Vogons Wiki - User contributions [en]

ATI

2018-04-16T20:54:04Z

Swaaye: /* Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 */ soft shadows

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== ATi Wonder Series ==

The '''ATi Wonder series''' represents some of the first [[graphics]] add on products for [[IBM]] [[Personal computer|PCs]] and compatibles introduced by [[ATi Technologies]] in the mid to late 1980s. These cards were unique at the time as they offered the end user a considerable amount of value by combining support for multiple graphics standards (and monitors) into a single card. The VGA Wonder series added additional value with the inclusion of a [[Bus mouse|bus mouse port]], which normally required the installation of a dedicated [[Microsoft Bus Mouse]] adapter.

The VGA Wonder series later merged with the [[ATI Mach]] series of cards in 1990. The [[ATi Graphics Ultra]] (VRAM) and [[ATi Graphics Vantage]] (DRAM) cards both featured independent VGA Wonder ASICs in addition to their Mach8 8514 compatible [[coprocessor chips]]. The Graphics Ultra was later renamed the VGA Wonder GT. In 1992, their following [[product line]], the Mach32, integrated the VGA wonder core and coprocessor into a single IC. At this point the VGA Wonder line was cancelled and replaced with a cost reduced DRAM based version of Mach32 known as the "ATi Graphics Wonder".

===Graphics Solution (CGA)===
[[File:ATI Hercules Card 1986.xcf|thumb|One of the early graphics cards from ATI Technologies: a ''Graphics Solution Rev 3'' [[Hercules Graphics Card|Hercules]] graphics card from 1986. As can be seen from the PCB the layout was done in 1985, whereas the marking on the central chip CW16800-A says "8639" meaning that chip was manufactured week 39, 1986.]]
''Release Date: 1986''

'''ATi Graphics Solution Rev 3'''
* [[Chipset]]: ATI CW16800-A
* Supports: [[Hercules Graphics Card]] mode
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus

'''ATi Color Emulation Card '''
* Did at least support CGA graphics output to a [[TTL Monochrome]] monitor

'''ATi Graphics Solution plus (1987)'''
* [[Chipset]]: ATI CW16800-B
* Supports CGA, [[Plantronics Colorplus]] CGA & [[Hercules Graphics Card]] graphics modes
* Compatible with MDA, CGA (and therefore also EGA displays), [[DIP switch]] selectable
* 64kb of DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
'''Graphics Solution Plus SP'''
* Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
* Adds Serial/Parallel Ports
'''Graphics Solution SR'''
* Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
* Uses Static RAM
'''ATi Small Wonder Graphics Solution (1988)'''
* Chipset: ATI 18700
* Also known as Graphics Solution Single Chip or just GS-SC
* Single-chip version of the Graphics Solution plus
* 64kb of static RAM
* Composite Output
'''Graphics Solution Single Chip or GS-SC with Game (1988)'''
* Includes a [[game port]]
* Lacks external [[composite connector]]

===EGA Wonder===
''Release Date: 1987''

'''ATi EGA Wonder''' (March 1987)
* Chipset: ATI16899-0 + CHIPS P86C435
* Supports CGA, Hercules mono & EGA graphics modes
* Removes support for plantronics mode/Single-page Hercules mode/composite output
* Compatible with MDA, CGA and EGA displays (DIP switch selectable)
* [[Internal composite port]] for machines such as [[IBM 5155 Portable]]
* 256kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
* Original MSRP: $399
'''ATi EGA Wonder 800'''
* Added support for extended EGA text and graphics modes (requires [[multisync monitor]])
* Added support for 16-colour VGA modes
'''ATi EGA Wonder 800+'''
* Rebadged VGA Edge lacking the analogue [[VGA port]]
* Chipset: ATI 18800
* Can auto-detect monitor type connected (DIP switches no longer present)

===VGA Wonder===
''Release Date: 1987''

'''ATi VIP or VGA Improved Performance (1987)'''

* Chipset: ATi 16899-0 & Chips P82C441
* Supports CGA, Hercules mono, EGA & VGA graphics with Softsense automatic mode switching
* Compatible with MDA, CGA, EGA and VGA displays (DIP switch selectable)
* 9-pin TTL and 15-pin analogue connectors
* 256kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
* Original MSRP: $449 ($99 for Compaq expansion module)
'''ATi VGA Wonder (1988)'''
* Chipset: ATI 18800
* Adds support for SVGA graphics modes
* Adds support for monitor auto-sensing (switchless configuration)
* Uses on-board EEPROM to store configuration information
* 256kb or 512kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
'''ATi VGA Edge 8'''
* Cost Reduced VGA Wonder
* 256KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder 16 (1988)'''
* Speed enhancements due to a wider bus
* VGA pass through connector
* Bus mouse connector
* 256KB or 512KB DRAM
* Port: [[16-bit]] PC/AT bus (ISA), [[8-bit]] compatible
* Original MSRP: $499 or $699 respectively
'''ATi VGA Edge-16'''
* Cost reduced VGA Wonder 16
* Lacks the bus mouse connector and the digital TTL output
* 256kb DRAM (not expandable to 512kb)
'''ATi VGA Wonder+ (1990)'''
[[File:ATI Wonder.jpg|right|thumb|ATI VGA Wonder+]]
* Chipset: ATI 28800-2, -4, or -5
* Based on a new chipset which claimed to offer speeds rivalling VRAM based cards
* Dual page mode memory access
* Dynamic CPU/CRT interleaving
* 256KB or 512KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Integra (1990)'''
* Cost reduced version based on new ATi 28800 ASIC
* Lacks bus mouse connector
* Uses a much smaller PCB with a surface mount BIOS & RAMDAC
* Supports SVGA Graphics with 72 Hz refresh rates
* 512KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Basic-16 (1990)'''
* PCB layout similar to VGA Integra but using cheaper RAMDAC
* Only supports the basic 60 Hz VGA modes of the IBM VGA standard from 1987
* 256KB DRAM (not upgradable)
'''ATi VGA Charger (1991)'''
* Similar to VGA Basic-16, but can be upgraded to 512KB
'''ATi VGA Wonder XL (May 1991)'''
* Sierra RAMDAC adds support for 15-bit colour in 640x480@72 Hz, 800x600@60 Hz
* Supports a flicker-free vertical refresh rate of 72 Hz
* 256KB, 512KB or 1MB DRAM
* Original MSRP: $229, $349, $399 respectively
'''ATi VGA Stereo·F/X'''
[[File:Vgafx.JPG|400px|right|thumb|ATi VGA Stereo·F/X]]
* Chipset: ATI 28800
* Combines a VGA Wonder XL with a Sound Blaster 1.5
* Features "fake" stereo sound
* 512KB or 1MB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder XL24 (1992)'''
* Contains a Brooktree Bt481KPJ85 RAMDAC that adds support for hi and true colour graphics modes
* 512KB or 1MB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder 1024'''
* A series of OEM cost reduced versions of several VGA Wonder models
* Typically lacks the bus mouse connector and/or the digital TTL output

== ATi Mach series ==

The ATi '''Mach''' line was a series of [[2D computer graphics|2D graphics accelerators]] for [[personal computer]]s developed by [[ATI Technologies]]. It became an extension (and eventual successor) to the ATI Wonder series of cards. The first chip in the series was the ATi Mach8. It was essentially a clone of the IBM 8514/A with a few notable extensions such as Crystal fonts. Being one of the first graphics accelerator chips on the market, the Mach8 did not have an integrated VGA core. In order to use the first Mach8 coprocessor cards, a separate VGA card was required. This made ownership considerably expensive. A temporary solution was presented with the ATi Graphics Ultra/Vantage cards, which combined an ATi 8514 Ultra and VGA Wonder+ into a single card (though using discrete ICs). The Mach32 chip was the follow-up to the Mach8, which finally featured an integrated VGA core, true colour support and a 64-bit datapath to internal memory.

===Mach 8===

''Released: 1990''
*[[IBM 8514|IBM 8514/A]] clone
*Support for up to 8-bit color modes
*Optional VGAWonder 2 (28800) graphics core (with dedicated 256–512 KB DRAM)
*512 KB or 1 MB available with either DRAM or VRAM
*Port: ISA, MCA
The Mach 8 chip was used on the following ATI products:

*8514 Ultra (VRAM, coprocessor only)
*8514 Vantage (DRAM, coprocessor only)
*Graphics Vantage (DRAM)
*Graphics Ultra (VRAM)
*VGAWonder GT (Repackaged Graphics Ultra, 1 MB RAM standard)

===Mach 32===

''Released: 1992''
*[[32-bit]] [[graphical user interface|GUI]] accelerator with basic [[DOS]] support
*Limited [[VESA BIOS Extensions|VESA VBE]] support
*Support for 15 bbp, 16 bbp and 24 bbp colour modes added
*Video memory: 1 or 2 MB [[Dynamic random access memory|DRAM]] or [[Dynamic random access memory#Video DRAM .28VRAM.29|VRAM]]
*Memory interface: [[64-bit]]
*Port: [[Industry Standard Architecture|ISA]], [[Extended Industry Standard Architecture|EISA]], [[VESA local bus|VLB]], [[Peripheral Component Interconnect|PCI]], [[Micro Channel Architecture|MCA]]
*Integrated VGA core
*100% compatible with IBM 8514/A

The Mach 32 chip was used on the following ATI products:
*Graphics Wonder (DRAM)
*Graphics Ultra + (DRAM, fast RAMDAC)
*Graphics Ultra CLX (DRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)
*Graphics Ultra Pro (VRAM)
*Graphics Ultra XLR (VRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)

===Mach 64===
''Released: 1994''
*64-bit GUI accelerator with basic DOS support
*Limited VESA VBE support
*Video memory: 1, 2, 4 or 8 MB DRAM, VRAM, or [[Dynamic random access memory#Synchronous graphics RAM .28SGRAM.29|SGRAM]]
*Memory interface: 64-bit
*Port: ISA, VLB, PCI
*Variants:

**"Mach64 CX/210888" - Original chipset, uncommon (up to 2 MB DRAM, or 4 MB VRAM)
**"Mach64 GX/210888GX" - Enhanced video playback capabilities
**"Mach64 ET/210888ET" - Embedded???
**"Mach64 CT/264CT - Cost-reduced Mach64 with integrated RAMDAC and clock chip (up to 2 MB DRAM)
**"Mach64 VT/264VT - AMC connector (Support for TV-tuner)
**"Mach64 GT/264GT 3D Rage" - 3D capabilities
**"Mach64 GT-B/264GT-B [[ATI Rage II|3D Rage II]] - SDRAM & SGRAM support(up to 8 MB)
**"Mach64 LT/264LT" - Low-power mobile version of Mach64 GT

The Mach 64 chip was used on the following ATI products:
[[File:Ati_Mach64_2_cards.jpg|thumb|Several Mach64 PCI graphics cards]]
[[File:Ati_Mach64.jpg|thumb|Mach64 PCI made by ASUS]]

'''Mach64 GX Family:'''
*Graphics Xpression (1 or 2 MB DRAM)
*Graphics Pro Turbo (2 or 4 MB VRAM)
*WinTurbo (1 or 2 MB VRAM, non-upgradable)
*Graphics Pro Turbo 1600 (fast RAMDAC,PCI-only)
*XCLAIM GA (Macintosh)

'''Mach64 CT Family:'''
*WinBoost (1 MB DRAM, upgradable to 2mb)
*WinCharger (2 MB DRAM)

'''Mach64 VT Family:'''
*Video Charger
*Video Xpression (Mach64 VT2)
*Video Xpression+ (Mach64 VT4)

'''Mach64 GT Family:'''
*3D Xpression (2 MB EDO DRAM))

'''Mach64 GT-B Family:'''
*3D Charger (2 MB EDO DRAM)
*3D XPRESSION+ (2 or 4 MB SDRAM)
*3D XPRESSION+ PC2TV (TV-out)
*3D Pro Turbo (2, 4, 6 or 8 MB SGRAM)
*3D Pro Turbo+ PC2TV (TV-out)
*Xclaim VR - early versions (Macintosh, 2, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM, Video-In Video-Out)
*Xclaim 3D - early versions (Macintosh, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM)
*All-In-Wonder (SDRAM, TV Tuner)

'''Important Note:''' The 3D Rage and 3D Rage II chips were also known as Mach64 GT and Mach64 GT-B respectively. The Mach64 moniker was eliminated with introduction of the 3D Rage Pro.

== ATi Rage series ==
[[File:Ati_3D_Rage_II.jpg|thumb|Rage 3D II PCI]]
[[File:Rage_LT_Pro.jpg|thumb|Rage LT Pro]]
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]
[[File:Rage_128_Pro_16MB.jpg|thumb|Rage 128 16MB]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
Released in the latter half of 1997, the Rage Pro was a major improvement on ATI's previous Rage II chip. Improvements include an increased texture cache size (now at 4 KB) allowing for improved texture filtering, as well as an integrated triangle setup engine. It is the first ATI chip (and among the earliest graphics chips) to fully support AGP bus features, including execute mode (AGP texturing). It is also the first ATI chip to support OpenGL in hardware. However, like the previous Rage chips, the Rage Pro cannot bilinear filter alpha textures, resulting in transparent textures still having a rough appearance. Performance-wise, it is very similar to 3Dfx's original Voodoo Graphics chipset. The Rage Pro was very popular with OEMs and up until the late 2000s, it was integrated into many server motherboards.

The Rage Pro is also the last chip to support ATI's CIF application programming interface. It is also ATI's last chip with Windows 3.1x support.

===== Rage 128 =====
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
== ATi Radeon series ==

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon_AGP.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7200]]
[[File:Radeon_7000_PCI_32MB_DDR.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7000 32MB DDR PCI]]
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
----
===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it "Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid. Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=4859&postcount=64]

Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

ATi introduced a tessellation function called [[TruForm]].

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500. Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

----
===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon_9500_128MB.jpg|thumb|Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB]]
[[File:Radeon_9600_AGP_256MB.jpg|thumb|Radeon 9600 256MB]]
[[File:Radeon_9800_XL_(Medion_OEM_card_with_cooler_removed).jpg|thumb|Radeon 9800 XL 128MB]]
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
Introduced in August 2002, the R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9.0-compliant graphics chips. R300 introduced Shader Model 2.0 support and is also OpenGL 2.0-compliant. The R300 was designed by the ArtX engineering team that ATI had acquired in Feburary 2000. The same ArtX engineers (who were also former SGI employees) designed the Nintendo Gamecube GPU (Flipper) as well as the SGI RealityEngine-based graphics processor in the Nintendo 64. The first R300-based cards released were the Radeon 9500 and 9700 line of cards. In 2003, the Radeon 9600 and 9800 series were added to the lineup. R300 has many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than ATI's prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic filtering quality is vastly improved in the R300, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work simultaneously with trilinear filtering. Furthermore, compared to its initial competitor, NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti series, R300's anisotropic filtering incurred much less performance decrease. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

The R300 enjoyed visual quality and performance supremacy over its competitors in games and applications that extensively used Shader Model 2.0. NVIDIA would not be able to match or exceed ATI's Direct3D 9.0 performance until the release of the GeForce 6 series in 2004.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.
Also, despite being Direct3D 9.0-compliant, the R300 is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.

 
 
 
 
 
 
----
===== R400 =====
[[File:Radeon_X600Pro_PCIe.jpg|thumb|Radeon X600 Pro 256MB]]
[[File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg|thumb|Radeon X800 XT PE]]

Introduced in 2004, this is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R400 series after the release of R500 series. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

The ATI R400 series are ATI's last GPUs with official Windows 98/98 SE/ME support. Likewise with the R300 series, the R400 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.
----
===== R500 =====
Introduced in 2005, the Radeon X1000 / R500 series are ATI's first Direct3D 9.0c-compliant GPUs with full Shader Model 3.0 features. The R500 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.

----
===== R600 =====

[[File:HD_2600_Pro_and_2600_XT_both_AGP.jpg|thumb|HD 2600Pro and HD 2600XT, AGP versions]]
[[File:HD_3850_AGP_512MB.jpg|thumb|HD 3850 AGP]]
Introduced in 2006, these Radeons added the "HD" prefix to their names.
R600 includes both the HD 2xxx and HD 3xxx series, with the AGP version of the HD 3850 arguably being the most powerful AGP graphics card to ever have been made (with only the AGP variants of the HD 4650 and the HD 4670 being of a more recent GPU family).

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

----
===== R700 =====

[[File:HD_4670_AGP_1GB_Club3D.jpg|thumb|HD 4670 1GB Club3D AGP]]
Introduced in 2008, the R700 family included the last graphics cards to be made for AGP slots.
 
 
 
 
 

----
===== Driver suggestions for games =====
====== Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 ======
These OpenGL games are problematic for Radeon cards. DirectX 8 Radeons should use Catalyst 4.2 for KOTOR and Catalyst 5.1 for KOTOR 2. DirectX 9 Radeons in the R300 series can try these as well. With the R4x0 through R6x0 Radeon cards, Catalyst 7.11 may be the best choice.

If the soft shadows option is greyed out and disabled, as it most likely will be, edit swkotor.ini and add "AllowSoftShadows=1" to the [Graphics Options] section.

==Video captures==

===3D Rage II ===
{{#ev:youtube|wdJXf6MpN7A}}
Note: The Dawning Demo was actually targeted for the ATI Rage128 series that is a considerably newer, thus faster core than the 3D Rage II.

{{#ev:youtube|iFHwNf7-oZk}}

{{#ev:youtube|wWzWdwj9NvU}}

===3D Rage Pro ===
{{#ev:youtube|DU5Zi69QPQs}}
{{#ev:youtube|uZna8WXC4ds}}
{{#ev:youtube|IG3hd1humM0}}
{{#ev:youtube|i4pB5Fw8Slk}}

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

==Related links==
*[http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=22 VOGONS Drivers Ati section]
*[http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Interesting_Vogons_Threads#Graphics_cards VOGONS threads about graphics cards]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

ATI

2018-04-16T20:52:18Z

Swaaye: game drivers

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== ATi Wonder Series ==

The '''ATi Wonder series''' represents some of the first [[graphics]] add on products for [[IBM]] [[Personal computer|PCs]] and compatibles introduced by [[ATi Technologies]] in the mid to late 1980s. These cards were unique at the time as they offered the end user a considerable amount of value by combining support for multiple graphics standards (and monitors) into a single card. The VGA Wonder series added additional value with the inclusion of a [[Bus mouse|bus mouse port]], which normally required the installation of a dedicated [[Microsoft Bus Mouse]] adapter.

The VGA Wonder series later merged with the [[ATI Mach]] series of cards in 1990. The [[ATi Graphics Ultra]] (VRAM) and [[ATi Graphics Vantage]] (DRAM) cards both featured independent VGA Wonder ASICs in addition to their Mach8 8514 compatible [[coprocessor chips]]. The Graphics Ultra was later renamed the VGA Wonder GT. In 1992, their following [[product line]], the Mach32, integrated the VGA wonder core and coprocessor into a single IC. At this point the VGA Wonder line was cancelled and replaced with a cost reduced DRAM based version of Mach32 known as the "ATi Graphics Wonder".

