5 ms·

This is not a new problem, back in the late 80s I worked for a Mac graphics card developer ... We made some of the first 24bit accelerated graphics cards. Our

This is not a new problem, back in the late 80s I worked for a Mac graphics card developer ... We made some of the first 24bit accelerated graphics cards. Our first was just an existing card with a small daughter card with pals an sram on it, it was so easy that we got our own logos put on many of the chips to put the competition off the scent, we designed that one in days and got it to market in weeks. We immediately started on 2 more designs. The next was all FPGA, it was as big a nubus card as one could build, it pulled too much power, and tilted under it's own weight out of the bus socket (Mac's didn't use screws to hold cards in place, that happened when you closed the chassis). We got it out the door about the point that the competition beat the first board's performance. The final card was built with custom silicon, designed backwards from "how fast can we possibly make the vrams go if we use all the tricks?", In this case we essentially bet the company on whether a new ~200 pin plastic packaging technology was viable. This design really soaked the competition. In those days big monitors didn't work on just any card so if you owned the high end graphics card biz you owned the high end monitor biz too ... The 3 card play above was worth more than $120m

smilespray 4y ago
I may well have used those cards for work! Radius, RasterOps or SuperMac?
- Taniwha 4y ago
  SuperMac - the first one was the "SuperMac Spectrum/24 series III", I can't remember the name of the big FPGA thing I built the accelerator on the last project (that 200 pin chip - look for a chip SQD-01 aka 'SQuiD') that was the basis of a whole family of subsequent cards (starting with the Thunder cards)
  - smilespray 4y ago
    I loved those cards. My daily driver was a fully stacked IIfx with a SuperMac card. I remember telling my friends my display was more than a thousand pixels (1152 or something) wide.
    - Taniwha 4y ago
      yup 1152x870 - essentially the largest number that is roughly a 4:3 aspect ratio and less than 1 megapixel (2^20 VRAM was so very expensive) (and meets a bunch of other limitations like video dot clocks, VRAM clock rates, must be a multiple of the width of the VRAM banks etc)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    I’d love to know more about that, if you blog or podcast, please share us a link. I never owned one of those cards but worked on a Mac that did on a summer job as a teen.
  - im_down_w_otp 4y ago
    I have a SuperMac Thunder/24 w/ DSP upgrade currently in a Quadra 840AV in my little home office museum here. I even have the original boxes, software, etc. :-) I'm a fan of your work! I'd love to chat sometime.
    - Taniwha 4y ago
      I'm not sure how useful I could be (it was more than 30 years ago) - remember that while I designed the accelerator these boards were made by a team of smart people, wasn't just me
- rwmj 4y ago
  I was going to guess TARGA, but maybe those cards were PC only?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I remember back then searching ebay for a used Targa, but being confused by why all of the result thumbnails were Porsches.
analognoise 4y ago
This might be a weird question, but do you have any rundowns of the architecture handy? I love Retrocomputing and it sounds like an awesome thing to look at.
- Taniwha 4y ago
  Nothing in particular - VRAM was the core of all the cards thise days, the serial port shift register (inside the VRAM) fed muxes that in turn fed luts and out to the display. The VRAM array was 2 sets of 96 bits wide - the accelerator was in part a 1:4 24:96 mux that drove the VRAM array - that's how the dumb frame buffer worked. I'd spent a year before all this writing code to grab stats figure out where the mac graphics code spent it's time, initially we'd expected to optimise drawing vectors (ie lines - autocad was driving the parallel PC graphics market at the time) - my big discovery was that for the sorts of workloads that our customers were using 99% consisted of just 4 operations: - solid fills (>90%) - patterned fills - copying within the FB (ie scrolling) - writing text (quite low by important for the DTP market) I wrote the spec for the first 2 cards (to do the first 3 operations) and the went off to design the 3rd chip (modelled in C, turned into an inch thick spec describing the state machines and data paths and then passed to someone else to make gates) I added a hack on top of the copy primitive to accelerate text hiliting. So that accelerator chip also contained a state machine did 4 simple things as fast as it possibly could (solid fills used magic modes in the VRAMS, it could fill at 1.5Gbytes/sec - faster than the high end 3D hardware at the time) In the end the text fill was useful, but not that much faster (it turned 1-bit font images into 24-bit pixels on the fly), all that cool hardware was pissed away by the way the underlying apps used the font rendering subsystem (page maker invalidated the font cache every line, quark did an N-squared thing, etc)
  - userbinator 4y ago
    my big discovery was that for the sorts of workloads that our customers were using 99% consisted of just 4 operations Those are the same operations that most if not all of even the very cheapest "2D-only" integrated graphics are capable of, starting from the early 90s up to today.

