Worst Game Graphics Cards - Alliance aT3D
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- Retro review of 1st and last 3D card from Alliance Semiconductor named ProMotion aT3D.
Big THANKS going to new and quite famous guy named Na...no i promised to keep it secret ....for english voiceover and games commentary.
Test in many other games can be found at vintage3d.org/...
GlidFPS tool can be found at www.vogons.org...
Chapters:
Alliance history - 1:19
Tested cards - 7:12
Drivers - 8:23
Final Reality (1997) - 8:46
3D Mark99MAX (1999) - 11:27
Tomb Raider 2 (1997) - 12:10
Forsaken (1998) - 13:57
Shadows of the Empire (1997) - 15:05
Warhammer Dark Omen (1998) - 17:02
Moto Racer (1997) - 17:12
Croc (1997) - 19:02
Sub Culture (1997) - 20:04
Turok demo (1997) - 21:10
Wing Commander Prophecy (1997) - 22:53
Incoming (1998) - 25:21
Carmageddon 2 (1998) - 28:09
Shogo (1998) - 29:43
Wipeout 2097 (1997) - 30:36
Expendable (1999) - 31:50
Half-Life (1998) - 32:39
Aliens vs Predator (1999) - 34:44
Unreal (1998) - 36:20
Conclusion - 37:31
3DMark99 demo - 39:07
Tested on:
Intel Pentium III 1GHz, Coppermine
Gigabyte GA-60XET rev. 1, Intel 815EP
2x256MB SDR PC133, Western Digital WD800JB, IDE 80GB
Windows 98SE, resolution 640x480x16bit upscaled to 1920x1080.
Background music:
Mysterious Horror Theme Song by emrebugday
Sunspots / Smile by Jeremy Blake
Well now we know what happens when you spend $0 budget on driver developers.
Honestly, the hardware may have been so buggy and full of failure cases that even a great driver team would have been hamstrung. Pure festering suck streaming from the graphics card and strangling the audio is a new one on me though, good Lord.
This makes me want to buy an S3 Virge for its superior rendering quality.
Some poor kid was irreparably scarred by this card. It's an abomination! I'm amazed that so many games even startup with it!
Yeah. S3 Virge at least had a decency to tell you to go and screw yourself when attempting to start a 3D game.
The thing was that 3Dfx and later on NVidia were founded by disgruntled ex SiliconGraphics employees, that brought years of pioneering "3D-knowledge" with them. So essentially the whole competition had no chance at all in the beginning of the 3D-PC-era.
3Dfx was startes by ex-SGi people. Nvidia was started by ex-AMD, ex-LSI Logic and ex-Sun people.
Rebecca Schade MANY 3Dfx people went to work for nVidia after 3Dfx went out of business.
@@ericcindycrowder7482 Yes, but that doesn't mean that Nvidia was started by SGi people. Nvidia had been around for a long time before buying out 3Dfx.
I call that time second extinction of graphics companies. Many even didn't tried to make their own 3D chip. A most of these who tried failed very hard. Only very few survived till release of DX7.
@@vgamuseum Like the Cambrian period of 3D acceleration.
I know that voice .... I think he likes graphic cards ;-)
he likes the pipes and pixels? :D
aT4D is thought to use an advanced deferred rendering technique whereby presentation of the scene is delayed until an unspecified date in the far future. Wink wink.
Also known as "speculative rendering", or the Soothsayer Architecture
@@PixelPipes Speculative rendering is a major step forward from selective rendering but can have unintended effects such as showing the user the moment of their death instead of their desktop.
The worst is actually Trident Blade 3D PCI. Performance and feature support like a Riva TnT, but only 2MB vram so it literally can't run anything.
Are you sure you are not confusing it with an earlier Trident chip? The Blade 3D was AGP and from what I can see it came with 8-16MB of RAM.
@@dkechag1979 Yeah, you’re right. The Blade 3D was no great shakes but it was a functional, basic Direct3D accelerator with enough OpenGL extensions to run Quake 3.
