Hacker News Reader

Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

For the upper right quadrant, something like a Silicon Graphics might fit.

You mean the early systems like the IRIS 2000?

It arguably fits, because it pairs a 68010 with hardware accelerated 3d graphics. As far as I can tell, it's not quite modern 3d graphics. If you paid for the geometry engine, you did get hardware accelerated transform and clipping. And the framebuffer supported hardware acceleration of 2d polygon. But if you wanted texture mapping, that was all done on the CPU.

I don't think we can consider SGI as having "modern" 3d accelerated graphics until they implemented support for hardware accelerated texturing with the Reality Engine in 1992, long after they switched to MIPS.

Upper right quadrant would be an 8-bit (or maybe 16-bit) CPU paired with a 3D graphics capable GPU. SNES + the SuperFX chip is the closest example I can think of. Similarly, there is the Genesis/Mega Drive + SVP chip.

I can't name a fully 8-bit machine with a 3d focused graphics chip. Maybe there are arcade boards?

Mega Drive is probably earliest that was capable of it really, but Namco System 21 and especially Sega Model 1 (1990) were designed with 3d/polygons in mind but have relatively old chips in them. Programming for those things could not have been easy.

It's stretching the definition of "3D-focused graphics chip", but an early example might be I, Robot. An 8-bit 6809 CPU drives a custom polygon-pushing graphics processor. It's primitive but must've been mind-blowing in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(video_game)

N64 is actually Silicon Graphics and it’s upper left.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com