Most Influential GPUs in History

[Deleted member 3]

No S3 Savage, no PowerVR, no Matrox, no Intel, no 3Dlabs but they did include XGI. And since the did mention XGI, why not Trident? SiS? They made some nice promises before XGI.

 

[inf3rno]

Great article!

Does anyone know i could get this article in PDF format including pictures?

 

[DarkMatter]

i would also have included the Voodoo 3 3000 ,as it was 3DFX's 1st 2d/3d card and it was at the time blazing fast for both 2d and 3d,i remember reading a benchmark on it ,and its 2d performance was faster than anything else around.Shame mine went pop and took out my board/cpu/ram

nice article but he has missed at least 2 or 3 cards id consider notable.

i would have included

Voodoo 3 (instead of Voodoo 2)
ATI 19xx series
Nvidia 8800 gtx (instead of 8800gt)

I agree with the Voodoo 3 3000, that card was a beast. If you could forgive the lack of 32 bit color it had superb performance that lasted many years. I even played UT2003 on that card when I had to use it as a replacement. 800x600 with medium/low settings (they were comparatively not so low as in today's games, I mean it looked well) and some lag here and there, but it played the damn game, the card was 4-5 years old by then!! Ha! Try playing the latest games today on a 4-5 years old 300 euro card (at launch) at some settings where the game doesn't suck!!

BTW I had a Riva TNT2 at the same time and it couldn't touch the Voodoo in pretty much anything, but most notably it sucked when it comes to compatibility, both hardware and software. Prabably the ones that were released a year later were better, but the first months in which both (V3 and TNT2) coexisted, the Voodoo3 was much better. Indeed I bought the TNT2 first following the seller's recomendation and had it 3 months before I had to buy the Voodoo3 because it was a pain, just to find the Voodoo was much faster, specially in games that suported Glide, that at the time that worked out to be the 99% of the games I bought. If D3D or Ogl were used the TNT2 was slightly faster, but back the Glide was the best of 3 anyway.

Anyway I think Voodoo 2 probably deserves the honour more, as it was a milestone in the GPU history and a reference used by anyone wanting to buy a card at that time. In the store I helped ("worked") back then, almost anyone wanting a card asked how the cards would compare to a Voodoo2. Even the Geforces later were compared to the V2!

No S3 Savage, no PowerVR, no Matrox, no Intel, no 3Dlabs but they did include XGI. And since the did mention XGI, why not Trident? SiS? They made some nice promises before XGI.

None of them were pitted against the strong duopoly Nvidia-Ati had at the time, and none of them had such an ambitious project. Remember that the Volaris were much faster than the others in paper (and TBH in hardware) and if they had managed to make decent drivers the market would have been different today. But most importantly none of them suffered such a catastrophic fate.