@@Halon1234 Quake 3 still doesn't run properly, as it has a bunch of artifacts. Budget Builds Official covered a laptop with that GPU and games often had artifacting.
PixelPipes! Instantly recognized his voice :D
Well... have no idea, why he wanted to keep it in secret :-)
Well one positive about this abomination... It has Z-Buffer support unlike the Rage!
You probably don't want to use it tho. The PS1 got off just fine without one. Later N64 games also didn't use it, as it saved on fillrate.
really good dithering accelerator tho... even the audio is dithered :|
Woah! Unreal looks amazing on this card! I have to grab myself one of these now!
I got one of these abominations in a lot i purchased some months ago. I didn't knew about this piece of crap, but i eventually found out once it got it installed in my old K6-3D board.
It was absolutelly amazing... It simply didn't reach the minimum on every single game i throw to it.
It simply doesn't work.
How did it make it to the shelves?
It's utterly crap...
I thought about just throw it away, or burn it with gasoline... Shot a 12" round to it, run over it with my car, or simply let it rot under the sun.
But i guess i will keep it.
It's so bad that deserves to be preserved.
Usually on cards with bad DirectX support you can at least take solace in the fact that on the card maker's dumb proprietary API you can get usable results. Who's bright idea was it to ship a card that was broken on the only API? Did they think people just wouldn't notice the fact that even when it works the entire game looks like fucking needlepoint?
man, I really want to get a hold of this card with all 4 mb of vram. I remember the chipset being used on a lot of voodoo rush cards but only with 2mb
Omg how did they even release this nothing works it may as well have been a fake card with no actual chips it should have been illegal to sell such a bad product.
The Half-Life footage kinda looks cool in an artsy way. I never had an Alliance card and seeing this video I will keep it that way.
I had one of these horrible things in my first pc, a pentium 75, i swapped it out for an old cirrus logic ISA card with better results. they really were garbage even when playing command and conquer
@Unknown Nomad in my opinion yes, even back then it was almost impossible to get drivers for it. i was stuck in 16 color mode for a good few weeks only to be severely disappointed when i eventually was given drivers
I dare you to run half-life 2 with it considering that half-life 2 has a directx 6 renderer option by setting sv_cheats 1 than mat_dxlevel 60 (you may want to get a half-life 2 potato config, and the directx 6 renderer only exists in pre-2006 builds of half-life 2)
Hey it can draw a blank screen at 60FPS! The video is worth a thumbsup and a subscribe for sitting there attempting to play Tomb Raider for that long without having a seizure alone. I need this card.
Stuttery framerate, garbled sound, spazzing polygons, missing textures. This feels exactly what N64 emulation was like 15 years ago. This card is a N64 emulation emulator - in hardware!
It has some cool sound effects though 🤣
selective rendering lmaoo
LOOOL - the intro!!
It's even more interesting videocard than mine S3 Virge and Trio3D/2X.
This card seems to be a 3D decelerator. Maybe the chip is a good brake pad?
There were a few examples of completely broken hardware somehow ending up on store shelves in the 90s, this is one of them.
They had to know it was fundamentally busted, something deeply wrong in the chip... or multiple things wrong. Alliance weren't specifically in the business of scamming and did presumably test their products, they sold this one in a broken state anyway.
It was a bit of a wild west for PC hardware though, you could do this kind of stuff and get away with it.
Want to suffer ? Buy an SIS 6326, it only has partial opengl support with the latest beta drivers.
I had one on my first Windows computer
I was lucky if the game would boot, even more if I could get accelerated 3D over 320x240 with smooth framerate (sweet spot was 512x384 for this card).
i rather use the sis6326 than this miserable gpu that can't render anything...
On a Celeron 266 (the original with NO cache), I ran Unreal Tournament on 320x240 software rendering because it was much smoother than the Sis6326. Upgraded to a cache, then GeForce 2MX PCI. Night and day difference 😂
@@jommoner But GF2MX is 4 generations younger card than SIS6326. You have to compare it to Riva128.