===Graphics Solution (CGA)===
[[File:ATI Hercules Card 1986.xcf|thumb|One of the early graphics cards from ATI Technologies: a ''Graphics Solution Rev 3'' [[Hercules Graphics Card|Hercules]] graphics card from 1986. As can be seen from the PCB the layout was done in 1985, whereas the marking on the central chip CW16800-A says "8639" meaning that chip was manufactured week 39, 1986.]]
''Release Date: 1986''

'''ATi Graphics Solution Rev 3'''
* [[Chipset]]: ATI CW16800-A
* Supports: [[Hercules Graphics Card]] mode
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus

'''ATi Color Emulation Card '''
* Did at least support CGA graphics output to a [[TTL Monochrome]] monitor

'''ATi Graphics Solution plus (1987)'''
* [[Chipset]]: ATI CW16800-B
* Supports CGA, [[Plantronics Colorplus]] CGA & [[Hercules Graphics Card]] graphics modes
* Compatible with MDA, CGA (and therefore also EGA displays), [[DIP switch]] selectable
* 64kb of DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
'''Graphics Solution Plus SP'''
* Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
* Adds Serial/Parallel Ports
'''Graphics Solution SR'''
* Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
* Uses Static RAM
'''ATi Small Wonder Graphics Solution (1988)'''
* Chipset: ATI 18700
* Also known as Graphics Solution Single Chip or just GS-SC
* Single-chip version of the Graphics Solution plus
* 64kb of static RAM
* Composite Output
'''Graphics Solution Single Chip or GS-SC with Game (1988)'''
* Includes a [[game port]]
* Lacks external [[composite connector]]

===EGA Wonder===
''Release Date: 1987''

'''ATi EGA Wonder''' (March 1987)
* Chipset: ATI16899-0 + CHIPS P86C435
* Supports CGA, Hercules mono & EGA graphics modes
* Removes support for plantronics mode/Single-page Hercules mode/composite output
* Compatible with MDA, CGA and EGA displays (DIP switch selectable)
* [[Internal composite port]] for machines such as [[IBM 5155 Portable]]
* 256kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
* Original MSRP: $399
'''ATi EGA Wonder 800'''
* Added support for extended EGA text and graphics modes (requires [[multisync monitor]])
* Added support for 16-colour VGA modes
'''ATi EGA Wonder 800+'''
* Rebadged VGA Edge lacking the analogue [[VGA port]]
* Chipset: ATI 18800
* Can auto-detect monitor type connected (DIP switches no longer present)

===VGA Wonder===
''Release Date: 1987''

'''ATi VIP or VGA Improved Performance (1987)'''

* Chipset: ATi 16899-0 & Chips P82C441
* Supports CGA, Hercules mono, EGA & VGA graphics with Softsense automatic mode switching
* Compatible with MDA, CGA, EGA and VGA displays (DIP switch selectable)
* 9-pin TTL and 15-pin analogue connectors
* 256kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
* Original MSRP: $449 ($99 for Compaq expansion module)
'''ATi VGA Wonder (1988)'''
* Chipset: ATI 18800
* Adds support for SVGA graphics modes
* Adds support for monitor auto-sensing (switchless configuration)
* Uses on-board EEPROM to store configuration information
* 256kb or 512kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
'''ATi VGA Edge 8'''
* Cost Reduced VGA Wonder
* 256KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder 16 (1988)'''
* Speed enhancements due to a wider bus
* VGA pass through connector
* Bus mouse connector
* 256KB or 512KB DRAM
* Port: [[16-bit]] PC/AT bus (ISA), [[8-bit]] compatible
* Original MSRP: $499 or $699 respectively
'''ATi VGA Edge-16'''
* Cost reduced VGA Wonder 16
* Lacks the bus mouse connector and the digital TTL output
* 256kb DRAM (not expandable to 512kb)
'''ATi VGA Wonder+ (1990)'''
[[File:ATI Wonder.jpg|right|thumb|ATI VGA Wonder+]]
* Chipset: ATI 28800-2, -4, or -5
* Based on a new chipset which claimed to offer speeds rivalling VRAM based cards
* Dual page mode memory access
* Dynamic CPU/CRT interleaving
* 256KB or 512KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Integra (1990)'''
* Cost reduced version based on new ATi 28800 ASIC
* Lacks bus mouse connector
* Uses a much smaller PCB with a surface mount BIOS & RAMDAC
* Supports SVGA Graphics with 72 Hz refresh rates
* 512KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Basic-16 (1990)'''
* PCB layout similar to VGA Integra but using cheaper RAMDAC
* Only supports the basic 60 Hz VGA modes of the IBM VGA standard from 1987
* 256KB DRAM (not upgradable)
'''ATi VGA Charger (1991)'''
* Similar to VGA Basic-16, but can be upgraded to 512KB
'''ATi VGA Wonder XL (May 1991)'''
* Sierra RAMDAC adds support for 15-bit colour in 640x480@72 Hz, 800x600@60 Hz
* Supports a flicker-free vertical refresh rate of 72 Hz
* 256KB, 512KB or 1MB DRAM
* Original MSRP: $229, $349, $399 respectively
'''ATi VGA Stereo·F/X'''
[[File:Vgafx.JPG|400px|right|thumb|ATi VGA Stereo·F/X]]
* Chipset: ATI 28800
* Combines a VGA Wonder XL with a Sound Blaster 1.5
* Features "fake" stereo sound
* 512KB or 1MB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder XL24 (1992)'''
* Contains a Brooktree Bt481KPJ85 RAMDAC that adds support for hi and true colour graphics modes
* 512KB or 1MB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder 1024'''
* A series of OEM cost reduced versions of several VGA Wonder models
* Typically lacks the bus mouse connector and/or the digital TTL output

== ATi Mach series ==

The ATi '''Mach''' line was a series of [[2D computer graphics|2D graphics accelerators]] for [[personal computer]]s developed by [[ATI Technologies]]. It became an extension (and eventual successor) to the ATI Wonder series of cards. The first chip in the series was the ATi Mach8. It was essentially a clone of the IBM 8514/A with a few notable extensions such as Crystal fonts. Being one of the first graphics accelerator chips on the market, the Mach8 did not have an integrated VGA core. In order to use the first Mach8 coprocessor cards, a separate VGA card was required. This made ownership considerably expensive. A temporary solution was presented with the ATi Graphics Ultra/Vantage cards, which combined an ATi 8514 Ultra and VGA Wonder+ into a single card (though using discrete ICs). The Mach32 chip was the follow-up to the Mach8, which finally featured an integrated VGA core, true colour support and a 64-bit datapath to internal memory.

===Mach 8===

''Released: 1990''
*[[IBM 8514|IBM 8514/A]] clone
*Support for up to 8-bit color modes
*Optional VGAWonder 2 (28800) graphics core (with dedicated 256–512 KB DRAM)
*512 KB or 1 MB available with either DRAM or VRAM
*Port: ISA, MCA
The Mach 8 chip was used on the following ATI products:

*8514 Ultra (VRAM, coprocessor only)
*8514 Vantage (DRAM, coprocessor only)
*Graphics Vantage (DRAM)
*Graphics Ultra (VRAM)
*VGAWonder GT (Repackaged Graphics Ultra, 1 MB RAM standard)

===Mach 32===

''Released: 1992''
*[[32-bit]] [[graphical user interface|GUI]] accelerator with basic [[DOS]] support
*Limited [[VESA BIOS Extensions|VESA VBE]] support
*Support for 15 bbp, 16 bbp and 24 bbp colour modes added
*Video memory: 1 or 2 MB [[Dynamic random access memory|DRAM]] or [[Dynamic random access memory#Video DRAM .28VRAM.29|VRAM]]
*Memory interface: [[64-bit]]
*Port: [[Industry Standard Architecture|ISA]], [[Extended Industry Standard Architecture|EISA]], [[VESA local bus|VLB]], [[Peripheral Component Interconnect|PCI]], [[Micro Channel Architecture|MCA]]
*Integrated VGA core
*100% compatible with IBM 8514/A

The Mach 32 chip was used on the following ATI products:
*Graphics Wonder (DRAM)
*Graphics Ultra + (DRAM, fast RAMDAC)
*Graphics Ultra CLX (DRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)
*Graphics Ultra Pro (VRAM)
*Graphics Ultra XLR (VRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)

===Mach 64===
''Released: 1994''
*64-bit GUI accelerator with basic DOS support
*Limited VESA VBE support
*Video memory: 1, 2, 4 or 8 MB DRAM, VRAM, or [[Dynamic random access memory#Synchronous graphics RAM .28SGRAM.29|SGRAM]]
*Memory interface: 64-bit
*Port: ISA, VLB, PCI
*Variants:

**"Mach64 CX/210888" - Original chipset, uncommon (up to 2 MB DRAM, or 4 MB VRAM)
**"Mach64 GX/210888GX" - Enhanced video playback capabilities
**"Mach64 ET/210888ET" - Embedded???
**"Mach64 CT/264CT - Cost-reduced Mach64 with integrated RAMDAC and clock chip (up to 2 MB DRAM)
**"Mach64 VT/264VT - AMC connector (Support for TV-tuner)
**"Mach64 GT/264GT 3D Rage" - 3D capabilities
**"Mach64 GT-B/264GT-B [[ATI Rage II|3D Rage II]] - SDRAM & SGRAM support(up to 8 MB)
**"Mach64 LT/264LT" - Low-power mobile version of Mach64 GT

The Mach 64 chip was used on the following ATI products:
[[File:Ati_Mach64_2_cards.jpg|thumb|Several Mach64 PCI graphics cards]]
[[File:Ati_Mach64.jpg|thumb|Mach64 PCI made by ASUS]]

'''Mach64 GX Family:'''
*Graphics Xpression (1 or 2 MB DRAM)
*Graphics Pro Turbo (2 or 4 MB VRAM)
*WinTurbo (1 or 2 MB VRAM, non-upgradable)
*Graphics Pro Turbo 1600 (fast RAMDAC,PCI-only)
*XCLAIM GA (Macintosh)

'''Mach64 CT Family:'''
*WinBoost (1 MB DRAM, upgradable to 2mb)
*WinCharger (2 MB DRAM)

'''Mach64 VT Family:'''
*Video Charger
*Video Xpression (Mach64 VT2)
*Video Xpression+ (Mach64 VT4)

'''Mach64 GT Family:'''
*3D Xpression (2 MB EDO DRAM))

'''Mach64 GT-B Family:'''
*3D Charger (2 MB EDO DRAM)
*3D XPRESSION+ (2 or 4 MB SDRAM)
*3D XPRESSION+ PC2TV (TV-out)
*3D Pro Turbo (2, 4, 6 or 8 MB SGRAM)
*3D Pro Turbo+ PC2TV (TV-out)
*Xclaim VR - early versions (Macintosh, 2, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM, Video-In Video-Out)
*Xclaim 3D - early versions (Macintosh, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM)
*All-In-Wonder (SDRAM, TV Tuner)

'''Important Note:''' The 3D Rage and 3D Rage II chips were also known as Mach64 GT and Mach64 GT-B respectively. The Mach64 moniker was eliminated with introduction of the 3D Rage Pro.

== ATi Rage series ==
[[File:Ati_3D_Rage_II.jpg|thumb|Rage 3D II PCI]]
[[File:Rage_LT_Pro.jpg|thumb|Rage LT Pro]]
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]
[[File:Rage_128_Pro_16MB.jpg|thumb|Rage 128 16MB]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
Released in the latter half of 1997, the Rage Pro was a major improvement on ATI's previous Rage II chip. Improvements include an increased texture cache size (now at 4 KB) allowing for improved texture filtering, as well as an integrated triangle setup engine. It is the first ATI chip (and among the earliest graphics chips) to fully support AGP bus features, including execute mode (AGP texturing). It is also the first ATI chip to support OpenGL in hardware. However, like the previous Rage chips, the Rage Pro cannot bilinear filter alpha textures, resulting in transparent textures still having a rough appearance. Performance-wise, it is very similar to 3Dfx's original Voodoo Graphics chipset. The Rage Pro was very popular with OEMs and up until the late 2000s, it was integrated into many server motherboards.

The Rage Pro is also the last chip to support ATI's CIF application programming interface. It is also ATI's last chip with Windows 3.1x support.

===== Rage 128 =====
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
== ATi Radeon series ==

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon_AGP.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7200]]
[[File:Radeon_7000_PCI_32MB_DDR.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7000 32MB DDR PCI]]
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
----
===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it "Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid. Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=4859&postcount=64]

Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

ATi introduced a tessellation function called [[TruForm]].

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500. Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

----
===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon_9500_128MB.jpg|thumb|Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB]]
[[File:Radeon_9600_AGP_256MB.jpg|thumb|Radeon 9600 256MB]]
[[File:Radeon_9800_XL_(Medion_OEM_card_with_cooler_removed).jpg|thumb|Radeon 9800 XL 128MB]]
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
Introduced in August 2002, the R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9.0-compliant graphics chips. R300 introduced Shader Model 2.0 support and is also OpenGL 2.0-compliant. The R300 was designed by the ArtX engineering team that ATI had acquired in Feburary 2000. The same ArtX engineers (who were also former SGI employees) designed the Nintendo Gamecube GPU (Flipper) as well as the SGI RealityEngine-based graphics processor in the Nintendo 64. The first R300-based cards released were the Radeon 9500 and 9700 line of cards. In 2003, the Radeon 9600 and 9800 series were added to the lineup. R300 has many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than ATI's prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic filtering quality is vastly improved in the R300, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work simultaneously with trilinear filtering. Furthermore, compared to its initial competitor, NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti series, R300's anisotropic filtering incurred much less performance decrease. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

The R300 enjoyed visual quality and performance supremacy over its competitors in games and applications that extensively used Shader Model 2.0. NVIDIA would not be able to match or exceed ATI's Direct3D 9.0 performance until the release of the GeForce 6 series in 2004.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.
Also, despite being Direct3D 9.0-compliant, the R300 is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.

 
 
 
 
 
 
----
===== R400 =====
[[File:Radeon_X600Pro_PCIe.jpg|thumb|Radeon X600 Pro 256MB]]
[[File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg|thumb|Radeon X800 XT PE]]

Introduced in 2004, this is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R400 series after the release of R500 series. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

The ATI R400 series are ATI's last GPUs with official Windows 98/98 SE/ME support. Likewise with the R300 series, the R400 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.
----
===== R500 =====
Introduced in 2005, the Radeon X1000 / R500 series are ATI's first Direct3D 9.0c-compliant GPUs with full Shader Model 3.0 features. The R500 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.

----
===== R600 =====

[[File:HD_2600_Pro_and_2600_XT_both_AGP.jpg|thumb|HD 2600Pro and HD 2600XT, AGP versions]]
[[File:HD_3850_AGP_512MB.jpg|thumb|HD 3850 AGP]]
Introduced in 2006, these Radeons added the "HD" prefix to their names.
R600 includes both the HD 2xxx and HD 3xxx series, with the AGP version of the HD 3850 arguably being the most powerful AGP graphics card to ever have been made (with only the AGP variants of the HD 4650 and the HD 4670 being of a more recent GPU family).

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

----
===== R700 =====

[[File:HD_4670_AGP_1GB_Club3D.jpg|thumb|HD 4670 1GB Club3D AGP]]
Introduced in 2008, the R700 family included the last graphics cards to be made for AGP slots.
 
 
 
 
 

----
===== Driver suggestions for games =====
====== Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 ======
These OpenGL games are problematic for Radeon cards. DirectX 8 Radeons should use Catalyst 4.2 for KOTOR and Catalyst 5.1 for KOTOR 2. DirectX 9 Radeons in the R300 series can try these as well. With the R4x0 through R6x0 Radeon cards, Catalyst 7.11 may be the best choice.

==Video captures==

===3D Rage II ===
{{#ev:youtube|wdJXf6MpN7A}}
Note: The Dawning Demo was actually targeted for the ATI Rage128 series that is a considerably newer, thus faster core than the 3D Rage II.

{{#ev:youtube|iFHwNf7-oZk}}

{{#ev:youtube|wWzWdwj9NvU}}

===3D Rage Pro ===
{{#ev:youtube|DU5Zi69QPQs}}
{{#ev:youtube|uZna8WXC4ds}}
{{#ev:youtube|IG3hd1humM0}}
{{#ev:youtube|i4pB5Fw8Slk}}

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

==Related links==
*[http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=22 VOGONS Drivers Ati section]
*[http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Interesting_Vogons_Threads#Graphics_cards VOGONS threads about graphics cards]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Aureal Semiconductor

2017-09-13T19:43:06Z

Swaaye:

Aureal Semiconducter was a company known for the Vortex chipsets that were released with sound cards in the late 1990s. The Vortex was famous for its advanced 3D sound reproduction through headphones and desktop speakers in games. In addition to supporting DirectSound3D and EAX like its main competitor (Sound Blaster Live!), it also featured its own proprietary 3D audio technology, called A3D.
A3D was generally considered to be superior at its time, but support from games was not as common compared to Creative's EAX. Vortex cards also support Sound Blaster emulation in DOS.
Aureal went bankrupt in 2000.

==Pre-Vortex==
Initially, A3D technology was implemented with an Analog Devices DSP. This design was sold on products such as the Diamond Monster Sound M80 and MX200. These cards supported A3D 1.x.

==Vortex ASICs==
===Vortex 1 / AU8820===
Aureal's first ASIC became very popular with sound card manufacturers and was sold in many OEM PCs. These cards produce good audio quality, and include hardware MIDI, DOS support (SBPro), DirectSound and DirectSound3D support, and support A3D 1.x. They have only 8 hardware streams though so the system CPU may need to process some streams.

===Vortex 2 / AU8830===
This was the first and only hardware designed to process A3D 2.0. It has features similar to Vortex 1 but has much more powerful 3D audio processing.

====Notes====
*Driver rev 2041 is perhaps the most functional. 2048 has bugs, including reversed-channel audio streams in some games.
*If you run higher than DirectX 7.0a, drivers beyond rev 2017 may cause Windows to lock up if you quit a game and try to play it again. It causes some kind of exception that crashes the OS. Reference driver 2015 and Diamond MX300 driver 1.02 (2017) seem to work fine with later DirectX versions.
*There are no drivers for Windows 2000 or XP that are fully functional. There are sound problems and missing features.

===Vortex Advantage / AU8810===
This card was a later entry that is essentially an enhanced Vortex 1. They added a hardware equalizer.

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Sound Cards]]

ATI

2017-09-13T04:54:47Z

Swaaye: kotor notes

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== ATi Wonder Series ==

The '''ATi Wonder series''' represents some of the first [[graphics]] add on products for [[IBM]] [[Personal computer|PCs]] and compatibles introduced by [[ATi Technologies]] in the mid to late 1980s. These cards were unique at the time as they offered the end user a considerable amount of value by combining support for multiple graphics standards (and monitors) into a single card. The VGA Wonder series added additional value with the inclusion of a [[Bus mouse|bus mouse port]], which normally required the installation of a dedicated [[Microsoft Bus Mouse]] adapter.

The VGA Wonder series later merged with the [[ATI Mach]] series of cards in 1990. The [[ATi Graphics Ultra]] (VRAM) and [[ATi Graphics Vantage]] (DRAM) cards both featured independent VGA Wonder ASICs in addition to their Mach8 8514 compatible [[coprocessor chips]]. The Graphics Ultra was later renamed the VGA Wonder GT. In 1992, their following [[product line]], the Mach32, integrated the VGA wonder core and coprocessor into a single IC. At this point the VGA Wonder line was cancelled and replaced with a cost reduced DRAM based version of Mach32 known as the "ATi Graphics Wonder".

