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the card that changed everything

esK` said:
Radeon 9800 PRO was a big leap...
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Pedantry really, but I'd say the 9700 was more significant than the 9800 :p

I've got a soft spot for the early 3dfx offerings, that's when things started getting friendlier I thought.
 
The IBM 8514/A released in 1987, the first graphics card to have its own processor on it, thus meaning the CPU had more time to do other things.

Yes, I have just finished a 1500 word assignment on 30 years of computing :p
 
Mr Paul said:
Easy, the 3DFX Voodoo 1
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Yarp.

I had one of these

Diamond_Monster_3D.jpg


Diamond Monster 3D 4Mb. Cost me £110 trade price, was working in an indie computer shop at the time.

Ahhh GLQuake, memories :p
 
Mr Paul said:
Easy, the 3DFX Voodoo 1
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This 1 as it showed that PC's could compete and easily beat any generation console and eversince 1996 this has been proven time & time again. Nvidia drivers up until 2003 still contained some 3DFX code as they used to run 3DFX games natively without any Glide wrappers:eek: (Ti4400 was the last card I tried it on). Not tested since then but may still be the case as a lot of the 3DFX people joined NV when they merged.
 
Yeah probably the Voodoo 1 - suddenly you had colored lighting, great filter quality all running at fluid framerates...

After that the next big jump wasn't really til the Geforce 256 with the starting of T&L and early pixel shader support (wasn't actually pixel shaders at this point just specific pipelines)... I'd say then the next big jump was the geforce 3/ati8500 with SM1.1 support.

Since then there hasn't been anything really ground breaking - they are just building on whats already there, newer revisions, more pipelines, but no major hardware break throughs.
 
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Power VR as my first step up from just running a regular video card with no 3d acceleration.

After that the biggest difference was the Voodoo 3 as it was my first all in one solution.
 
Anyone who does not say the Voodoo 1 must be too young to remember the impact it had. Going from software rendering to something that put the PS1 and N64 to shame was staggering.

The 9700pro also is worthy of a mention, if just for the wtf where the heck did that come from impact it had on the totally Nvidia dominated market.
 
For me it would have to be the Geforce 256. I paid quite a bit extra to get one added to my first PC that i bought myself (a Dell) and it blew me away. That card lasted me ages as well.

Maybe Larrabee will be the next big thing, i really hope so just for the fact it would shake things up and hopefully push Nvidia and ATI on to some interesting new designs. Not that i think their recent desings are poor, but they are really incrimental updates to existing ideas for the most part.
 
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