[I.S.T.]

Those videos are very educational for someone who was using an SNES at the time and had nothing resembling a modern PC. Thank you!

Do you plan to do Battle Arena Toshinden? I wonder how the extra character animates given he's using another character's moves...

[vetz]

Originally Posted by I.S.T.

Do you plan to do Battle Arena Toshinden? I wonder how the extra character animates given he's using another character's moves...

I had actually started recording for an episode on that game since it is one of the few games that have Nvidia NV1 support. Unfortunately the Matrox Mystique version just crashes when I try to start a match on my capturing computer, so to get some footage I need to install the card and game onto my Socket 7 machine and see if it works there. Since my Socket 7 machine is on another floor in my house I haven't bothered so much due to other games I have on my list that co-operate more easily

[Mendel]

Originally Posted by swaaye

By the way.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL995DE461767BFB71

So many videos... and I have to watch them all!
How do you suppose I have time to sleep now?

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Mendel

So many videos... and I have to watch them all!
How do you suppose I have time to sleep now?

You're right. I could delete them all at any moment. Or the intarwebz could fry and they'd be lost forever. You'd better watch them all right away!

[swaaye]

BTW some of my favs are

- Parhelia's broken Doom3. Apparently Matrox never fixed that.
- Savage 3D doing Unreal with S3TC. Insane texture resolution.
- 3DfxCity. I had to dig for this based on a old memory of it. It was a supposed precursor to VR website experiences.
- NV1 Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter
- CL Laguna3D (RDRAM based) showing off its visual problems.
- Rendition V1000 running RRedline-based Grand Prix Legends with edge antialiasing.

[Blazkowicz]

my 3dfx favorite was the demo that shows side by side 30fps and 60fps, you can also choose 15fps.
this was great little stuff to showcase the voodoo2 and high framerates, voodoo2 really did bring us 60fps as long as the game was light enough and/or you had a decent CPU.

the difference jumps at you, yet a decade later we still had the old tired meme of "the human eye cannot see more than 24fps", or 30fps depending on who you ask.

my not favorite is showcasing of voodoo5's "motion blur" in quake 3. it works in a custom build of Q3test (a beta) and not in Q3 itself, it applies to ammo boxes and weapons only not the whole scene, and it doesn't have enough samples anyway. 3dfx's promise of brute force motion blur was bunk (we got nothing from it, not even 640x480 glquake kind of gaming)

in the favs :
- Quake 2, and Kingpin sharing the same engine : early 60fps gaming yet looking great. Soldier of Fortune, too.
- Final Reality benchmark : it was fun to look at and ran on the terrible early GPUs.
- Descent 2 and Terminal Velocity demos that came on a CD with the S3 Virge. looks like they were 640x480 with bilinear filtering. not compatible with later Virges.
- Jedi Knight. ran great, huge environments, really worth playing and had CD Audio music that triggered sometimes. I did not know if it ran from the S3 Virge DX or from the Voodoo1.
- Turok 2 : sorry, I played that one on the voodoo5 with 4x SSAA. smooth old graphics with high IQ, this felt like CGI from the 80s or a very high res Nintendo 64. nice animation when climbing ladders. this game didn't feel like all the quake 1/2/3 clones.
- Quake 3 on a Laguna. yes, this ought to be a terrible card but I think what I was witnessing is Quake 3 on a Laguna, on a celeron 300 with 32MB ram.

[swaaye]

Yeah the whole "eyeball can't see more than 30fps" is crazy. I used to run my CRT at 120Hz 640x480 occasionally to get massive framerate and incredible fluidity. But honestly 60Hz and 60fps is satisfactory to me.

BTW, my listing of favs was in reference to the videos I recorded for my YouTube page. Playlist link is a few posts up. I recorded a pile of retro 3D cards with a VGA capture card. It was a little project I worked on for VOGONS earlier this year. I primarily wanted to do the less talked about chips like the NV1 and Parhelia, and S3, SiS, Trident and Cirrus Logic stuff.

[fellix]

Anyone remember this benchmark?



I benched the frack out of my rusty Riva TNT back then with this one and only dreamed the day I would get it to run on a T&L accelerated GPU.

[swaaye]

Yup I remember it. GL Excess comes to mind too now.

[Lightman]

Originally Posted by swaaye

Yup I remember it. GL Excess comes to mind too now.

Still have all the exe of them plus XLR8R, Codecreatures, X-Isle (early Crytek demo from 2001), all 3DMarks and ATI Radeon demos .

Some of them work in W7 x64 others *require* something not newer than W98SE!
What's funny, I just checked size of my folder containing all the benchmarks (not only 3D) I've gathered over the years and it is 17.2GB in size!

[swaaye]

I think it would be great to see Crytek recreate the old Jurassic Park: Trespasser game from many years ago using modern technology. X-Isle makes me think of that.

[Davros]

Damm you I keep trying to forget about that extensible arm....

[fellix]

Originally Posted by swaaye

I think it would be great to see Crytek recreate the old Jurassic Park: Trespasser game from many years ago using modern technology. X-Isle makes me think of that.

Amen, brother!

[Blazkowicz]

I remember reading the Volari V3 was good, unlike the others. that's because it's a Trident.

So I found your Matrox Parhelia video, and the link to all the others you've made. Wow, there's lot of nice stuff with even quake 3 on voodoo1.
with the Parhelia on doom 3 I wonder which renderer you were using. From what I know the generic ARB2 mode requires pixel shaders 2.0 level, then specific codepaths for older cards (NV10, NV20, R200), then a crappy ARB generic renderer with no features except shadows.

so, it looks to me the Parhelia doesn't meet requirements to run without question, and didn't get the same special treatment as the ATI and nvidia cards, because of no market. it seems to get some normal mapping on visages and hands, though, I don't know why.

[mczak]

Originally Posted by Blazkowicz

so, it looks to me the Parhelia doesn't meet requirements to run without question, and didn't get the same special treatment as the ATI and nvidia cards, because of no market. it seems to get some normal mapping on visages and hands, though, I don't know why.

Yes Parhelia doesn't support the extensions needed for nv10, nv20 (needs nv_register_combiners) or r200 (needs ati_fragment_shader) doom3 render path (might need even more extensions than those).
I'm not sure though if it's just because of no market, the parhelia supposedly exposed its fragment shaders via GL_MTX_fragment_shader but I don't think matrox ever told anyone how this extension actually worked . I'm not quite sure that something like nv20 or r200 render path would have been possible but certainly the hw should have had the capability to do something nv10-path equivalent.

[swaaye]

There are some posts around on the old MURC forum that hint at Parhelia OpenGL being a disaster at the time. Maybe posts here for that matter. I did some searching months ago for info about why Doom3 is as it is on the Parhelia. John Carmack also had a .plan or two with some remarks about Parhelia performing very poorly and there was a vibe that he wasn't going to bother with it.

Originally Posted by Davros

Damm you I keep trying to forget about that extensible arm....

That arm could heave barrels and stuff all by its lonesome. Astonishing.

[vetz]

A bit overdue, but here is a new video. Not Tomb Raider (due to various issues with the ATI version), so I did Assault Rigs for the ATI 3D Rage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZna...s&feature=plcp

[vetz]

Originally Posted by vetz

I had actually started recording for an episode on that game since it is one of the few games that have Nvidia NV1 support. Unfortunately the Matrox Mystique version just crashes when I try to start a match on my capturing computer, so to get some footage I need to install the card and game onto my Socket 7 machine and see if it works there. Since my Socket 7 machine is on another floor in my house I haven't bothered so much due to other games I have on my list that co-operate more easily

Quick update on the Toshinden video. Thanks to Swaaye and Putas (on Vogons) I managed to find out what caused the Matrox crashes. The game is simply not compatible with the Matrix Mystique 220 and requires the original Mystique. Now I just need a Creative 3D Blaster PCI or VLB card to get the last version included as well. If anyone have one of these (PCI most likely), feel free to contact me for a sell or a trade.

[I.S.T.]

Thanks. For someone like me who wasn't playing then modern PC games at the time(I had an ancient DOS PC inherited from my grandfather in '95), this series of videos is incredibly illuminating.

[Davros]

Going from software 256 colour to 16bit colour hardware accelerated with filtering (unless you have a mystique ) was amazing, we never had a jump in eyecandy so dramatic.

[fellix]

Originally Posted by Davros

Going from software 256 colour to 16bit colour hardware accelerated with filtering (unless you have a mystique ) was amazing, we never had a jump in eyecandy so dramatic.

That's nothing. I still remember the jump from 16-colour palette to 256 on my first PC -- now talk about drama here.

[Blazkowicz]

one game that really impressed me was Screamer 2 demo, in 320x200 16bit.
I wish I had gotten the full version.

[Davros]

It ran at 640x480 under glide

[Lightman]

Originally Posted by Blazkowicz

one game that really impressed me was Screamer 2 demo, in 320x200 16bit.
I wish I had gotten the full version.

Loved that game!
First played it on my friends AMD 486DX2 80MHz with VESA VGA card (cirrus logic). It was choppy as hell but very impressive. Then he upgraded to PCI S3 Trio64 1MB and the game transformed into fluid 30+ FPS

[fellix]

Originally Posted by Blazkowicz

one game that really impressed me was Screamer 2 demo, in 320x200 16bit.
I wish I had gotten the full version.

I played this one too, but can't really remember on what machine. I think it was one of my Cyrix 6x86 builds back then when those were briefly very popular CPUs. No recollection on the performance, though.