===Graphics Solution (CGA)===
[[File:ATI Hercules Card 1986.xcf|thumb|One of the early graphics cards from ATI Technologies: a ''Graphics Solution Rev 3'' [[Hercules Graphics Card|Hercules]] graphics card from 1986. As can be seen from the PCB the layout was done in 1985, whereas the marking on the central chip CW16800-A says "8639" meaning that chip was manufactured week 39, 1986.]]
''Release Date: 1986''

'''ATi Graphics Solution Rev 3'''
* [[Chipset]]: ATI CW16800-A
* Supports: [[Hercules Graphics Card]] mode
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus

'''ATi Color Emulation Card '''
* Did at least support CGA graphics output to a [[TTL Monochrome]] monitor

'''ATi Graphics Solution plus (1987)'''
* [[Chipset]]: ATI CW16800-B
* Supports CGA, [[Plantronics Colorplus]] CGA & [[Hercules Graphics Card]] graphics modes
* Compatible with MDA, CGA (and therefore also EGA displays), [[DIP switch]] selectable
* 64kb of DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
'''Graphics Solution Plus SP'''
* Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
* Adds Serial/Parallel Ports
'''Graphics Solution SR'''
* Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
* Uses Static RAM
'''ATi Small Wonder Graphics Solution (1988)'''
* Chipset: ATI 18700
* Also known as Graphics Solution Single Chip or just GS-SC
* Single-chip version of the Graphics Solution plus
* 64kb of static RAM
* Composite Output
'''Graphics Solution Single Chip or GS-SC with Game (1988)'''
* Includes a [[game port]]
* Lacks external [[composite connector]]

===EGA Wonder===
''Release Date: 1987''

'''ATi EGA Wonder''' (March 1987)
* Chipset: ATI16899-0 + CHIPS P86C435
* Supports CGA, Hercules mono & EGA graphics modes
* Removes support for plantronics mode/Single-page Hercules mode/composite output
* Compatible with MDA, CGA and EGA displays (DIP switch selectable)
* [[Internal composite port]] for machines such as [[IBM 5155 Portable]]
* 256kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
* Original MSRP: $399
'''ATi EGA Wonder 800'''
* Added support for extended EGA text and graphics modes (requires [[multisync monitor]])
* Added support for 16-colour VGA modes
'''ATi EGA Wonder 800+'''
* Rebadged VGA Edge lacking the analogue [[VGA port]]
* Chipset: ATI 18800
* Can auto-detect monitor type connected (DIP switches no longer present)

===VGA Wonder===
''Release Date: 1987''

'''ATi VIP or VGA Improved Performance (1987)'''

* Chipset: ATi 16899-0 & Chips P82C441
* Supports CGA, Hercules mono, EGA & VGA graphics with Softsense automatic mode switching
* Compatible with MDA, CGA, EGA and VGA displays (DIP switch selectable)
* 9-pin TTL and 15-pin analogue connectors
* 256kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
* Original MSRP: $449 ($99 for Compaq expansion module)
'''ATi VGA Wonder (1988)'''
* Chipset: ATI 18800
* Adds support for SVGA graphics modes
* Adds support for monitor auto-sensing (switchless configuration)
* Uses on-board EEPROM to store configuration information
* 256kb or 512kb DRAM
* Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
'''ATi VGA Edge 8'''
* Cost Reduced VGA Wonder
* 256KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder 16 (1988)'''
* Speed enhancements due to a wider bus
* VGA pass through connector
* Bus mouse connector
* 256KB or 512KB DRAM
* Port: [[16-bit]] PC/AT bus (ISA), [[8-bit]] compatible
* Original MSRP: $499 or $699 respectively
'''ATi VGA Edge-16'''
* Cost reduced VGA Wonder 16
* Lacks the bus mouse connector and the digital TTL output
* 256kb DRAM (not expandable to 512kb)
'''ATi VGA Wonder+ (1990)'''
[[File:ATI Wonder.jpg|right|thumb|ATI VGA Wonder+]]
* Chipset: ATI 28800-2, -4, or -5
* Based on a new chipset which claimed to offer speeds rivalling VRAM based cards
* Dual page mode memory access
* Dynamic CPU/CRT interleaving
* 256KB or 512KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Integra (1990)'''
* Cost reduced version based on new ATi 28800 ASIC
* Lacks bus mouse connector
* Uses a much smaller PCB with a surface mount BIOS & RAMDAC
* Supports SVGA Graphics with 72 Hz refresh rates
* 512KB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Basic-16 (1990)'''
* PCB layout similar to VGA Integra but using cheaper RAMDAC
* Only supports the basic 60 Hz VGA modes of the IBM VGA standard from 1987
* 256KB DRAM (not upgradable)
'''ATi VGA Charger (1991)'''
* Similar to VGA Basic-16, but can be upgraded to 512KB
'''ATi VGA Wonder XL (May 1991)'''
* Sierra RAMDAC adds support for 15-bit colour in 640x480@72 Hz, 800x600@60 Hz
* Supports a flicker-free vertical refresh rate of 72 Hz
* 256KB, 512KB or 1MB DRAM
* Original MSRP: $229, $349, $399 respectively
'''ATi VGA Stereo·F/X'''
[[File:Vgafx.JPG|400px|right|thumb|ATi VGA Stereo·F/X]]
* Chipset: ATI 28800
* Combines a VGA Wonder XL with a Sound Blaster 1.5
* Features "fake" stereo sound
* 512KB or 1MB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder XL24 (1992)'''
* Contains a Brooktree Bt481KPJ85 RAMDAC that adds support for hi and true colour graphics modes
* 512KB or 1MB DRAM
'''ATi VGA Wonder 1024'''
* A series of OEM cost reduced versions of several VGA Wonder models
* Typically lacks the bus mouse connector and/or the digital TTL output

== ATi Mach series ==

The ATi '''Mach''' line was a series of [[2D computer graphics|2D graphics accelerators]] for [[personal computer]]s developed by [[ATI Technologies]]. It became an extension (and eventual successor) to the ATI Wonder series of cards. The first chip in the series was the ATi Mach8. It was essentially a clone of the IBM 8514/A with a few notable extensions such as Crystal fonts. Being one of the first graphics accelerator chips on the market, the Mach8 did not have an integrated VGA core. In order to use the first Mach8 coprocessor cards, a separate VGA card was required. This made ownership considerably expensive. A temporary solution was presented with the ATi Graphics Ultra/Vantage cards, which combined an ATi 8514 Ultra and VGA Wonder+ into a single card (though using discrete ICs). The Mach32 chip was the follow-up to the Mach8, which finally featured an integrated VGA core, true colour support and a 64-bit datapath to internal memory.

===Mach 8===

''Released: 1990''
*[[IBM 8514|IBM 8514/A]] clone
*Support for up to 8-bit color modes
*Optional VGAWonder 2 (28800) graphics core (with dedicated 256–512 KB DRAM)
*512 KB or 1 MB available with either DRAM or VRAM
*Port: ISA, MCA
The Mach 8 chip was used on the following ATI products:

*8514 Ultra (VRAM, coprocessor only)
*8514 Vantage (DRAM, coprocessor only)
*Graphics Vantage (DRAM)
*Graphics Ultra (VRAM)
*VGAWonder GT (Repackaged Graphics Ultra, 1 MB RAM standard)

===Mach 32===

''Released: 1992''
*[[32-bit]] [[graphical user interface|GUI]] accelerator with basic [[DOS]] support
*Limited [[VESA BIOS Extensions|VESA VBE]] support
*Support for 15 bbp, 16 bbp and 24 bbp colour modes added
*Video memory: 1 or 2 MB [[Dynamic random access memory|DRAM]] or [[Dynamic random access memory#Video DRAM .28VRAM.29|VRAM]]
*Memory interface: [[64-bit]]
*Port: [[Industry Standard Architecture|ISA]], [[Extended Industry Standard Architecture|EISA]], [[VESA local bus|VLB]], [[Peripheral Component Interconnect|PCI]], [[Micro Channel Architecture|MCA]]
*Integrated VGA core
*100% compatible with IBM 8514/A

The Mach 32 chip was used on the following ATI products:
*Graphics Wonder (DRAM)
*Graphics Ultra + (DRAM, fast RAMDAC)
*Graphics Ultra CLX (DRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)
*Graphics Ultra Pro (VRAM)
*Graphics Ultra XLR (VRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)

===Mach 64===
''Released: 1994''
*64-bit GUI accelerator with basic DOS support
*Limited VESA VBE support
*Video memory: 1, 2, 4 or 8 MB DRAM, VRAM, or [[Dynamic random access memory#Synchronous graphics RAM .28SGRAM.29|SGRAM]]
*Memory interface: 64-bit
*Port: ISA, VLB, PCI
*Variants:

**"Mach64 CX/210888" - Original chipset, uncommon (up to 2 MB DRAM, or 4 MB VRAM)
**"Mach64 GX/210888GX" - Enhanced video playback capabilities
**"Mach64 ET/210888ET" - Embedded???
**"Mach64 CT/264CT - Cost-reduced Mach64 with integrated RAMDAC and clock chip (up to 2 MB DRAM)
**"Mach64 VT/264VT - AMC connector (Support for TV-tuner)
**"Mach64 GT/264GT 3D Rage" - 3D capabilities
**"Mach64 GT-B/264GT-B [[ATI Rage II|3D Rage II]] - SDRAM & SGRAM support(up to 8 MB)
**"Mach64 LT/264LT" - Low-power mobile version of Mach64 GT

The Mach 64 chip was used on the following ATI products:
[[File:Ati_Mach64_2_cards.jpg|thumb|Several Mach64 PCI graphics cards]]
[[File:Ati_Mach64.jpg|thumb|Mach64 PCI made by ASUS]]

'''Mach64 GX Family:'''
*Graphics Xpression (1 or 2 MB DRAM)
*Graphics Pro Turbo (2 or 4 MB VRAM)
*WinTurbo (1 or 2 MB VRAM, non-upgradable)
*Graphics Pro Turbo 1600 (fast RAMDAC,PCI-only)
*XCLAIM GA (Macintosh)

'''Mach64 CT Family:'''
*WinBoost (1 MB DRAM, upgradable to 2mb)
*WinCharger (2 MB DRAM)

'''Mach64 VT Family:'''
*Video Charger
*Video Xpression (Mach64 VT2)
*Video Xpression+ (Mach64 VT4)

'''Mach64 GT Family:'''
*3D Xpression (2 MB EDO DRAM))

'''Mach64 GT-B Family:'''
*3D Charger (2 MB EDO DRAM)
*3D XPRESSION+ (2 or 4 MB SDRAM)
*3D XPRESSION+ PC2TV (TV-out)
*3D Pro Turbo (2, 4, 6 or 8 MB SGRAM)
*3D Pro Turbo+ PC2TV (TV-out)
*Xclaim VR - early versions (Macintosh, 2, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM, Video-In Video-Out)
*Xclaim 3D - early versions (Macintosh, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM)
*All-In-Wonder (SDRAM, TV Tuner)

'''Important Note:''' The 3D Rage and 3D Rage II chips were also known as Mach64 GT and Mach64 GT-B respectively. The Mach64 moniker was eliminated with introduction of the 3D Rage Pro.

== ATi Rage series ==
[[File:Ati_3D_Rage_II.jpg|thumb|Rage 3D II PCI]]
[[File:Rage_LT_Pro.jpg|thumb|Rage LT Pro]]
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]
[[File:Rage_128_Pro_16MB.jpg|thumb|Rage 128 16MB]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
Released in the latter half of 1997, the Rage Pro was a major improvement on ATI's previous Rage II chip. Improvements include an increased texture cache size (now at 4 KB) allowing for improved texture filtering, as well as an integrated triangle setup engine. It is the first ATI chip (and among the earliest graphics chips) to fully support AGP bus features, including execute mode (AGP texturing). It is also the first ATI chip to support OpenGL in hardware. However, like the previous Rage chips, the Rage Pro cannot bilinear filter alpha textures, resulting in transparent textures still having a rough appearance. Performance-wise, it is very similar to 3Dfx's original Voodoo Graphics chipset. The Rage Pro was very popular with OEMs and up until the late 2000s, it was integrated into many server motherboards.

The Rage Pro is also the last chip to support ATI's CIF application programming interface. It is also ATI's last chip with Windows 3.1x support.

===== Rage 128 =====
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
== ATi Radeon series ==

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon_AGP.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7200]]
[[File:Radeon_7000_PCI_32MB_DDR.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7000 32MB DDR PCI]]
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
----
===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it "Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid. Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=4859&postcount=64]

Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

ATi introduced a tessellation function called [[TruForm]].

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500. Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
*With Star Wars KOTOR, use Catalyst 4.2. For KOTOR2, use Catalyst 5.1. These drivers should enable all effects and perform well.
----
===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon_9500_128MB.jpg|thumb|Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB]]
[[File:Radeon_9600_AGP_256MB.jpg|thumb|Radeon 9600 256MB]]
[[File:Radeon_9800_XL_(Medion_OEM_card_with_cooler_removed).jpg|thumb|Radeon 9800 XL 128MB]]
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
Introduced in August 2002, the R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9.0-compliant graphics chips. R300 introduced Shader Model 2.0 support and is also OpenGL 2.0-compliant. The R300 was designed by the ArtX engineering team that ATI had acquired in Feburary 2000. The same ArtX engineers (who were also former SGI employees) designed the Nintendo Gamecube GPU (Flipper) as well as the SGI RealityEngine-based graphics processor in the Nintendo 64. The first R300-based cards released were the Radeon 9500 and 9700 line of cards. In 2003, the Radeon 9600 and 9800 series were added to the lineup. R300 has many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than ATI's prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic filtering quality is vastly improved in the R300, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work simultaneously with trilinear filtering. Furthermore, compared to its initial competitor, NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti series, R300's anisotropic filtering incurred much less performance decrease. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

The R300 enjoyed visual quality and performance supremacy over its competitors in games and applications that extensively used Shader Model 2.0. NVIDIA would not be able to match or exceed ATI's Direct3D 9.0 performance until the release of the GeForce 6 series in 2004.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.
Also, despite being Direct3D 9.0-compliant, the R300 is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.

'''Notes:'''
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.
*With Star Wars KOTOR, use Catalyst 4.2. For KOTOR2, use Catalyst 5.1. These drivers should enable all effects and perform well.

 
 
 
 
 
 
----
===== R400 =====
[[File:Radeon_X600Pro_PCIe.jpg|thumb|Radeon X600 Pro 256MB]]
[[File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg|thumb|Radeon X800 XT PE]]

Introduced in 2004, this is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R400 series after the release of R500 series. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

The ATI R400 series are ATI's last GPUs with official Windows 98/98 SE/ME support. Likewise with the R300 series, the R400 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.
----
===== R500 =====
Introduced in 2005, the Radeon X1000 / R500 series are ATI's first Direct3D 9.0c-compliant GPUs with full Shader Model 3.0 features. The R500 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.

----
===== R600 =====

[[File:HD_2600_Pro_and_2600_XT_both_AGP.jpg|thumb|HD 2600Pro and HD 2600XT, AGP versions]]
[[File:HD_3850_AGP_512MB.jpg|thumb|HD 3850 AGP]]
Introduced in 2006, these Radeons added the "HD" prefix to their names.
R600 includes both the HD 2xxx and HD 3xxx series, with the AGP version of the HD 3850 arguably being the most powerful AGP graphics card to ever have been made (with only the AGP variants of the HD 4650 and the HD 4670 being of a more recent GPU family).

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

----
===== R700 =====

[[File:HD_4670_AGP_1GB_Club3D.jpg|thumb|HD 4670 1GB Club3D AGP]]
Introduced in 2008, the R700 family included the last graphics cards to be made for AGP slots.
 
 
 
 
 

==Video captures==

===3D Rage II ===
{{#ev:youtube|wdJXf6MpN7A}}
Note: The Dawning Demo was actually targeted for the ATI Rage128 series that is a considerably newer, thus faster core than the 3D Rage II.

{{#ev:youtube|iFHwNf7-oZk}}

{{#ev:youtube|wWzWdwj9NvU}}

===3D Rage Pro ===
{{#ev:youtube|DU5Zi69QPQs}}
{{#ev:youtube|uZna8WXC4ds}}
{{#ev:youtube|IG3hd1humM0}}
{{#ev:youtube|i4pB5Fw8Slk}}

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

==Related links==
*[http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=22 VOGONS Drivers Ati section]
*[http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Interesting_Vogons_Threads#Graphics_cards VOGONS threads about graphics cards]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

NVIDIA

2014-10-06T07:15:00Z

Swaaye: /* NV3 | RIVA 128 & 128 ZX */

==Retro value==
GeForce 256 through GeForce FX are fine cards for old games for a number of reasons. Their DOS game compatibility and GUI performance are top notch. Their Direct3D driver supports two critical old features, fog table and 8-bit palettized textures. OpenGL compatibility and performance are second to none, and some games utilize proprietary NVIDIA extensions.

One problem with NVIDIA cards prior to GeForce4 is that some card vendors built their cards too cheaply. The most noticeable result is poor analog signal quality. It causes problems such as blurriness, loss of color saturation and color bleed, particularly at higher resolutions and refresh rates. Determining which cards are high quality is difficult but the GeForce4 and newer cards are most likely to be good.

Perhaps the finest choices are the GeForce FX series because they offer the most refined quality-enhancing features and the high end models have the performance to use these features at higher resolutions. GeForce 6 drops support for palettized textures, which is a problem with a few games, but otherwise they too are great choices. GeForce 7 drops support for Windows 9x but still supports Windows 2000. Some users, however, have reportedly gotten GeForce 7800 cards to work under Windows 98 and ME using an unofficial, modified driver [http://www.mdgx.com/files/nv8269.php (link)]. This modified driver does not support Windows 95. The GeForce 7 series is also the last that is supported by NVIDIAs Stereo3D driver extension for shutter glasses such as ELSA Revelator. GeForce 8 and above support only XP and newer.

==Cards==
===NV1 / STG2000 ===
[[File:Dedge3d.jpg|thumb|NV1]]
Released in 1995, NVIDIA's first 3D accelerator was an all-in-one product with audio, GUI, VGA, 3D and Sega Saturn gamepad support. It uses a type of 3D rendering called quadratic texture mapping that is not Direct3D or OpenGL compatible so it is only useful with games that use its proprietary API. It is the same technology used by Sega Saturn and as such various games were ported to use the NV1. Its audio consists of wavetable MIDI and DirectSound support but very little DOS support. DOS VGA compatibility is limited.

It comes in various memory configurations with up to 4 MB maximum. The final drivers support Direct3D, but it is a software-only implementation.

Games with support: Battle Arena Toshinden, Descent: Destination Saturn, NASCAR Racing, Panzer Dragoon, Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter Remix.

===NV3 | RIVA 128 & 128 ZX===
[[File:Riva128.jpg|thumb|RIVA 128]]
The RIVA 128 was released in late 1997 and it is the first Direct3D compatible GPU from NVIDIA. RIVA stands for '''R'''eal-time '''I'''nteractive '''V'''ideo and '''A'''nimation and 128 for the internal 128-bit pipeline and memory interface. It has a 206 MHz RAMDAC and supports DDC2 and VBE3. RIVA 128 has all the hardware features required for Direct3D 5 and has also good OpenGL compatibility. It renders at only 16-bit color depth. The 3D performance is competitive with [[3dfx|Voodoo Graphics]] (Voodoo1).

The RIVA 128 shows a number of rendering quality compromises. It has blending issues that introduce dithering patterns/noise. Its texture mapping does automatic mipmap generation. This combined with its per-polygon mip mapping causes texture popping and other quirks. The per-pixel mipmapping in the control panel does not operate as true per-pixel mipmapping and can cause problems. It also has some kind of problem maintaining texture alignment and visible gaps often occur. Finally its bilinear texture filtering is not as blurring as you may be used to. Sometimes textures look almost as if they are only point-sampled. Overall RIVA 128 is an interesting mix of speed and compromise.

A special feature of the PCI version of the card is the ability to load textures over the PCI bus, which was advertised as ''AGP content on PCI''. The 2D-features include video scaling and color conversion capabilities. The chip features also PAL/NTSC output so many cards were released with TV-out, some even with TV-in.

In early 1998, NVIDIA refreshed the NV3 architecture by releasing the RIVA 128 ZX. The RIVA 128 ZX is an upgraded chip that has a 250 MHz RAMDAC and supports up to 8 MB SGRAM. For texture intense games the increased memory results in higher performance. Higher resolutions as also supported. The RIVA 128 ZX was also integrated onto Intel's i440BX-based RC440BX motherboard.

===NV4-6 | RIVA TNT & TNT2===
[[File:Tntpci.jpg|thumb|TNT PCI]]
Released in 1998, NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is a drastically improved Direct3D 6-compliant GPU with much better image quality and performance compared to its predecessors. It is competitive with Voodoo2 but with more flexibility such as 32-bit color rendering and 1024x1024 texture support. It also supports AGP 2x with execute mode (AGP texturing). 32-bit color rendering comes with a significant speed loss though and large textures are of very limited use since the chip lacks any form of texture compression. 16 MB RAM allows for very high resolutions. Great OpenGL support. All NVIDIA cards have the advantage of seperately clocked memory which makes for more flexible overclocking than with 3dfx cards. Unlike ATI's Rage 128 - one of its main competitors, the RIVA TNT does not support true trilinear filtering, but rather, its trilinear filtering is an approximation implementation. This results in reduced visual quality when viewing textures / MIP levels at far distances (which can be best described as a "sanding" or dither-pattern type effect) when trilinear filtering is enabled, but otherwise the RIVA TNT's visual quality is great. The RIVA TNT was also integrated onto Intel's SR440BX and PowerColor's DREAMCODE motherboards, both of which are based on Intel's i440BX chipset.

