what we enjoy today
I watched a Video on the NV1 and man it was an interesting spectacle. Being able to play Saturn Games on the PC. It even came with controllers that were compatible with the PC.
Excellent video! I owned an NV1 back in the mid-late 1990's. I found it on a bidding site for $40, and I think it was on an SIS or some other generic graphics board (not Diamond). It was an interesting card, but seemed to only work well with the Sega games it came with (now I know why, lol). Super cool that it used quadratic polygons. I now wish I would have kept it.
My first Windows PC in early 1998 came with the Riva 128 in the form of the Diamond Viper V330. It was a nice card for what it was, but it had horrible issues around precision, both for the triangle edges and for the textures. This lead to some very annoying render errors. So as soon as the Riva TNT came out, which resolved those issues, I swapped it out for a Diamond Viper V550 and held onto that until the Geforce 2 came out.
NVIDIA’s first ever GeForce graphics card, however, was a game changer. I remember selling my 3Dfx Voodoo card to get a GeForce DDR card. It was a big upgrade.
In the 3D modelling world quads are required for better and cleaner mesh. also quads subdivide very well. if you use triangles you will have bad topology. when making a mesh it must be made of quads. also you can convert a quad mesh down to triangles because a quad is made up of two triangles. triangles are highly discouraged.
This isn't quite right. The 'quads' you're referring to are actually just two triangles with the middle edge hidden, and should not be confused with real quads found in the NV1 or Sega Saturn. Hiding edges to create 'fake' quads like this makes certain modeling tasks easier, and allows subdivision algorithms to know which edges are important (visible) and unimportant (hidden) when determining how to divide a mesh for the optimal topology. The same is true for ngons which are just a series of triangles with multiple edges hidden making them appear to be a single selectable surface.
Triangles are for architecture like in Doom. Doom is a killer app and killed quads. Also someone mentioned alpha channel needs triangles. And bilinear textures on N64 need tris.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Blender is triangle based like all other modern 3D software. For performance reasons it doesn't bother keeping an up-to-date list of triangles that's accessible via Python (that's why you need to call calc_loop_triangles() first), as they update dynamically depending on how each selectable surface is changed. But yea, Blender's not really doing anything special there. And like I said; N-Gons are just a way of showing a bunch of triangles as a single surface. Theoretically if someone wanted to they could add real quad support to Blender, but it would need to be done via software rendering (since modern GPU's have no support for them) which means either it would look completely different in renders and the viewport, or the viewport would need to take a gigantic performance hit.
Triangles are preferrable for rendering since a triangle has a normal vector which can be used for backface removal and these also takes part in lighting. A quad needs to have rules like all 4 points lie on the same plane for it to have a valid normal.
Whatever happened to the BTX motherboard spec? I remember reading in MaximumPC and had a Dell workstation that was BTX and then they kind of disappeared. It was supposed to be like the next-gen motherboard standard.
My first PC had a Diamond Edge 3D card, it came with Virtua fighter, and I personally thought it was pretty good for the time, it was more about software support than the hardware, and at the time it was nice to have one card that could handle 2D, 3D and Sound on one card, (and it was my first PC.) Sad part never knew about the SEGA support until much much later, So I hardly played the two games included with the PC, as I couldn't find a suitable controller, not realising my Saturn Controllers would have worked fine.
Not sure on the NV1, but the saturn quads have a MAJOR disadvantage that is that there's no UV mapping whatsoever. On a regular 3D system, you can use a small section of a texture per triangle, with every point of the triangle being able to pick a place from the texture etc, but on the saturn, every quad always, ALWAYS use the entire texture, so to make a texture mapped character, you had to create a microtexture for every surface in the character. It limited the saturn quite a bit in terms of for example special effects you could do on the system.
@@knight0fdragon The biggest problem is the way it blocks some effects from being done at all on the saturn, like metallic effects. The gamehut channel has a video on how he pulled it off, and it was basically by drawing everything by software
Nvidia would keep NV chip codenames for a long time, Riva 128 was actually NV3, TNT was NV4, TNT2 was NV5, GeForce 256 was NV10, Geforce2 NV11, Geforce3 NV20, till the GeForce7 ended it with NV47. The big trouble with quads was not technical or an API support problem but that none of the professional modelling packages supported creating 3d models using Quads, as such game devs had to use triangles for 3d models so triangle rendering was an essential feature.
I need someone's help, I'm not a computer genius. I was playing my PC when randomly my pc turned off and now it won't turn back on. I've changed the location and still nothing. When I turn the power supply on I can hear it turn on but when I turn the PC on nothing.
