Let's at least give some credit to 3dfx Interactive for PCs dethroning the 3D giants. There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a Voodoo card.
With the advent of semi fabs like TSMC, STM, etc. making their processes more accessible to smaller fabless companies, 3dfx, PowerVR, ATI, Nvidia and other startups in the 3D space back then, realized they can replace all those expensive discrete RISC chips SGI was using for their massive 'reality engine' PCBs, and instead design a cheaper and more efficient custom ASIC from the ground up that does nearly the same things SGI's reality engine was doing (triangle rendering and texture mapping was enough for a PC 3D accelerator back then), but at 1/100th of the price, and sell it to consumers.
Fast forward, and we all know how the story played out and where the industry is today.
>There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a Voodoo card.
Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then, plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was wild as hell.[1]
Even the box-art on their GPU boxes was the most memorable of any HW of that era. Anyone remember those eye glaring down on you from the store shelves?[2] I feel like this is now a lost art.
This one. It is amazing seeing how some monstruosity of a full-length, full-heigth cards were replaced by, essentially, a single chip solutions. I would recommend something akin to a computer museum to see exactly how it came to be.
On mobile ATM, if someone is interested - leave a reply, I would provide some links on the most interesting ones.
Yeah, I'm surprised SGI didn't see the tides turning as the ground shifted beneath them and the rest of the industry leapfrogged them.
But that's what made SV great, young visionary companies could come out of nowhere and eat the lunch of old dinosaurs who lacked the vision.
The reality is the company suffered from the same fundamental market forces that killed off most of the Workstation market in the 90s. No niche company could spend what Intel was spending on R&D every year so their performance advantage was continually eroding, while the price points for the hardware were not. Trying to transition to being a PC manufacturer wasn't totally crazy, but it would mean competing a highly price competitive market which SGI was absolutely not equipped to do.
I had the impression that the smart people in the graphics department saw that management was never going to go along with their "lets build far cheaper and better versions of our existing products on a PCI card that you can stuff in a cheap off the shelf PC" that would massively undercut the core business. So they quit the company and started nVidia.
Yeah, I can imagine you could count on the fingers of your hands, the number of people could, back then, design 3D acceleration hardware, so it must have been a pretty exclusive club in the Bay Area at the time where everyone in this field knew each other, I can only assume.
This happens a lot of times. The reality is that someone will do it for you. Sometimes they even grow bigger than you.
Intel was really on a dumb path starting in the late 90s, with RAMBUS, Itanium, the P4 debacle, and missing the emerging mobile market, and didn't right themselves until 2006 with the Core series. But they were big enough to be able to make a few mistakes unlike SGI.
Now with that out of the way, did Pandemic always use x86 or did it use other architectures, like SPARC or Alpha?
Originally we were just x86 PC games but started working on console stuff in mid-2000. I got a chance to head up design on a PS2 game with Sony, and we had one or two other 'keep the company alive' projects as well before having the breakout hits of Full Spectrum Warrior and Battlefront. By then I was well off to college though.
As a teenager/young adult in the late 90s/early 00s, I was so glad to see 3dfx fail. I hated how popular the Glide API was since you could only run it on a 3dfx card. I had asked for a 3dfx Voodoo for Christmas one year, and my dad got me a Rendition Verite 2200. It supposedly had better performance than a Voodoo while having a lower price, but it couldn't run Glide, so couldn't play half the games I wanted a Voodoo for.
I didn't want to feel ungrateful to my dad, so my frustration got targeted to 3dfx for making a proprietary API when OpenGL and Direct3D existed.
I eventually got a Voodoo Banshee, but by that time Glide was falling out of favor.
Do you happen to know a fruity HW company that today runs it's own proprietary graphics API when the open Vulkan or OpenGL exist? /s
All jokes aside, back then it made sense why every 3D HW company was baking their own API. It wasn't just for gatekeeping/rent seeking, but the consumer 3D graphics acceleration business was brand new, there was no standardization, so nobody knew where the future was heading, so they wanted to have full control over it as they built it. Plus, they were shipping hardware before Microsoft had come up with DirectX so they needed some API until then, and I assume they were afraid to touch OpenGL, the API of their biggest competitor.
Yeah, but how many AAA games use it exclusively? Every AAA game I know of is either using Vulkan, OpenGL, or DirectX directly, or they're using a game engine like Unity or Unreal and abstracting away the graphics API.
