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It was sold as a serious gaming GPU. Recall that this was an era where GPUs weren't yet a thing; instead there was 2D video cards and 3D accelerators that pair

It was sold as a serious gaming GPU. Recall that this was an era where GPUs weren't yet a thing; instead there was 2D video cards and 3D accelerators that paired with. The i740 and TNT paved the way toward GPUs, while I don't recall whether either had programmable pipelines they both had 2D capacity. For budget gamers, it wasn't a _terrible_ choice to purchase an i740 for the combined 2D/3D ability.

acdha 5y ago
I definitely remember that era, I just don't remember that having anything other than an entry-level label. It's possible that this could have been due to the lackluster results — Wikipedia definitely supports the interpretation that the image changed in the months before it launched: > In the lead-up to the i740's introduction, the press widely commented that it would drive all of the smaller vendors from the market. As the introduction approached, rumors of poor performance started circulating. … The i740 was released in February 1998, at $34.50 in large quantities. However, this suggests that it was never going to be a top-end contender since it was engineered to hit a lower price point and was significantly under-specced compared to the competitors which were already on the market: > The i740 was clocked at 66Mhz and had 2-8MB of VRAM; significantly less than its competitors which had 8-32MB of VRAM, allowing the card to be sold at a low price. The small amount of VRAM meant that it was only used as a frame buffer, hence it used the AGP interface to access the system's main memory to store textures; this was a fatal flaw that took away memory bandwidth and capacity from the CPU, reducing its performance, while also making the card slower since it had to go through the AGP interface to access the main memory which was slower than its VRAM.
- dleslie 5y ago
  It was never aimed at top-end, but that doesn't mean it wasn't serious about being viable as a gaming device. And it was, I used it for years.
smcl 5y ago
My recollection is that the switchover to referring to them as a "GPU" wasn't integrating 2D and 3D in the same card, but the point where we offloaded MUCH more computation to the graphics card itself. So we're talking specifically about when NVidia launched the Geforce 256 - a couple of generations after the TNT

acdha 5y ago

I definitely remember that era, I just don't remember that having anything other than an entry-level label. It's possible that this could have been due to the lackluster results — Wikipedia definitely supports the interpretation that the image changed in the months before it launched: > In the lead-up to the i740's introduction, the press widely commented that it would drive all of the smaller vendors from the market. As the introduction approached, rumors of poor performance started circulating. … The i740 was released in February 1998, at $34.50 in large quantities. However, this suggests that it was never going to be a top-end contender since it was engineered to hit a lower price point and was significantly under-specced compared to the competitors which were already on the market: > The i740 was clocked at 66Mhz and had 2-8MB of VRAM; significantly less than its competitors which had 8-32MB of VRAM, allowing the card to be sold at a low price. The small amount of VRAM meant that it was only used as a frame buffer, hence it used the AGP interface to access the system's main memory to store textures; this was a fatal flaw that took away memory bandwidth and capacity from the CPU, reducing its performance, while also making the card slower since it had to go through the AGP interface to access the main memory which was slower than its VRAM.

dleslie 5y ago
It was never aimed at top-end, but that doesn't mean it wasn't serious about being viable as a gaming device. And it was, I used it for years.

smcl 5y ago

My recollection is that the switchover to referring to them as a "GPU" wasn't integrating 2D and 3D in the same card, but the point where we offloaded MUCH more computation to the graphics card itself. So we're talking specifically about when NVidia launched the Geforce 256 - a couple of generations after the TNT