What’s crazy is that graphics card right there doesn’t have a heat sink even and the first graphics card I ever bought from nvida only had little tiny fan and it was a green board from what I remember. By today’s standards no GPU or modern motherboard is green and has a small little fan and was considered their flagship 😂
so thats why when i built my first PC there was only ATI graphic's cards, iused ATI up until my last PC build in 2002 then my next GPU was my first NVidia a 3080Ti in my Alienware *( badass card when 32GB's of 3600mhz ram back it up wish i coulda threw 64 in but it got killed, was a badass PC best i ever had till next build )* and i have a 3050 Max Q *( paired with 64GB of 3200MHz GSkillz RipJaw it gets about 85% the performance of a desktop 3050 backed by 16GB 3600mhz ram dual channel )* soon to gave a 3060 Max Q as well
Few small corrections: nVidia NV1 was announced in May 1995 and released in November 1995. 3dfx Voodoo was announced in November 1995 as well as Glide. About same time you had DirectX 1 that was just released in September same year. And OpenGL did exist, but it was limited to professional applications back then. So technically there were no popular existing graphics API back then. And another problem for NV1 was poor 2D performance while at that time all the games were basically relying on 2D speed for software rendering. Also price at that time was not very competitive for what you'd get.
My first graphics card was a Riva TNT. They made compatible drivers for it for over a decade. Loved that card. Eventually moved onto a 3dfx voodoo 5500, massive card back then. Awesome until 6 months later Nvidia bought them and killed all support. I still have that card in my box of old pc stuff.
I Still have my first 3d card The Diamond edge 3d! With all the special version games and the saturn controller ports, back then i use to have a pentium 60mhz and everything in software 3d was unplayable at 640x480. With that card virtua fighter remix,nascar racing, panzer dragoon and Descent destination Saturn, toshinden and Daytona usa was buttery smooth! The next year i pass on the voodoo1 and the rest is history. And for the history the first console that used quadrilateral was the Panasonic 3DO
I wonder what video games today would have been like if we went with quads over triangles. What if the Saturn sold 101 million and the Playstation only sold 9.26 million? We'd probably have a lot more Sonic games.
Games probably wouldn't be that different. A lot of the same ideas would still have happened, they would just be coded optimizing quads instead of triangles. The saturn actually selling well would probably have changed more than a switch from triangles to quads would have since that could potentially mean 4 consoles in the market, or even no Playstation but Sega in its place. Who knows.
SEGA went tile based renderer in the Dreamcast and that became standard for mobile. Now show me how quads work in tiles! And even if we trick UV once, what about complex pixel shaders who look up multiple ( 1D, 2D, 3D ) textures?
They sure did learned from their first mistakes. It took them long enough, but you can't deny that their strategy since 1999 was nothing but perfect. Starting with Riva TNT2 till like Geforce 4, Nvidia did everything right. Just think about this - had they decided to push for NV2 or relased Riva128 few months later and Nvidia would have basically no place in history. Yet somehow I doubt that modern PC market would have been much different without prime player in it.
Damn, what a blast from the past, my first graphics card was a RIVA TNT 1 (PCI). I was saving got the Voodoo 2, when the TNT came out and was cheaper....lol, how times have changed. I still have the card, actually, I've kept all my graphics cards.
The TNT2 Ultra in many ways was even superior to the 3dfx Voodoo 3. The TNT2 ultra could handle better quality textures in most games, and the Voodoo3 couldn't even run in 32 bit mode. It even got a better framerate in a few games.
I remember having a RIVA TNT2 back in the day. I eventually upgraded from that to an ATi Rage Fury Pro 32MB AGP card I bought from CompUSA. Played the fuck out of Unreal Tournament on that thing lol
Quads can be great. Just look at SEGA's S.C.U.D. race. They made sense back then because that meant fewer polygons -- which = less RAM required. I question quads requiring more CPU power than tris when you need two tris per quad (so that should be the same amount of CPU power either way). Plus, how else could you play Virtua Fighter smoothly on a PC back then?
I did the same hardware design class where the NVIDIA founders got their idea to built a graphics processor with the same professor. Crazy how far it’s all come!
I had the Diamond Multimedia Edge3D card with the NV1.. and yes.. it sucked.. while it could use sega controllers and came with 3D acecllerated versions of Panzer Dragoon and Virtual Fighter 3D on PC.. .. if you tried to use it in Windows NT.. you got colors that were all wrong.. on everything.. OK for 9x.. but ye.. had it less than a year.. lol
During the Riva 128 era I had an ATI Rage Fury, it was a pretty decent card. I kind of miss it even though it would be prehistoric now, it never did die. I sold the system to an ex-girlfriend, and I think the processor or motherboard died first before she junked the whole system.
Biggest problem is not that they are bad cards, 4000 series performance and feature wise are amazing cards its just that they are just badged wrong and priced ridiculously. If the 4060 Ti was badged as a 4050 Ti and priced decently then it would be a really great card, but as it is it's just a really poor value card.
The first several generations of video cards NVidia produced were pretty terrible. 1) 2D graphics was noticeably slower then any of the competition. 2) colors were bland. Even Voodoo cards that went through DAC-ADC-DAC conversions had noticeably better colors, let alone comparing to ATI or Matrox 3) 3D performance was fake in a way similar to the current DLSS. It was just interpolation back then. But ultimately end users didn't care much ..and this is why we can't have nice things.