NVIDIA further refined the RIVA TNT architecture in early 1999 with the RIVA TNT2. The RIVA TNT2 is very similar to the original TNT but adds support for AGP 4x and 2048x2048 resolution texture maps. It also typically has 32 MB of RAM and it is clocked much higher so performs noticeably better. Some popular budget variants include Vanta and TNT2 Model 64 (M64). The M64 model uses a 64-bit memory interface (rather than 128-bit as opposed to the regular variant), effectively halving its memory bandwidth. The performance of the M64 model, however, is faster than the original TNT in some situations.

Acer Laboratories Inc. (ALi) later integrated the RIVA TNT2 core into the northbridge of their M1631 motherboard chipset, commonly known as the Aladdin TNT2. The Aladdin TNT2 could also use shared system memory (up to 32 MB total) in addition its onboard graphics memory. Most motherboard manufacturers opted to equip it with 8 MB local memory. The Aladdin TNT2 is on par with the TNT2 M64 in gaming performance.

The RIVA TNT and TNT2 do not support 8-bit palettized textures. This is a problem with, for example, Final Fantasy VII. Likewise with the original TNT, the RIVA TNT2 only supports trilinear approximation rather than true trilinear filtering. NVIDIA would not implement true trilinear filtering until the NV1x (GeForce 256 / GeForce2 / GeForce4 MX) architecture.

The TNT2 is also NVIDIA's last chip with Windows 3.1x support. The TNT/TNT2 Windows 3.1x drivers were only released in beta form and therefore have stability issues and occasionally produce screen corruption - for example, video playback is fickle and will usually crash the system. Furthermore, the same drivers are locked to 60 Hz refresh rate, making them undesirable for use with CRT monitors under this OS. The TNT/TNT2 Windows 3.1x drivers will not work on any GeForce cards.

===NV1x | GeForce 256 / 2 / 4 MX===
[[File:Gf256sdr.jpg|thumb|GeForce 256 SDR]]
Released in October 1999, GeForce 256 / NV10 was the first Direct3D 7-compliant GPU. It was initially released with standard SDRAM, but a DDR version later followed. The DDR version is roughly twice as fast as TNT2. It introduced ordered grid super-sampling anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering support (up to 2x level), cubic environment mapping, and support for hardware dot product bump mapping.

The next refinement in the architecture came in April 2000 in the form of the GeForce 2 / NV15. The GeForce 2 has twice the texture fillrate per clock compared to NV10 and uses a smaller manufacturing process allowing higher clock rates while reducing the power consumption at the same time. The GeForce 2 GTS is about 40% faster than the GeForce 256. GeForce 2 performance is mostly limited by memory bandwidth. Some card manufacturer used a low quality analog circuit design that produces a blurry image output.

GeForce 2 MX / NV11 is the low end series of the GeForce 2, released in September 2000. These cards have half of the pixel pipelines and half the memory interface of the NV15. It is the first NV chip with two integrated TDMS channels, providing dual display output (called "TwinView"). It also has "Digital Vibrance Control" that allows calibration of various image output aspects. The 3D performance of GeForce 2 MX at 16-bit color depth is slightly faster than a GeForce 256 SDR. With its relatively low price and with the performance it offered, it became a popular card. The GeForce 2 MX core was later integrated into NVIDIA's nForce IGP motherboard chipset northbridge.

GeForce 4 MX / NV17 replaced the GeForce 2 series in January 2002. The NV17 core is a hybrid of the NV11 and NV25. The integration of various efficiency and bandwidth improving features, combined with significantly higher clock speed than NV11, allows it to match NV15 performance. These features were advertised as "Lightspeed Memory Architecture II," which was a refinement of the Lightspeed Memory Architecture introduced with the GeForce 3 (NV20). It also gained the "AccuView" anti-aliasing capabilities which are considerably advanced in quality and performance over NV11 and NV15. However, the GeForce 4 MX lacks the hardware pixel and vertex shaders support, as well as environment mapped bump mapping support and higher level anisotropic filtering support found in the NV2x architecture.
*[http://www.anandtech.com/show/875/6 AnandTech: NV17 and NV25 Come to Life]
*[http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_lmaii.html Lightspeed Memory Architecture II]

NVIDIA further refreshed the GeForce 4 MX line in late 2002 with the NV18, which added AGP 8x support. In 2004 the series received another refresh with PCI Express x16 support via a bridge chip. The first such product introduced was the GeForce PCX 4300. The GeForce 4 MX core was also integrated into NVIDIA's nForce2 IGP motherboard chipset northbridge.

Estimated model performance ranking:

GF2 MX100 < GF2 MX200 < GF2 MX < GF2 MX400 < GF4 MX420 < GF2 GTS < GF2 Pro < GF2 Ti VX < GF2 Ti < GF2 Ultra < GF4 MX440

===NV2x | GeForce 3 & 4===
[[File:GeForce3_Ti200.JPG|180px|thumb||GeForce 3 Ti 200]]
Released in March 2001, the GeForce 3 / NV20 is the first Direct3D 8.0-compliant GPU. It is more efficient than GeForce 2 because of improvements in memory bandwidth utilization and the addition of hidden surface removal (HSR) functions similar to those of ATI Radeon. NVIDIA called this "Lightspeed Memory Architecture". Despite lower fillrate than GeForce 2 Ultra/Pro/Ti, in some cases GeForce 3 can outperform those cards by up to 50%, namely in situations with anti-aliasing or when the HSR features save considerable fillrate. However in some cases it loses to GeForce 2 Ultra. In the latter half of 2001, NVIDIA released the GeForce 3 Ti 200 and Ti 500. GeForce 3 Ti 200 is clocked lower than the original GeForce 3, while Ti 500 is fastest. The original GeForce 3 and GeForce 3 Ti 500 were only released in 64 MB configurations, while the GeForce 3 Ti 200 was released in 64 MB and 128 MB configurations. The GeForce 3, however, benefitted very little from 128 MB memory.

GeForce 3 is the first GeForce GPU with environment mapped bump mapping (EMBM) support, multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) and complete anisotropic filtering support (up to 8x level). MSAA is considerably less demanding of fillrate than SSAA. 2X and 4X MSAA modes are available. There is also an anti-aliasing mode called "Quincunx" that uses a combination of 2X MSAA and a RAMDAC-based filter. This mode was intended to allow better quality anti-aliasing than 2X MSAA/SSAA but without the performance hit of 4X MSAA/SSAA. Higher anisotropic filtering levels (4x and 8x), however, incur a heavy performance decrease (sometimes by as much as 50%). However, compared to its main competitor, ATI's R200 series, GeForce3's anisotropic filtering implementation is less angle-dependent and can work simultaneously with trilinear filtering, yielding better quality when observed in motion.

The next evolution in the NV2x architecture came in early 2002 in the form of the NV25 / GeForce 4 Ti series. The GeForce 4 Ti is quite similar to the GeForce 3 in general. Changes include higher clock speed, pixel shader 1.3 support, Direct3D 8.1 compliance, an additional vertex processor for better geometry performance and dual RAM DAC for dual display output. Later in 2002, NVIDIA released the NV28, which added AGP 8x support. With the NV28 release, the AGP 8x versions of the Ti 4400 and 4600 were respectively rebranded as the Ti 4800 SE and Ti 4800. The AGP 8x variant of the Ti 4200 was just known as the "Ti 4200 with AGP 8x."

In the GeForce4 Ti line, the Ti 4200 is slowest and the Ti 4800 is fastest.
*[http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/gf4/index1.html Review from ixbtlabs GeForce 3 Ti500, Radeon 8500, GeForce 4 Ti]

===NV3x | GeForce FX===
[[File:Gf5200u.jpg|thumb|FX 5200 Ultra]]
These are NVIDIA's first Direct3D 9 GPUs. They have excellent Direct3D 5-8 compatibility and performance but are of limited value for Direct3D 9. They are very useful for old games because they still have support for palettized textures and fog table. Similar anti-aliasing and anisotropic features, but performance with these is improved compared to older models. The high performance models like 5700 Ultra, 5800 Ultra and 59x0 Ultra allow one to run old games in high-resolution with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

Avoid models with 64-bit bus and naming suffixes like LE, XT or VE because they have been crippled in some way. There were some PCIe models made, named GeForce PCX 5xxx.

5200 < 5500 < 5200 Ultra < 5600 < 5600 Ultra < 5700 < 5700 Ultra < 5800 < 5800 Ultra < 59x0 < 59x0 Ultra

===NV4x | GeForce 6===
The GeForce 6 series (NV4x) was released in 2004 and is the first Direct3D 9.0c-compliant GPU. It introduced support for Shader Model 3.0 and support for PCI Express x16, though initially released cards were AGP-only. Compared to the GeForce FX series, the NV4x had dramatically improved performance all-around but dropped palettized texture support, so it is incompatible with some old games (few). This is NVIDIA's final generation of GPUs with Windows 9x and NT 4.0 support.

==Compatibility notes==
*With Intel 440BX motherboards, drivers newer than 56.64 may be unstable.

==Video captures==

===NV1 / STG2000 ===
{{#ev:youtube|2H-gEKsd5SY}}
{{#ev:youtube|9bJGnzb0Asw}}
{{#ev:youtube|t9Zqy5BZQ1E}}
{{#ev:youtube|_4l_2Bqbi9Q}}
{{#ev:youtube|ZOstiHUk_EM}}
{{#ev:youtube|Ibs90LY_Ph8}}
{{#ev:youtube|JG0kqg8QlLw}}
{{#ev:youtube|nc6cH0zuMSs}}
{{#ev:youtube|VK9sg_93iCE}}

===NV3 | RIVA 128 & 128 ZX ===
{{#ev:youtube|0GAEXE3eu0o}}
{{#ev:youtube|Cqxia9tPFrs}}
{{#ev:youtube|QpGVOAuDfNc}}
{{#ev:youtube|h2KGiIen4n4}}
{{#ev:youtube|LZrWRMMdwW4}}
{{#ev:youtube|hv07UKRetPY}}

==Related links==
*[http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=24 VOGONS Drivers NVIDIA section]
*[http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ Gona's PCI and AGP DOS game compatibility matrix]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Main Page

2013-04-13T21:03:48Z

Swaaye: add links to info about our MediaWiki plugins

'''Welcome to ''VOGONS Wiki''''', a reference site covering vintage computer hardware used for playing games that don't run correctly on modern computers.

Current goals:
*Write about the details, advantages, disadvantages and quirks of useful old gaming hardware.
*Write guides to help get old games running their best.

== Getting Started ==
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup Wiki Page Markup Guide] (how to make Wiki pages)
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlashMP3 FlashMP3] plugin info (add audio playback to pages)
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EmbedVideo EmbedVideo] plugin info (embed videos from common sites)

== Gaming Build Guides ==

*[[Hardware guides]]
*[[Software guides]]
*[[Recommended Builds]]

== Hardware Info ==

*[[CPUs]]
*[[Graphics Cards]]
*[[Sound Cards & Modules]]
*[[Motherboards & Chipsets]]
*[[Input Devices]]
*[[Storage Devices]]
*[[Monitors]]
*[[Miscellaneous Components]]

== Game Setup Guides ==

*[[General DOS articles]]
*[[General Windows articles]]
*[[Specific DOS game guides]]
*[[Specific Windows game guides]]

== [[User benchmarks]] ==
*[[3dfx Benchmarks]]
*[[Socket 7 benchmark results]]

== [[Retrocomputing resources]] ==

== Related sites ==
* [http://vogons.zetafleet.com VOGONS Forum]
* [http://www.vogonsdrivers.com VOGONS Vintage Driver Library]
* [http://www.dosbox.com DOSBox]

List of games with 8-bit paletted texture support

2013-04-04T19:21:14Z

Swaaye:

Hardware support:
*[[3dfx]] cards
*[[NVIDIA]] GeForce 256 through GeForce FX [http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/shared_texture_palette.txt]

Games that require this feature or run only in software mode without it:

*Final Fantasy VII (1998)
*European Air War (1998)
*Final Fantasy VIII (2000), optional

ATI

2013-04-04T17:44:01Z

Swaaye: /* R200 */ truform

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== Graphics card series ==
=== Mach ===
===== Mach 8 =====
===== Mach 32 =====
===== Mach 64 =====

=== Rage ===
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
===== Rage 128 =====

=== Radeon ===

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.

===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it "Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid. Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=4859&postcount=64]

Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

ATi introduced a tessellation function called [[TruForm]].

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500. Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

'''Notes:'''
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R420 =====
[[File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg|thumb|Radeon X800 XT PE]]

This is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R420 series after the release of R520. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

===== R520 =====
A Direct3D 9.0c GPU with full shader model 3 features.

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

TruForm

2013-04-04T17:42:27Z

Swaaye: Created page with "'''TruForm''' was an early tessellation implementation created by ATI and employed primarily on Radeon 8500 (R200). It was never accepted into the DirectX or OpenGL specif..."

'''TruForm''' was an early tessellation implementation created by [[ATI]] and employed primarily on Radeon 8500 (R200). It was never accepted into the DirectX or OpenGL specifications.

== Overview ==
Before the adoption of pixel shader-enhanced bump mapping methods such as normal and parallax mapping that simulate higher mesh detail, curved 3D shapes in games were typically created with large numbers of triangles. TruForm creates a curved surface using the existing triangles, and tessellates this surface to make a new, more detailed polygonal model. By performing this geometry improvement on the graphics card, bus transfer and system memory utilization are reduced compared to if a complex mesh was used for the entire process[http://www.ati.com/products/pdf/truform.pdf]. For best results, Truform needs to be implemented in the models with flags that identify areas to be tessellated.

The Radeon R200 chip is the only chip that performs TruForm fully in hardware. Radeon 9000 and later use a combination of CPU and vertex shader processing to perform it[http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=2134065&postcount=5] and this impacts performance and stability. In later versions of Catalyst drivers, the TruForm feature is removed. Beginning with the Radeon R520 generation, TruForm was no longer advertised as a hardware feature.

== Games with support ==
*[[Bugdom]]
*[[Command & Conquer: Renegade]]
*[[Counter-Strike]] (ati_subdiv "2.0", ati_npatch "1.0")
*[[The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind]] (unofficially, with the FPS Optimizer)
*[[FTE QuakeWorld]] (Quake World, Net Quake, Quake II, Quake, Quake III: Arena, Hexen 2, Nexuiz) [http://sourceforge.net/projects/fteqw/files/Full%20GL-only/3343/] [http://fteqw.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gl_ati_truform]
*[[Hexen II]] (TruHexen2 Patch, developed by RaVeN [http://hexen.clan.su/forum/7-804-1])
*[[Madden NFL 2004]]
*[[Neverwinter Nights]] (must edit the game's ".ini" file and set "Enable Truform=1")
*[[Quake]] (TruQuake Patch)
*[[Quake 2]] (TruQuake2 Patch)
*[[Quake III Arena]] [http://raven-05.narod.ru/Test-Quake-III-Arena-Truform.7z] (developed by RaVeN )
*[[Return to Castle Wolfenstein]]
*[[Serious Sam]]
*[[Soldier of Fortune]]
*[[Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix]]
*[[Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six]]
*[[Unreal Tournament]] (TruUT Patch)
*[[Unreal Tournament 2003]] and [[Unreal Tournament 2004]] (must edit the game's ".ini" file and set "UseNPatches=True")
*[[Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory]]

== External links==
*[http://web.archive.org/web/20080225041723/http://ati.amd.com/fr/products/gamesupport/index.html ATI's Official List of TruForm Enabled Games]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

ATI

2013-04-04T17:33:13Z

Swaaye: categories

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== Graphics card series ==
=== Mach ===
===== Mach 8 =====
===== Mach 32 =====
===== Mach 64 =====

=== Rage ===
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
===== Rage 128 =====

=== Radeon ===

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.

===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it "Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid. Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=4859&postcount=64]

Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500.

Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

'''Notes:'''
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R420 =====
[[File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg|thumb|Radeon X800 XT PE]]

This is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R420 series after the release of R520. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

===== R520 =====
A Direct3D 9.0c GPU with full shader model 3 features.

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

ATI

2013-03-25T21:58:49Z

Swaaye: /* R200 */

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== Graphics card series ==
=== Mach ===
===== Mach 8 =====
===== Mach 32 =====
===== Mach 64 =====

=== Rage ===
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
===== Rage 128 =====

=== Radeon ===

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.

===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it "Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid. Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=4859&postcount=64]

Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500.

Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

'''Notes:'''
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R420 =====
[[File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg|thumb|Radeon X800 XT PE]]

This is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R420 series after the release of R520. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

===== R520 =====
A Direct3D 9.0c GPU with full shader model 3 features.

ATI

2013-03-25T17:28:21Z

Swaaye: /* R420 */

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== Graphics card series ==
=== Mach ===
===== Mach 8 =====
===== Mach 32 =====
===== Mach 64 =====

=== Rage ===
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
===== Rage 128 =====

=== Radeon ===

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.

===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

Improvements over the R100 generation include the aforementioned Direct3D 8.1 support, meaning pixel shader 1.4 and vertex shader 1.1 support. A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance) which use a programmable jittered grid. Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500.

Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

'''Notes:'''
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R420 =====
[[File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg|thumb|Radeon X800 XT PE]]

This is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R420 series after the release of R520. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

===== R520 =====
A Direct3D 9.0c GPU with full shader model 3 features.

File:RadeonX800XTPE.jpg

2013-03-25T17:27:45Z

Swaaye:

ATI

2013-03-25T17:25:32Z

Swaaye: /* R420 */

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== Graphics card series ==
=== Mach ===
===== Mach 8 =====
===== Mach 32 =====
===== Mach 64 =====

=== Rage ===
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
===== Rage 128 =====

=== Radeon ===

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.

===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

Improvements over the R100 generation include the aforementioned Direct3D 8.1 support, meaning pixel shader 1.4 and vertex shader 1.1 support. A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance) which use a programmable jittered grid. Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500.

Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

'''Notes:'''
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R420 =====
This is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.

A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R420 series after the release of R520. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.

===== R520 =====
A Direct3D 9.0c GPU with full shader model 3 features.

ATI

2013-03-25T02:20:12Z

Swaaye:

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== Graphics card series ==
=== Mach ===
===== Mach 8 =====
===== Mach 32 =====
===== Mach 64 =====

=== Rage ===
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
===== Rage 128 =====

=== Radeon ===

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.

===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

Improvements over the R100 generation include the aforementioned Direct3D 8.1 support, meaning pixel shader 1.4 and vertex shader 1.1 support. A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance) which use a programmable jittered grid. Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500.

Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

'''Notes:'''
*DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

'''Notes:'''
*With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.

===== R420 =====
This is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds.

===== R520 =====
A Direct3D 9.0c GPU with full shader model 3 features.

ATI

2013-03-25T02:04:34Z

Swaaye:

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

== Graphics card series ==
=== Mach ===
===== Mach 8 =====
===== Mach 32 =====
===== Mach 64 =====

=== Rage ===
[[File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG|thumb|Rage 128 Pro OEM]]

===== 3D Rage =====
===== 3D Rage II =====
===== 3D Rage Pro =====
===== Rage 128 =====

=== Radeon ===

===== R100 =====
[[File:Radeon7500agp.jpg|thumb|Radeon 7500 64MB]]
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.

RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.

===== R200 =====
[[File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG|thumb|Radeon 8500 128MB]]
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

Improvements over the R100 generation include the aforementioned Direct3D 8.1 support, meaning pixel shader 1.4 and vertex shader 1.1 support. A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance) which use a programmable jittered grid. Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500.

Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.

===== R300 =====
[[File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG|thumb|Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB]]
The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

===== R420 =====

===== R520 =====

ATI

2013-03-24T21:15:37Z

Swaaye: /* Rage */

ATI

2013-03-24T21:15:08Z

Swaaye: Created page with "ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today. == Graphics card series ..."

File:Radeon9800pro256.JPG

2013-03-24T20:48:11Z

Swaaye:

File:Radeon9500pro.JPG

2013-03-24T20:47:53Z

Swaaye:

File:Radeon7500agp.jpg

2013-03-24T20:47:33Z

Swaaye:

File:Radeon8500 128mb.JPG

2013-03-24T20:47:20Z

Swaaye:

File:ATIRage128Pro.JPG

2013-03-24T20:36:29Z

Swaaye:

3dfx Benchmarks

2013-03-11T20:46:58Z

Swaaye: categories

This page contains user benchmarks using [[3dfx]] graphics cards.

==Michael Dale==
Test system: Pentium 3 933MHz, 320MB SDRAM, 3GB HDD, Windows 2000 SP2
===Quake 3 Demo===

The first value is Timedemo 1 in FPS while the second is Timedemo 2 in FPS

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size: 85%;"
|-
! Mode/Resolution
! Voodoo 1 4MB
! Voodoo 2 12MB
! Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
! Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
! Voodoo 4 4500 AGP
! Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
|-
| Normal/Voodoo (640x480)
| 16.1/15.5
| 50.4/50.9
| 74.9/75.3
| 90.9/93.5
| 94/91.4
| 94.1/91.2
|-
| High/Voodoo (640x480, Lightmap, High, Bilinear)
| 5.4/4.8
| 26.5/14.5
| 69.3/69.1
| 85.2/86.8
| 91.5/87.7
| 91/86.8
|-
| Normal/Voodoo (800x600)
| -
| 32.2/32.6
| 53.3/53.8
| 67.4/71.6
| 86.0/88.0
| 93.5/90.9
|-
| High/Voodoo (800x600, Lightmap, High, Bilinear)
| -
| 21.3/13.2
| 48.9/48.8
| 61.3/63.9
| 82.8/83.7
| 90.4/86.4
|-
| Normal/Voodoo Settings (1024x768)
| -
| -
| 35.0/35.4
| 44.3/47.4
| 60.1/62.8
| 88.8/88.5
|-
| Max/Voodoo (1024x768, Lightmap, High, Bilinear)
| -
| -
| 32.2/32.4
| 40.4/42.6
| 58.4/60.3
| 86.1/84.2
|-
| Ultra/Voodoo (1024x768, Lightmap, High, Trilinear, 32bit)
| -
| -
| -
| -
| 38.2/40.2
| 70.4/73.8
|-
| Max/Voodoo (1280x1024, Lightmap, High, Bilinear)
| -
| -
| 21.3/21.8
| 25.0/25.8
| 35.5/37.4
| 67.1/70.0
|-
| Ultra/Voodoo (1280x1024, Lightmap, High, Trilinear, 32bit)
| -
| -
| -
| -
| 21.2/22.6
| 44.3/46.8
|-
|}

=== 3DMark2000 ===

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size: 85%;"
|-
! Resolution
! Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
! Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
! Voodoo 4 4500 AGP
! Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
|-
| 1024x768 16Bit
| 2634
| 3039
| 3037
| 3935
|-
| 1280x1024 16Bit
| 1767
| 2052
| 2056
| 3054
|-
|}

=== 3DMark2001se ===

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size: 85%;"
|-
! Resolution
! Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
! Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
! Voodoo 4 4500 AGP
! Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
|-
| 1024x768 16Bit
| 1223
| 1377
| 1421
| 1429
|-
| 1024x768 32Bit
| -
| -
| 1174
| 1401
|-
| 1280x1024 16Bit
| 840
| 974
| 1230
| 1403
|-
| 1280x1024 32Bit
| -
| -
| 762
| 733
|-
|}

[[Category:Graphics Cards]]
[[Category:Benchmarks]]

Hanging note bug

2013-03-11T20:46:00Z

Swaaye: category

The so-called ''hanging note bug'' is a hardware bug on certain models of the Creative [[Sound Blaster 16]] and [[Sound Blaster AWE32]] series of sound cards. The bug only occurs when affected cards are utilized for digital sound effects and MIDI music simultaneously, but it happens on any MIDI device regardless if connected to the internal [[Wave Blaster connector]] or externally through the game port.

== Type 1: Illegitimate hanging notes ==
This variant of the bug happens in games which use the ''DMX sound system'' programmed by Paul Radek:
*Doom
*Doom2
*Heretic
*Hexen
*Raptor
*Hocus Pocus
It manifests itself as MIDI notes being generated randomly. Since these notes are not part of the soundtrack, they are not stopped and hang for a long time. Also, these 'illegitimate' notes tend to be high-pitched, which makes this variant of the bug a rather annoying experience.

== Type 2: Legitimate hanging notes ==
This type of the bug has been witnessed in many games, but occurs very rarely. In this case, the hanging notes are part of the soundtrack, but for some reason the "Note off" command is missed.

== Affected cards ==
Affected are all Sound Blaster models with DSP revisions 4.11, 4.12 and 4.13. 
Type 1 doesn't occur on cards with a CT1747 bus interface.

=== Bugged (Type 1 and 2) ===
*CT1740 (DSP >4.05) - SB 16 CSP
*CT1750 (DSP >4.05) - SB 16 Multi-CD CSP
*CT1770 (DSP >4.05) - SB 16 SCSI-2
*CT2260 - SB 16 Multi-CD OEM
*CT2800 - SB 16 Value OEM
*CT2860 - SB 16 Value OEM
*CT2910 - SB 16 Pro
*CT2940 - SB 16 Value PnP OEM
*CT2950 - SB 16 Value PnP OEM
*CT2980 - SB 16 Value PnP
*CT3600 - SB AWE 32 IDE PnP
*CT3990 - SB AWE 32 IDE PnP

=== Bugged (Type 2 only) ===
*CT2230 - SB 16 Multi-CD CSP
*CT2760 - SB AWE 32 Multi-CD
*CT3900 - SB AWE 32 IDE
*CT3980 - SB AWE 32 IDE

=== Bug-free ===
*CT1730 - SB 16
*CT1740 (DSP ≤4.05) - SB 16 CSP
*CT1750 (DSP 4.05) - SB 16 Multi-CD CSP
*CT1770 (DSP 4.05) - SB 16 SCSI-2
*AWE64 cards (DSP 4.16)

== Cause ==
...?

== External links ==
*[http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=20849 Related thread on the VOGONS forums]

[[Category:Sound Cards]]

EWS64

2013-03-11T20:44:33Z

Swaaye:

The EWS64 is a line of semi-professional ISA soundcards released by [[Terratec]] in 1997. They consist of a codec and the Dream SAM9407 synthesizer chip and are thus basically two soundcards on one PCB.

There are two different versions of the actual card: the EWS64L/XL/XXL and the EWS64S. The former are basically variants built around the same card and only differ in the type of the front panel delivered with the card (L: no front panel, XL: basic front panel, XXL: front panel with integrated MicrowaveXT synthesizer).

The latter EWS64S has a different, more simple card design and comes with a different codec chip. Both cards are PnP-compatible and can be configured by software.

== EWS64L/XL/XXL ==

[[File:EWS64XL.JPG|thumb|400px| ''EWS64 XL'']]
=== Hardware description ===
The codec is a CS4236B made by Crystal Semiconductors, featuring SBPro, OPL3 and Windows Sound System compatibility. The card's IN-1 and the CD/MIDI-DB analog-in is wired to the codec. The synthesizer is a Dream SAM9407 which has access to the onboard memory (2MB) and PS/2 SIMM module. Version 1.0 of the EWS64 also had an onboard ROM, which was removed for the 1.2 revision of the card. The IN-2 connector can also be wired to the SAM9407.

The card has two analog outputs: OUT-2 is permamently connected to the SAM9407. OUT-1, however, can either output the analog signal from the codec or the output from the SAM9407. In the former case, the synthesizers' signal is routed into the codec. In the latter case, the signal of the codec can be sent to the SAM9407 instead of the IN-2 signal.

The Dream chip also features an effects processor which can apply different (predefined) reverb and chorus effects to the SAM9407 input signals. If the codec sound is routed through the synthesizer, these effects also can be applied to this signal. The SAM9407 also provides a four-band equalizer, echo and pseudo-3D (Vspace) effects.

Using OUT-1 and OUT-2, the EWS64 also provides basic DirectSound3D compatibility, however, in 4-channel mode, the effects are unavailable. The EWS64 also has two independent MIDI ports (UART only). MIDI-1 is always connected to the SAM9407 chip, while MIDI-2 is connected to the daughterboard header in the front panel, or, if no daughterboard is connected, to the Gameport on the back of the card. Both MIDI ports can also be used by the 5-pin DIN connectors in the front panel.

=== Operating system support ===
The EWS64 is supported by the following operating systems: DOS, Windows 9x, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Linux (via 3rd-party driver). OSs which have support for the CS4236 can drive the codec part only. The DOS and Windows drivers and tools can be downloaded from the Terratec FTP server.

Only the 1.2 revision can be used with Windows 2000 or XP.

==== DOS support ====
The EWS64 comes with a few DOS utilities:

* EWS64CFG.EXE: Is used to configure the IO/IRQ/DMA resources used by the card. The codec can also be disabled with this tool. EWS64CFG '''must''' be run under plain DOS (i.e. Not in a Win9x DOS box).

* EWSINIT.EXE: This must be called on each boot as it initializes the codec and the SAM9407, loads a .94B sound set into the on-board RAM and sets up the mixer.

As the EWS64 has no dedicated DOS mixer application, all mixer settings are read from a configuration file (extension .TTM). The easiest way to create these mixer files is to use the Windows EWS64-Mixer to adjust the volumes as desired and then save the settings to a .TTM file. This file, in turn, can be passed to the DOS initialization tool.

Due to a (hardware?) bug, the codec tends to mute several of its input channels (such as the wavetable daughterboard / CD-in) when the SBPro part is used. This can be overcome by doing a „post-initialization“ with the DOS mixer application from the original Crystal CX423X drivers. This program is usually called CS32MIX or CWDMIX, depending on the driver version.

==== Windows 9x support ====
The EWS64 Windows driver comes with several tools in order to control the EWS64:

* The EWS Control Panel controls the volume settings of the codec and the SAM9407 as well as the audio signal routing on the card.

* The FX panel is used for adjusting the effects processor. Echo, Equalizer, Reverb and Chorus settings can be changed here.

* The „Virtual Channels“ tool is used to control the individual hardware mixing channels. See

„Hardware Mixing“ section below.

* The Set Manager loads and removes sound sets to and from the cards' RAM.

There is also the 3rd-party application „EWS ProMix“ which combines the first three programs to one convenient application.

==== Control panel settings ====

[[File:EWScontrol.png|frameless|600px|EWS64XL Control Panel layout]]

The Control panel has several sections which control either volume levels or specific routing settings. Section A has all the volume sliders for the CS4236 codec. If the codec is disabled, these sliders do nothing. The slider SYN adjusts the volume of the SAM9407 if its output is routed into the codec. This is done when the switch D is set to „A“. When set to „B“, the synthesizer is directly connected to OUT-1 (section B left). The remaining input channel IN-2 of the SAM9407 can be switched with switch „C“ between the IN-2 connector on the cards' bracket (setting A), the digital input of the front panel (setting D) or the output signal from the codec mixer (setting M). The OUT-2 is always connected to the SAM9407.

The MIDI routing switch E controls which of the two MIDI ports of the card is connected to the game port on the back plate. The corresponding MIDI connectors in the front panel are disabled if the routing is active.

==== Hardware Mixing ====
As the SAM9407 also supports hardware mixing, the Windows driver allows for the use of 16 independent wave output devices which represent 2x16 channels of the synthesizer chip. The number of these virtual channels can be adjusted under Control Panel/System/Device Manager/Terratec Devices/EWS Synthesizer. Each of those channels has its own volume and effects control slider, accessible via the „Virtual Channels“ application. If the Reverb/Chorus sliders are set to zero, no effects are applied to the selected virtual channel, regardless of the settings in the FX panel.

==== Windows NT4 and 2000 support ====
TBD

==== Linux support ====
<nowiki>Although Terratec does not offer a driver for it, the EWS64 can be used under Linux as well. The codec is supported by the appropriate ALSA or OSS driver for Crystal CX423X chips. The Dream chip, however, needs a third-party driver from Gerd Rausch (see links below). Unfortunately, this driver has now been unmaintained for years and has several problems:</nowiki>

* Only kernels up to and including 2.4.x are supported.

* The control panel looks sort of „clumsy“ and requires profound knowledge of the inner working of the EWS64.

* Only EWS64L/XL hardware version 1.2 is supported.

The driver requires the firmware EWS64OS.BIN and a .94B sound bank in order to work. As it is a generic driver for all SAM9407-based cards, some of the elements in the control panel are non-functional or disabled.

When installed and configured successfully, the SAM9407 can be used as an audio output device via /dev/sam0_dsp and as a MIDI playback device via /dev/sam0_sequencer or (via MikMod) as a MOD player.

== EWS64S ==
=== Hardware description ===
[[File:EWS64S.JPG|thumb|400px| ''EWS64 S'']]

Despite the name and the use of the same synthesizer chip, the EWS64S is a completely different piece of hardware when compared with the L/XL/XXL counterpart. The main differences are the codec chip and the internal routing possibilities. The codec is an Analog Devices AD1816 which provides SBPro and OPL3 compatibility. It is, however, not WSS-compatible. The AD codec is wired permanently to the SAM9407 and cannot be routed directly to the OUT-1. In addition, the codec cannot be disabled as on the L/XL/XXL variants.
The XL/XXL front panel is incompatible with the 64S. In order to get digital outputs, a small slot-mountable PCB called "DigitalXtension R" is needed. A waveblaster header is also missing.

=== OS support ===
The 64S needs a different set of drivers and applications from Terratec, the L/XL/XXL drivers do not work. Moreover, there are no NT4 or Windows 2000 drivers available for this card. The card is supported under Linux with Gerd Rauschs generic SAM9407 driver.

== External links ==
* [ftp://ftp.terratec.de/Audio/EWS/64XL Terratec FTP archive]
* [http://www.studio4all.de/htmle/welcomeewst.html Site dedicated to the EWS64]
* [http://sam9407.sourceforge.net Linux SAM9407 driver]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Sound Cards]]

Category:Graphics Cards

2013-03-11T20:43:36Z

Swaaye: Created page with "PC graphics cards"

PC graphics cards

Paradise Tasmania 3D

2013-03-11T20:42:58Z

Swaaye:

[[File:Tasmania.jpg|200px|thumb|Tasmania 3D]]
A very early 3D accelerator based on the Yamaha YGV612 Rendering Polygon Accelerator.

The history of the Tasmania 3D starts in the mid-to-late 1980s, with Western Digital adding the Paradise subsidiary to their Multimedia Products Unit in 1986. Paradise produced some of the best VGA cards of the era. The next evolutionary step for many companies was dedicated 3D acceleration.

On Sept 11, 1995, Western Digital and Yamaha announced that they formed a strategic partnership to develop and market 3D products for the PC.

At the time of announcement, 3D acceleration was considered as the next step in real life graphics for the pc, and with the advent of new 3D APIs, and faster interfaces, a number of companies dared to step into this new realm of PC computing.

The 3D game board would be based on the Yamaha YGV612 3D Rendering Polygon Accelerator, and would be marketed under the Paradise brand name.

In the press release, officials from WD and Yamaha explained why they chose to partner up:
"Three dimensional graphics is the next technology wave in multimedia," explained Leonard Sharp, who was at the time the vice president of marketing for Western Digital's Multimedia Products Unit. "Yamaha's current 3D technology is the right solution at the right time for consumers to realize the excitement of 3D.
“The Yamaha and Western Digital partnership will deliver a new dimension in reality and `twitch response' to PC games that will allow them to rival the best console game machines," said Robert Starr, general manager for sales and marketing for Yamaha Systems Technology Inc. "Our core 3D accelerator expertise combined with Western Digital's board-level knowledge is already attracting OEMs, resellers and game developers."

On Sept 25, 1995, the official announcement came when Western Digital announced its first 3D accelerator, based on the Yamaha YGV612, called the Paradise Tasmania 3D.

The actual Yamaha YGV612 chip was announced Nov 14, 1994, when Yamaha announced two new 3D accelerator chips, the Vram based YGV611 RPA, and a cost reduced, Dram based YGV612 RPA2 that would be released at a later date.

Running at 50Mhz, and produced on a 208-pin QFP package, the YGV612 was one of the first 3D chips to market, and performed polygon rendering, shading, hidden surface removal, texture mapping and Z-buffering. Performance was measured at 300,000 Gouraud-shaded polygons per second and Z-buffering and 150,000 shaded/texture mapped polygons/sec.

The highest resolution supported in 3D was 640 x 480 with 65k colours and supported a maximum of 4Mb Dram.

WD tried to give their first 3D card an edge over the soon to be released competing products by keeping the costs low while still satisfying the consumer’s desire for 3D performance.

At $250, the Tasmania 3D gaming board gave software developers a quick path to porting their 3D games while maintaining compatibility with any VGA board, by using a 9 pin loopback cable, similar to the later released Voodoo Graphics.

The Tasmania controlled the switching from 2D acceleration to 3D acceleration using an on-board analogue MUX. This back-end circuitry takes in the analogue data from the VGA board via a loop-back cable and either routes it directly to the display or switches to the 3D engine.

At the time, 2D graphics cards were still vastly superior to the integrated 2D/3D solutions, so combining 3D acceleration with any 2D board that a consumer already had was a logical move, and also cut down the cost considerably.

The first boards came with a PCI interface, though Western Digital did plan to offer a VL-Bus based board.

The company chose to use the more common polygon rendering approach of the Yamaha chip, rather than employ an alternative rendering technique, such as the curved surfaces (quadratic texture mapping) used in the NV1, produced by their competitor NVidia.

On Sept 27, 1995, only two days after the Tasmania 3D was announced, Western Digital announced that they sold their Multimedia Products Unit to Phillips, which re-established the Paradise name. The sale was finalised on October 31, 1995. The Paradise brand was then owned by the Multimedia PC Group of Philips Semiconductors, which was a Philips Electronics company.

The board began shipping in the same month, but was expected to be widely available in October.

With the upcoming arrival of Direct3D in Windows 95, Yamaha announced support for the new API already back in April, 1995, and subsequently Phillips confirmed that announcement once again with their Tasmania card on April 10, 1996.

The card supported games written for DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and was backed up by the major API's at the time, namely RenderWare, BRender and RenderMorphics.

Shipping with Tasmania 3D were two popular PC games: FX Fighter by GT Entertainment, and Domark ‘s Tank Commander . In addition, for a limited time, Tasmania 3D customers could register with Philips to receive three more games from Mindscape: SU-27 Flanker, CyberSpeed and Air Power.

The card was discontinued August 1996, and Direct3D drivers were never released. (More sources needed on D3D drivers and date discontinued)

==External links==
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=52625&page=2

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Matrox Mystique

2013-03-11T20:42:50Z

Swaaye:

[[File:Mystique 2.jpg|thumb|Matrox Mystique]]
[[File:Mystique.JPG|thumb|Matrox Mystique (Compaq version)]]
[[Matrox]] Mystique is a 2D/3D/video accelerator for PC. [[Matrox]] released their first Mystique on August 14, 1996. Newer versions, including Mystique 220, kept appearing until summer 1997. The videocard usually had 2-4 Mb SGRAM expandable to 8MB with a special memory add-on card. However, apart from higher resolutions, upgrading memory did not make much difference.

