From Voodoo to GeForce: The Awesome History of 3D Graphics

Thought this might be interesting to people who may be of interest.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/graphics_extravaganza_ultimate_gpu_retrospective?page=0,0

 

good times. :nerd:

 

Yeah its amazing how much ram and how much speed cards had back then...very very very little compared to today, Yet games were still very good.

Makes you think were things could be going...Cybernet...? hehe

 

aww the geforce fx line who could forget that rubbish. I went with my first ever ati card at that time 9800 pro

 

I just noticed that pic below. Sapphire was doing AIO's before they became cool lol.

 

I loved my desert orchid voodoo 1

 

Here's a much more comprehensive history of the modern video card:
http://www.techspot.com/article/650-history-of-the-gpu/
http://www.techspot.com/article/653-history-of-the-gpu-part-2/

The next two parts (2000 - present) will be available soon.

 

I remember the first PC I owned had a Voodoo card - no idea what model it was. It was a second hand beige beauty and I got given it in about 2002.

Having only just really got into GPUs in the past couple of years, it was an interesting read. Thanks for posting.

 

Ahh yes the 3DFX Voodoo Banshee (Half-Life FTW)

My first real videocard, i was like 14/15 years old and worked my ass off for it!.
In the end my dad bought it for me ... Those were the days.

Few years later i bought a Ati Radeon 9600 modded to a 9700 :banana:, after that i got a 6800GT (epic card) and the rest:

8800GTS 320MB
8800GT 512MB
8800GTX SLI
GTX285
GTX480 SLI

And now my current beast: GTX TITAN

:nerd:

 

Wow awesome was shocked at how many of those card I owned loved the 3DFX cards awesome gaming

 

Awsome post thank you!

 

Still have my Diamond Voodoo 3Dfx 2 12Mb packed and ready to go in Glide THX for the post!!! :] Good times and good games.

 

i had Voodoo 3 3500 TV haha was nice thing

 

Wow nice, although I never used one of these cards though.

Thanks

 

6600gt sli blew my mind away at the time. I remember playing bf2 with them. Good times indeed.

 

I remember I bought one of those for DOOM3, actually prebuild system with P4 530HT 3ghz in it and 2x256mb ram lol

 

i remember when the GTX 8800 was released, nothing could match is till HD4K series. that card was one of the few cards that were worth the money, one of the best card ever made. i was shocked how good it was

 

Yeap as long ago as the 8800, when you bought a card like this you got an absolute monster of a card that destroyed anything that you threw at it. It also lasted years, this is not the case nowadays as new cards are often needed to be sli of cfx and even this isnt even enough sometimes.

 

Yep,

I loved how the article basically skipped over this generation of cards and only mentioned this one.

The X1900XTX was a beast of graphics card, I know I had two of them in Crossfire using that stupid dongle. I remember maxing out Oblivion at 1680x1050 and still getting 90fps out doors in the game blew my mind!

These cards basically walked over the 7800GTX and lower (which is why Nvidia released the 7900GTX).

Also the article said that the HD2900XT was the first architecture to use unified shaders (along with Nvidia's 8800GTX) when it wasn't the X1900 series used 48 unified shader units that could do both pixel and vertex calculations and the chip also had 8 geometry units as well. THIS was the same architecture that was implemented into the Xbox 360 which also has 48 unified shader units. Whereas the PS3 used the 7800GTX (or a slightly cut down version) in the name of the RSX chip.

It is extremely hard to believe that the 360 and PS3 lasted so long with these chips!!!

EDIT:

Another fun fact the X1950XTX cards were the first and only GPU's to use GDDR4 memory. Which was later skipped over by both companies in favour for the more developed GDDR3 memory and then skipped over entirely for the MUCH more efficient, and faster GDDR5 we have today.

 

I had a Sapphire X1950XT 256MB, great for BF2 - only negative aspect was the infamous leafblower fan.