Originally posted by Team Andromeda
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Gaming with 3DFX, PowerVR and early graphics cards
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Originally posted by Cepp View PostBiggest issue with the PC versions for me was finding a decent controller. It was rough going for a long time. Even today I stick to using PS1 to USB adapter on my Windows 98 PC.
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Originally posted by Team Andromeda View PostThat to me was the best version of windows until windows 10
Hated Windows 8.Last edited by Leon Retro; 20-12-2019, 21:27.
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Our first 3D card was a Matrox Mystique, was pretty cool at the time, it came with a special version of Mechwarrior 2 that used some extra features, was really blown away at the time, but we eventually got an Orchid Voodoo 2 to work alongside it for glide games.
Voodoo 2 cards scales really well, you can really ramp up the cpu, I have built a few Windows 98 machines using fast Athlons or socket 939 CPU’s, my current setup has a Socket 775 Q9650 with GeForce FX 5950 and 2 Voodoo 2 cards in sli for Glide.. complete overkill but fun to play around with!
I
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Little fun fact for people. Back then, the 3D cards all had their own APIs and interfaces; so we've already mentioned GLide for 3Dfx, but there were others too, as well as early support for OpenGL and Direct3D, which often had to pass through abstraction layers to get the best features out of each card.
This created a problem where 3D cards almost became like consoles; the manufacturers played a zero-sum game where they paid companies to give better/earlier support to their cards.
This led to unfortunate situations where some technologies nearly got left behind. S3's cards had support for higher quality/optimised textures, by a technology called S3TC (S3 Texture Compression), which was udoubtedly better than others, but S3 weren't on top as far as cards were concerned. However, Microsoft bought this technology and rolled it into DirectX, renaming it to DXTC, and this format is still used in Direct3D games today (which is a fair chunk of all 3D games).
Direct3D, in part, was a way to try and standardise the way graphics worked in the same way that DirectX standardised a bunch of other stuff.
Didn't stop nVidia trying the same thing years later, though!Last edited by Asura; 20-12-2019, 20:00.
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Originally posted by vanpeebles View PostI think my fave ever PC will be my Duron 750mhz running at 1ghz with windows 2000.Last edited by Leon Retro; 20-12-2019, 21:48.
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Originally posted by Leon Retro View Post
I remember non-PC magazines raving over the Banshee card and saying it did great things at an attractive price. Seemed like quite a breakthrough card at the time.
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