@@jommoner "No" isn't an acronym
I didn't know this card. it's so horrible and disastrous that now i need to have it
The intro is amazing 😂
Awesome video, have a feeling I might know that voice from somewhere ;)
heh this is the chip that got paired with the Voodoo Rush. its meh 2d chip and has good color for the price other then that yeah let a real 3d card of the time do the heavy lifting
If you blink just right, tomb raider 2 is playable....
Finally. The Alliance aT3D. I thought the Paradise Tasmania 3D
was the worst graphics card ever.
Well i guess from a viewing youtube that Tasmania 3D at last was working in these few games supported. aT3D isn't working properly anywhere.....
What the heeeell!!?? Alliance aT3D card have a horrible quality and performance. No features of standard 3d rendering, no blend alpha, no transparency, no simple lighting, ugly dithering shadows and when is trying filtering mipmap textures ended with pencil drawing with glitchy and terrible texture warping. Any card is better that this card! That card is worse than 1MB GPU in PSX where 3d rendering is very good. The PSX's GPU is a beast than this fvcking shit! Burn it in silicon hell!
Thanks Jen-Hsun Huang for founded Nvidia company and this days release brilliant RTX 3080!
You are right.. I never heard of this company 😜
There is at least one positive of this card. It's a perfect donor for 8MB Voodoo 2. I found aT3D card with 100MHz 25ns memory chips, and on top of that aT25 IC on one of my Voodoo Rush is damaged (missing few legs). So it's best card ever.
I had this (or a similar model, not sure) for few days to test, plannig to upgrade my S3 that was onboard in my P1@166. While it was not that bad, it was worse than the integrated S3. I ran under Win95 Quake, Starcraft and the framerate was low but I do not remember having issues with sound. Anno 1602 had some issues with the palette (unplayable), but it was kinda picky with many other cards at the time. Finally, I choosed to upgrade the memory for the S3 instead buying this card and it was a better choice.
Have you tried it on an older motherboard, with an 430-440 chipset? The chopped sound seems to me came from the CPU or the chipset being the bottleneck or the PCI bus is overloaded, maybe tweaking some setting in BIOS could improve (PCI setting, timings, etc)? Also, I had DX5 or DX6 at the time, maybe the newer API fom higher versions of DirectX have something to do with the issue? I simply do not believe that all the games are broken, mainly because you used period correct games and the card made it to the marked, hey at least they have tested it, right? Right?
This chip became the 2D part of the Voodoo Rush. Even if 3D was utterly broken the ProMotion created a good 2D image. Most likely 3dfx got that chip for cheap because nobody else wanted it. ^^
I what one such video card for my collection
This card is so Bad I had to Skip a few Areas of this Video..WOW,,Just WOW....
new voice, is it PixelPipes?
aT3D means anti-3D
This thing handles textures like those demos where they have AI render out a video off of a text prompt
No one doubts that all graphics chips from Alliance are crap. However, it is possible that a bit smaller than we could see. Why? Some old graphics such as S3 VirgeVX and DX were sensitive to which PCI slot they were inserted into, depending on the used chipset (VIA). They gave less power, or it made errors in the sound, or other nonsense. It seems to me that the bad sound in the video indicates that the AT3D somehow communicates poorly via PCI, and subsequently it affects what is happening on the sound board. So it could be a similar situation. It might be worth trying a card on a motherboard with an Intel chipset from that era (such as something with an i430HX or VX). Something may have gone wrong during development and the chip may have a problem with a newer PCI implementation or with specific PCI slots. It's just speculation though, I don't have it tracked for this particular chip unlike others.
I think that issues might be from Gigabyte board as i recently tried to test chromatic mpact cards on it and on both cards i got i didnt get through boot screen (always freeze). when i tried aopen board with same cpu, ram i got into windows. So i guess gigabyte wasn't most compactible board around. Sadly chromatic cards video is not possible, as im unable to find any working driver - they had vendorlocked drivers, that didnt work with other brands....
15:36 Thats "style" of graphic like PS1) I like that sh*t)
Much better than RTX 4090 💯🔥
I mean, this card was just a scam? These 2 Indian brothers were arrested for fraud right?
My eyes won't stop bleeding. Why have you done this?
I know that they sold this card in order to make money, but uh.. how did they sell this card?
i wonder if we can use AI to build better drivers and see if its a software issue or hardware issue
yes a new video! can't wait to watch this, this card is literally terrible
Need a vid about voodoo rush!
Well theres already some online. Not from me, but id like rather spend my time on showing cards that have no reviews at all....
th-cam.com/video/-BClYLu45D8/w-d-xo.html
@@vgamuseum thx for link ;) but i'll wait till you ran out of unique cards and make vid about rush with comparison to v1 ))
@@vgamuseum agreed on i740 😏
Actual 3D decelerator and video deadapter
Wait is this the Pixel Pipes guy doing the voice over? Thats awesome.
Yep i think he's took it as little recognition test of his soon to be trademarked voice ;-) as i offered him to give credit in video description. As i see no need for revealing his identity, good stuff is selling itself...also he did games commentary, which is big relief for me as non english speaker.
what is final reality, a game?
Are you sure your card isn't broken? This looks like how some card look when they have broken VRAM.
Guy at Vintage3D had same issues with his card, check review and screenshots on link in video description. Its just broken....guess they didn't had time and manpower to fix it....
@@vgamuseum Wow, insane. I wonder if the picture would get *better* by broken VRAM at this point? 🤣
This card doesn't seem to support real bilinear filtering, instead faking it via Unreal-style ordered dithering of texture coordinates.
worse than that 3d trident card
Even worse than the Trident.
3D was such a big challenge back then. So many companies tried and failed.
This is the kind of performance that would make people grateful for the S3 ViRGe.
this is defenetly the worst of them all ,at least for now :D I rather use software rendering instead of this "3D" thanks very much :D heheh
it is too bad this 3D card
I am using a Alliance 2meg t24 with a Voodoo 1 4mb in a pentium 233 mmx white box.
It's a little funny how the sound effect of Croc collecting the crystal points sounds like a crate being broken or electrocuted whenever the sound is bad. I wonder why the sound is so bad depending on the graphics card.
I couldn't imagine a worse experience on any other card. Is there really such a thing?
Pretty sure I had a 3D decelerator like this in one of my old laptops. I appreciate the review of these awful cards as people don't understand the struggles some of us went through.
How's the DOS 2D and VESA support?
I am wondering, did they even try to run something on their hardware? At least XGI was clever enough to have at least 3dmark support...
3dmark wasnt a thing back then, few more years into its release. Think they had time limit for release of Rush cards, thats why it came out in such state....
I will have to chalk the audio issues that you seem to have with so many of these cards to the 815 chipset. I had issues like this with 810 boards but not with LX or BX boards and pci latency set to 64.
Yep, that possible. Compatibility issues are common at some old chipsets. For example i wanted to do chromatic mpact video, but found out that card will freeze at memory test on boot screen and wont go past it. On athlon xp with via chipsets seems to not have this issue.
Are you sure it wasn't your screen-grabbing or frame-counter software causing the artifacts and sound glitches? I refuse to believe that an actual product was released in such a state. Maybe try again without any screen-grabbing or frame-counter software installed just in case?
Screen grabbing is done through vga cable into external PC. Testing PC would be too slow for software grabbing and will slow games even more. For FPS is used mostly Fraps (except glide on voodoo) and games are bugged even without it running.
I guess that they had agreement with 3DFx to deliver chips for Rush cards and no time to fix bugs. So they have to release it, otherwise Rush cards might be delayed.
The 4d was probably a shutter controller
Kamo obdivujem ta za tento výkon že si to dal celi ten test
Nathan intro was funny))
nice
wth, why does he sound like the guy from pixel pipes?
No idea, i guess that he forgot to change filter in his voice changing plugin ;-)
@@vgamuseum lol
You really should've put a seizure warning at the start of the video.
Also calling this thing a graphics card is quite a stretch.