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When I was working on early 3D video games in the 1990s, all these companies would give you prototype 3D cards to make sure what you made was compatible. This

When I was working on early 3D video games in the 1990s, all these companies would give you prototype 3D cards to make sure what you made was compatible. This was pre-direct X. On Battlezone, many of us had different video cards to maintain compatibility. I had a G200. It wasn't the fastest card, but I always thought it looked great. Later we got to demo early builds on pre-release TNT2 cards and it caused a panic for us because our game had always been graphics limited, and the graphics pipeline was built to be very steady. Incredibly smart programmers wrote our renderer from scratch in those days. Suddenly the frame rate was really fast, and choppy, because the hit from physics and AI between frames caused stutters. After that NVIDIA dominated.

qingcharles 1mo ago
I remember the same. My whole game dev company went to one game developer show and everyone came back with a couple of GPUs each. Two out of the three games we were writing were 2D only.
jasonwatkinspdx 1mo ago
I was just a teenager and enthusiastic LAN party participant back then, but also was learning the basics of 3d modeling, animation, and gamedev. The pre 3DFX era was kinda interesting. The first hardware accellerated game I saw was VQuake on the Rendition Verite 1000 or whatever the branding was. It blew me away. When the Voodoo1 came out I was shocked by the framerate, but thought it looked ugly compared to the Rendition version. Technically the Verite had worse texture filtering, but I was used to the aliasing and thought the Voodoo looked overly smoothed. Back when 2d acceleration mattered Matrox was king. And you could always trust it'd drive even the most picky CRT at whatever refresh rate. You also could get the capture card with the Matrox Millenium and turn a Win95 pc into a legit video editing station, all be it hilariously limited vs today. I worked with a non profit briefly that did stop motion animation production with this setup. I was the first with a TNT2 at the big LAN party group in my area. The Voodoo2 SLI setups were still faster, but with the TNT2 you could do 16 bit color with a tweaked color map for id engine games, and it looked absolutely killer.
rtra 1mo ago
Wow, I loved that game when I was a kid. Thank you!

qingcharles 1mo ago

I remember the same. My whole game dev company went to one game developer show and everyone came back with a couple of GPUs each. Two out of the three games we were writing were 2D only.

jasonwatkinspdx 1mo ago

I was just a teenager and enthusiastic LAN party participant back then, but also was learning the basics of 3d modeling, animation, and gamedev. The pre 3DFX era was kinda interesting. The first hardware accellerated game I saw was VQuake on the Rendition Verite 1000 or whatever the branding was. It blew me away. When the Voodoo1 came out I was shocked by the framerate, but thought it looked ugly compared to the Rendition version. Technically the Verite had worse texture filtering, but I was used to the aliasing and thought the Voodoo looked overly smoothed. Back when 2d acceleration mattered Matrox was king. And you could always trust it'd drive even the most picky CRT at whatever refresh rate. You also could get the capture card with the Matrox Millenium and turn a Win95 pc into a legit video editing station, all be it hilariously limited vs today. I worked with a non profit briefly that did stop motion animation production with this setup. I was the first with a TNT2 at the big LAN party group in my area. The Voodoo2 SLI setups were still faster, but with the TNT2 you could do 16 bit color with a tweaked color map for id engine games, and it looked absolutely killer.

rtra 1mo ago

Wow, I loved that game when I was a kid. Thank you!