smilespray 4y ago

I may well have used those cards for work! Radius, RasterOps or SuperMac?

Taniwha 4y ago
SuperMac - the first one was the "SuperMac Spectrum/24 series III", I can't remember the name of the big FPGA thing I built the accelerator on the last project (that 200 pin chip - look for a chip SQD-01 aka 'SQuiD') that was the basis of a whole family of subsequent cards (starting with the Thunder cards)
- smilespray 4y ago
  I loved those cards. My daily driver was a fully stacked IIfx with a SuperMac card. I remember telling my friends my display was more than a thousand pixels (1152 or something) wide.
  - Taniwha 4y ago
    yup 1152x870 - essentially the largest number that is roughly a 4:3 aspect ratio and less than 1 megapixel (2^20 VRAM was so very expensive) (and meets a bunch of other limitations like video dot clocks, VRAM clock rates, must be a multiple of the width of the VRAM banks etc)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  I’d love to know more about that, if you blog or podcast, please share us a link. I never owned one of those cards but worked on a Mac that did on a summer job as a teen.
- im_down_w_otp 4y ago
  I have a SuperMac Thunder/24 w/ DSP upgrade currently in a Quadra 840AV in my little home office museum here. I even have the original boxes, software, etc. :-) I'm a fan of your work! I'd love to chat sometime.
  - Taniwha 4y ago
    I'm not sure how useful I could be (it was more than 30 years ago) - remember that while I designed the accelerator these boards were made by a team of smart people, wasn't just me
rwmj 4y ago
I was going to guess TARGA, but maybe those cards were PC only?
- dylan604 4y ago
  I remember back then searching ebay for a used Targa, but being confused by why all of the result thumbnails were Porsches.

analognoise 4y ago

This might be a weird question, but do you have any rundowns of the architecture handy? I love Retrocomputing and it sounds like an awesome thing to look at.

Taniwha 4y ago
Nothing in particular - VRAM was the core of all the cards thise days, the serial port shift register (inside the VRAM) fed muxes that in turn fed luts and out to the display. The VRAM array was 2 sets of 96 bits wide - the accelerator was in part a 1:4 24:96 mux that drove the VRAM array - that's how the dumb frame buffer worked. I'd spent a year before all this writing code to grab stats figure out where the mac graphics code spent it's time, initially we'd expected to optimise drawing vectors (ie lines - autocad was driving the parallel PC graphics market at the time) - my big discovery was that for the sorts of workloads that our customers were using 99% consisted of just 4 operations: - solid fills (>90%) - patterned fills - copying within the FB (ie scrolling) - writing text (quite low by important for the DTP market) I wrote the spec for the first 2 cards (to do the first 3 operations) and the went off to design the 3rd chip (modelled in C, turned into an inch thick spec describing the state machines and data paths and then passed to someone else to make gates) I added a hack on top of the copy primitive to accelerate text hiliting. So that accelerator chip also contained a state machine did 4 simple things as fast as it possibly could (solid fills used magic modes in the VRAMS, it could fill at 1.5Gbytes/sec - faster than the high end 3D hardware at the time) In the end the text fill was useful, but not that much faster (it turned 1-bit font images into 24-bit pixels on the fly), all that cool hardware was pissed away by the way the underlying apps used the font rendering subsystem (page maker invalidated the font cache every line, quark did an N-squared thing, etc)
- userbinator 4y ago
  my big discovery was that for the sorts of workloads that our customers were using 99% consisted of just 4 operations Those are the same operations that most if not all of even the very cheapest "2D-only" integrated graphics are capable of, starting from the early 90s up to today.