The WIP Thread

[Trance]

A big change from my anime stuff, i've been working on........ perfecting sarah's 3dfx voodoo emulation lately in the accuracy department. I've learned the reason why 3dfx gets that distinctive crosshatch dither is that it has a 4x4 dither matrix applied subtractively to the blend destination and they clash and make the waffle dither

As someone who did not enter the age of computers at a young age (my interests started around the XP era) and who's first PC was windows 98 and not DOS, can someone explain what lei is trying to emulate? I've heard voodoo before but I though it was an inside joke about how it required voodoo magic to make 3d games run on old PCs or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Inte ... aphics_PCI
Mid-late 90s graphics card technology.

[insightguy]

So Nvidia and AMD before Nvidia and AMD, got it.

[Trance]

AMD Radeon used to be known as ATI Radeon, because ATI was Nvidia's main competitor prior to their acquisition a decade ago. And ATI was right there up against 3dfx in the mid-90s with their 3D Rage product line.

[xenoxols]

AMD Radeon used to be known as ATI Radeon, because ATI was Nvidia's main competitor prior to their acquisition a decade ago. And ATI was right there up against 3dfx in the mid-90s with their 3D Rage product line.

AMD was a separate company that acquired ATI, and later rebranded the GPUs to AMD. They were actually considering buying Nvidia instead, believe it or not.

[Rachael]

The Voodoo series was a series of cards made by 3dfx, similar to NVidia's GeForce or ATI's Radeon series. Voodoo was their trademark, and they were early graphics accelerators that at their time were the best on the market, mostly because the API was actually written for the graphics chip.

Nowadays, nearly everything 3dfx did is supported by modern day Direct3D/OpenGL API's, minus a few key things but they can probably be emulated with shaders, anyway.

Nevertheless, there's a reason why Unreal Engine games and many other 3D games from the 90's and early 00's had "Glide" support - that was the API specifically written for Voodoo chipsets.

What really made Voodoo special was, at the time, Direct3D and OpenGL utterly sucked. They were slow, clunky, and shitty, and they were the only things that ATI and NVidia at the time supported.

[Marisa the Magician]

Apart from Glide UE1 had support for PowerVR's own thing called "SGL", and also something S3 had called "Metal", which has nothing to do with the newer API of the same name.

[leileilol]

You know you're old when you're ELI5'd about a once mainstream product.

also it's a shame imgtec still keeps spec docs of the earliy PowerVR stuff under wraps (the best you can get are SGL SDKs and debug drivers which still don't provide register-level information). I could rehearse PCX2-esque rendering as hacks on the Voodoo code in the meanwhile... :/ The only other that opened up was Rendition, one of the earliest programmable 3d cards.

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Nvidia bought 3dfx in 2000. 3dfx released source of their glide stuff to the public and made their specs open. That's the only real reason how they're emulated and wrapped so much.

You could probably parallel 3dfx with SEGA's 16-bit->demise days. Like the Genesis, they kept tacking stuff onto SST-1 (Voodoo1) as new products. They released the Voodoo4-5 too late and closed up (many technical shortcomings like the lack of HW T&L and the external power did them in)

So Nvidia and AMD before Nvidia and AMD, got it.

Nvidia beat them by a few months with the failed NV-1 and ATI of course had the Rage3D around the same time. AMD's really old and did AM5x86 and K5 CPUs and sound chips at the time of the Voodoo debut.

What really made Voodoo special was, at the time, Direct3D and OpenGL utterly sucked. They were slow, clunky, and shitty, and they were the only things that ATI and NVidia at the time supported.

ATI at least had ATICIF!! S3 was also a major player even in their decelerator days. They've had S3DTK.

Backseat mod note: I think most of this ELI5 3d card stuff could be split off

[insightguy]

@leileilol You are not old, my country got electronics late for a while. My first introduction into to computers was a DOS computer owned by my uncle was around 1998-1999 with my first game being heretic, I got my windows 98 at around 2000-2002, XP at 2003-2005 and used a game boy (not color, not advance, the original) until 2002. Country's electronic import surged around the time of the internet became widely available in our country so it feels like I missed a ton of things. Hell, I did not even get into programming till the 2010's. (seriously, computer class was literally just teaching us how to unplug cables from the back of the computer and how to use Microsoft office, no programming or anything even like HTML)

I always feel like my understanding and introduction to computers is sort of like jumping in a TV series in the 2nd or 3rd season, you get the gist of it all, but feels like you missed something important.

Still, thanks for the overview guys!

[leileilol]

This needs color.


and polygons

[Marisa the Magician]

For just 66 triangles that really looks nice actually.

[Guardsoul]

Finally found some time for myself so I started mapping again. What about some E1M3 remake stuff?

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[imgur]https://i.imgur.com/RefW14T[/imgur]

[imgur]https://i.imgur.com/I6R53dg[/imgur]

[Gutawer]

A weapon I've been working on for Elementalism (viewtopic.php?f=42&t=60018):

[Vostyok]

If I had known how to do that lightning effect a year ago....

I would have been really happy.

[JadedLexi]

That looks very satisfying to use.

[Pixel Eater]

Mythbusters inspired: