What if 3dfx still existed today?

[Dutch Guy]

It would have seeing as their philosophy was changing with rampage. It was basically management that screwed them over by making the enigneers work on stop gap products and spending stupid sums of money on tv adverts, etc.

And 3dfx not wanting to sell their chips to other board manufacturers but make all their cards themselves?

 

[Indy500]

ATI Radeon is no where near as efficient as PowerVR's method and PowerVR are still going strong with some very interesting tech coming out in 2 years. Bring on hardware ray tracing. Should be a very disruptive technology and a surprise to many people. EDIT: Even today ATI and Nvidia are still very much brute force approach compared to PowerVR's methods. Thats why PowerVR rule the mobile world.

Except they don't manufacture the chips themselves, only license out the designs. If we're talking business figures, the parent company is tiny in terms of margins compared to ATI or Nvidia.

 

[jinxpad]

I wish I still had my Orchid Righteous 3DFX card...

 

[techpops]

You say global illumination is the holy Gail for gaming well isn't that pretty much what ray tracing is? I don't see that much faking going off. Once we get full ray tracing games will be much cheaper to make and faking it will just not look as good and take longer to produce.

Ray tracing just traces where the light will hit objects as seen from your perspective. It's a very old technique that we once would have said produced amazing visuals, but today our eyes seem to be much more refined when it comes to computer imagery. We would say ray tracing looks fake now. GI on the other hand while similar in that were still tracing light, goes on to work out what the light hit, so for instance if a lit ray hits a red ball, the rays that bounce off that ball will carry with them the colour of the ball and any texture it has will affect how the light bounces. with every extra bounce you get an overall diffused lighting that's using the entire scene to affect everything else in the scene, unlike ray tracing which is just dealing with what you're seeing as the viewer. GI looks very realistic because that's exactly how real light/sky works in the real world. Its just far more intensive to work out GI than simple ray tracing.

Pretty much all 3D games today fake it too. From the texturing to the lighting to the rendering. The engines have just got better at faking it so they don't have to do huge amounts of calculations in real-time when you can predict what will happen with simple algorithms and tricks. fogging, tessellation, pre baking the lighting, bump and normal mapping and so on. To then drop that and move to real-time, i mean when the work has already been done. Well I can't see it personally, although in the pro graphics market that's exactly what's happening so maybe that will filter down to gaming one day.

 

[mikeo]

First time that I've taken this out of the box since being removed from one of my first home builds. The thing that immediately strikes me is how small and light it is compared to modern cards.

And "yes" that is an SLI bridge. I was one of the loonies that forked out for a 2nd card to bump my resolution up one notch (some £199 per card if my memory serves me well). Those were the days.

 

[jkb]

Who still have their voodoo cards? I've got a voodoo 2 and 3 somewhere under my bed

I've still got my Voodoo 2 up in the loft somewhere. It was a Christmas present from my brother.

 

[janksteruk]

hmm the original unreal on voodoo2 sli..good times

 

[Gerard]

And 3dfx not wanting to sell their chips to other board manufacturers but make all their cards themselves?

Dumb management decision, but if rampage had been on track it could have worked out well for them.

 

[Pottsey]

techpops I am not following your post. Ray tracing has Global illumination as far as I am aware and I have not heard of people ray tracing without it in recent times. All the hardware ray tracing cards I know off accelerates global illumination with ray based rendering processes. The CausticOne hardware card did full Global illumination and the CausticTwo card is meant to be due this year at over 30fps realtime with the tech being moved to mobiles within two years time.

 

[arc@css]

Just an after thought, a video here of John Carmack. He does touch on ray tracing (about eleven minutes in), amongst other elements of game development.

 

[techpops]

techpops I am not following your post. Ray tracing has Global illumination as far as I am aware and I have not heard of people ray tracing without it in recent times. All the hardware ray tracing cards I know off accelerates global illumination with ray based rendering processes. The CausticOne hardware card did full Global illumination and the CausticTwo card is meant to be due this year at over 30fps realtime with the tech being moved to mobiles within two years time.

It was a long boring post, no worries about not following it. Not sure what else to say. wikipedia does a superb job compared to my half arsed attempt at explaining how both are very different from each other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination

As for GI at 30fps. The lower the quality, the faster you can go, not sure what resolution that 30fps was running at but I'm betting its pretty faked GI that looks nothing like what a high end renderer like vray outputs. Graphics studios don't put many hours per frame into their animation for nothing heh

 

[techpops]

Just an after thought, a video here of John Carmack. He does touch on ray tracing (about eleven minutes in), amongst other elements of game development.

that was pretty interesting. I remember him talking about ray tracing some years ago and he said he didn't think it was the way to go at the time. Shows how much more performance there is to play with now that he's playing around with it.

I wouldn't even dare to disagree with him, he's a genius and it seems like he's saying ray tracing used as one element in an engine is what might end up happening. Like the demo car using ray traced speculars.

I think HDRI images produce amazing speculars too and were seeing that already in games. I know when I light my scenes, the first thing that goes in there is a sky object with a hdri image on it so the reflections get nice detailed specular highlights.

 

[Rroff]

^^ Hes mentioned before about using ray tracing for niche/specific engine features I think one thing he was looking at was using it specifically for lighting terrain.

 

[billyboyd]

Still got my Voodoo 3 and in it's box too. It's going in my retro comp that i plan on building someday and will partner my old AMD Thunderbird 1200.

 

[Pottsey]

What I follow most is Caustic and I just assumed all the other solution also did GI. For Caustic at least it's not faked but full global illumination.

There isn't a lot of info on the new hardware other then its due this year but I found this two year old video and while is not clear if it's with or without the old hardware it shows full GI. His accent is a little hard for me to understand but pretty sure he said 5 GI bounce. Not sure if you count 5 bounce GI as low or high but it should prove it's not fake GI. I have no idea is 5 bounce low or high GI? http://www.vizworld.com/2009/09/caustics_3dsmax_demonstration/#more-8926

Would love to see the above video on today's hardware and with a CausticTwo.
From what I have seen everything's is being setup for a big ray tracing with GI explosion over the next 2 years. From the hardware, API, development software solutions.

 

[jorzeh]

I actually cried when 3dFX was bought out, I was cursing like hell when i bought my first Geforce 2MX, Not to worry that chip now lives on my keyring

 

[petertr2000]

I remember seeing a Voodoo 1 being used in 1998 for Half Life (or maybe Sin). Had never seen anything like it.

Installed HL on my PC, and it ran like a dog. Took my student loan money and went to PC World and came back with my very own Voodoo card.


Funny, I'd still say Half Life, and shortly after, Counter Strike were my favourite ever games.

 

[Awahwah]

Agree, Half Life and CS are and will be the original beast games ever.