You forgot the Playstation (LibGNM/LibGNMX) and Nintendo ones (depending on the generation, microcoded GPU, GX (Wii), GX2 (WiiU), NVN (the main one on the Switch), Vulkan and GL 4.6).
No, it's not. What a silly thing to say.
Is the developer writing Metal code? No. Then they're not using it directly. They're using an abstraction.
"using it directly" means the developer is writing Metal code themselves. Writing Unity code that eventually gets compiled to Metal is not writing Metal any more than writing C that gets compiled into machine code means you're writing machine code.
Think of it this way...if someone wants to hire an experienced Metal developer for a Mac-exclusive game, do you think someone who's only developed using a game engine like Unity would be qualified?
> You forgot the Playstation (LibGNM/LibGNMX) and Nintendo ones (depending on the generation, microcoded GPU, GX (Wii), GX2 (WiiU), NVN (the main one on the Switch), Vulkan and GL 4.6).
Irrelevant to the conversation. We can talk about developing with proprietary APIs and continue to just use Apple's Metal as an example without bringing up all the other proprietary APIs. Not sure why you think I "forgot" all the other APIs.
If networking protocols were managed the same way as ARB and then Khronos do their work, we would only have the RFC for the IP layer, and then lots of extensions to choose from for the upper layers and traffic monitoring from each networking card vendor.
(By today's standards, those famous early 3D games were laggy crap, both hardware- and software-rendered, on many/most period-correct computers. It's rarely said that simple things like texture interpolation (computationally way too much for a CPU) were new, and impressed people more than fps counters. Yes, the vaseline polygons were once the look of the Future!)
Then two companies leveraged their positions to change that course. First was Microsoft, which really needed everyone to start using system-wide multimedia APIs instead of dozens of unmanageable DOS era bypasses offered by this or that hardware manufacturer. So Direct3D was introduced, and then quickly remade in a numbers of later versions to match the breakneck progress in hardware features (or directly wrap around them, if you wish). On one hand, it was a universal API, on the other, people would still write “ATi code” and “Nvidia code” years later.
The other was id Software, though not in a straightforward way. Quake I was ported to accelerated hardware (vQuake, glQuake). Partially because of vQuake experience, Quake II compartmentalized the renderer into a library, and only that library was supposed to be written with the help of hardware makers (or by them). Ironically, OpenGL support was more of a tech demo thing because id Software had the expensive professional hardware, and regular users obviously didn't, despite the calls to support that API in consumer 3D accelerators. Even more ironically, 3dfx decided to make a bare minimum OpenGL wrapper library for Glide to let already existing glQuake run on Voodoo instead of trying to make some deal on the porting. They called it MiniGL. Soon other manufacturers, game makers, and people trying to make this or that existing software work on consumer PCs followed the example, and the world saw a lot of custom hacked "opengl32.dll" semi-implementations tightly coupled to respective applications. Of course, if any of them happened to be copied into system directory, everything but the specific software running with specific hardware that library was supposed to support crashed or broke. Those who tried to write new programs by the book using these wrappers probably had some problems, too.
Then Microsoft was forced to act, even though it never really intended to support alternatives to DirectX family. It made OpenGL (standardized) an official system-wide API, but made the system library to be just a wrapper over complete OpenGL implementation provided by hardware manufacturer (if present). So it continues to this day, and making everything work properly has been AMD/Nvidia's problem, not Microsoft's. This is why people on Windows can still choose between OpenGL and Direct3D in game settings, and see something on screen using both. But when it all got started both were just thinner or thicker wrappers over what chip designers initially had in mind.
"Carmack: Direct3D is now better than OpenGL"
https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/carmack-directx-bett...
Another bit of history, before DirectX, during the days of Win32s extensions for 16 bit Windows there was WinG library, which provided an accelerated framebuffer.
In other words, by the time 3dfx had a product out the door, Direct3D already existed. The fight over proprietary APIs should have been over and Glide should not have existed. DirectX 5, which greatly matured the Direct3D API, came out in August 1997, less than a year after the Voodoo, and still 6 months before the Voodoo 2. Glide should have been dead by then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_2.0_and_3.0
Haha. Amazing commercials. I don’t remember those at all, but they’re 100% on brand for the times.
those who had a voodoo + those who wanted to have one = 100%
Which had enough power to dethrone the Indy or O2 at a fraction of the price :)