For sure! Thank you so much for watching, and I'm glad that you enjoyed! CTF Face is still one of my favorite shooter maps of all time! Such a fun one, and UT99 is probably my favorite multiplayer game to this day!
Thank you so much for the kind words and for the support Rik! It's truly an honor to hear this from you! The Intel 740 is really one of those things that you don't want to know about, but you can't resist messing with, you know? It's a cool card, and really launched a revolution of sorts, but dang does it SUCK at the end of the day. Sure, for the money, it was great, but it was not the card to have, despite what Intel's marketing attempted to convey. I'd have rather bought a Voodoo 1 at a discount in 1998 than buy this thing haha. Thank you again for all the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the video!
9:35 - About Unreal, it's not gamma, but lighting - it seems colored (and dynamic) lighting is completely disabled. Go to Preferences->Display and there should be a "NoLighting" option probably set to True.
For a couple of years, the Intel 740 was the best bang for the buck display adapter around. 9/10 systems that I sold would have had one, I must have sold a few thousand. And then the GeForce 2MX came out and for the price, that thing was unbeatable.
Thank you for watching and for all of the support! I hope that you enjoyed the video! It truly was an interesting card and I found the budget proposition aspect of it quite nice. The card itself was not anything flashy, nor was it particularly gamer-oriented. It's a lot like that era of Intel--business-orientated, well-made, and does the job well enough. I can see where this card had its place as an early budget-oriented beast, prior to the GF2MX. The 2MX is another league, sure, but the i740 definitely surprised me and provided quite a nice experience! Thanks again for watching!
First of all, thanks for another great video, you are very talented. Second, that image quality is UNREAL (pun intended). I'm not one to notice this but the color range and contrast is just ridiculous, I don't think I have ever seen that game look like this, then maybe, thats because I usually run it with glide. It's a shame the Intel 740 can't run Shogo very well! Great video, thanks for another one, Will!
uhm, I think both stock and the fixed versions look pretty bad: the first is over bright and washed and the second one is oversaturated/contrasted to compensate 😅
Thank you for the kind words, friendship, and for all of the support as always Bruno! I'm just trying to learn and improve and I know that with the guidance and support of guys like you and the whole community on the whole, we'll all only keep improving and learning! As far as the image quality, it really was quite nice! I wonder how the i740 would look on a CRT. It's a neat experience, too, when you consider just how crisp the 2D is! Using Windows never felt blurry or slow; if anything it was snappy and always crystal clear. I was impressed the card even ran Unreal as well as it did; I went in expecting a LOT worse haha! It definitely was weird to see it too, because I always run it with Glide myself! It's neat though and I'm considering messing with this card some more. I was really disappointed with Shogo, but that's to be expected haha. Shogo isn't that easy to run in the first place and this card is not great when it comes to certain games. Shogo did run better at 480p and at 800x600 it was okay I guess haha. Either way, thank you again for everything my friend! It's always an absolute pleasure!
Great video Will!. I had no idea that Intel ever entered the GPU game, that is really cool! This is a sweet piece of history. I really enjoyed seeing all those charts and how it compared to the competition of the time. This looks like it would have been a decent 1998 budget card. This 2D image quality is ridiculously good! And I was surprised how well Unreal and Half-Life ran. That is a lot faster than I thought it would be. Awesome video and awesome card.
Thank you so much for watching Rami and, as always, thank you for all the support and for the friendship! It's kinda crazy to think Intel made this, then dropped out of the dGPU space for what? 20+ years? And now they're back!? It's insane, but definitely cool to see the history of this and I'm so glad that you enjoyed this! It's interesting to see that this thing was so, so good in 2D and it sucked so, so bad in 3D! I have heard, but am not personally sure, that this is a great AGP card for DOS for that very reason. It definitely fits right in the timeframe there as a budget card for 1998, and I think it would've been okay to hold onto for a year or two. I was surprised too on the 2D! This thing must've been killer on a CRT! I bet one of these could make up for the V1 and V2's terrible 2D degradation. Unreal and Half-Life shocked me too! I've heard this card is trash, but they ran fine for me! Then again, I used a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, so this isn't too fair of a comparison to the average performance back then haha! Thank you again, though, for all the kind words and support!
Hey, thank you for all of the support and for checking out the video! Glad to hear that you learned a few things! That was the coolest part for me too, honestly. The i740 isn't explored much and I've always wondered why. In a sense, it's a weird card, but it pioneered AGP as the way forward and that was cool! Anyway, thanks again for watching and for the support!
Ah, that makes sense! Unfortunately, my eyesight is quite poor, but that would explain the difference. I have a harder time than not discerning textures and lighting in older games, but once you say that I can see where that adds up! Thank you for letting me know, this is quite interesting! I wonder if it just wasn't supported, or if this is a driver bug?
@@RetroTechBytes Can be a bug in DX driver. You can try to alter renderer to OpenGL by changing Engine section in "UnrealTournament.ini" file. Maybe it will make some kind of positive difference. [Engine.Engine] ;GameRenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice GameRenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice
Thank you for checking out my video, Nathan, and thank you for starting GPUJune! This has been such a pleasure and a truly awesome experience. I agree with you on your assessment here. It's a disappointing card, in that it's such a cool concept, but fails to execute on that. It's a good card for what it is, but would be a brilliant card if not for what it's not (not that that statement makes sense, in re-reading, but yes haha). I didn't have the pleasure of using this back in the day, but I did have a PC with an i752 core in the 815 chipset and oh, jeez, was that a mess. The drivers still hadn't improved or matured enough by the time this series of cards ended its reign. Either way, thank you again for watching, and thank you again for all that you do!