Mystique was oriented on mid-end consumer and business market, offering excellent 2D performance, traditional for Matrox. It also has basic 3D capabilities, delivered mainly through [[Matrox]] Simple Interface API. As for the 2D part, it's safe to say the videocard has no known flaws. The image is crisp, has fine colors. But the 3D part is not as good as 2D. Its major flaws are:
* absence of texture filtering
* absence of mipmapping
* crude alpha-blending and environmental mapping emulation
* performance issues.

Basically, it means that:
* pixels of low-resolution textures have sharp edges
* distant textures appear noisy
* glass, fog, smoke, etc. appear as a check pattern of fully transparent/opaque pixels, environment (like underwater) is frequently not implemented at all.
* many early Direct3D titles are barely playable.

[[Matrox]] Mystique had its own advantages. It outran its competitors (S3 ViRGE, ATI Mach64) in 2D. It still accelerated 3D graphics a great deal, and, although the picture was close to software rendering, Mystique worked on calculating 3D instead of the CPU, which was already under heavy load. For a friendly price it offered gamers, who could not afford a [[3dfx]] Voodoo, a playable framerate on some 3D titles, which was more than enough. Indeed, if one learns to deal without alpha-blending and proper environment mapping, Mystique brings its owner a nice crisp image with bright colors. In games, where it's not crucial (Tomb Raider, for example), the picture can be described as curious and overall not bad. Due to its good 2D performance and lower than average 3D capabilities, it is common practice to put Mystique in pair with a [[3dfx]] Voodoo Graphics to combine fast 2D with widely supported and almost perfect 3D.

'''Today:''' Mystique is a nice 2D choice to run alongside [[3dfx]] Voodoo and as a secondary 3D accelerator for wider 3D experience.

==Matrox Simple Interface API compatible games==

Thanks to '''[http://vogons.zetafleet.com/onzin.php?mode=viewprofile&u=25315 vetz]''', we can enjoy this list of games, that work with Matrox Mystique API (MSI):
*Actua Soccer ''(does not work on Mystique 220)''
*Battle Arena Toshinden ''(does not work on Mystique 220)''
*Destruction Derby 2
*Croc
*Mechwarrior 2: Mystique Edition
*Monster Trucks (Thunder Truck Rally)
*Scorched Planet
*Screamer II
*Screamer Rally
*Time Warriors
*Tomb Raider
*UEFA Champions League 1996/1997
For more information on the supported games, see [http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=33483 forum thread]

==Mystique 220==

Original [[Matrox]] Mystique has 170 MHz RAMDAC and is based on MGA 1064 GPU. The later version, Mystique 220, has 220MHz RAMDAC and is based on MGA 1164 GPU. Other than that, there is basically no difference between two versions of the card. The major problems of Mystique were never resolved.

However, benchmarking concludes that Matrox kept including minor changes in Mystique without informing the customers, so later Mystique versions, like the one made by Compaq (on the picture above), can have 220 MHz RAMDAC and identify themselves as Mystique 220 while having old 1064 GPU.

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

3dfx

2013-03-11T20:42:34Z

Swaaye:

3dfx (written as 3Dfx until 1999) was a 3D graphics chipset manufacturer and later on graphics card manufacturer. Founded in 1994, the company was one of the pioneers of 3D graphics in the PC industry in the mid to late 1990's. Their products were popular for arcade machines, PC 3D game accelerators and professional visualization systems. They played an important role in the 3D graphics industry until 2000, when most of their assets were purchased by [[NVIDIA]] Corporation, after which the company filed for bancruptcy and officialy went defunct in 2002.

== General 3dfx advice ==

3dfx cards - namely their proprietary Glide API - can be considered one of the prime reasons to use vintage hardware today, because many early 3D games starting from 1996 had versions for at least some 3dfx cards, and in a lot of times, those versions had the superior image quality. Perhaps the most notorious example here is Unreal (1998), a game that first was developed for software rendering, but had a Glide renderer added as soon as it was clear that Voodoo would come out as the best 3D accelerator. The game also had Direct3D and OpenGL renderers, but Direct3D was well in its infancy back in the day and even the OpenGL renderer wasn't their best effort, therefore players with competitor cards had to wait for Epic's patches to improve the graphics, but in the end it would take fanmade patches to provide competitive renderers.

It was also common for game developers to put 3dfx logos on their games' boxes, leading to misconceptions for a decent amount of games supporting Glide which actually do not at all, or only provide a special MiniGL driver for 3dfx cards. This was again due to 3dfx being the dominant 3D solution at this time, and also a commonly known brand with PC gamers. Technically, all 3dfx MiniGL/OpenGL ICDs and the 3dfx Direct3D HAL redirect to Glide. If software does not straightforwardly access either glide2x.dll/ovl or glide3x.dll, it cannot be said to directly support the Glide API.

Since Glide was a proprietary interface, there were 3rd party efforts from day one to bring it to all 3D cards. Glide wrappers are at a level where they can properly emulate how those games would look on a real Voodoo card and can be considered a viable alternative to the real cards. A problem with them is that games written for Win9x are not necessarily compatible with modern operating systems, so only a (at best) period-correct Win9x system can be guaranteed to play all games properly.

The main weak points of all vintage cards apart from incompatibility with modern mainboards/operating systems are lack of full screen anti-aliasing (addressed with V5), anisotropic filtering (only started to be useful with about GF3) and bad performance in some then available Direct3D games, since Microsoft's API had the problem of not being programmable as close to the hardware as OpenGL and its MiniGL/Glide derivatives were and therefore was slow to take off initally.

The biggest disadvantage of 3dfx' SLI multiple GPU solution (V2 SLI/V5 for consumer cards) is that it is prone to slight horizontal artifacts somewhat akin to screen tearing, which results from the multiple chips not fully working synchronously. This can be prevented by activating VSync in the drivers or in the games, a solution which itself has the problem of causing mouse lag in many cases.

All 3dfx cards use the AGP port as a mere 66 MHz PCI port and do not utilize any of the special features that AGP offers; therefore, PCI and AGP versions of 3dfx cards perform almost identically.

Cards of Voodoo2 SLI/3 grade speed scale with CPUs up until about a ~1 GHz Intel Pentium III Coppermine, although a PIII 500 Katmai should be enough to get all Glide games going fluently. AMD's K6 line can only be considered second choice when building a 3dfx centered PC, because these CPUs can be a significant bottleneck with some later games. Pentium Classic and Pentium MMX CPUs will only be able to run the earliest Glide titles decently, as these CPUs were already reaching the end of their lifecycle when 3dfx cards arrived. Older games besides a very few [[List of games that require specific CPUs to run properly|exceptions]] should be able to cope with faster CPUs. Lastly, it should be noted that Voodoo Graphics cards will not work with K7 (Athlon) CPUs, and Voodoo2 cards will need special 3rd party drivers to work with these CPUs.

Community-made resources for 3dfx cards include drivers, such as Amigamerlin, x3dfx and SFFT, which can provide more features and speed than the latest official drivers from 2000 and some of which allow the cards to be run under Windows XP, or tools such as V.Control which provide more in-depth tweaking options. For potentially better OpenGL compatibility or speed, one can use the MesaFX standalone OpenGL driver or Metabyte's WickedGL MiniGL driver.

== Getting the best compatibility ==

For better compatibility and versatility, it is common practice among vintage computer enthusiasts to have multiple video or sound cards in one system. Back in the day, this was typically widespread and necessary for 3D-only 3dfx cards with a loop cable (V1/V2). That way, one can easily have a faster card for OpenGL/D3D (or a card supporting one of the other proprietary 3D APIs) combined with e.g. V2 SLI which will automatically engage when Glide is chosen in games. This may cause issues with some cards if for some reason OpenGL/D3D would be needed on the 3dfx card(s).

Another way is to combine said non-3dfx card with a 2D+3D 3dfx card, one of them being AGP and the other one PCI. Due to both being full video cards one would need to perform the switch in the BIOS under "Primary VGA adapter", "Boot from AGP/PCI" or likewise (if it supports it) depending on what card is needed. This method has the disadvantage of requiring to relocate the monitor cable each time because there is no passthrough; a monitor with multiple inputs or a VGA or KVM switch would solve that problem, potentially with DVI for one of the cards if available. This should work very reliably without any conflicts.

It is also possible to take advantage of multi-monitor support in Windows 98, either with a multi-input monitor by switching between inputs on the monitor itself or two monitors. However, this has been reported to cause Windows to use the OpenGL software fallback mode as long as the secondary display is enabled, so it is perhaps not the optimal solution. Direct3D hardware acceleration only works on the primary display.

Finally, for maximum Glide compatibility, one could even use three cards (e.g. V1, V2 and V3/4/5) and switch between the cards by copying the appropriate glide2x.dll/glide3x.dll drivers into the game directory depending on which card the game should run with. When using this method, it is important to install the drivers in ascending order, so that games which access the drivers in the Windows folder use the newest 3dfx card. For DOS games, one would analogically copy Glide2x.ovl into the game folder.

To get games which were originally made for Voodoo Graphics to work with Voodoo2 boards, one can use the following SST variables in the autoexec.bat, either directly or by an external batchfile:

<pre>SET SST_GRXCLK=90
SET SST_FT_CLK_DEL=0x4
SET SST_TF0_CLK_DEL=0x6
SET SST_TF1_CLK_DEL=0x6
SET SST_VIN_CLKDEL=0x1
SET SST_VOUT_CLKDEL=0x0
SET SST_TMUMEM_SIZE=2</pre>

== Voodoo Graphics ==

[[File:Canopus_Pure3D.jpg|200px|thumb||Canopus Pure3D]]
[[File:Voodoo_1.jpg|200px|thumb||Diamond Monster 3D]]

The Voodoo Graphics chipset, based on the SST1 architecture, was 3dfx' first foray into the PC market. Its release in 1996 was primarily made possible by EDO DRAM declining in price, allowing good profits from an adequately-equipped ~$300 Voodoo Graphics solution. The PCI cards, which were manufactured by board partners, feature a frame buffer processor, a texture mapping unit (TMU), a RAMDAC and 4 MB EDO DRAM (some later versions were released with 6 or even 8 MB). Both the RAM and graphics processors operate at 50 MHz, with 2 MB RAM being used as framebuffer and 2 MB as texture memory. The RAM banks are on independent 64-bit buses. A Pentium 90 with 8 MB RAM was considered the minimal specifications for these cards.

The chipset was rich in features, boasting perspective correct texture mapping, bilinear texture filtering, level of detail MIP mapping, sub-pixel correction, polygonal-based Gouraud shading and texture modulation. It natively supported Direct3D 5 and introduced Glide, 3dfx's own proprietary API that worked initially under DOS and later under Windows 9x and NT 4.0/2000. Glide was essentially a subset of OpenGL, with no support for features deemed unnecessary for PC gaming at the time, and for some functions not supported by the SST-1 architecture. OpenGL games were initially only supported through the use of MiniGL, which was an OpenGL driver with only the necessary functions implemented for a specific game, most notably Quake engines. In 1999, 3dfx released a full OpenGL ICD, providing support for all OpenGL applications, which was becoming increasingly important at the time since it was required for the then-upcoming Quake 3.

Voodoo Graphics does not have 2D functions like VGA or GUI acceleration, meaning that they have to be used in conjunction with a standard 2D card by means of a [[VGA passthrough cable]]. Voodoo cards have relays onboard that switch between passthrough mode and output mode, controlled by the driver or DOS game/Glide. Unfortunately the passthrough impacts 2D quality because of the signal passing through additional circuitry that may not be of optimum quality. High resolution GUI modes are most noticeably affected.

Thanks to 3dfx's efforts with game developers and publishers and the excellent performance of their solution, the company's technology was quickly adopted as the de-facto standard in PC 3D gaming. Voodoo 1 enjoyed lengthy support from game developers. Despite only supporting resolutions as high as 640x480 (800x600 without the usage of Z-buffering) and 16-bit color depth, the card was usable with games into 2000.

The prime competitors upon its release were the [[PowerVR]] PCX1 and [[Rendition]] Vérité V1000 chipsets, the latter of which already featured complete 2D processing onboard. Other competitors include the [[Matrox]] Millenium II/[[Matrox Mystique]], [[ATI]] Rage II, [[S3]] Virge and [[NVIDIA]] RIVA 128, all of which had 2D functions, but only the RIVA 128 can be said to match the Voodoo 1 in performance, while of course lacking Glide support.

'''Today:'''
The card's prime use case would be statically-linked Glide games in DOS that depend on the first Voodoo chipset. Later games, starting with ca. 1997, are better played with the subsequent Voodoo cards.

Cards with higher than 4 MB are a trade-off: they have somewhat higher compatibility to later games, but lose some compatibility with first generation titles. 6 MB versions only have more texture memory and are therefore still limited to 640x480; 8 MB boards are able to show 800x600 resolutions due to extra framebuffer memory. Both offer smoother frame rates in games with more texture memory usage, such as Unreal and Quake 2.

== Voodoo Rush ==

[[File:Jazz Multimedia Voodoo Rush.jpg|200px|thumb|Jazz Adrenaline 3D (Alliance ProMotion)]]
[[File:Voodoo_Rush_with_Macronix_2D.jpg|200px|thumb|Procomp G108 (Macronix)]]

Voodoo Rush was released in August 1997 for the PCI bus and addressed the main shortcoming of the Voodoo Graphics by being a complete 2D/3D solution. The chipset combined either an [[Alliance Semiconductor]] AT25/AT3D or [[Macronix]] 2D core on the same board as the exact same Voodoo chipset (on some cards the 3dfx part came as a daughterboard).

The combination of two independent chipsets led to a bottleneck for the 3dfx part and therefore about 10% lower performance. The cards had 4, 6 or 8 MB total memory, with only 8 MB versions offering 4 MB for texture space, similarly to Voodoo Graphics. Some cards had slightly higher clocks to close the performance gap. The cards also sometimes weren't fully compatible to existing games, leading to specific Voodoo Rush patches for some games, e.g. Tomb Raider.

The AT3D chipset has rudimentary 3D functions which can be activated, meaning that Rush cards that feature it have two 3D chipsets.

'''Today:''' Rush cards were an infamous early attempt at a 2D/3D card by 3dfx and should be avoided when building a vintage gaming system. Primarily a curiosity. Despite that, the cards may be potentially useful in fringe cases like in a system with only a single available PCI slot that does not support a Banshee or Voodoo3 because of a weak power supply or weak voltage regulators. They shouldn't be difficult to acquire since the demand is not as high as for other 3dfx cards.

== Voodoo2 ==

[[File:3dfx_Voodoo_2.jpg|200px|thumb|Provideo PV830 (reference Voodoo2)]]

Released in early 1998, the Voodoo2 chipset (SST96) expanded upon its predecessor by adding a second texture processor and featuring 8 or 12 MB EDO DRAM. The clock was increased to 90 MHz, almost doubling the performance compared to Voodoo1. Since the V2 features single-pass multi-texturing and single-pass trilinear filtering (and therefore supports Direct3D 6), performance in games utilizing these features is further increased because the second texture unit is taken advantage of. The first notable game to do so was Quake II (1997). The cards also support SLI (Scan-Line Interleave), a technique which allows 2 cards to be run simultaneously and draw the lines of the image in turn, boosting performance and enabling resolutions up to 1024x768. With one card installed, up to 800x600 is possible regardless of memory.

Following the same principle as the Voodoo1 there are three independent 64-bit RAM buses, one for the frame buffer processor and one for each TMU. While 4 MB RAM are available for the frame buffer, the textures have to be copied into the RAM of both TMUs. So even though there are technically 4 or 8 MB of texture memory on a card effectively there are only 2 or 4 MB available for textures. With SLI this amount does not grow, instead the textures will be copied two more times.

A large number of cards from different manufacturers were released, with some deviating from the reference design and/or featuring extra cooling and even slight factory overclocks. The Voodoo2 remained the best 3D accelerator card throughout 1998.

Voodoo2 still requires the passthrough cable and use of a separate 2D card. However, the chipset does have some 2D features and there is a driver for Linux that allows one to use Voodoo2 as a GUI accelerator.

'''Today:''' The iconic Voodoo2 SLI setup holds nostalgic value for some people. Thanks to the PCI interface, they can theoretically be used even with some modern mainboards. Voodoo2 SLI is viable for almost all Glide games, and has the advantage over Voodoo3 that it can play more Glide games originally only designed for Voodoo1, with necessary environment variable configuration.

== Banshee ==

Released in 1998, the Banshee was 3dfx's first fully integrated 2D+3D chip. Due to its 100 MHz clock the midrange Banshee is actually slightly faster than the high-end Voodoo2 in single-textured games, yet falls clearly behind in games utilizing multi-texturing. Banshee cards were the first 3dfx cards to universally feature some kind of cooling solution and came equipped with 8MB/16MB SDRAM or SGRAM, with PCI and AGP versions existent.

Its 2D acceleration was very capable. It rivaled the fastest 2D cores from Matrox, Nvidia, and ATI, consisting of a 128-bit GUI engine and a 128-bit VESA VBE 3.0 VGA core. DirectDraw is accelerated, and the GUI portion supports all of the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) in hardware. The GUI engine achieved near-theoretical maximum performance with a null driver test in Windows NT.

'''Today:''' Banshee cards are far superior to Voodoo Rush, although they have a few bugs in various areas such as video playback and DOS VESA modes. As such they are not ideal gaming choices, although they can be still useful for some games.

== Voodoo 3 ==

[[File:3dfx_Voodoo_3_3000.jpg|200px|thumb||Voodoo 3 3000 AGP]]
[[File:3dfx_Voodoo_3_3500.jpg|200px|thumb||Voodoo 3 3500 TV]]

The Voodoo 3, codenamed "Avenger", was announced at COMDEX in November 1998 and released on April 3, 1999. Following the buyout of STB, 3dfx was now manufacturing their own cards. The Voodoo 3 was basically a higher-clocked Banshee core outfitted with a second texture unit and some bugfixes. The cards were released in four different flavors: the 125 MHz Voodoo 3 1000, the 143 MHz Voodoo 3 2000, the 166 MHz Voodoo 3 3000, and the 183 MHz Voodoo 3 3500 TV with integrated TV tuner. Except for the low-end V3 1000, which could also come with 8 MB, all cards featured 16 MB. The V3 line came both in PCI or AGP versions, with the 3500 being AGP-only. Some PCI versions featured SGRAM instead of the standard SDRAM. Thanks to the integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC (V3 3000/3500), the maximum resolution is 2048x1536 at about 75 Hz.

Now facing stronger competition from [[NVIDIA|NVIDIA's]] RIVA TNT line, which already supported 32-bit color depth, higher than 256x256 textures and AGP texturing, the Voodoo 3 line was somewhat panned by critics and called outdated in terms of features, but was still considered to be very competitive speed-wise, because 32-bit rendering introduced a big performance hit on competitor cards. At that time, 3dfx' marketing was centered around speed, but to demonstrate that the image quality was still better than their last year's high-end setup, they invented the term "22-bit", describing the fact that the RAMDAC of the card would perform either a 2x2 box or 4x1 line filter on the image, depending on the driver settings, masking some of the dithering.

The RIVA TNT2 Ultra was competitive to the higher V3 cards in speed. The GeForce 256, which came out later that year, beats it both by features and performance in D3D and OGL games, yet can still merely tie it in some Glide-centric games such as Unreal Tournament.

A noteworthy problem with Voodoo3 or other cards from this generation was the higher power demands, which certain mainboards at the time could not cope with. The issue lied specifically in the voltage regulators for the AGP slot. Intel specified 6A at 3.3V for this slot, but due to cost saving measures some mainboard manufacturers utilized parts that were specified for less than that. Voodoo3 cards were reported to demand up to 4.8A, which could cause severe thermal issues, crashes and even hardware failures with these boards. One known manufacturer with this problem was Gigabyte. A list with Gigabyte motherboards which are confirmed for use with Voodoo3 cards by the company is available in the links section.

'''Today:''' A Voodoo 3 2000 roughly matches Voodoo2 SLI 12MB in speed, while only taking one slot and offering better real-world performance due to more texture memory (for 1024x768 as the highest resolution available with Voodoo2 SLI there would be 16 - 4.5 = 11.5 MB available instead of 4 MB, nearly three times as much). The image quality is slightly better due to more advanced RAMDAC filtering and the end of the passthrough design.

Like with all Voodoo cards, V3 will run games requiring 8-bit paletted textures or table fog. If all this is taken into account together with its good DOS compatibility/speed, wide availability and low cost, the Voodoo 3 can be considered the all-around best vintage card for games of its time frame and before.

== Voodoo 4/5 ==

[[File:PowerColor_Voodoo_4_4500.jpg|200px|thumb||PowerColor Evilking IV]]
[[File:3dfx_Voodoo_5_5500.jpg|200px|thumb||Voodoo 5 5500]]

The VSA-100 (Voodoo Scalable Architecture), codenamed "Napalm", was the final product from 3dfx and was released in 2000. Only the single-chip Voodoo 4 4500 and the dual-chip Voodoo 5 5500 made it to market, both clocked at 166 MHz and released both in AGP and PCI versions. It is a further refinement of the architecture of all previous products, with some changes and additions such as two pixel pipelines with one texture unit each (instead of one pipeline with two texture units), 32-bit rendering and larger texture caches. The chip supports 2048x2048 textures, FXT1 and DXTC texture compression.

The marketing was now more centered on image quality ("cinematic effects") than speed: Due to the added "T-buffer" the Voodoo 4 4500 can do 2x RGSSAA (rotated-grid super-sampling anti-aliasing), while the Voodoo 5 5500 is capable of up to 4x RGSSAA. This method of anti-aliasing is considered high quality until today and was actually usable in a large number of titles, albeit with considerable performance impact.

The Voodoo 5 matched the GeForce 256 or slightly edged it out, but was not competitive with high-end GeForce 2 cards, especially since Glide support in new games was rapidly declining by that time. Unlike the GeForce cards which were Direct3D 7 capable, the VSA-100 line was still limited to Direct3D 6, as it lacked Hardware T&L. This feature, which was introduced by Nvidia a year ago, was slowly taking off in 2000 and games from that time which use it are not optimally suited for these cards.

Voodoo 4 4500 cards have 32 MB SDRAM. Voodoo 5 5500 cards have 64 MB SDRAM, although only 32 of it are actually usable due to the SLI method used, much like with Voodoo2 SLI. Voodoo5 cards require supplementary power in the form of a single Molex connection.

'''Today:''' The V4 4500 is arguably not much better than the V3, since it performs similarly and its new features are of limited benefit. The V5 5500 is considerably faster and provides an optimal Glide experience up to around 1280x1024 without AA, with the added possibility of adding anti-aliasing for higher image quality in lower resolutions.

For the best possible frame rates, it can be combined with fast CPUs such as Athlon XPs with the KT333 chipset. AGP 3.3v support is necessary.

Macintosh PCI versions of the V5 5500 have DVI outputs for clearer image quality. Using this with DOS games is said to cause problems due to locked refresh rates though.

== Other 3dfx cards ==

The company also released other cards, such as the budget Velocity (name taken after the acquisition of STB) line, which only came with 1 TMU similar to Banshee, although the second one can reportedly be enabled by a registry hack. Also, 3dfx had plans for a Voodoo 5 6000, which would have come with four VSA-100 chips installed and would have been powered by an external power supply, dubbed "Voodoo Volts". About 150-250 of these were made as prototypes. These cards beat Nvidia's GeForce 2 line and are even competitive with GeForce 3 when used with faster CPUs, and are also capable of 8x RGSSAA. The prototypes are considered "legendary" in the enthusiast community and are highly sought after, with prices easily as high as $1000 paid for them.

== User benchmarks ==

''Main article: [[3dfx Benchmarks]]''

== External links ==
*[http://www.tdfx.de/eng/grafikkarten_alle.shtml Complete database of 3dfx cards]
*[http://www.falconfly.de/ Best resource for 3dfx drivers + other information]
*[http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide/compatibility nGlide wrapper compatibility list]
*[http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=886 Complete list of Glide games for DOS]
*[http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2DC6912FD577F199 3D Acceleration Comparison with many 3dfx games]
*[http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.voodooalert.de%2Fde%2Fcontent%2Ftests%2Findex.php&act=url Many 3dfx tests and driver comparisons]
*[http://patrizio1.tripod.com/var.htm List of SST variables]
*[http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20000108224559%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.gigabyte.de%2Fgigadeutsch%2Fnews%2Fnews.htm&act=url List of Gigabyte mainboards which will accept a Voodoo3]
*[http://www.3dgw.com/faq/moodys_voodoo2_faq.htm Moody's Voodoo2 FAQ]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

NVIDIA

2013-03-11T20:42:24Z

Swaaye:

PowerVR

2013-03-11T20:42:14Z

Swaaye:

== Series 1 ==

=== Midas ===
OEM

=== PCX-1 ===

=== PCX-2 ===
1997 and it's bilinear filtered and MiniGL drivers for this are in the 1.0.x.x version range. Supports Direct3D 3, and its own API, SGL.

A seal swimming quickly in polluted water in a sinus pattern was used to demonstrate this card. Bundled games typically are Ultim@te Race.

Something about infinite planes and dummied-out 24-bit rendering.

Something about Crime Cities' MiniGL driver to get newer games ""working""

== Series 2 ==
=== PowerVR SG ===
Announced early 1998 and never released, however some games were tooled to support it (Half-Life) which suggests a prototypical existence in 1998.

MiniGL drivers for this are in the 1.1.x.x version range.

=== Neon250 ===
Released in late 1999, something about dreamcast, "still" no support for OpenGL, supports SGL2 API which almost no games used, and it's rare!!!

MiniGL drivers for this are in the 1.2.x.x version range.

== Series 3 ==
=== Kyro 1 ===

[[File:3D_Prophet_4000XT_PCI.jpg|200px|thumb||3D Prophet 4000XT]]

=== Kyro 2 ===
2001. Another 'false DirectX7' card that supports DirectX 6 features, with S3TC and EMBM. Like everything that isn't Nvidia and ATI, it deprecated quickly for its lack of hardware T&L and its lateness to the market. Most of the marketing were about features the older series had, including tiled rendering, full sorting, internal true color rendering, etc. The emphasis on hidden surface removal was supposed to be the feature to make up for the lack of HW T&L. It also does not support cubemapping.

The tiled rendering was also a drawback to supporting more modern graphic features that rely on rendering-to-texture and framebuffers.

Unsurprising for it's KYRO name (Cairo, Egypt), many tech demos to showcase this card take place in ancient Egypt.

It has no support for the SGL or SGL2 API.

[[File:3D_Prophet_4500_AGP.jpg|200px|thumb||3D Prophet 4500]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Rendition

2013-03-11T20:42:07Z

Swaaye:

Rendition was a graphics chip manufacturer that produced cards for PCs from 1996 through 1999.

==Vérité==
===V1000===
[[File:Veritev1000.jpg|thumb|V1000E]]
V1000 was one of the earliest chips with 2D, 3D and video functions all integrated into one ASIC while also providing impressive performance all around. It still used an external RAMDAC, which was common at the time. The GUI acceleration is adequate but not exceptional. DirectDraw and VESA VBE 2.0 functions are fast. All V1000 cards are equipped with 4MB of EDO DRAM running synchronously with the graphics chip.

The chip is based upon MIPS-like RISC CPU technology with microcode programmability and a fixed-function pixel engine. The CPU-like design provided flexibility allowing the chip to be tweaked for various use cases. Its 3D capabilities were second only to Voodoo Graphics in 1996. 3D performance is perhaps around 50% of Voodoo. V1000 is best utilized with Rendition's APIs, Speedy3D (DOS) and RRedline (Win9x). The first 3D accelerated form of Quake was [[VQuake]], using Speedy3D. Direct3D is less optimal for it though Direct3D 5 games like Jedi Knight are quite playable. The chip is not really adequately capable of OpenGL although there is an ICD available.

Legacy VGA modes are very slow. For example Doom, which uses VGA Mode X, will run at around 10 fps on a Pentium III. There is a DOS utility program to remap some VGA modes to VESA VBE modes, but Mode X can not be improved in this manner.

There are two V1000 chips, V1000E and V1000L. V1000L operates on 3.3v instead of 5v and so uses less power and may be slightly higher clocked. V1000E boards should be used with the available BIOS update TSR for improved performance.

===V2x00===
[[File:Rendition_2100.JPG|thumb||V2100]]
The second generation Vérité chip is similar in design to the V1000 but it has been drastically enhanced with a focus on single-cycle operation. V2200 can get much more work done per clock than the V1000 and this improves both 2D and 3D performance. The chip was offered in a budget form as V2100 and a high-end model as V2200 although both are identical and clock speed is the only differentiation. V2100 operates at 40-45 MHz while V2200 is 55-60 MHz. Memory is 4-8 MB SGRAM operating asynchronously, by default usually clocked twice as high as the chip clock. V2x00 is AGP capable but operates as a 66 MHz PCI device, without AGP's special features.

Unfortunately V2x00 is not able to perform per-pixel mip-mapping, something even Voodoo 1 could do. Legacy VGA modes are also still very slow.

===V3300===
The V3300 was to be Rendition's third generation 3D graphics chipset and was initially scheduled for release in 1999. It was never released, likely because it was not going to be adequately competitive.

*Dual Pixel Engine
**dual-texturing for bilinear and trilinear filtering
**specular highlighting (per vertex), Anti-aliasing
**3 million triangles/second triangle setup engine, 200 million pixels/s trilinear fillrate
*Dual independent 250 MHz RAMDAC CRT controllers
*iDCT transformations & motion compensation support (DVD playback acceleration)
*Compatible with 166 MHz SDRAM/SGRAM
*128-bit bus architecture
*AGP 2X execute mode support
*0.35 μm process

===V4400===
After canceling V3300, Rendition accelerated development of V4400. This chip was to utilize Micron's EDRAM technology and have 4MB of integrated memory. The project was eventually canceled.

==Video captures==
{{#ev:youtube|NADd6w0wFk8}}
{{#ev:youtube|7HQ8J3Vthz8}}
{{#ev:youtube|hIDYwsVS85E}}
{{#ev:youtube|pYXF_VhAhlI}}
{{#ev:youtube|ZC6PYQpWoPQ}}
{{#ev:youtube|mfxOP4g3-Zk}}

==Related links==
*[http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=23019 Rendition thread on VOGONS]
*[http://gona.mactar.hu/v1000/ Gona's V1000-E vs. V1000L-P benchmarks]
*[http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ Gona's PCI and AGP DOS game compatibility matrix]
*[http://vintage3d.org/index.php Vintage3D] - Rendition sections with benchmarks and screenshots
*[http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=18 VOGONS Drivers Rendition section]
*[http://web.archive.org/web/200101240126/http://renaddiction.com/index.htm Renaddiction fan site] (Internet Archive)
*[[VQuake]] - details about how VQuake works.

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

S3

2013-03-11T20:41:58Z

Swaaye:

S3 Graphics, Ltd is a graphics hardware manufacturer founded in January 1989. Their proprietary API's were S3D for DOS and Windows 9x and MeTaL for Windows.

''*S3 chip sets were very popular among low-end graphic hardware manufacturers. Sometimes standard S3 drivers won't work on such cards. Use [http://transition.fcc.gov/oet/fccid/ FCC ID] to confirm the graphic card's origin.''

== Chips ==
=== S3 Vision ===
[[File:S3_Vision968.JPG|thumb||S3 Vision968]]
High performance GUI accelerators during 1994 and 1995. The family includes the 864, 868, 964 and 968 chips. The 9xx series uses VRAM memory instead of fast-page DRAM, enhancing memory performance and improving high-resolution GUI performance. The x68 chips include motion video acceleration features including color space conversion and video scaling.

=== S3 Trio ===
[[File:S3_Trio64.JPG|thumb||S3 Trio64]]
An evolution of previous accelerators. The name refers to the integration of 3 components into one ASIC: RAMDAC, graphics core and clock generator. Higher integration reduces overall product cost.

Trio64 variants are popular for DOS gaming due to their high compatibility and good speed.

=== S3 ViRGE / Trio 3D ===
[[File:VirgeDX.JPG|thumb||ViRGE DX 4MB]]
[[File:S3 3D2X.JPG|thumb||S3 Trio 3D/2X]]
The ViRGE is the first S3 chip with 3D acceleration support and launched in 1996. Aside from the 3D hardware, it is quite similar to the Trio64V+. These cards typically come equipped with 2-4MB RAM. S3 created the S3D API to program directly for the ViRGE accelerators although they also support Direct3D 3+.

There are several variants. The original ViRGE (marked 325), the ViRGE VX, ViRGE DX, ViRGE GX, ViRGE GX/2, Trio3D and Trio3D/2X. VX is slower at 3D but uses VRAM memory to somewhat improve high-resolution GUI performance. DX and GX are the second generation and GX supports SGRAM. GX/2 and Trio3D are AGP capable and therefore mostly used on AGP cards. They might be called third generation.

All ViRGE chips posses a fairly complete 3D feature set and can output quality 3D visuals. The original 325 chip and the VX have inadequate performance outside of S3D games. The DX and GX have approximately double the 3D performance and can run some Direct3D adequately if the driver is compatible with the game. Later chips are somewhat faster still.

S3D games often only recognize the original ViRGE 325 chip but there is a third party utility to fix the game executable.

The similarity to Trio64V+ provides high compatibility for DOS games.

==== S3D accelerated games ====
*Demolition Derby
*Descent 2
*Mechwarrior 2
*Terminal Velocity
*Tomb Raider

=== S3 Savage3D ===
[[File:S3savage3d.jpg|thumb|Savage3D]]
Savage3D was released in 1998 and was S3's first 3D chip with useful Direct3D and OpenGL performance. Its performance is similar to [[3dfx|Voodoo Banshee]] or [[Matrox|Matrox G200]], and its image quality is excellent. GUI performance is excellent. It supports single-cycle trilinear filtering, meaning one can enable trilinear filtering with little speed impact. It can use textures up to 2048x2048 pixels. It is also fully AGP 2x compliant.

It is the first 3D accelerator to support texture compression, in the form of S3TC, which would later become the DXT1 Direct3D standard. Texture compression dramatically reduces the size of a texture while only minimally affecting quality, allowing very high quality textures to be used even with the limited 8MB RAM of the Savage3D.

S3 created a new API called Metal for the Savage family. Unreal Engine 1 games frequently support it, and may also have optional S3TC textures available. Like 3dfx Glide, it offers superior quality and performance compared to Direct3D and OpenGL with Unreal Engine.

Savage3D's greatest failing was, as typical with S3, driver quality.

=== S3 Savage4 ===
This is an enhancement of Savage3D. Clock speed was improved, AGP 4x implemented, and the cards typically come equipped with 16-32MB RAM. It doesn't have enough fill-rate to compete with the other 3D cards of 1999 such as NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 and 3dfx Voodoo3, and drivers are again sub par. However, S3 Metal support made it somewhat popular for Unreal Tournament because the S3TC textures were a dramatic visual upgrade.

=== S3 Savage 2000 ===
[[File:Dviper2z200.jpg|thumb|Savage 2000]]
Savage 2000 was an ambitious overhaul of previous 3D technology and was released at the end of 1999. It was to be a fully Direct3D 7 part, meaning support for a hardware transform and lighting engine. Compared to Savage4, it has twice the pixel throughput per clock, and potentially quadruple the texture processing rate. It is superficially comparable to NVIDIA GeForce 256.

However, the chip is not entirely functional. It is faster than Savage4, but it is not Direct3D 7 compliant because the S3TL (HW T&L) engine is not entirely bug-free. S3TL is disabled by default, but can be enabled. It produces visual anomalies and it does not improve performance because it is not fast enough to outperform the CPU at the task. Overall the Savage 2000 is not as fast as GeForce 256, but it can beat Matrox G400, 3dfx Voodoo3 and RIVA TNT2.

Like Savage4, this chip was somewhat popular for Unreal Tournament. It is significantly faster than Savage4 and only the Savage series could run the game with the S3TC textures.

== S3 Savage Comparison Chart ==
[[File:S3quake.png|thumb|S3 cards DOS performance]]
{| class="wikitable"
! Chip !! Release !! Die process !! Core clock !! Pipeline (Px × Tex) !! Fillrate (MT/s)!! Memory clock !! Bus width !! Memory bandwidth !! System interface !! Notes
|-
| Savage 3D
|| 6/1998
|| 0.25 μm
|| 100-120 MHz
|| 1 × 1
|| 100-120
|| 120 MHz
|| 64-bit
|| 0.96 GB/s
|| PCI, AGP 2x
||Versions: 390, 391 with Macrovision.
|-
| Savage 4 Pro
|| 2/1999
|| 0.25 μm
|| 110-143 MHz
|| 1 × 1
|| 110-143
|| 125-143 MHz
|| 64-bit
|| 1.00-1.14 GB/s
|| PCI, AGP 2/4x
||
|-
| Savage 4 GT
|| 2/1999
|| 0.25 μm
|| 110 MHz
|| 1 × 1
|| 110
|| 125 MHz
|| 64-bit
|| 1.00 GB/s
|| PCI, AGP 2/4x
||
|-
| Savage 4 MX
|| 2/1999
|| 0.25 μm
||
|| 1 × 1
||
||
|| 64-bit
||
|| PCI, AGP 2/4x
|| Notebooks
|-
| Savage 4 Xtreme
|| 8/1999
|| 0.25 μm
|| 166 MHz
|| 1 × 1
|| 166
|| 166 MHz
|| 64-bit
|| 1.33 GB/s
|| PCI, AGP 2/4x
|| Diamond Stealth III
|-
| Savage 2000
|| 11/1999
|| 0.18/0.22 μm
|| 125 MHz
|| 2 × 2
|| 500
|| 155 MHz
|| 128-bit
|| 2.48 GB/s
|| PCI, AGP 2/4x
|| aka GX4. S3TL hardware is bugged and disabled.
|}

==Related links==
*[http://vintage3d.org/ Vintage3D] - has a section dedicated to the examination of performance and image quality of ViRGE cards.
*[http://www.servodata.com.pl/ftp/ELSA/GRAPHICS/ELSAWARE/S3DTOOL.ZIP S3DTool] - a game patcher that enables S3D games to run on later ViRGE chips.
*[http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=26 VOGONS Vintage Driver Library] - S3 file section
*[http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ Gona's PCI and AGP DOS game compatibility matrix]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Matrox

2013-03-11T20:41:48Z

Swaaye:

==Chips==
===Impression===

===Millennium===
[[File:Matrox Millennium 8mb rotate.jpg|thumb|Millennium]]
Successor to the Impression series, Millennium is a capable VGA and GUI accelerator with good output quality. Its intended audience was CAD users and others who desired high-performance, high-resolution GUI acceleration and was highly-priced accordingly.

It is a rudimentary 3D accelerator with support for Gouraud shading. It is not Direct3D compatible. There were a few games included with the card that interfaced with it.

===Mystique===
[[File:Mystique 2.jpg|thumb|Mystique]]

''See main article: [[Matrox Mystique]]''

[[Matrox Mystique]] is a 2D/3D/video accelerator for PC. Matrox released their first Mystique on August 14, 1996. Newer versions, including Mystique 220, kept appearing until summer 1997. The videocard usually had 2-4 Mb SGRAM expandable to 8MB with a special memory add-on card. However, apart from higher resolutions, upgrading memory did not make much difference.

Mystique was oriented on mid-end consummer and business market, offering excellent 2D performance, traditional for Matrox. It also has basic 3D capabilities, delivered mainly through Matrox Simple Interface API. As for the 2D part, it's safe to say the videocard has no known flaws. The image is crisp, has fine colors. But the 3D part lacked a lot of functions, which were removed to improve overall performance. Overall, [[Matrox Mystique]] is a good choice for 2D graphics alongside [[3dfx]] Voodoo.

