8 ms·
One of my very first jobs I worked to test VGA cards. They were 4mb and 8mb. Yes you read that right, that is "m" as in megabytes. My setup was a 25 megahert
by jzer0cool 6y ago
One of my very first jobs I worked to test VGA cards. They were 4mb and 8mb. Yes you read that right, that is "m" as in megabytes. My setup was a 25 megahertz open case motherboard, a few of these. It was part of the last quality control station and I would pop each vga card into the PCI slot and boot it up.
I would basically run a macro which cycle through the resolutions from b/w, 4 colors, 16, 256, ... and up to a million or so. I think there is a name for this, but basically watching a prism of rainbow colors. At a million+ the color tones are very smooth and you don't see an outline.
I could not imagine I would be able to differentiate a billion colors from its previous factor. At that point, I would stamp it and it goes off to shipping for packaging, and to the customers.
- ecopoesis 6y agoThey must have been fancy to use PCI. I would have expected ISA of AGP.
- jimsmart 6y agoPCI was in fact pretty standard for graphics cards, in the period between ISA and AGP. Edit: link https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/graphics-beginners,1288-4.html https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/graphics-beginners,1...
- throwaway87521 6y agoWell, now I feel old.
- barrkel 6y agoPCI graphics was standard around the time of Windows 3.11 and into Windows 95. Major difference in UI speed vs EISA graphics. I used to work as a hardware technician in a local computer shop as a summer / weekend job back then. I installed dozens of 4mb Cirrus Logic PCI graphics cards when building PCs.
- jzer0cool 6y agoIf I remember, AGP did not come out until later. The motherboard multiple ISA and 1 PCI slot if I recall right. In fact I was testing VGA and also sound cards on the ISA slot. So checking sound and playing some mpeg video file. I can maybe write up a short post about this if anyone would be interested more. At home, away from work, I owned a mac which was running the power pc processor. And that was also 25 mhz. What I remember was how everything seemed integrated (e.g. not upgradable. Young me could not understand why there was no graphics card. I could only upgrade here the hard drive, or simm memory)
- bombcar 6y ago4mb! I remember trying driver after driver on the SimCity 3000 CD until I found one that worked with my 512K Oak VGA card. Now cards have more RAM than I had disk.
- singhkays 6y ago25 Mhz! Wow. Is the the GPU frequency or the CPU?
- jacquesm 6y agoCPU, likely a high end 386 or a low end 486.
- jzer0cool 6y agoCPU, 25 Mhz. This is when I learned to over clock the cpu to run at a higher speed, at risk of burning it. You simply moved a jumper on the board board and it would boot up at 33 Mhz, yahoo! My boss showed me this and I was able to test much faster, not having to wait so long during the boot sequence.
- the8472 6y agoA rainbow is a rather bad test-case to distinguish color stops because it can vary two of the components at the same time. Monochromatic gradients make it easier to spot the quantization. Additionally wider color gamuts also mean that each quantization step would cover a larger absolute difference if we kept things at 8bpc.
- viraptor 6y ago> I think there is a name for this, but basically watching a prism of rainbow colors. It's called seizure test, aka intermittent photic stimulation ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_photic_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_photic_stimulatio...
- phire 6y agoMillions of colors is most likely 8bit color with 16.7 million colors. Still in use today. 7 bit color would also count as "millions of colors", but I don't remember any GPU ever offering it as a display mode.
- tyingq 6y agoUnless I'm missing something (dithering?), 24bit color is 16.7M. 8 bit color is 256 colors, 7 is 128 colors.
- meditative 6y agoyou're correct. I assume they're referring to 8bit per colour (RGB) which is 24bit colour (True Colour) 16.7M
- mixmastamyk 6y ago8*3=24, 8 bit per channel is a description they use in visual effects. Recently the rest of the computing industry started using it. Yes, confusing.
- tyingq 6y agoAh, okay. I'm using old terminology I guess. Appreciate the gentle pointer.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI asked the same question on starting a vfx job many years back. 8-bit, 256 colors for a feature film? Impossible, that would make it look like .gif or Windows95, right?
- DavidSJ 6y agoI hate to be a stickler for this but please say MB, not mb, when you mean megabytes. There are contexts where the distinction between m and M, or b and B, really matters!
- reaperducer 6y agoThere are contexts where the distinction between m and M, or b and B, really matters! Is this one of them?
- DavidSJ 6y agoNo, but I do see people use them inaccurately in those contexts also, and I suspect that’s partially out of habit.
- sorenjan 6y ago> They were 4mb and 8mb. Yes you read that right, that is "m" as in megabytes. mb is short for millibit, the abbreviation for megabyte is MB (or MiB if you mean 2^20 bytes). I know it's a minor thing, but "m" and "M" does not mean the same thing, neither does "b" and "B", and they're mixed up too often. Sorry for the off topic.
- reasonabl_human 6y agoWhere does mebibyte come into play?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Phrodo_00 6y agoMebibyte comes from pedants (like myself) that say that the Mega prefix in SI means 10^6, but in computing we often take it to mean 2^20. Mebibyte is unambiguous, and if everybody used it (unlikely. I don't think either MacOs or Windows use it), then Mega would also be. Right now, when you see mega in a computing context you're not sure if it means 10^6 or 2^20, although a lot of times it doesn't even matter.
- dr_zoidberg 6y agoOkay, this is second hand as I don't own a mac, but a friend who does noticed that on his macbook, macOS reports file sizes with megabyte being 10^6 bytes, whereas windows follos the 2^20 convention. He was going crazy over a file being shown as 600Mb on Windows and 629Mb on mac. When he compared the bytes values, they were the same (around 629,145,600 bytes) and that settled it.