Thank you again man! I’m just most glad to hear you enjoyed it! I love your work and hearing that you-the guru of this stuff-liked my vid means a heck of a lot more than you know!
Good to have a pretty comprehensive video on this card, as not many people have actually used them in gaming systems owing to them being found mostly in business systems. I pulled mine from an IBM NetVista. Even if it had come to market when AGP was launched in August of 1997, nVidia took the market quite early on, and then the Voodoo2 was released right around the time the i740 was in Feb '98, so really no-one was paying any attention to it by then.
Hey, thank you so much for watching and for all of the support! The i740 was definitely not a widely-adopted product in the consumer space beyond business systems, that's for sure. I do see IBM NetVistas with them now and again, and I've found that the only really competent i740 with games was the PCI version (which I'd love to have, but dang are they rare). I was impressed with the performance, but having a Voodoo2 or Riva 128 would've been preferable at this time. Heck, a Rage Pro Turbo would've been solid too! There were so many other, faster cards, but the i740 was a solid budget card, and Intel did a nice job with it. Anyway, thank you for watching and I hope that you enjoyed!
A very interesting card. Cool to learn more about the 740. You hear allot about intel and AGP but never really knew or heard much talk about the 740. Sweet.
Thank you so much for the kind words and support! You know, this is precisely what I thought too! I wonder why that is? It's not like the i740 is some rare/mystical beast like the Rendition Bonnie and Clyde or the Quantum Obsidian X24 or something. It's just a basic card, but it does offer a unique piece of history, and some pretty nice performance! Thank you again for watching!
I used that card with my Intel Celeron 300 without L2 cache years ago and worked great for me, even Quake 2 was playable. Great video as always. There was even i752 model but wasn't sold in much quantity. And also there was Intel 740's with PCI and more memory than 8 MB. My i740 version had orange color and black radiator.
Thank you so much for your kind words, my friend! And thank you for your continued support and for all that you do! I can imagine that this card must've done pretty well in that system. It feels like the i740 was designed with acceleration in mind, and it really could be had even with a PC66 memory bus, without issue. Intel did a great job with that and, while it's a shame the card doesn't really scale with faster RAM, the card is quite great without it and really a blast to use! The image quality is supberb--did you notice that too on yours? Interesting on the i752, that is one that I'd be interested to see how it would have done as a true successor. The PCI cards are WILD! That's what I call a weird GPU haha! I've been looking for one but they're quite rare. I hear they're faster too! Orange and black, huh? That's an awesome combination! Intel's partners sure made some nice looking cards! Thanks again for all that you do, my friend!
@@RetroTechBytes I also noticed that very good image quality at output of that card. It's almost like that from my Matrox G200. I liked to use my i740 years ago, once I even tried Serious Sam on that card but with Celeron 300 that game slowed badly on my pc in that time but worked normally without errors, I remember also how much Quake II was playable on that card. Sadly I don't have that card now. I miss that card as much as Voodoo 2/3 cards.
Thank you greatly for your kind words! I hope that you enjoyed the video! There's really not much out there at all about this thing. It's interesting to see how intel really made something that was good, but not great, and yet it paved the way to greatness! Such a cool card for what it is, and even cooler for what it's not!
Regarding Half Life running better in OpenGL than Direct3D…is normal. Direct3D was still young back then and OpenGL was almost always better, especially with nvidia cards. As you suspected, I’d say that your issue was driver related.
That makes sense! I do suspect the i740 drivers were not the best, as the earlier ones were REAL bad when I tried them compared to the 4.0 release. Either way, OpenGL is just so much better in that era haha, that's for sure! I do think I'm just perhaps more used to the ATI cards of the era handling OpenGL and D3D without question, but this makes sense. Thank you for sharing!
I had this back in the day. :) I agree this was not a bad card. I was disappointed that they never made a faster model. I finally changed this for a banshee.
Shogo:) First game what i finished and was dissapointed that it ended to soon for me.. Played on pentium 166mhz, rest i dont remember, i was like 10 years old. Enterteining video thanks for fun:)
I’m so glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for watching, and thanks for the support! Shogo is a great game, even by today’s standards. Thanks for sharing your story-I love hearing memories like these!
Do my eyes fail me again, or is the 740 missing all colored lighting in Unreal? Also, the ceiling lights in the prison cell room seem not to be flickering at all. It looks like this card is not rendering dynamic colored lights, which was one the most anticipated features of this game back then. A 4MB Riva 128 PCI released a few months earlier is capable of that (while has its own share of glitches, though). Maybe Unreal is not such a good choice to compare this cards performance to others.
Indeed you are right! I actually did not notice that at all! My eyes aren't the best, unfortunately, but I re-watched that part out of curiosity and it seems that this card just did not render the dynamic lighting at all! How strange! I wonder if it's a driver thing, or a hardware issue? The Riva 128 is definitely a better card, that's for sure. At least, for gaming it is! But hey, yeah, you're right about that. Regardless, it's still kinda neat to find this bug so many years later! Thanks again for watching and catching this! And thanks for all the support!
Back in the day there were shops selling what they claimed were Intel 740s but we're just cheap sis cards. A buddy of mine bought one and he wasn't very tech savvy so he didn't catch the scam until it was too late
I hope that you find one too! Nothing beats all-in-one cards with TV tuners! If only that was still a thing haha. Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed my video, and thank you for the support!