===Millennium II===
[[File:Matroxmillennium2.jpg|thumb|Millenium II 8MB PCI]]
This chip is mysteriously similar to Mystique but it uses WRAM instead of SGRAM and this gives it higher high-resolution GUI performance. The 3D acceleration appears to be identical with even the same bugs.

It comes in both AGP and PCI versions.

===G100===
This was primarily a budget VGA/GUI "productivity" accelerator card. It has somewhat improved 3D hardware compared to the Mystique and Millennium II, with bilinear filtering, but it still lacks critical features like full alpha blending.

===G200===
[[File:MatroxG200.jpg|thumb|Millennium G200]]
The G200 is Matrox's first in-house 3D accelerator with full Direct3D 5 feature compliance. It typically comes with 8MB RAM and is capable of rendering at any resolution that can fit within that. It is capable of 32-bit rendering color depth although the performance hit is considerable. It is AGP 2x compliant and can use AGP texturing.

Unreal and Unreal Tournament may display an incorrect, overly bright image. Editing the Unreal.ini and disabling multi-texturing will fix this. Z-fighting may also be a problem and enabling 32-bit z-buffer can help this.

G200's OpenGL support was very poor until years into its life. Initially a slow OpenGL-to-Direct3D wrapper was used to support a few games. Eventually a full OpenGL driver was released at around the same time as G400's. Note that the final drivers for G200 include a OpenGL driver with a bug that breaks transparent water. This is remedied with later G400 driver package that contains a G200 OpenGL ICD. Overwrite the older ICD in the Windows directory.

Retail cards were ''Millennium G200'', ''Mystique G200'', ''Marvel G200'' and ''G200 MMS''. Millennium uses SGRAM while Mystique has slightly slower SDRAM but also TV-output. Marvel features video in/out capabilities. There is also a G250 chip which was OEM-only. It is built on 250nm manufacturing instead of G200's 350nm and typically does not need a heatsink.

===G400===
[[File:MatroxMillenniumG400Max.JPG|thumb|Millennium G400 Max]]
The G400 was essentially an improved and upgraded G200. Main improvements include 2 rendering pipelines, 128-bit memory bus, dual VGA monitor output, Direct3D 6 compliance, and environmental bump mapping support (EMBM). It is over twice as fast as Millennium G200. The G400 Max was similar in performance to TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo3 3500.

It lacks most DVD acceleration features but has an interesting DVD Max mode for output onto the second display.

Initially the card did not have an OpenGL driver. Matrox compensated for over a year with a miniGL called TurboGL which supported mainly Quake 1/2/3-based games. In early 2000 the final OpenGL driver was ready.

Variants include the ''Millennium G400'', ''Millennium G400 Max'', ''Marvel G400'', and ''Marvel G400-TV''. There are also a number of OEM models with different specifications. Some cards come with slightly slower SDRAM instead of SGRAM.

===G450===
A cost-reduced version of G400 with similar performance and features. G400 Max is faster.

Retail products were ''Millennium G450'' and ''Marvel G450 eTV''.

===G550===
A Direct3D 6 GPU in practice. It does have a hardware transform and lighting unit but it is not Direct3D 7 compliant. This was only used for the Headcasting software. Performance of this card is slightly above the G400 and G450.

The retail model was ''Millennium G550''.

===Parhelia===
[[File:MatroxParhelia128.jpg|thumb|Parhelia revision 1]]
Matrox's first Direct3D 8 accelerator, although it was initially advertised has having partial D3D9 capabilities. Performance is similar to a GeForce4 Ti. Initial version of the GPU has some bugs with secondary displays and also shipped with a low clock speed because of manufacturing difficulties. A later version increased clock speeds but also eliminated AGP 2x (3.3v) support.

It features a unique anti-aliasing technique called fragment anti-aliasing that provides very high quality (claimed 16X-equivalent MSAA). This technique has some caveats though, such as incompatibility with stencil buffering, and so was not further developed.

The first Matrox chip with full DVD acceleration.

It does not support Windows 9x.

==Video captures==
{{#ev:youtube|K2CXlvWRzF4}}
{{#ev:youtube|uPY9lsMDW-o}}
{{#ev:youtube|bdA2UwA1YPc}}
{{#ev:youtube|qrV6eAPdMlA}}
{{#ev:youtube|SQTntSm17Xs}}
{{#ev:youtube|AntyM8KtIAs}}

==Related links==
*[http://web.archive.org/web/20040110103309/http://grafi.ii.pw.edu.pl/gbm/matrox/ MatroX Files] - site with technical information about various Matrox cards. Includes overclocking, BIOS modification, tweaks, etc.
*[http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ Gona's PCI and AGP DOS game compatibility matrix]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Trident

2013-03-11T20:41:39Z

Swaaye:

[[File:TVGA8900C.JPG|200px|thumb||Trident TVGA8900C 1Mb ISA]]
[[File:TVGA9000i.JPG|200px|thumb||Trident TVGA9000i 512Kb ISA]]
[[File:Trident_PCI.JPG|200px|thumb||Trident 9440 PCI]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

SiS

2013-03-11T20:41:32Z

Swaaye:

[[File:SiS_6326_PCI.JPG|200px|thumb||SiS 6326 PCI]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Alliance Semiconductor

2013-03-11T20:41:24Z

Swaaye:

[[File:ProMotion_6410.JPG|200px|thumb||Alliance Semiconductor ProMotion 6410 with only half it's maximum memory installed]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Western Digital/Philips

2013-03-11T20:41:12Z

Swaaye:

*[[Paradise Tasmania 3D]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Graphics Cards

2013-03-11T20:40:43Z

Swaaye:

*[[3dfx]]
*[[NVIDIA]]
*[[ATI]]
*[[Rendition]]
*[[PowerVR]]
*[[S3]]
*[[Matrox]]
*[[Tseng Labs]]
*[[Cirrus Logic]]
*[[Trident]]
*[[Number Nine]]
*[[SiS]]
*[[Intel/Real3D]]
*[[3Dlabs]]
*[[Alliance Semiconductor]]
*[[Chromatic]]
*[[Western Digital/Philips]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Graphics Cards]]

Sound Cards & Modules

2013-03-11T20:40:04Z

Swaaye:

*[[Creative Labs]]
*[[Ad Lib, Inc.]]
*[[Advanced Gravis]]
*[[Roland]]
*[[Yamaha]]
*[[Terratec]]
*[[Ensoniq]]
*[[ESS Technologies]]
*[[Aureal Semiconductor]]
*[[C-Media]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Sound Cards]]

Category:Sound Cards

2013-03-11T20:39:44Z

Swaaye: Created page with "PC sound card articles"

PC sound card articles

Terratec

2013-03-11T20:38:16Z

Swaaye: categories

Terratec is a German manufacturer of multimedia equipment founded in 1994. Their products mainly include sound cards and TV adapters.

== Soundcards (ISA) ==

* [[EWS64]] family
* Maestro 32/96

== Soundcards (PCI) ==

* XLerate Pro (Aureal Vortex2)
* DMX XFire (Crystal SoundFusion CS4624)
* SiXPack (Crystal SoundFusion CS4630)
* 512i digital (ForteMedia FM801)
* Soundsystem DMX (ESS Canyon3D)

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Sound Cards]]

Ensoniq

2013-03-11T20:38:05Z

Swaaye: categories

Ensoniq was a popular electronic musical instrument and sound processor company that produced sound cards during the 1990s. Their cards competed against Creative Labs' offerings. At the end of the decade they were suffering financially and were purchased by Creative and merged with the E-mu subsidiary.

==Cards==
===Soundscape S-2000===
Based upon the OttoR2/Sequoia/MC68EC000 chipset and an AD1848KP DAC/ADC, the Soundscape S-2000 was a high-quality wavetable sound card in 1994. It has clean, quality output, especially noticeable when compared to Creative Labs' ISA cards. There is no MIDI effects processor but the samples have reverb/chorus pre-computed.

I/O ports are configured by jumpers. DMA, IRQ, SB emulation and some other settings are software configurable.

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:80%;"
! Doom E1M1
! Dark Forces
|-
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape - Doom E1M1.mp3</flashmp3>
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape - Dark Forces.mp3</flashmp3>
|}

===Soundscape DB===
This is a Waveblaster-compatible daughtercard with the Otto/Sequoia/MC68EC000 chipset on board with 1 or 2MB ROM. Again there is no effects processor but the samples have pre-computed effects.

===Soundscape PnP / OPUS ===
This is an OEM-only cost-reduced product with similar specifications to the S-2000. It uses the AD1845JP and a MIDI chipset consisting of Cow and Opus. It has compatibility problems with some DOS games because of the use of I/O addresses not used by S-2000 (games don't always support them). Again there is no effects processor but the samples have pre-computed effects.

Hardware settings are configured by PnP and by the SSINIT program.

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:80%;"
! Doom E1M1
! Dark Forces
|-
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape Opus - Doom E1M1.mp3</flashmp3>
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape Opus - Dark Forces.mp3</flashmp3>
|}

===Soundscape Elite===
This is a revision of the S-2000 board. The Elite model includes an effects DSP daughtercard, called the "ESP", that is fully programmable by a Windows application and by sysex commands. The patch set is revised and has notably stronger percussion samples. The Elite was released in 1995.

I/O ports are again configured by jumpers. DMA, IRQ, SB emulation and some other settings are software configurable. PnP is not supported.

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:80%;"
! Doom E1M1
! Dark Forces
|-
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape Elite - Doom E1M1.mp3</flashmp3>
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape Elite - Dark Forces.mp3</flashmp3>
|}
{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:80%;"
! Dark Forces (FM emulation)
|-
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape Elite - Dark Forces (FM).mp3</flashmp3>
|}

===Soundscape II===
The Elite without the ESP daughtercard and possibly a different patch set.

===Soundscape VIVO 90===
This card uses the Mark 5 / OttoR2 MIDI chipset and an AD1845JP DAC/ADC. This card replaced the Opus card as an OEM favorite and was available at retail. Aside from the disappointing 1MB patch set, the card is the first to require EMM386 for DOS support, creating problems for some old games that conflict with EMM386. Settings are configured by PnP and by the SSINIT program.

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:80%;"
! Doom E1M1
! Dark Forces
|-
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape Vivo90 - Doom E1M1.mp3</flashmp3>
| <flashmp3 id="1">Soundscape Vivo90 - Dark Forces.mp3</flashmp3>
|}

===AudioPCI===
The final sound card from Ensoniq is a very cost-reduced PCI card that is almost entirely host-driven (software-based). MIDI is a soft-synth in both Windows and DOS and has limitations that make it impossible to produce a patch set that rivals the older cards with 2 megabyte ROMs.

When Creative purchased Ensoniq, a driver update was released renaming the card to Sound Blaster PCI 64. This also added some new features. In Windows 9x it has rudimentary DirectSound3D 4-speaker support and minimal A3D/EAX emulation.

The ES1370 is not AC97 compatible and is actually natively 44.1 kHz. 48 kHz playback plays with a higher-than-normal pitch. Apparently the chip lacks sample rate conversion.

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:80%;"
! 8MB / Doom E1M1
! 8MB / Dark Forces
|-
| <flashmp3 id="1">AudioPCI - Doom (8MB).mp3</flashmp3>
| <flashmp3 id="1">AudioPCI - Dark Forces (8MB).mp3</flashmp3>
|}

<gallery>
File:Soundscape s2000.jpg|Soundscape S-2000
File:SoundscapeOpus.jpg|Soundscape OPUS
File:Soundscape elite.jpg|Soundscape Elite
File:Soundscape vivo mark5.jpg|Soundscape VIVO 90
File:Audiopci.jpg|AudioPCI
</gallery>

==Elite FX Toolkit==
Windows 3.x application that allows the user to control the ESP effects processor. Works on Windows 9x as well.
<gallery>
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 08.png
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 03.png
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 04.png
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 05.png
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 06.png
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 07.png
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 01.png
File:Ensoniq elite fx toolkit 02.png
</gallery>

==Comparison table==
{| class="wikitable" style="font-size: 85%;"
|-
! Name
! Model
! Release Date
! Bus
! Chipset
! PCM
! MPU-401
! Patch Set
! EMM386 req'd
! Standards
! SNR
! I/O
! CD Interface
! OS Support
! Notes
|-
| Soundscape S-2000
| S2016
| 1994
| ISA
| OttoR2B, Sequoia, MC68EC000, AD1848KP
| 16-bit 48 kHz
| hardware
| 1, 2 MB
| No
| SB 2.0, Adlib, MT-32, General MIDI, WSS
| 83db
| aux-in, line-in/mic, line-out, gameport/MIDI
| Panasonic, Sony, Mitsumi
| DOS, W3.x, W9x, NT4, OS/2
| CD interfaces optional. OEM models may have 1MB ROM.
|-
| Soundscape DB
| SSDB
| 1994
| -
| OttoR2, Sequoia, MC68EC000
| 16-bit 48 kHz
| hardware
| 1, 2 MB
| No
| General MIDI
|
| waveblaster port
| -
| -
|
|-
| Soundscape OPUS
| S3016
| 1995
| ISA
| Opus, Cow, MC68EC000, AD1845JP
| 16-bit 48 kHz
| hardware
| 1 MB
| No
| SB 2.0, Adlib, MT-32, General MIDI, WSS
|
| aux-in, line-in/mic, line-out, gameport/MIDI
| -
| DOS, W3.x, W9x, NT4, OS/2
| PnP
|-
| Soundscape Elite
| S2016-II
| 1995
| ISA
| OttoR2C, Sequoia, MC68EC000, AD1848KP
| 16-bit 48 kHz
| hardware
| 2 MB
| No
| SB 2.0, Adlib, MT-32, General MIDI, WSS
| 83db
| aux-in, line-in/mic, line-out, gameport/MIDI
| IDE, Panasonic, Sony, Mitsumi
| DOS, W3.x, W9x, NT4, OS/2
| effects processor daughtercard. New 2MB ROM.
|-
| Soundscape II
| S2016-II
| 1995
| ISA
| OttoR2, Sequoia, MC68EC000, AD1848KP
| 16-bit 48 kHz
| hardware
| 2 MB
| No
| SB 2.0, Adlib, MT-32, General MIDI, WSS
| 83db
| aux-in, line-in/mic, line-out, gameport/MIDI
| IDE, Panasonic, Sony, Mitsumi
| DOS, W3.x, W9x, NT4, OS/2
| Elite minus ESP
|-
| Soundscape VIVO 90
| VIVO-90DB
| 1996
| ISA
| Mark 5, OttoR2C, AD1845JP
| 16-bit 48 kHz
| software
| 1 MB
| Yes
| SB Pro 2, Adlib, MT-32, General MIDI, WSS
| 90db
| aux-in, line-in/mic, line-out, gameport/MIDI
| -
| DOS, W3.x, W9x, NT4
| PnP
|-
| AudioPCI 3000
|
| 1997
| PCI
| ES1370, AK4531
| 16-bit 48 kHz
| software
| 2, 4, 8 MB
| Yes
| SB Pro 2, Adlib, MT-32, General MIDI, WSS, Soundscape
| 90db
| aux-in, line-in/mic, line-out, gameport/MIDI
| -
| DOS, W3.x, W9x, NT4-6
| MIDI FX in W9x. DS3D 2/4-speaker, EAX and A3D with SBPCI64 driver.
|-
|}

==Related links==
*[http://web.archive.org/web/19970607101326/http://www.ensoniq.com/html/multimedia_products.htm Ensoniq within Internet Archive]
*[http://johnengelmann.net/technology/ecw/ AudioPCI .ecw patch set information]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Sound Cards]]

Yamaha

2013-03-11T20:37:46Z

Swaaye: categories

Yamaha is a Japanese company that manufactures audio equipment, among many other products. Their audio chips are often used on third-party sound cards.

== Sound chips ==

=== OPL2 ===
The Yamaha OPL2 (YM3812) is the chip used on the original [[AdLib]] card and clones. This is an FM-synthesizer chip, featuring 9 two-operator channels.
OPL2 is an abbrevation of 'FM Operator type L2'.

=== OPL3 ===
The Yamaha OPL3 (YMF262) is an extended version of the original OPL2 chip, adding an extra register base for a total of 18 two-operator channels. Twelve of these channels may be combined to form six four-operator channels.
Each channel can be routed to a maximum of 4 output channels, though there are no sound cards that actually use all four. Normally only the first two channels are connected to a DAC (YAC512), providing crude stereo support.
The first soundcards equipped with an OPL3 chip include the [[Creative Sound Blaster Pro 2]] and the [[AdLib Gold]].
OPL3 is an abbrevation of 'FM Operator type L3'.

=== OPL3-SAx ===
[[File:YMF718-s.JPG|200px|thumb||YMF718-s based sound card]]
The Yamaha OPL3-SAx is an all-in-one sound chip, featuring [[Creative Sound Blaster Pro 2|SBPro2]], [[Windows Sound System|WSS]], [[Roland MPU-401|MPU-401]] and OPL3 compatibility. Chipsets featuring it include YMF-701, YMF-711, YMF-715, YMF-718 and YMF-719. The last two are probably rebranded YMF-715s. 
Drivers include a XG-compatible softsynth which although having some tuneable options is largely inferior to other such solutions from Yamaha.
Windows 2000 and XP support these chipsets out of the box, requiring no external drivers.
Sound cards using these chips were manufactured by Aopen, Labway, Genius and Addonics, possibly others. 
The OPL3-SAx is a popular choice with retro gamers, and is often praised for its excellent compatibility and low noise level. Its MPU-401 interface does not suffer from the [[hanging note bug]] present in certain [[Creative]] sound cards. For best sound quality, the internal amp should be disabled by jumper and all settings in the driver set to zero and setting the output type to hi-fi. The main drawback of most cards with these chipsets is that they cannot house regular-sized daughterboards due to being too small. A possible workaround is creating an own cable.

== Wave Blaster modules ==

=== OPL4 ===
...?

=== DB50XG ===
Released in 1995, the Yamaha DB50XG is a wavetable synthesizer daughter card for the [[Wave Blaster]] connector. It is compatible with General MIDI and the Yamaha XG standards. The unit features 676 instruments, 16 Parts and maximum 32-note polyphony. It features 2 operation modes: XG and TG300B. The software synthesizer S-YXG50 is 100% identical to this particular series of hardware, with the 4 MB soundfont possibly being a dump of this card's ROM.

=== DB60XG ===
The Yamaha DB60XG is an extended version of the DB50XG, sold only in Japan. In the rest of the world this card is known as the NEC XR385.
It is exactly identical to the DB50XG, with two extra analog sound inputs that can be routed through the effects processor. It is rumored that the analog inputs were meant for karaoke or related applications.

== Expansion cards ==

=== SW60XG ===
16-bit ISA expansion card, standalone version of the DB50XG/DB60XG. Features no codec and is only a pure XG synth.

== Sound modules ==

=== MU80 ===
The first XG compatible device, released in 1994. 729 instruments, 32 parts, 64-note polyphony.

=== MU10 ===
Sound module version of DB50XG released in 1996, no LCD screen.

== External links ==
*[http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3-19990518/cabpool/1403848.cab Free Yamaha S-YXG50 for Windows 2000/XP]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Sound Cards]]

Creative Labs

2013-03-11T20:37:31Z

Swaaye: categories

[[File:Soundblaster_32_IDE_PNP_(CT3600).JPG|200px|thumb||Sound Blaster 32 IDE PNP (CT3600)]]
[[File:SBlive.JPG|200px|thumb||Sound Blaster Live! (CT4830)]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:Sound Cards]]

Category:Hardware

2013-03-11T20:35:49Z

Swaaye: Created page with "Computer hardware articles"

Computer hardware articles

Matrox Mystique

2013-03-11T20:35:11Z

Swaaye: categories

Paradise Tasmania 3D

2013-03-11T20:34:01Z

Swaaye: categories

Western Digital/Philips

2013-03-11T20:33:40Z

Swaaye: categories

*[[Paradise Tasmania 3D]]

[[Category:Hardware]]
[[Category:3D Cards]]