I was too young for nv1. My first Nvidia card was a GeForce 2 mx 200 in a pre-built hp Pavillion p3 700mhz. Then quickly upgraded to a geforce 4 ti 4200 with an Athlon 2400÷
It was always odd to me that quads didn't win out, a quad can represent a tri but not vice versa without using multiple tri, granted back then computational complexity was a thing and yeah... I had fun coding in quads could make them do a lot back in the day...
@@SirRebonack I didn't say quads have no disadvantages. In terms of computational complexity, triangles win out for doing what was, at the time, fancy stuff like advanced lighting effects and back-face culling, because you can simply assume a normal by whether the triangle's points are drawn clockwise or anticlockwise. You also don't have some of the alpha-blending problems of quads when you're using triangles. However, the Saturn mentioned in the video was designed around quads in a similar way to the AM2 and AM3 boards that Sega was using in its arcades, and as a natural extension of the super-scaler arcade architecture that Sega had been doing previously. For sprites it makes sense, because you literally just map the four corners of the bitmap to the quad and do some simple linear math to decide what pixel corresponds to which texel. For anything more complex than that, wikipedia has some typically dense stuff on skew polygons. Start there.
@@benuscore8780the hardware read the sprite data row by row, texel by texel and spit single pixels onto the screen ( 3do and Jaguar can show this ). The driver up scales any texture until overlap is achieved. You just need a write cache, which delays the actual write of a tile, until it is filled. Triangles need a cache for the texture.
I had a diamond v330 and a diamond v770 ultra. I saved up all my money to buy them as a kid. And I had to jump through a million hoops to play games because everyone programed their games to work with voodoo. I remember playing ff7 and all the videos were upside down.
late 90s cards were either way out of consumer price range, or .... Junk. Luckily most games back then were developed to the most common denominator, basic home computers. Of which I had no problem playing. 99% of most games one would want, for a $1000 HP, etc. My favorite game at the time was boulders d gate
I mean... the "All in one" solution isn't a terrible idea. Pretty much everything from USB, WiFi, Sound, and Graphics are often built into the CPU and Chipset (Okay, that's 2 chips not one, but still) these days.
I had no idea about NV1. But I had Riva TNT2 in my first PC back in 1999, and I remember I was also considering Voodoo2. Or it was Voodoo3🤔I played Soldier of Fortune so much and I got sick of first person shooters and haven't played them in years until Far Cry. Or maybe because I was hooked on Football Manager and PES😁
nvidia ntn2 32mb vram were basicilly my first gaming card for like 100 bucks (tax included) -it were ok but with new games like Unreal tournament coming out or quake 1 one were down to lower resolutions - Yes they ran but limited fps-Open Gl was its strongest point
I worked for a computer manufacturer who was a very early partner with Nvidia, I remember we got access to and employee pricing on the very first Geforce 256 SDR cards for personal purchase in 1999. Feels like an eternity ago. Kinda wish I still had all the memorabilia and swag from back then, especially the 3Dfx stuff.
I wish I had a big ol' pile of NVDA common shares! 💰😎✌️
I played diablo on one of those, 😂
Yes the Geforce DDR was such a great card, I got one from working in a computer shop and and I really wish I kept it in the collection.
@@GoonyMclinux back when diablo was good
I also purchased the GeForce 256 back in 99. it was a awesome card. Had a few issues with compatibility with my motherboard at the time. Had to purchase another to get it to work. Can not remember the exact chipset that was the issue now
I owned a RIVA 128. It had awful graphical glitches and lackluster 3D performance, but as the first real contender at an all-in-one 2D/3D card, it was worth owning at the time. Loved it.
Sold them at the Electronics Boutique I worked at, I got one for my 2nd gaming PC, for my roommate. I was a 3DFX fan boy and had their card in my machine.
I think i played Project IGI on a Riva 128 many years ago. That was a cool ass game
I had the riva 128 too, the 4mb pci version. It was decent. My friends had s3 virge and s3 savage 32mb cards and my riva 128 was the fastest (sport car gt, fifa 2000, f1 2000, tomb raider 1, 2 run fine). The fifa 2000 had very smooth graphics with this card. And the driver had a lot of tweaking options. The card almost had an xp driver too, but after a beta release it was gone and never found it on the internet. There is just a basic directdraw driver left on the internet without 3d support
Man you old, what kind of horse did you have?
Wasnt the 128 competitive with the voodoo in speed (with much better visuals and bit depth) after some driver updates? I remember the TNT was as fast as the voodoo 2 after some driver updates. All the voodoo fanboys used to laugh at me, until they saw it in action then were like.. hmm, maybe youre onto something here.
There's an additional subtlety with the rendering of quads in that they were basically a 3d bodge/evolution of the sprite 2d. The same concept that allows easy rendering of textures without warping also messes up transparency.
Each quad is essentially just a sprite warped as necessary, every 'texel' of the sprite is drawn even if the warping is such that multiple texels of the sprite now occupy a single pixel of screen space. Thus if the sprite/quad is drawn with transparency, this transparency reduces for the pixels with multiple underlying texels as the opacity essentially stacks up. Hence the saturn using dithered transparency for 3d objects. Unfortunately this works better on a fuzzy tv screen than a crisp monitor.