Thank you for watching! I hope that you enjoyed and that this brought back some good memories! I love the PCB on these things. Such nice colors were used! A SS7 board, one of these, and some UT99 sounds like a great time to me haha!
I noticed that the unreal engine games do not only have corrupted textures in places but are also missing ALL lighting effects on the level geometry. They are rendered properly on the models but not on the static geometry. Maybe this is why there was a note not to run those games in hw accelerated mode.
Would be interesting to bench this card against the i810/i815 motherboards that had dedicated video memory. I think they are fairly uncommon though. Every board that I've seen that had the v-mem pads next to the chipset, the chips were not populated! I would assume that there would have been little point as most 810/815 boards were for low cost/SFF/office PCs.
Oh, now that would be very cool! I wonder if it could be added? I know the PCI variant of this card used dedicated memory and a bridge chip. Kinda weird honestly! Anyway, thanks for watching, and I hope that you enjoyed!
@@RetroTechBytes Liked it? Of course! I subscribed too. :) Adding the memory (and passive components) might be easier said than done - unless there's schematics out there somewhere. Just one example without the VMEM is the Intel Cognac board. OEM board for Emachines and likely others.
My first computer had an Intel 740 video adapter. It locked up in almost all 3D games. I wasn't good at heatsinks and was afraid of my parents for damaging the PC. Strangely it could play GLQuake and Rally Championship 2000. I drove the demo track many times. Half-life was software for me. With 32 MB of RAM games opened grey without any textures. But initially they worked when the PC was new. Later Intel 965 also suffered from lockups from heat. How do you judge the video quality? Isn't that down to the implementation, how well the impedances are matched and crosstalk and stuff like that? My card was smeared at 1024*768 and slightly yellow, but at the time that didn't bother me in comparison to lesser sources of video. Many people later played Unreal washed out because of the darkness bug of multitexturing and just the natural darkness of it. Unreal got complete renderers years later. You're good with Quake arena, jesus. Double unaliving. OpenGL was superior all around, and had lasting compatibility. So many Direct3D 7 titles no longer run at all. Poor anti-aliasing and distorted captions in Half-Life.
Thanks for watching and I sure hope you enjoyed! Definitely a jack-of-all, mater-of-none situation, that's for sure. I think that this card does have some merit as a cool, budget-oriented beast, but that's about it. It was a neat step toward AGP dominance, though, and that I really do appreciate. As far as rarity, if you're in the US, there's a seller with a bunch of these Gigabyte ones for cheap, but otherwise they are quite rare! And FORGET the PCI variant--that's impossible to find for a good price haha
It's not a gamma-problem in unreal. The lighting is set different. I don't know the corresponding line in the unreal.ini but I have seen this before. Please check that.
I think, you didnt get purpouse of Intel 740. They wanted to show capabilities of AGP at full extend, and to compete with VOODOO1, NOT voodoo2 or banshee. It wasnt meant to be highend accelerator of 1998. That was voodoo2, and later summer 1998 generation of acceleartors (matrox G200, Savage 3D, banshee and TNT, later Rage 128). It wanted to enter at well established market, as mainstream card ... that mean to compete with Riva 128 and voodoo1, and Rage Pro. So you can have that mainstream card into AGP slot. Later, banshee took that position, and did better, so it was capable solution only for like half year (beginning of 1998 till end of summer 1998). That means, you really cannot test it on most demanding games of 1998, like Unreal and Half-Life. For those, highend accelerators of 1998 was meant. And not even like Unreal Tournament or Quake 3. Why do reviewers same mistake again and again, that they pick up games, for which accelerator is outdated. You need to test games from 1997!!! and early 1998, except Unreal. Try these games: MDK, Terracide, Forsaken, Quake 2, Motoracer, Jedi Knight, Shadow of the Empire, Wind Commander Prophecy, Battlezone, Hexen 2, Dreams to Reality, NHL 98, Tomb Raider 2. These were the games, for which accelerator was meant. Not Unreal. Not Half-Life, not Unreal Tournament. Not Quake3. Also, people was ok to play 640x480 x 16 bit , in that era. Because they were used for software rendering. 800x600 was still quite out of reach, voodoo2 was first accelerator, that handled it comfortable.
I suspect the reason the card doesn't scale past say, 133 mhz SDR is because the AGP port is still stuck at 66 mhz. Beyond a certain point there's enough bandwidth to service both the GPU (running at a max of AGP 2x I think) and the CPU. I suspect the GPU is still bottlenecked by having to use the system memory, it's just a bottleneck that doesn't respond to bandwidth increases once there's enough to go around. It's a shame that the i740 didn't get a memory config (say a 8 meg 64 bit bus like in the Rage Pro Turbo or a 4 meg 128 bit bus like the Riva 128) that really told us what it could do. It didn't help things that this card just WILL NOT work with a lot of non Intel chipsets (VIA, ALI, and AMD chipsets all had issues with AGP early on) because early AGP implementations were a bit spotty: unfortunately those mobos were generally budget options. So, you have a budget card that absolutely falls on its face when it's paired with a lot of chipsets in its price range while other AGP cards (3DFX, Riva 128, maybe ATI?) which just used AGP as a really fast PCI bus worked fine: one understands why the i740 came and went really fast.
