• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Very interesting

Turb3k said:
They say the rampage was leaps and bounds ahead of ati or nvidia! Would have been an awesome card!
Click to expand...
It looks pretty poor to me, missing key features like Hardware T&L.

The Rampage had some big flaws and wouldn't have been as good as it looked and not as good as PowerVR, Nvidia or ATI who all did something like 8 textures in a single pass. Rampage could only do one texture in a single pass and this was a time when games had just swapped to Muti-texturing. If I recall correctly games with 2 texture layers would cut the Rampage speed in half. But games had more than 2 textures layers and each extra layer was a massive drop in speed for the rampage.

EDIT: Also take Rampage specs with a pinch of salt. After 3DFX died some fans kept upping the specs each year saying if only this came out it would have killed everything else. After 3DFX died and stopped working on Rampage it somehow kept getting more and more powerful and better specs.
 
Last edited:
If you read the full webpage it was written about 6months after 3dfx went bust and as you can see from the specs nvidia and ati had nothing that could match it even in the works! Let alone ready to be released, 3dfx lead the gpu industy for most of the time they existed, with the rampage they were pushing the boat again, i mean needing more power than the agp port could provide, nvidia and ati would have just thought "it cant be done then" at the time but 3dfx decided lets up the anti and draw power from the psu! Standard practice now days!
 
Turb3k said:
If you read the full webpage it was written about 6months after 3dfx went bust and as you can see from the specs nvidia and ati had nothing that could match it even in the works! Let alone ready to be released, 3dfx lead the gpu industy for most of the time they existed, with the rampage they were pushing the boat again, i mean needing more power than the agp port could provide, nvidia and ati would have just thought "it cant be done then" at the time but 3dfx decided lets up the anti and draw power from the psu! Standard practice now days!
Click to expand...
The only dates I could fine are over a year after 3DFX died. I am looking at the specs and they looked to be slower then Nvidia and ATI in games. For example the Rampage fillrate could drop as low as 200Mpixels/S. That is slower than the Geforce 2 Ultra at 1000Mpixels/that came out years before the Rampage.

The Rampage card was flawed which was why 3DFX delayed it and did not realise it.
 
Turb3k said:
If you read the full webpage it was written about 6months after 3dfx went bust and as you can see from the specs nvidia and ati had nothing that could match it even in the works! Let alone ready to be released, 3dfx lead the gpu industy for most of the time they existed, with the rampage they were pushing the boat again, i mean needing more power than the agp port could provide, nvidia and ati would have just thought "it cant be done then" at the time but 3dfx decided lets up the anti and draw power from the psu! Standard practice now days!
Click to expand...
This is the real 3DFX file on Rampage http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/rampage/rampage_pp.zip
. Direct from 3DFX not edited by fanboys. The Website you linked to also points towards it. I know its real as I saved it back in the 3DFX days.
Noticed how the specs are very different. Only up to 128meg of ram, only 800MP/s fillrate max which drops to 100MP/S fillrate in 8layer texture games. Only 6.4GB/sec bandwith. I could go on but you get the idea. The real specs are not as high as those fanboy pages say.

Lastly that website you linked said " Fully programmable DirectX8 1.1compiant Pixel Shaders with additional features (DX9)"
Last time I checked both DX8.1 and DX9 came out years after 3DFX collapsed. DX9 did not even exist back when Rampage was being worked on.
 
Last edited:
I suppose we will never know what would have happened as it was never released, but as 3dfx invented graphics cards and lead the market most the time im going to default to thinking in my head it would have destroyed nvidia cards back then! :-)
 
Also just read that the voodoo 2 from 1997 could do 2 texture passes, so the information that the rampage from 2000, 3years later could only do one! is wrong mate.

Also the 6.4GB/sec bandwith was only on the spector 1000/2000, the 3000 was 12.2!

Also the nvidia Geforce4 mx 440, which had 6.4GB/sec was released in 2002, so they were two years behind 3dfx there, had the rampage been released and that was only the spector 1000 and 2000 it was 2003 when they released the GeforceFX 5600 Ultra before they broke the 12GB/sec mark and that was only on there top top end card, which by the way they had 100+ 3dfx employees working for them at this point!

Last bit of info for now, its was 2004 with the Geforce fx 5900 xt that nvidia broke the 256bit mark! The Rampage spector 3000 was set to do it in 2000
 
Last edited:
Turb3k said:
I suppose we will never know what would have happened as it was never released, but as 3dfx invented graphics cards and lead the market most the time im going to default to thinking in my head it would have destroyed nvidia cards back then! :-)
Click to expand...
3DFX did not invent graphics cards and we will still be where we are today without them. In fact 3DFX was late to the graphics card market by a few years.

" Also just read that the voodoo 2 from 1997 could do 2 texture passes, so the information that the rampage from 2000, 3years later could only do one! is wrong mate."
The funny thing is the Voodoo 2 could do multitexturing but they removed it. The Voodoo 3,4,5 and Rampage took a step backwards and reduced the TMU's (texture mapping unit) per pipeline down from the 2 the Voodoo 2 had down to 1. That was one of the major failings of Voodoo 5 and Rampage as around Voodoo 5 we started to get multitexturing games which both the Voodoo 5 and Rampage could not do without cutting speed down by 50 to 75% depending on the type of multitexturing used. Massive flaw in design.

EDIT: ( I think some Voodoo 3's had two TMU's as well, depends on version)
 
Last edited:
topdog@OC said:
If it was that good, wouldn't Nvidia have released a card based on it after they bought out 3dfx's doom?
Click to expand...
They did it was called the Geforce FX ;) it was based around 3DFX tech made by 3DFX Engineers.

3DFX never had good technology, what they had was good marketing, good drivers and good dev support. That is what made them popular not the hardware.
 
Pottsey said:
3DFX never had good technology
Click to expand...

Laughing my bottom off.

despite what you think of them personally pottsey, i really don't believe you actually think that your statement above is actually true. now 3dfx may have made mistakes at the end and they paid for it by being bought out but to say they never had good technology I'm sorry your talking billy round dangley things.
 
Problem was even with the Rampage they were trying to flog a dead horse, sure it had boat loads of horsepower but it was using dated techniques and missing a lot of hardware features that were rapidly becoming mainstream.

Theres no way it would have saved 3DFX.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom