Past GPU releases: fillrate is king and your drivers are cheating
- Thread starter pauli
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Not really equivalent to Apple - they were ubiquitous in schools as the government funded them, they didn't have much reach outside of schools (very little home or business use) and weren't pioneering GUIs or stuff. They ran a version of basic, but the Spectrum 48, C64 or Amstrad 464 were all vastly more popular for home use.
The BBC led to the Archimedes, which eventually morphed into the ARM chips that run our phones (and all Apple stuff) today.
Yeah not really the commercial success of Apple, but the ubiquity in schools makes them kind of a cultural equivalent. The line between gen x and a millennial is "did you learn to type on a typewriter or a computer". And the computer you would have used in the US was an Apple II, and in the UK it was a BBC Micro.
Guess I'm right on the line, then, since I had one class on a typewriter, but actually learned how using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. It took about a month at a half-hour a day. That might be the single best time investment I've ever made. It's still paying off nearly forty years later.
I think of myself as firmly Gen X, btw, so I'm not sure how good that line is.
I'm towards the tail end of GenX and it was a BBC for me (and even they were getting long in the tooth by adolescence.) My older siblings learned on a typewriter though (with blank keys to learn touch typing!)
Yeah, we had BBC micros in our high schools here in Australia also, you never saw them outside of educational settings and I sure as hell would never have traded in my C64 or C128 on a BBC or worse an Electron for home use!
In case anyone else is in the same situation for Starfield, these settings get framerates in the high 50's - 60 on a R5 5600X & RTX 4070 while wandering around New Atlantis in the rain after getting off the NAT train at the start of the game.
Hwinfo reports CPU utilization in the 70% range, while the GPU is maxed out. This is with the 1.8.86 patch that added official DLSS support to the live game today. nvidia driver version 537.58.
In short, not going to bother upgrading to the 5800X3D unless things get worse further in-game.
Does a Voodoo 2 work in Windows 11? The answer is yes:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVwGpddQaTM
Gigabyte doesn't have the B660 board here in the USA. Instead, they have a B760 version, the B760M D3H. Even has DDR5 support! There's also the Asus Pro B550M-C/CSM, complete with a green PCB that matches my V5-5500 PCI cards.
Guess I better see if I can get the V5 or V2 cards working in an older Core 2 Quad system before buying a modern board
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVwGpddQaTM
Gigabyte doesn't have the B660 board here in the USA. Instead, they have a B760 version, the B760M D3H. Even has DDR5 support! There's also the Asus Pro B550M-C/CSM, complete with a green PCB that matches my V5-5500 PCI cards.
Guess I better see if I can get the V5 or V2 cards working in an older Core 2 Quad system before buying a modern board
I remember playing the pack in game Mechwarrior 2 when I got my Voodoo1, blew my tiny mind. Crazy unstable unfortunately but still made of pure awesome.
I keep wanting to build a retro pc for my Voodoo 1 card, to replay Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Something like a PII 266, Matrox Milennium and the Voodoo. Or maybe go slightly more modern with a K6-2 500.
Something like a PII 266, Matrox Milennium and the Voodoo. Or maybe go slightly more modern with a K6-2 500.
I had an AMD K6-2 500 in late 1998 and then a K6-III 450 in 1999. Ran the K6-2 500 at a bit over 600 MHz on a FIC VA-503+Baby AT motherboard. That motherboard had the most jumpers I've ever seen. In mid 1999 I went to an Intel rig with a slot 1 Pentium III 450 Katmai running on a Soyo SY-6BA+III Baby AT motherboard also at 600 MHz. Towards the end of 1999 I upgraded to a socket 370 PIII 700 Coppermine using an Asus S370 slocket running at 933 MHz on the same slot 1 Soyo SY-6BA+III. Never had a Voodoo, I ran an Nvidia Riva TNT and ATI Rage 128 GPUs around that time. It was a fun year.I keep wanting to build a retro pc for my Voodoo 1 card, to replay Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
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He got a Win98 VM working in Linux and has a github up if people want to do the same:
View: https://youtu.be/MfnZRTz5rJ4
The point of the exercise was to get the old card working on modern hardware. That sidesteps the whole problem of finding supported old hardware to plug just the GPU into.
The "newest" board I could find that has two PCIe slots was a B360 board from Asus, the Asus Prime B360-Plus. All of Asus's boards appear to use the same PCIe to PCI bridge chip, an ASM 1083. There's even a B550 version, the Pro B550M-C/CSM, but it lacks native VGA out. The Gigabyte board that GearSeekers used has an ITE bridge chip of some sort. Asus gives their bridge chip plenty of room, while Gigabyte hides half of their bridge chip under a second PCIe x16 slot.
View: https://youtu.be/MfnZRTz5rJ4
The point of the exercise was to get the old card working on modern hardware. That sidesteps the whole problem of finding supported old hardware to plug just the GPU into.
The "newest" board I could find that has two PCIe slots was a B360 board from Asus, the Asus Prime B360-Plus. All of Asus's boards appear to use the same PCIe to PCI bridge chip, an ASM 1083. There's even a B550 version, the Pro B550M-C/CSM, but it lacks native VGA out. The Gigabyte board that GearSeekers used has an ITE bridge chip of some sort. Asus gives their bridge chip plenty of room, while Gigabyte hides half of their bridge chip under a second PCIe x16 slot.
Neat bit of history regarding nvidia: https://www.techspot.com/news/10308...-bankrupted-nvidia-before-sega-executive.html
Pity they sold it for $15M a while later. I reckon it would be worth over $2B now.
That $5 million is probably what let them develop the Riva 128, which I remember being a perfectly cromulent 2D and 3D accelerator. I know that my uncle had one in the PII-300 rig he purchased in late 1997, and as soon as he was able to he supplemented it with an 8 MB Voodoo 2.
I feel a similar regret after having sold my shares in 2002.
Yeah, I worked at a small OEM back then, we shipped an absolute boatload of Riva128's. People who were flush with cash would go for stuff like a Millennium + Voodoo/V2, but for more standard setups the R128 was just an amazing value. I remember the image quality was kinda shit compared to Voodoo cards but performance was pretty great.
I remember in late 1997/early 1998 the Riva 128 was one of the few cards that an ATI Rage Pro actually looked better than; the Rage Pro was notorious for poor 3D image quality, partly because the damned thing often rendered in 15-bit instead of 16-bit colour and couldn't do alpha blending properly.
I remember it had a... different rendering of Quake 2 to the Voodoos. But Q2 was so wonky looking to begin with, it was just that. Different. Not inferior. It wasn't a bad card for the money at the time, but the TNT2 I bought later was just so vastly superior.