Makes sense to me! I am inclined to agree with you and it's true that AGP features being this card's main draw also doubly functioned as its Achilles heel. The truth is, had intel not pushed this thing, AGP probably would not have become the de-facto standard it was. I do think that you're right about AGP being the limiting factor and that the bottleneck of having to use system memory probably meets a limit at a certain point. I do know that the PCI version of the Real3D starfighter is supposedly a good deal faster, and it also usually had 8-24MB of dedicated, on-card RAM for "AGP" texturing with its bridge chip. Either way, thanks for this comment and for all of the support! I hope that you enjoyed my video, and I have to say that this was super interesting--thank you for sharing your thoughts!
@@RetroTechBytes thanks. I'll always think of the i740 as a waste of what might have been a really good GPU, it had the heritage and brains behind it, being a child of freaking Lockheed-Martin simulator division as well as Chips and Technolgies's 2d expertise. If it had a real 128 or 64 bit bus direct to the GPU that handled textures as well as the framebuffer you might have had 3 players in the GPU market in the '00s (I suspect both nVidia and ATI would have stuck around as they did). FWIW, I suspect the PCI variant of the i740 showed the most disparity between the AGP version in systems with a slower (66 mhz) FSB because its those systems that show the bandwidth constraints/conflicts most readily (say a stock Mendocino Celeron on a 440 series chipset). Once you bump that FSB up to 100 to 133 mhz, I suspect that advantage falls away, because the PCI version uses what amounts to an ersatz AGP bus on the card itself, with the same basic bandwidth as the unencumbered AGP bus linked to 100 to 133 mhz SDRAM. Its still unfortunate that the PCI version is so freaking rare, it would be an awesome card for a Super Socket 7 system that has no AGP ports (e.g. some of those MVP4 boards or those cheapo SIS boards). Pair it with a Voodoo 1 and you're good to go. The AGP card on the other hand remains what it was in 1998: a curiosity, useful in say a DOS build if its free or a general retro rig if your board sticks rigidly to Intel AGP Specs (IOW, a 440 series Intel board), otherwise, there are better choices out there ( say S3 Virge for DOS or as a 2D card with a 3DFX card or a Rage Pro Turbo/Riva 128/Riva TNT M64 as a inexpensive all in one option).
Yeah, that makes sense. Unfortunately, it turned out more Rockwell Retro Encabulator and less Lockheed-Martin flight sim. Chips&Tech made some awesome cards and the Wingine series is pretty incredible for the time; it's a shame that none of this expertise was utilized in a fruitful way. I suspect that you are correct and that it would've been a great third-party card. Interesting, I can see that being the case since the PCI card is just such a weird implementation and the AGP card at a proper FSB of 100MHz or 133MHz would get you further. It definitely is a shame that it's so rare! It'd be great in an SiS or MVP4 board, or even in an Aladdin IV+ board, since those are clock-for-clock some of the fastest chipsets. The AGP version is definitely useful in DOS, but it's troubled for sure. It's fun to mess with, but I agree with you completely!
@@RetroTechBytes You can see C&T's influence in the 2D performance of the card as well as the image quality. They didn't really drop the ball on that count if you ask me, it still has fairly nice image quality IIRC and does 2D stuff fairly well. And yeah, I might just pick up one of these cards in the near future just to tinker with. It's gotta be one with the holographic "Intel" logo though!!
Yeah, that's very true! The 2D image is very sharp and the Windows acceleration is notable! I think C&T never really was able to help Intel "get there" in terms of 3D, but they sure did rock the 2D portion of the card! And hey, yeah, I hope that you do! It's a fun card to mess with! And oh, yeah, nothing beats that design haha!
I am going to tell my story. Back in the late 90s I saved a ton of money to buy my first graphics accelerator (grandpa had bought me a voodoo graphics) so I got the Intel 740 instead of the Voodoo 2.....yeah. The reason I did that was because Real3D was working with Intel and those guys had made the Sega Model 3 arcade graphics board(it was an entire board) called the Real3D Pro 1000. A few years later I remember watching the Project Offset trailer and thinking it would be better than Oblivion only for Intel to buy them and close them down once Intel Larrabee was cancelled......Intel sucks
Hey, thanks for watching! I hope that you enjoyed! Yeah, I can see where the Real3D cards had appeal, especially since they made the Sega Model 3 board (super interesting--did not know that, but thank you for sharing!)! It's kinda a shame that Larrabee was cancelled. I think it could've been compelling. At least Intel is now getting back into the game with the Xe DG2, but who knows how good it'll be once driver support is ironed out.
I'd definitely say this thing isn't really crap, so much as it's just not a great card haha. It's okay, but not good, but the tech it pioneered is super, super cool! Thanks for watching!
![[Tech Byte 0010] This 386SX Motherboard has the WEIRDEST L2 Cache Setup!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/w8371NW3SQA/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Tech Byte 0010] This 386SX Motherboard has the WEIRDEST L2 Cache Setup!](/img/tr.png)
23:17 that sound track for CTF Face is timeless, great video, i really didn't know that card will perform that well
Thanks for pinup and, great content
For sure! Thank you so much for watching, and I'm glad that you enjoyed! CTF Face is still one of my favorite shooter maps of all time! Such a fun one, and UT99 is probably my favorite multiplayer game to this day!
@@RetroTechBytes
UT99 never leaves my hdd, and essential install to any retro pc :)
Have to say I didn't know much about the Intel 740 and this was educational hah. Great video!
Thank you so much for the kind words and for the support Rik! It's truly an honor to hear this from you! The Intel 740 is really one of those things that you don't want to know about, but you can't resist messing with, you know? It's a cool card, and really launched a revolution of sorts, but dang does it SUCK at the end of the day. Sure, for the money, it was great, but it was not the card to have, despite what Intel's marketing attempted to convey. I'd have rather bought a Voodoo 1 at a discount in 1998 than buy this thing haha. Thank you again for all the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the video!
