The Geforce 3: why?

[GiGaBiTe]

It's worth it if you want to run 800x600. A normal 4 MB card doesn't have enough FBI memory to go above 640x480, or 512x384 for games that have a Z buffer.

 

[rmay635703]

I put my Voodoo 5 AGP back in its box when I was done with it (purchased new at bestbuy). I have a few Voodoo 1,2,3 cards purchased either new or on ebay a decade later. My Voodo 4 PCI was found in a free machine somebody gave me, and that is kinda rare.

There are a bunch of different Parhelia versions out there some of which are cut down. I wanted a PCI-X version for a long time but prices are stupid for them.

After Parhelia flopped I bought one for <$99 (was cheaper than whatever GF2 was then)
to resell a socket A (windows 2000) system I wanted to unload. (Had cheesy graphics)

I would have bought more of the cards but they didn’t work with 9x

Also used some 32mb SIS cards of various flavors, oddly not as bad as you would expect

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a SIS AGP something or other card NIB I got from eBay for next to nothing ages ago just for the heck of it (have yet to open it). If you are going to test unknown motherboards that don't have built in video a cheap low end card is he way to go.

I did purchase a cheap Diamond Speedstar A50 (SIS 6326) for a spare machine and it worked ok for an 8MB non-gaming card.

Before I snagged an ATI 9000 card, I used a Kyro II GPU, and it worked well before T&L became mandatory. I miss the days of competing graphics chips and technology.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I miss the days of competing graphics chips and technology.

Same. Now its pretty much "what model of nvidia can you afford?" or "oh, all the RTXs have been snapped up by scalpers and cryptominers? Well, I guess I can use an AMD card for now..."

This is part of what drives me to the retro world. Old hardware is just more interesting.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Same. Now its pretty much "what model of nvidia can you afford?" or "oh, all the RTXs have been snapped up by scalpers and cryptominers? Well, I guess I can use an AMD card for now..."

This is part of what drives me to the retro world. Old hardware is just more interesting.

Retro computer parts have the same problem with scalpers and worse. Like those dirt bags that snap up keyboards that are required for machines to function and jack up the prices on them, or buy machines and tear them apart to sell piecemeal at inflated prices.

The age of video cards being snapped up for crypto mining is over, because everyone that wanted cards, already has them. They're also not profitable anymore unless you have hundreds of them, so that pushed all of the small players out of the market. Crypto cards are being dumped right now.

Though, that isn't going to bring down prices because both AMD and Nvidia saw how much people were willing to spend for video cards and keep their prices astronomically high accordingly. With the rise of AI and other intensive GPGPU computing, the PC gamer market is now in the back seat and they have no reason to lower prices, because everything will always sell.

 

[Unknown_K]

From what I seen the high end GPUs still sell to people with the money will buy them. The problem is people have switched to consoles for gaming or are getting by with low end (not very profitable) cards.

GPU's are very expensive and even Nvidia is putting more effort into other markets (AI) other than gaming now. AMD probably makes more money on CPU's then GPU's chip for chip.

Crypto was a fad where most of the mining was done in China anyway. If anything, it boosted AMD and NVidia's profits for a few years to fuel more R&D before sales crashed. AI is also a fad in my opinion as people think it can do everything but can't (just makes up bullshit output with bullshit input).

 

[Unknown_K]

The keyboard craze only happened because whole machines were worth much less than the keyboard alone (which was easier to ship). There are also plenty of retro machines in bad condition where parting them out makes more sense than trying to sell them as is (or are made of brittle plastics where shipping is not an option). People want $75 a pop for old VLB graphics cards these days because they are harder to find, and some people will pay that (I won't).

The spike in GPU prices annoyed me not because I want a new high-end GPU, but because I wanted the older cards for my collection and people held onto them longer than they should, and prices went up.

 

[rmay635703]

If they would fix the $199 Intel 770 gpu to actually be capable of running/emulating compatibility with retro games they aren’t actually that terrible price/vrs performance at the moment now that the driver sets are somewhat AAA compatible

 

[Agent Orange]

Starfield is the latest video game and the minimum specs are a 5700/1070 - 5 2600X/ I7-6800K. Those specs date back to about 2014-15. A 5700 goes for about $110 and the 1070 for about $210 depends on where you shop. Cyber Punk 2077 specsare even less demanding and will even run on a Bulldozer. The point is you can play some of the latest games and not break the bank. Caveat: You may not see all of the top end features in those games unless you have the latest and greatest hardware but you will be able t play. I don't think the hardware here is in the collector class yet.

 

[Unknown_K]

$200 for a Geforce GTX 1070 that came out in 2016 for $379 new is a bit much don't you think? The Radeon 5700 came out much later in 2019 but was also $349 new.

 

[Moondog]

I just picked up a 1050ti for a desktop I built in 2013. It had a gtx 460 in it, and it would occasionally blue screen with an error which pointed to the video card, and started showing artifacts on the screen. I was surprised how much vendors are asking for older cards.

I used to build a new system every 2-3 years using 2nd tier parts, however 10 years ago I got out of gaming, and what I still run are older titles.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

If they would fix the $199 Intel 770 gpu to actually be capable of running/emulating compatibility with retro games they aren’t actually that terrible price/vrs performance at the moment now that the driver sets are somewhat AAA compatible

Intel is never going to support older games. They already dropped DirectX 9 support from their Arc GPUs, and only provide compatibility via an emulation layer that translates DX 9 calls to DX 12.

OpenGL support is even worse. Intel never did properly support OpenGL on any of their graphics chips, going back to the i740. Games that use immediate mode rendering are going to be a bad time.