This contrasts to the triangle method where, for each screen pixel, a texture value is determined by computing the part of the texture that it's covered by that pixel and sampling it to arrive at a single value, avoiding the alpha value stacking in the same way.
Obviously this could have been worked around but doing so would have removed much of the benefit of quads anyway.
drawing quads in general doesn't mess up transparencies, just a quirk of that architecture. more importantly, it made traditional UV mapping methods useless. death sentence.
I still have a couple of NV1s somewhere in the attic. Here in the UK they came in prebuilts made by Daewoo.
Virtua Fighter ran pretty well on it, and it was a time before emulators were really a thing, so I had a few confused friends who couldn't work out how it was all happening.
The only major disagreement I have is the notion that the Sega Saturn failed due to third party developers not supporting it because of quads. Saturn in Japan has major third party development support, with some of the best games of the generation being left over seas.
Yep! This guy should do some research before shooting off his mouth. He was probably still in diapers in the 90's.
Bernie Stolar was the one who ruined the console with his 3D only obsession. Not to mention the fact they forced an early release when it barely had any games. If not for him, Sega would probably still make consoles.
@@kraosdadafusfus8034 no, by the time Stolar joined Sega, the console was on its way to failing.
My first card was a 3DFx Voodoo, I went from zero to hero in Quake 1 as I could snipe all my mates so easily.
I used to have LAN parties and the Quake time demo benchmark was always the first thing people did once they had their gear setup.
Topic suggestion: why heat is bad for components. We always hear that colder is better, but never why (except catastrophic failures when chips go over 100°C or something)
Because heat will cause computer parts to overheat. NEXT!
The CPU can only do so many operations at a given speed because each one generates heat. To be the most efficient as possible, the CPU runs as hot as it's able without overheating. Cooler CPU = more operations = faster computer.
To add to the actually legitimate answer, heat also causes increased resistance, and this causes efficiency to go down, so it uses more energy to do the same work even as it gets slower.
Heat also causes quantum tunnelling to get worse I believe, which means errors or degradation gets worse the higher the temperature.
How much any of this matters is dependent on the specifics of the chip and the speed and power consumption of it (among other things) so how much you need to worry can vary between not at all for low power devices, to you absolutely must run active cooling or the chip dies very quickly for a desktop GPU for example.
I squared R losses
Colder is not always better, because if it's extremely cold, the electrons will slow down and eventually stop. I believe it also affect silicon, but I'm not sure what, something about the crystal lattice, especially doped silicon.
Always loved nvidia's old packaging lol
@tjb94no
@tjb94no
@tjb94 I don't believe that for a nanosecond lol
But what would 2000 followers be use to you anyway?
the pretty ladys were embarrising when your parents were buying it for you lol
@tjb94 Bot
I once owned an NV1 card. Had I known that it would shoot into triple digit pricing on eBay, I would have kept it...
hindsight is 20/20
I actually owned a Riva 128 back in the day -- I remember it being the first 3D card I owned that did *not* need a separate 2D card and a short VGA cable to connect to that card as a passthrough. I thought that was a very neat concept at the time. 🙂
... yeah ... indeed very unique ... the S3 Virge, ATI Rage, Matrix Mystique, they ALL needed seperate 2D cards ...
Oh no, wait ...
This takes me back down memory lane. I didn't get my first PC till 2001 and I had it coupled with an SiS card in it. I soon swapped that out for a GeForce 2 MX with what was an astounding-to-me-at-the-time 64MB of VRAM.
Same. My first graphics card was from an Acer Aspire prebuilt which contained SiS graphics, however, when it was time to upgrade, I wanted the GeForce 4 but my mother did not trust the technicians since they couldn't get the SDRAM working, so we went to the store that originally sold the prebuilt, but they only had the ASUS Geforce 2 which was more expensive than the Inno3D Geforce 4, but it was fanless and had plenty of space. Though, I felt cheated but I was a kid back then and not in control of our finances. It will take a while before I develop my skill in building computers.
I went from a Matrox Mystique to GeForce 2 Ultra back in 2000
My first real 3D video card was a 3Dfx Voodoo Rush. I was still young enough that my parents bought it for me from EB Games. This was in the US before they became the store we all know and love, GameStop! It wasn't until the geFORCE 3 did I get my first nVIDIA card. (P.S. geFORCE and nVIDIA was the proper way to write those names back then)
Eb games still exists in canada!
Nice! Thanks for covering this. I have one of these. One of the launch titles, NASCAR Racing, supported this card, the Creative VLB and Matrox MGA. Literally the first gaming title, I think, accelerated by that many GPUs.
I owned that first Nvidia graphics card. Back in that time, I was more concerned with Doom and Mortal Kombat performance over polygons. This card played both games very well!
Love the historical videos from LTT!