9:35 - About Unreal, it's not gamma, but lighting - it seems colored (and dynamic) lighting is completely disabled. Go to Preferences->Display and there should be a "NoLighting" option probably set to True.
For a couple of years, the Intel 740 was the best bang for the buck display adapter around. 9/10 systems that I sold would have had one, I must have sold a few thousand.
And then the GeForce 2MX came out and for the price, that thing was unbeatable.
Thank you for watching and for all of the support! I hope that you enjoyed the video! It truly was an interesting card and I found the budget proposition aspect of it quite nice. The card itself was not anything flashy, nor was it particularly gamer-oriented. It's a lot like that era of Intel--business-orientated, well-made, and does the job well enough. I can see where this card had its place as an early budget-oriented beast, prior to the GF2MX. The 2MX is another league, sure, but the i740 definitely surprised me and provided quite a nice experience! Thanks again for watching!
@Johnny Macaroni And very quickly fell in price, it became my budget graphics card of choice and don’t think I ever paid more than £30 for one.
First of all, thanks for another great video, you are very talented. Second, that image quality is UNREAL (pun intended). I'm not one to notice this but the color range and contrast is just ridiculous, I don't think I have ever seen that game look like this, then maybe, thats because I usually run it with glide. It's a shame the Intel 740 can't run Shogo very well! Great video, thanks for another one, Will!
uhm, I think both stock and the fixed versions look pretty bad: the first is over bright and washed and the second one is oversaturated/contrasted to compensate 😅
Thank you for the kind words, friendship, and for all of the support as always Bruno! I'm just trying to learn and improve and I know that with the guidance and support of guys like you and the whole community on the whole, we'll all only keep improving and learning! As far as the image quality, it really was quite nice! I wonder how the i740 would look on a CRT. It's a neat experience, too, when you consider just how crisp the 2D is! Using Windows never felt blurry or slow; if anything it was snappy and always crystal clear. I was impressed the card even ran Unreal as well as it did; I went in expecting a LOT worse haha! It definitely was weird to see it too, because I always run it with Glide myself! It's neat though and I'm considering messing with this card some more. I was really disappointed with Shogo, but that's to be expected haha. Shogo isn't that easy to run in the first place and this card is not great when it comes to certain games. Shogo did run better at 480p and at 800x600 it was okay I guess haha. Either way, thank you again for everything my friend! It's always an absolute pleasure!
Great video Will!. I had no idea that Intel ever entered the GPU game, that is really cool! This is a sweet piece of history. I really enjoyed seeing all those charts and how it compared to the competition of the time. This looks like it would have been a decent 1998 budget card. This 2D image quality is ridiculously good! And I was surprised how well Unreal and Half-Life ran. That is a lot faster than I thought it would be. Awesome video and awesome card.
Thank you so much for watching Rami and, as always, thank you for all the support and for the friendship! It's kinda crazy to think Intel made this, then dropped out of the dGPU space for what? 20+ years? And now they're back!? It's insane, but definitely cool to see the history of this and I'm so glad that you enjoyed this! It's interesting to see that this thing was so, so good in 2D and it sucked so, so bad in 3D! I have heard, but am not personally sure, that this is a great AGP card for DOS for that very reason. It definitely fits right in the timeframe there as a budget card for 1998, and I think it would've been okay to hold onto for a year or two. I was surprised too on the 2D! This thing must've been killer on a CRT! I bet one of these could make up for the V1 and V2's terrible 2D degradation. Unreal and Half-Life shocked me too! I've heard this card is trash, but they ran fine for me! Then again, I used a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, so this isn't too fair of a comparison to the average performance back then haha! Thank you again, though, for all the kind words and support!
Well I learned some new things from your video! Thanks 👍
Hey, thank you for all of the support and for checking out the video! Glad to hear that you learned a few things! That was the coolest part for me too, honestly. The i740 isn't explored much and I've always wondered why. In a sense, it's a weird card, but it pioneered AGP as the way forward and that was cool! Anyway, thanks again for watching and for the support!
In Unreal it's not a brighter image, it's an absence of the light map texture.. Don't you see?
Ah, that makes sense! Unfortunately, my eyesight is quite poor, but that would explain the difference. I have a harder time than not discerning textures and lighting in older games, but once you say that I can see where that adds up! Thank you for letting me know, this is quite interesting! I wonder if it just wasn't supported, or if this is a driver bug?
@@RetroTechBytes
Can be a bug in DX driver. You can try to alter renderer to OpenGL by changing Engine section in "UnrealTournament.ini" file. Maybe it will make some kind of positive difference.
[Engine.Engine]
;GameRenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
GameRenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice
This card was almost a marketing ploy for AGP. I'd have been pretty disappointed if I had it back in the day, I think.
Thank you for checking out my video, Nathan, and thank you for starting GPUJune! This has been such a pleasure and a truly awesome experience. I agree with you on your assessment here. It's a disappointing card, in that it's such a cool concept, but fails to execute on that. It's a good card for what it is, but would be a brilliant card if not for what it's not (not that that statement makes sense, in re-reading, but yes haha). I didn't have the pleasure of using this back in the day, but I did have a PC with an i752 core in the 815 chipset and oh, jeez, was that a mess. The drivers still hadn't improved or matured enough by the time this series of cards ended its reign. Either way, thank you again for watching, and thank you again for all that you do!
@@RetroTechBytes Thanks goes to YOU for making the video!