- stephenr 6y agoThis is true, macOS reports it using decimal sizing. I believe the reason is that all storage devices are marketed in decimal sizes anyway.
- dehrmann 6y ago> I could not imagine I would be able to differentiate a billion colors from its previous factor Dark scenes on a OLED might look better since your eyes can adjust to low light.
- dehrmann 6y ago> They were 4mb and 8mb 640px x 480x x 3 bytes per channel = ~1MB. So yeah, 4-8MB is about right for a VGA card.
- vetinari 6y agoVGA could not do truecolor; the original VGA at this resolution 640x480 could do 16 colors, i.e. 4 bits per pixel and that means 150 kB framebuffer. It could do 256 colors with lower resolution (oficially 320x200, or "mode-x" 320x240). VGA came with 256 kB RAM onboard. Then, in the early 90's, SVGA came with 512 kB and 1 MB onboard, and it could do 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024. The main RAM would be around 4 MB for the midrange computer. It took until mid-90, that you could get 4 or 8 MB SVGA, that could also do hicolor and truecolor.
- nine_k 6y agoThink not about 4 times more hues, but about 4x the brightness range. Think about a 300 or 400 nit screen that shows you a scene with a bright sun but details in shadows still very discernible.
- mschuetz 6y ago> I could not imagine I would be able to differentiate a billion colors from its previous factor. Darker single color gradients exhibit very strongly noticeable color stairs. Tried to generate one for a background, locked horrible. It only looked good once I randomized the gradients a bit, i.e., even with 8 bit colors, you might need dithering. Similar effects can be noticed in relatively dark photos of scenes with gradients, e.g., a sky.
- Ballas 6y agoAre you sure the panel you are viewing on is in fact also 8bits/color? The only time I have experienced what you are describing was when the panel turned out to be 6bpc - at the time I was working with raw data from a 12 bit sensor. Of course my experience is only 1 test point...
- kuschku 6y ago> Are you sure the panel you are viewing on is in fact also 8bits/color Yes, if you actually compare a 10-bit and an 8-bit panel next to another, it's immediately obvious. Here's a photo of a 6-bit, 10-bit and 8-bit gradient on a native 10-bit panel without any dithering (Dell UP2718Q): https://i.k8r.eu/VolYbQ.png https://i.k8r.eu/VolYbQ.png
- Ballas 6y agoThanks, that is very informative. Could you give a link to the source, or even the grey level range used here? I am trying to reproduce the results, but I an not having any luck unless I change my brightness/contrast to unacceptable levels.
- kuschku 6y agoThat’s the grey level test of the official VESA DisplayHDR Test application: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/displayhdr-test/9nn1gpn70nf3?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/displayhdr-test/9nn1gpn70n... Running on a Dell UP2718Q, in HDR10 mode. That said, in person can be – depending on environmental lighting conditions – much more subtle. The test here was done with blinds closed in a mostly dark room. In bright environments 8-bit is enough, and 6-bit with dithering can be close, but in dark environments (such as when watching a movie or gaming) you'll even notice banding in 10-bit content.
- lowbloodsugar 6y ago4mb? 4mb! We used to dream of 4mb when I were a lad. We had 1mb for the whole computer, and we got 160k for graphics, if we were lucky!
- tinus_hn 6y agoWalking miles to school every day through rain and snow, uphill both ways!
- agumonkey 6y agoMatrix Millenium had 4MB of ram and was considered the beastiest of beast in its era. It's still peak in my brain :)
- serf 6y ago>It's still peak in my brain :) that's neat that someone else does that. i'm like that with the voodoo2, for some unknown reason. don't get me wrong, the voodoo2 was great, but i'm not sure why it stuck in my head for that long.
- agumonkey 6y agoActually I exaggerated a bit, Matrox was peak 2D era. And yeah 3dfx voodoo 2 still had a massive glow in my brain. It represented so much magic and power in its day. It started the 3d ~high quality FPS... (riva128 and geforce3 followed). Same goes for some symbols like 386 dx2. Our young brain were imprinted hard.
- glhaynes 6y agoI was watching a guy on YouTube the other day talking about a computer he was building. He made reference to how he was keeping some component simple (the memory interface, I believe), which would compromise performance, but he wasn't worried about it because the 68000 he was using in it was so fast. My first thought was "yeah, that makes sense" but my second was "what could it possibly mean when we talk about a 68000 being 'fast' in 2021?!" It really made me think about how an attribute like "fastness" can get endowed and then still stick 40 years later, almost as though it were describing some spiritual attribute that transcends the fact that a modern $0.25 microcontroller is many times more performant.
- Someone 6y agoI don’t remember VGA doing millions of colors. I thought it did 256 colors, at best. Wikipedia agrees with that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array), but adds “The 640×480 16-color and 320×200 256-color modes had fully redefinable palettes, with each entry selected from an 18-bit (262,144-color) gamut.”. That, I don’t remember knowing, even reading that. So, a quarter of a million, but only 256 at a time. I think the Macintosh II, doing 256 colors out of 16.7 million, looked better, especially with a Trinitron display (https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/classic_monitors/specs/apple_mac_color_disp.html https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/classic_monitors/specs/a...).
- compsciphd 6y agoa "vga" card with 8mb of ram was probably a svga card (24 * 640 * 480 is just under 8 mega). no real reason for it to need 8mb otherwise back then.
- Narishma 6y agoThat's less than 1 MB.
- compsciphd 6y agoyou're right, I multiplied it by 10 in my head. but even more so for OP. It wasn't a plain vga card.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]