Diamond Viper V330 was my first GPU and it had a Riva 128 on it, it came bundled with Star Wars Jedi Knight
...i think i still got a Viper V770 with a Riva TNT chip somewhere. The real star was of course 3Dfx at the time, i wanted a Diamond Monster 3D but it was all sold out so the Viper V330 was the 2nd best choice, i still got my 3Dfx GPU a few years later with the Voodoo3 2000 ...which i also will never let go off.
Some day i'll build a proper Retro PC with 3Dfx Glide and Creative EAX audio on a CRT screen again. (i have most of the parts here, i just don't have the Desk space.)
Episodes like this. That's why I keep going to this site. Quality content.
2:06 skip ad
First 3D graphics card that was actually mine was an ELSA Gladiac TNT2 Ultra - so freaking cool it had an S-Video out and I remember playing Half-Life on our 32” Sony Trinitron with 5.1 surround over SPDIF. Crazy times
Was it terrible though? You said that in the days when this came out the standard of triangles for 3D rendering wasn't fully set, amd that it's "all in one" wasn't that good.
But when it allowed you to play full feature packed 3D games, with a controller, and offering sound through a single connector without the need of any pass-throughs it was pretty ahead of its time.
We are talking a time when 3D cards required a seperate video card to be passed through to get the full image, where you also needed a seperate card for audio and then you have to make sure that they aren't conflicting by setting up their addresses...
Its easy to look back and see the flaws in the hardware but when it was relevant it was pretty decent.
Diamond Edge 3D, Rendition V1000 (Creative 3D Blaster), RIVA128 (nv3), Voodoo/Voodoo2, TNT/TNT2 Ultra (nv5), GeForce256 (nv10). 90's GPU dawn was glorious, loved them all. Sure slag it off now but at the time being able to play Sega rally, daytona, virtua fighter, panzer dragoon orta was cool. NV1 was the dawn of what we enjoy today
I watched a Video on the NV1 and man it was an interesting spectacle. Being able to play Saturn Games on the PC. It even came with controllers that were compatible with the PC.
Excellent video! I owned an NV1 back in the mid-late 1990's. I found it on a bidding site for $40, and I think it was on an SIS or some other generic graphics board (not Diamond). It was an interesting card, but seemed to only work well with the Sega games it came with (now I know why, lol). Super cool that it used quadratic polygons. I now wish I would have kept it.
My first Windows PC in early 1998 came with the Riva 128 in the form of the Diamond Viper V330. It was a nice card for what it was, but it had horrible issues around precision, both for the triangle edges and for the textures. This lead to some very annoying render errors. So as soon as the Riva TNT came out, which resolved those issues, I swapped it out for a Diamond Viper V550 and held onto that until the Geforce 2 came out.
I remember Diamond, good lord, so many old school computer memories. Probable gonna have to build my retro arcade sometime soon.
NVIDIA’s first ever GeForce graphics card, however, was a game changer. I remember selling my 3Dfx Voodoo card to get a GeForce DDR card. It was a big upgrade.
It was a big mistake, considering the prices of Voodoo cards today. I kept all my Voodoo cards.
In the 3D modelling world quads are required for better and cleaner mesh. also quads subdivide very well.
if you use triangles you will have bad topology. when making a mesh it must be made of quads. also you can convert a quad mesh down to triangles because a quad is made up of two triangles.
triangles are highly discouraged.
This isn't quite right. The 'quads' you're referring to are actually just two triangles with the middle edge hidden, and should not be confused with real quads found in the NV1 or Sega Saturn. Hiding edges to create 'fake' quads like this makes certain modeling tasks easier, and allows subdivision algorithms to know which edges are important (visible) and unimportant (hidden) when determining how to divide a mesh for the optimal topology. The same is true for ngons which are just a series of triangles with multiple edges hidden making them appear to be a single selectable surface.
Triangles are for architecture like in Doom. Doom is a killer app and killed quads. Also someone mentioned alpha channel needs triangles. And bilinear textures on N64 need tris.
@@PolyHertzBlender works with ngons. The editor of course needs to send triangles to the GPU for preview. What does cycles use internally??
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Blender is triangle based like all other modern 3D software. For performance reasons it doesn't bother keeping an up-to-date list of triangles that's accessible via Python (that's why you need to call calc_loop_triangles() first), as they update dynamically depending on how each selectable surface is changed. But yea, Blender's not really doing anything special there. And like I said; N-Gons are just a way of showing a bunch of triangles as a single surface. Theoretically if someone wanted to they could add real quad support to Blender, but it would need to be done via software rendering (since modern GPU's have no support for them) which means either it would look completely different in renders and the viewport, or the viewport would need to take a gigantic performance hit.
Triangles are preferrable for rendering since a triangle has a normal vector which can be used for backface removal and these also takes part in lighting. A quad needs to have rules like all 4 points lie on the same plane for it to have a valid normal.
Whatever happened to the BTX motherboard spec? I remember reading in MaximumPC and had a Dell workstation that was BTX and then they kind of disappeared. It was supposed to be like the next-gen motherboard standard.
The last BTX board that I knew is HP Z220 (Sandy and Ivy bridge)
After that, with the HP prodesk it's an ATX (haswell).