Thank you again man! I’m just most glad to hear you enjoyed it! I love your work and hearing that you-the guru of this stuff-liked my vid means a heck of a lot more than you know!
Good to have a pretty comprehensive video on this card, as not many people have actually used them in gaming systems owing to them being found mostly in business systems. I pulled mine from an IBM NetVista. Even if it had come to market when AGP was launched in August of 1997, nVidia took the market quite early on, and then the Voodoo2 was released right around the time the i740 was in Feb '98, so really no-one was paying any attention to it by then.
Hey, thank you so much for watching and for all of the support! The i740 was definitely not a widely-adopted product in the consumer space beyond business systems, that's for sure. I do see IBM NetVistas with them now and again, and I've found that the only really competent i740 with games was the PCI version (which I'd love to have, but dang are they rare). I was impressed with the performance, but having a Voodoo2 or Riva 128 would've been preferable at this time. Heck, a Rage Pro Turbo would've been solid too! There were so many other, faster cards, but the i740 was a solid budget card, and Intel did a nice job with it. Anyway, thank you for watching and I hope that you enjoyed!
A very interesting card. Cool to learn more about the 740. You hear allot about intel and AGP but never really knew or heard much talk about the 740. Sweet.
Thank you so much for the kind words and support! You know, this is precisely what I thought too! I wonder why that is? It's not like the i740 is some rare/mystical beast like the Rendition Bonnie and Clyde or the Quantum Obsidian X24 or something. It's just a basic card, but it does offer a unique piece of history, and some pretty nice performance! Thank you again for watching!
I used that card with my Intel Celeron 300 without L2 cache years ago and worked great for me, even Quake 2 was playable. Great video as always. There was even i752 model but wasn't sold in much quantity. And also there was Intel 740's with PCI and more memory than 8 MB. My i740 version had orange color and black radiator.
Thank you so much for your kind words, my friend! And thank you for your continued support and for all that you do! I can imagine that this card must've done pretty well in that system. It feels like the i740 was designed with acceleration in mind, and it really could be had even with a PC66 memory bus, without issue. Intel did a great job with that and, while it's a shame the card doesn't really scale with faster RAM, the card is quite great without it and really a blast to use! The image quality is supberb--did you notice that too on yours? Interesting on the i752, that is one that I'd be interested to see how it would have done as a true successor. The PCI cards are WILD! That's what I call a weird GPU haha! I've been looking for one but they're quite rare. I hear they're faster too! Orange and black, huh? That's an awesome combination! Intel's partners sure made some nice looking cards! Thanks again for all that you do, my friend!
@@RetroTechBytes I also noticed that very good image quality at output of that card. It's almost like that from my Matrox G200. I liked to use my i740 years ago, once I even tried Serious Sam on that card but with Celeron 300 that game slowed badly on my pc in that time but worked normally without errors, I remember also how much Quake II was playable on that card. Sadly I don't have that card now. I miss that card as much as Voodoo 2/3 cards.
interesting, there is not much stuff about the i740 around, nice to see some content about this card 😉
Thank you greatly for your kind words! I hope that you enjoyed the video! There's really not much out there at all about this thing. It's interesting to see how intel really made something that was good, but not great, and yet it paved the way to greatness! Such a cool card for what it is, and even cooler for what it's not!
@@RetroTechBytes from i740 to a770
Regarding Half Life running better in OpenGL than Direct3D…is normal. Direct3D was still young back then and OpenGL was almost always better, especially with nvidia cards. As you suspected, I’d say that your issue was driver related.
That makes sense! I do suspect the i740 drivers were not the best, as the earlier ones were REAL bad when I tried them compared to the 4.0 release. Either way, OpenGL is just so much better in that era haha, that's for sure! I do think I'm just perhaps more used to the ATI cards of the era handling OpenGL and D3D without question, but this makes sense. Thank you for sharing!
Old goldsrc (won version) uses an opengl to d3d wrapper. It's not a native implementation.
Great video! I just learned intel once had a discreet gpu back then. Now intel has Arc competing with nVidia and Radeon in the ray tracing era.
I had this back in the day. :)
I agree this was not a bad card.
I was disappointed that they never made a faster model.
I finally changed this for a banshee.
Shogo:) First game what i finished and was dissapointed that it ended to soon for me.. Played on pentium 166mhz, rest i dont remember, i was like 10 years old. Enterteining video thanks for fun:)
I’m so glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for watching, and thanks for the support! Shogo is a great game, even by today’s standards. Thanks for sharing your story-I love hearing memories like these!
Do my eyes fail me again, or is the 740 missing all colored lighting in Unreal? Also, the ceiling lights in the prison cell room seem not to be flickering at all. It looks like this card is not rendering dynamic colored lights, which was one the most anticipated features of this game back then. A 4MB Riva 128 PCI released a few months earlier is capable of that (while has its own share of glitches, though). Maybe Unreal is not such a good choice to compare this cards performance to others.
Indeed you are right! I actually did not notice that at all! My eyes aren't the best, unfortunately, but I re-watched that part out of curiosity and it seems that this card just did not render the dynamic lighting at all! How strange! I wonder if it's a driver thing, or a hardware issue? The Riva 128 is definitely a better card, that's for sure. At least, for gaming it is! But hey, yeah, you're right about that. Regardless, it's still kinda neat to find this bug so many years later! Thanks again for watching and catching this! And thanks for all the support!
Back in the day there were shops selling what they claimed were Intel 740s but we're just cheap sis cards. A buddy of mine bought one and he wasn't very tech savvy so he didn't catch the scam until it was too late
I still hope to find ASUS V2740TV with TV In/Out. The normal non-ViVo version was my first GPU and it came bundled with Incoming😀. Good times.
I hope that you find one too! Nothing beats all-in-one cards with TV tuners! If only that was still a thing haha. Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed my video, and thank you for the support!
I had one of these (gold color pcb) and used it on my super socket 7 via board back in the day :-)
Thank you for watching! I hope that you enjoyed and that this brought back some good memories! I love the PCB on these things. Such nice colors were used! A SS7 board, one of these, and some UT99 sounds like a great time to me haha!
@ 08:58 thats my scientist.
I noticed that the unreal engine games do not only have corrupted textures in places but are also missing ALL lighting effects on the level geometry. They are rendered properly on the models but not on the static geometry. Maybe this is why there was a note not to run those games in hw accelerated mode.
Would be interesting to bench this card against the i810/i815 motherboards that had dedicated video memory. I think they are fairly uncommon though. Every board that I've seen that had the v-mem pads next to the chipset, the chips were not populated! I would assume that there would have been little point as most 810/815 boards were for low cost/SFF/office PCs.
Oh, now that would be very cool! I wonder if it could be added? I know the PCI variant of this card used dedicated memory and a bridge chip. Kinda weird honestly! Anyway, thanks for watching, and I hope that you enjoyed!
@@RetroTechBytes Liked it? Of course! I subscribed too. :)
Adding the memory (and passive components) might be easier said than done - unless there's schematics out there somewhere.
Just one example without the VMEM is the Intel Cognac board. OEM board for Emachines and likely others.
well atleast i know what Quake 3 would look like if it was ever ported the the N64.
lol being serious great video.
Hey, thanks for watching haha! That's pretty accurate as far as I'm concerned, jokes or not, but hey, at least the image quality was clear, right? LOL
My first computer had an Intel 740 video adapter. It locked up in almost all 3D games. I wasn't good at heatsinks and was afraid of my parents for damaging the PC. Strangely it could play GLQuake and Rally Championship 2000. I drove the demo track many times. Half-life was software for me. With 32 MB of RAM games opened grey without any textures. But initially they worked when the PC was new. Later Intel 965 also suffered from lockups from heat.
How do you judge the video quality? Isn't that down to the implementation, how well the impedances are matched and crosstalk and stuff like that? My card was smeared at 1024*768 and slightly yellow, but at the time that didn't bother me in comparison to lesser sources of video.
Many people later played Unreal washed out because of the darkness bug of multitexturing and just the natural darkness of it. Unreal got complete renderers years later. You're good with Quake arena, jesus. Double unaliving. OpenGL was superior all around, and had lasting compatibility. So many Direct3D 7 titles no longer run at all. Poor anti-aliasing and distorted captions in Half-Life.
It truly is a odd card. It does many things but is the master of none. They seem to be rare and quite expensive as well
Thanks for watching and I sure hope you enjoyed! Definitely a jack-of-all, mater-of-none situation, that's for sure. I think that this card does have some merit as a cool, budget-oriented beast, but that's about it. It was a neat step toward AGP dominance, though, and that I really do appreciate. As far as rarity, if you're in the US, there's a seller with a bunch of these Gigabyte ones for cheap, but otherwise they are quite rare! And FORGET the PCI variant--that's impossible to find for a good price haha
intel is open my eyes , i was have befor intel s3trio 3d2x junk
I had this card with first pc. It was decent but drivers were poor - i remember issues with shogo and interstate 76
It's not a gamma-problem in unreal. The lighting is set different. I don't know the corresponding line in the unreal.ini but I have seen this before. Please check that.
I think, you didnt get purpouse of Intel 740.
They wanted to show capabilities of AGP at full extend, and to compete with VOODOO1, NOT voodoo2 or banshee.
It wasnt meant to be highend accelerator of 1998. That was voodoo2, and later summer 1998 generation of acceleartors (matrox G200, Savage 3D, banshee and TNT, later Rage 128).
It wanted to enter at well established market, as mainstream card ... that mean to compete with Riva 128 and voodoo1, and Rage Pro. So you can have that mainstream card into AGP slot.
Later, banshee took that position, and did better, so it was capable solution only for like half year (beginning of 1998 till end of summer 1998).
That means, you really cannot test it on most demanding games of 1998, like Unreal and Half-Life. For those, highend accelerators of 1998 was meant. And not even like Unreal Tournament or Quake 3. Why do reviewers same mistake again and again, that they pick up games, for which accelerator is outdated.
You need to test games from 1997!!! and early 1998, except Unreal.
Try these games:
MDK, Terracide, Forsaken, Quake 2, Motoracer, Jedi Knight, Shadow of the Empire, Wind Commander Prophecy, Battlezone, Hexen 2, Dreams to Reality, NHL 98, Tomb Raider 2.
These were the games, for which accelerator was meant. Not Unreal. Not Half-Life, not Unreal Tournament. Not Quake3.
Also, people was ok to play 640x480 x 16 bit , in that era. Because they were used for software rendering. 800x600 was still quite out of reach, voodoo2 was first accelerator, that handled it comfortable.