My first PC had a Diamond Edge 3D card, it came with Virtua fighter, and I personally thought it was pretty good for the time, it was more about software support than the hardware, and at the time it was nice to have one card that could handle 2D, 3D and Sound on one card, (and it was my first PC.)
Sad part never knew about the SEGA support until much much later, So I hardly played the two games included with the PC, as I couldn't find a suitable controller, not realising my Saturn Controllers would have worked fine.
Seems we’ve come full circle.
Not sure on the NV1, but the saturn quads have a MAJOR disadvantage that is that there's no UV mapping whatsoever.
On a regular 3D system, you can use a small section of a texture per triangle, with every point of the triangle being able to pick a place from the texture etc, but on the saturn, every quad always, ALWAYS use the entire texture, so to make a texture mapped character, you had to create a microtexture for every surface in the character.
It limited the saturn quite a bit in terms of for example special effects you could do on the system.
UV mapping wasn’t a major disadvantage, since the Saturn had more video RAM. UV mapping would have definitely helped though.
Take a look at the homebrew game Hellslave, or Irreal (which is a port of Unreal) to see what they system was capable of.
@@knight0fdragon The biggest problem is the way it blocks some effects from being done at all on the saturn, like metallic effects.
The gamehut channel has a video on how he pulled it off, and it was basically by drawing everything by software
@@dan_loup Hellslave achieves metallic effects through hardware.
th-cam.com/video/IRDho_yvT9E/w-d-xo.html here is the developer showing it off in a tech demo
omg Edge 3D!!! I had one in my first PC! Fortunately, I managed to got my hands on a Voodoo card a couple of months later :)
Nvidia would keep NV chip codenames for a long time, Riva 128 was actually NV3, TNT was NV4, TNT2 was NV5, GeForce 256 was NV10, Geforce2 NV11, Geforce3 NV20, till the GeForce7 ended it with NV47.
The big trouble with quads was not technical or an API support problem but that none of the professional modelling packages supported creating 3d models using Quads, as such game devs had to use triangles for 3d models so triangle rendering was an essential feature.
I need someone's help, I'm not a computer genius. I was playing my PC when randomly my pc turned off and now it won't turn back on. I've changed the location and still nothing. When I turn the power supply on I can hear it turn on but when I turn the PC on nothing.
sad we didn't get to see a photo of James with frosted tips
I was working in technical support at Diamond when the Edge 3D was released! Good times...good times.
What’s crazy is that graphics card right there doesn’t have a heat sink even and the first graphics card I ever bought from nvida only had little tiny fan and it was a green board from what I remember. By today’s standards no GPU or modern motherboard is green and has a small little fan and was considered their flagship 😂
Honestly I would buy that just for the bundled games. Come on, Descent and Panzer Dragoon? What a steal!
so thats why when i built my first PC there was only ATI graphic's cards, iused ATI up until my last PC build in 2002 then my next GPU was my first NVidia a 3080Ti in my Alienware *( badass card when 32GB's of 3600mhz ram back it up wish i coulda threw 64 in but it got killed, was a badass PC best i ever had till next build )* and i have a 3050 Max Q *( paired with 64GB of 3200MHz GSkillz RipJaw it gets about 85% the performance of a desktop 3050 backed by 16GB 3600mhz ram dual channel )* soon to gave a 3060 Max Q as well
Few small corrections:
nVidia NV1 was announced in May 1995 and released in November 1995. 3dfx Voodoo was announced in November 1995 as well as Glide. About same time you had DirectX 1 that was just released in September same year. And OpenGL did exist, but it was limited to professional applications back then.
So technically there were no popular existing graphics API back then.
And another problem for NV1 was poor 2D performance while at that time all the games were basically relying on 2D speed for software rendering. Also price at that time was not very competitive for what you'd get.
In before the storm
My first graphics card was a Riva TNT. They made compatible drivers for it for over a decade. Loved that card. Eventually moved onto a 3dfx voodoo 5500, massive card back then. Awesome until 6 months later Nvidia bought them and killed all support. I still have that card in my box of old pc stuff.
I still have a Riva 128 and it work really well :) Too bad I missed NV1. :( Great video!
I have the nividia geforce RTC 3050 Ti laptop gpu ..but while playing games it runs at high 90% ,what can i do to fix this?
TIL there's a name for those square polygons I see in 3D modeling screenshots.
Would quads have succeeded and surpass triangles if given the chance?
I Still have my first 3d card The Diamond edge 3d! With all the special version games and the saturn controller ports, back then i use to have a pentium 60mhz and everything in software 3d was unplayable at 640x480. With that card virtua fighter remix,nascar racing, panzer dragoon and Descent destination Saturn, toshinden and Daytona usa was buttery smooth! The next year i pass on the voodoo1 and the rest is history. And for the history the first console that used quadrilateral was the Panasonic 3DO
I wonder what video games today would have been like if we went with quads over triangles. What if the Saturn sold 101 million and the Playstation only sold 9.26 million? We'd probably have a lot more Sonic games.
Games probably wouldn't be that different. A lot of the same ideas would still have happened, they would just be coded optimizing quads instead of triangles.
The saturn actually selling well would probably have changed more than a switch from triangles to quads would have since that could potentially mean 4 consoles in the market, or even no Playstation but Sega in its place. Who knows.
SEGA went tile based renderer in the Dreamcast and that became standard for mobile. Now show me how quads work in tiles!
And even if we trick UV once, what about complex pixel shaders who look up multiple ( 1D, 2D, 3D ) textures?
the almost uniform background make the greenscreen removal really pop, especially with the non aligned lighting
That Joystick you showed, I had that exact model. I think it's still in a box somewhere.
They sure did learned from their first mistakes. It took them long enough, but you can't deny that their strategy since 1999 was nothing but perfect. Starting with Riva TNT2 till like Geforce 4, Nvidia did everything right.
Just think about this - had they decided to push for NV2 or relased Riva128 few months later and Nvidia would have basically no place in history. Yet somehow I doubt that modern PC market would have been much different without prime player in it.
Didn't the RIVA violate 3Dfx's patents? I seem to recall a lawsuit around that time.
Damn, what a blast from the past, my first graphics card was a RIVA TNT 1 (PCI). I was saving got the Voodoo 2, when the TNT came out and was cheaper....lol, how times have changed.
I still have the card, actually, I've kept all my graphics cards.
That TRIANGLE you forgot to cut out of your beard is killing me.
I had a Voodoo 3 16Mb 2000 PCI, I still remember when I first played Quake 1 using Glide, It was a complete shock!
You forgot the TNT, TNT2 AND TNT2 Ultra. The ultra smoked the 3dfx voodoo 2.
The TNT2 Ultra in many ways was even superior to the 3dfx Voodoo 3. The TNT2 ultra could handle better quality textures in most games, and the Voodoo3 couldn't even run in 32 bit mode. It even got a better framerate in a few games.
I had a pentium mmx 233mhz with a S3 trio 64-1MB and 16 MB Ram... Switch for the S3 for Riva TNT... It was a revolution... A new pc!!
I remember having a RIVA TNT2 back in the day. I eventually upgraded from that to an ATi Rage Fury Pro 32MB AGP card I bought from CompUSA. Played the fuck out of Unreal Tournament on that thing lol
Linking to a Fusion 360 tutorial in a video sponsored by SolidWorks is peak comedy.
Quads can be great. Just look at SEGA's S.C.U.D. race. They made sense back then because that meant fewer polygons -- which = less RAM required. I question quads requiring more CPU power than tris when you need two tris per quad (so that should be the same amount of CPU power either way). Plus, how else could you play Virtua Fighter smoothly on a PC back then?
I did the same hardware design class where the NVIDIA founders got their idea to built a graphics processor with the same professor. Crazy how far it’s all come!
0:28 Man that is the most mid-90s box art possible.
I had the Diamond Multimedia Edge3D card with the NV1.. and yes.. it sucked.. while it could use sega controllers and came with 3D acecllerated versions of Panzer Dragoon and Virtual Fighter 3D on PC.. .. if you tried to use it in Windows NT.. you got colors that were all wrong.. on everything.. OK for 9x.. but ye.. had it less than a year.. lol
Why is everybody always forgetting the TNT Chips? They where the first major blow against Voodoo at this time.
imagine having a graphics card, couldn't be me **goes back to my text only terminal**
During the Riva 128 era I had an ATI Rage Fury, it was a pretty decent card. I kind of miss it even though it would be prehistoric now, it never did die. I sold the system to an ex-girlfriend, and I think the processor or motherboard died first before she junked the whole system.
And over 2 decades later, Nvidia still releases dumb cards like the 4060 ti
Biggest problem is not that they are bad cards, 4000 series performance and feature wise are amazing cards its just that they are just badged wrong and priced ridiculously. If the 4060 Ti was badged as a 4050 Ti and priced decently then it would be a really great card, but as it is it's just a really poor value card.
My first PC in 1999 had Riva128ZX videocard. I played NFS 4, Half-Life, Homeworld, etc. on it.
2:33 Um no. The cause for that is the PS1 didn't have perspective correct textures.
The first several generations of video cards NVidia produced were pretty terrible.
1) 2D graphics was noticeably slower then any of the competition.
2) colors were bland. Even Voodoo cards that went through DAC-ADC-DAC conversions had noticeably better colors, let alone comparing to ATI or Matrox
3) 3D performance was fake in a way similar to the current DLSS. It was just interpolation back then.
But ultimately end users didn't care much ..and this is why we can't have nice things.
Love that you had a sponsor from SolidWorks and proceeded to do a demo in Fusion360! Bold! 😂
At least Intel is doing better than this, though 'quad only' and 'poor dx9 support' seem fairly similar
Especially when he said "the drivers were just a software emulation layer". That sounded pretty familiar lol
I was too young for nv1. My first Nvidia card was a GeForce 2 mx 200 in a pre-built hp Pavillion p3 700mhz. Then quickly upgraded to a geforce 4 ti 4200 with an Athlon 2400÷
Imagine if they had a modern gt710 back then
It was always odd to me that quads didn't win out, a quad can represent a tri but not vice versa without using multiple tri, granted back then computational complexity was a thing and yeah... I had fun coding in quads could make them do a lot back in the day...