I suspect the reason the card doesn't scale past say, 133 mhz SDR is because the AGP port is still stuck at 66 mhz. Beyond a certain point there's enough bandwidth to service both the GPU (running at a max of AGP 2x I think) and the CPU. I suspect the GPU is still bottlenecked by having to use the system memory, it's just a bottleneck that doesn't respond to bandwidth increases once there's enough to go around. It's a shame that the i740 didn't get a memory config (say a 8 meg 64 bit bus like in the Rage Pro Turbo or a 4 meg 128 bit bus like the Riva 128) that really told us what it could do. It didn't help things that this card just WILL NOT work with a lot of non Intel chipsets (VIA, ALI, and AMD chipsets all had issues with AGP early on) because early AGP implementations were a bit spotty: unfortunately those mobos were generally budget options. So, you have a budget card that absolutely falls on its face when it's paired with a lot of chipsets in its price range while other AGP cards (3DFX, Riva 128, maybe ATI?) which just used AGP as a really fast PCI bus worked fine: one understands why the i740 came and went really fast.
Makes sense to me! I am inclined to agree with you and it's true that AGP features being this card's main draw also doubly functioned as its Achilles heel. The truth is, had intel not pushed this thing, AGP probably would not have become the de-facto standard it was. I do think that you're right about AGP being the limiting factor and that the bottleneck of having to use system memory probably meets a limit at a certain point. I do know that the PCI version of the Real3D starfighter is supposedly a good deal faster, and it also usually had 8-24MB of dedicated, on-card RAM for "AGP" texturing with its bridge chip. Either way, thanks for this comment and for all of the support! I hope that you enjoyed my video, and I have to say that this was super interesting--thank you for sharing your thoughts!
@@RetroTechBytes thanks. I'll always think of the i740 as a waste of what might have been a really good GPU, it had the heritage and brains behind it, being a child of freaking Lockheed-Martin simulator division as well as Chips and Technolgies's 2d expertise. If it had a real 128 or 64 bit bus direct to the GPU that handled textures as well as the framebuffer you might have had 3 players in the GPU market in the '00s (I suspect both nVidia and ATI would have stuck around as they did). FWIW, I suspect the PCI variant of the i740 showed the most disparity between the AGP version in systems with a slower (66 mhz) FSB because its those systems that show the bandwidth constraints/conflicts most readily (say a stock Mendocino Celeron on a 440 series chipset). Once you bump that FSB up to 100 to 133 mhz, I suspect that advantage falls away, because the PCI version uses what amounts to an ersatz AGP bus on the card itself, with the same basic bandwidth as the unencumbered AGP bus linked to 100 to 133 mhz SDRAM. Its still unfortunate that the PCI version is so freaking rare, it would be an awesome card for a Super Socket 7 system that has no AGP ports (e.g. some of those MVP4 boards or those cheapo SIS boards). Pair it with a Voodoo 1 and you're good to go. The AGP card on the other hand remains what it was in 1998: a curiosity, useful in say a DOS build if its free or a general retro rig if your board sticks rigidly to Intel AGP Specs (IOW, a 440 series Intel board), otherwise, there are better choices out there ( say S3 Virge for DOS or as a 2D card with a 3DFX card or a Rage Pro Turbo/Riva 128/Riva TNT M64 as a inexpensive all in one option).
Yeah, that makes sense. Unfortunately, it turned out more Rockwell Retro Encabulator and less Lockheed-Martin flight sim. Chips&Tech made some awesome cards and the Wingine series is pretty incredible for the time; it's a shame that none of this expertise was utilized in a fruitful way. I suspect that you are correct and that it would've been a great third-party card. Interesting, I can see that being the case since the PCI card is just such a weird implementation and the AGP card at a proper FSB of 100MHz or 133MHz would get you further. It definitely is a shame that it's so rare! It'd be great in an SiS or MVP4 board, or even in an Aladdin IV+ board, since those are clock-for-clock some of the fastest chipsets. The AGP version is definitely useful in DOS, but it's troubled for sure. It's fun to mess with, but I agree with you completely!
@@RetroTechBytes You can see C&T's influence in the 2D performance of the card as well as the image quality. They didn't really drop the ball on that count if you ask me, it still has fairly nice image quality IIRC and does 2D stuff fairly well. And yeah, I might just pick up one of these cards in the near future just to tinker with. It's gotta be one with the holographic "Intel" logo though!!
Yeah, that's very true! The 2D image is very sharp and the Windows acceleration is notable! I think C&T never really was able to help Intel "get there" in terms of 3D, but they sure did rock the 2D portion of the card! And hey, yeah, I hope that you do! It's a fun card to mess with! And oh, yeah, nothing beats that design haha!
my first gpu but i had igpu :)
I am going to tell my story. Back in the late 90s I saved a ton of money to buy my first graphics accelerator (grandpa had bought me a voodoo graphics) so I got the Intel 740 instead of the Voodoo 2.....yeah. The reason I did that was because Real3D was working with Intel and those guys had made the Sega Model 3 arcade graphics board(it was an entire board) called the Real3D Pro 1000. A few years later I remember watching the Project Offset trailer and thinking it would be better than Oblivion only for Intel to buy them and close them down once Intel Larrabee was cancelled......Intel sucks
Hey, thanks for watching! I hope that you enjoyed! Yeah, I can see where the Real3D cards had appeal, especially since they made the Sega Model 3 board (super interesting--did not know that, but thank you for sharing!)! It's kinda a shame that Larrabee was cancelled. I think it could've been compelling. At least Intel is now getting back into the game with the Xe DG2, but who knows how good it'll be once driver support is ironed out.
i had that card and it was CRAP,,,,,,, i still got it now
I'd definitely say this thing isn't really crap, so much as it's just not a great card haha. It's okay, but not good, but the tech it pioneered is super, super cool! Thanks for watching!