Realistically the only way to render quads is by triangulating them first anyway...
@@benuscore8780 Not really. Think of how sprites work. Now start warping sprites around and what you have is quad-based 3D.
@@technicalfool Try drawing a non-planar quad as a sprite.
@@SirRebonack I didn't say quads have no disadvantages. In terms of computational complexity, triangles win out for doing what was, at the time, fancy stuff like advanced lighting effects and back-face culling, because you can simply assume a normal by whether the triangle's points are drawn clockwise or anticlockwise. You also don't have some of the alpha-blending problems of quads when you're using triangles.
However, the Saturn mentioned in the video was designed around quads in a similar way to the AM2 and AM3 boards that Sega was using in its arcades, and as a natural extension of the super-scaler arcade architecture that Sega had been doing previously. For sprites it makes sense, because you literally just map the four corners of the bitmap to the quad and do some simple linear math to decide what pixel corresponds to which texel.
For anything more complex than that, wikipedia has some typically dense stuff on skew polygons. Start there.
@@benuscore8780the hardware read the sprite data row by row, texel by texel and spit single pixels onto the screen ( 3do and Jaguar can show this ). The driver up scales any texture until overlap is achieved.
You just need a write cache, which delays the actual write of a tile, until it is filled. Triangles need a cache for the texture.
I owned Riva TNT 2 pro. Had TV in so I could record music videos from MTV :) Best card I owned at the time.
I had a diamond v330 and a diamond v770 ultra. I saved up all my money to buy them as a kid. And I had to jump through a million hoops to play games because everyone programed their games to work with voodoo. I remember playing ff7 and all the videos were upside down.
I heard that Nvidia invented a new shape and their GPUs will only work with that shape and that everyone else will have to license that shape. .
You should do a video on Winaero Tweaker
We need to see James in frosted tips now....
my riva128 (diamond viper) wasn't as fast as 3dfx but i needed to do some openGL programming (windowed)
Reminds me of my first GPU, an Orchid Righteous 3D from 1996.
And a good one too. It had the legendary 3DFX Voodoo chip and Orchid paired it with fast memory making it one of the best Voodoo 1 cards out there.
@@Aranimda aye, and it only cost £140 new lol. How times have changed
I must be senile cause I remember Diamond video cards being made by ATI which later got purchased by AMD. Am I wrong?
Nvidia also developed and released TNT (16MB) and TNT2 (32MB) GPUs before the GeForce
Today we model in quads, but export to triangles.
late 90s cards were either way out of consumer price range, or .... Junk. Luckily most games back then were developed to the most common denominator, basic home computers. Of which I had no problem playing. 99% of most games one would want, for a $1000 HP, etc.
My favorite game at the time was boulders d gate
I had a Riva 128, but stopped at the MX440. I did have a nForce4 6150 nice I only use iGPU since 2005.
I suggest next topic to be about the "Realmagic" MPEG Decoder card from Sigma Designs
well the additional software needed to run msi afterburner properly now makes sense with the riva 128
I owned it back in the day. It had quite a few games and looking back I actually got my value from it
Love that clip of 12 year old Linus and an all-in-one printer. :)
My first PC had a Geforce 256. I'd love a video about that. The first true GPU.
Digital Foundry has a cool video about GeForce 256. Have you seen it?
"The first true GPU."
Lol. Seems like you have been indulging in the Nvidia koolaid. How's your 4060 ?
@@Gatorade69I think he called it the first true GPU because it was the first to do T&L(Transform and Lighting) in hardware.
@@abionaalli The first GPU was the Rendition Verité. It was just to slow and lost against the Voodoo, that did only rasterization.
Looking at those old chips you can see why I type it as nVidia.
Born in 1974. I had one of these. It just didn't work right ever.
A headsup about how to make the old IBM keyboards that is gold for some, to get it to work with USB would be nice!
Is that the official labs logo he's wearing?
I mean... the "All in one" solution isn't a terrible idea. Pretty much everything from USB, WiFi, Sound, and Graphics are often built into the CPU and Chipset (Okay, that's 2 chips not one, but still) these days.
i had a TNT2 m64, which sucked hard. it had a tiny fan which was stuck so hard from dust or whatever that you could barely turn it with your finger...
I had no idea about NV1. But I had Riva TNT2 in my first PC back in 1999, and I remember I was also considering Voodoo2. Or it was Voodoo3🤔I played Soldier of Fortune so much and I got sick of first person shooters and haven't played them in years until Far Cry. Or maybe because I was hooked on Football Manager and PES😁
nvidia ntn2 32mb vram were basicilly my first gaming card for like 100 bucks (tax included) -it were ok but with new games like Unreal tournament coming out or quake 1 one were down to lower resolutions - Yes they ran but limited fps-Open Gl was its strongest point
Just like their last😂