I'm honestly surprised that current AMD and Nvidia GPUs have such extensive backwards compatibility, you can run stuff going back to Windows 95 fairly easily. They could have dropped that a LONG time ago now.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I'm curious when people are going to start using FPGAs to emulate vintage graphics cards. There's already a thriving cottage industry cloning old sound cards. The GPUs are a bit tougher, but slap an FPGA on a board and in theory you could emulate any AGP card before a about the last few generations.

 

[Unknown_K]

If AMD and Nvidia already put the effort into emulating old DX's in hardware, why remove it. Intel never had to spend the resources to do that so they won't now.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

GPU drivers are highly proprietary. Trying to program an FPGA to be completely compatible with a 20 year old binary driver you don't have the source for that might do (read: does) all manner of awful undocumented things with the at-best sketchily documented hardware sounds... Sisyphean. Let alone trying to make it behave in a completely "cycle-accurate" manner to the original.

Honestly I don't ever see this happening, for a number of reasons, but the main one is simply that, generally speaking, the fact that games from the Windows 9x era onward targeted APIs instead of the hardware directly kind of renders this moot. I mean, sure, I get that building "retro rigs" out of Pentium 4s and AGP video cards specifically for running video games made between year X and Y is a thing people are doing right now, but the brass tacks is that many of of those games can run perfectly well on modern hardware using API translation. It seems pretty pointless to spend money on an FPGA big enough to emulate some specific early 2000's video card when all the game software cares about is API support. API translation is an extremely powerful technology, and done well the performance hit from it can be pretty negligible. Yes, there's overhead, but even the cheapest laptop with integrated video has several times the horsepower of a "retro rig" to work with. The complaining about Intel's ARC GPU support for DX9 games is kind of a special case; DX9 is a 20 year old API that Intel apparently neglected to notice was still being used by several popular game engines, and they did a lousy job optimizing for it. But that said, does anyone believe the games so affected would literally run better on a 20 year computer? Nobody really needs this, but even if they think they do...

... You're going to need a *very expensive* FPGA; the biggest FPGAs available today have between five and ten million logical units, which sounds like a lot, but using them to emulate some specific piece of hardware custom designed and optimized for its role will use them up very quickly. It's hard to make a direct translation between "logical units" on an FPGA and GPU transistor counts, but by the mid-2000's GPUs were already flirting with a hundred million transistors, which were of course arranged "optimally"; I would guess that trying to do cycle-accurate emulation of anything more advanced than... maybe a GeForce4? just isn't going to be doable, and based on what people are doing with computer emulation I'm thinking that might be exceedingly optimisitic. You could undoubtedly use the FPGA's resources more efficiently to create an optimized "3D accelerator" using a driver tailored for it (which of course would be missing the point of building this thing at all), but that's still going to be a *lot* of work. For context, a group called the "Open Graphics Project" tried to create a fully open-sourced 3D graphics card using (multiple) FPGAs in the mid-2000s; after six years of development they released a massively expensive PCI card that *kinda* worked as a framebuffer but it appears the project died before ever achieving a working 3D accelerator. (And given the constraints of the FPGA's available at the time the end result would likely have been inferior to *really* low-spec 3D cards like the Riva128.) Even if a bunch of people got together *today* to start churning out an FPGA Voodoo card or whatever I suspect there's not going to be a lot of working AGP computers left to stick it in before they're finished, and the cards' going to make what the eBay scalpers are charging for old Nvidia cards look like nothing.

 

[Agent Orange]

$200 for a Geforce GTX 1070 that came out in 2016 for $379 new is a bit much don't you think? The Radeon 5700 came out much later in 2019 but was also $349 new.

Just did a quick search on some site for prices, UK. You're up on this more than anyone else here on the forum.
;w

 

[NeXT]

I'm curious when people are going to start using FPGAs to emulate vintage graphics cards. There's already a thriving cottage industry cloning old sound cards. The GPUs are a bit tougher, but slap an FPGA on a board and in theory you could emulate any AGP card before a about the last few generations.

Lets go full crazy.
I'd have to dig for the photo again but it popped up in my feeds last week that someone had completely bypassed emulating 3DFX silicon in an FPGA and opted to instead graft a chip onto a new card with a bridge and a PCI Express slot. No, this is not the guy who made a Voodoo5 work on a PCIe to AGP bridge board.
In fact, I've seen a LOT of repro 3DFX cards coming out lately that are using original 3DFX chips, so either they have access to a lot of unused tray chips or they are already actively stealing them from original boards rather than starting over from scratch.

 

[Agent Orange]

I just picked up a 1050ti for a desktop I built in 2013. It had a gtx 460 in it, and it would occasionally blue screen with an error which pointed to the video card, and started showing artifacts on the screen. I was surprised how much vendors are asking for older cards.

I used to build a new system every 2-3 years using 2nd tier parts, however 10 years ago I got out of gaming, and what I still run are older titles.

Fooling with PC's, old or new, sure beats scraping stamps and sorting through a pile of pennies for that 1909 Lincoln VDB. (been there done that) Have to admit, it takes up a little more room though.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

The only GPUs that could feasily be implemented in FPGAs are 3dfx, because they open sourced the Glide API shortly before their demise in 2001. You theoretically wouldn't even need to copy the 3dfx core, you could just implement something that ran the Glide API. But that is really pointless since Glide wrappers have been around for decades and work in almost all cases just fine.

If you go back even farther into the 90s, some chips from various manufacturers are already being emulated.

 

[Unknown_K]

Lets go full crazy.
I'd have to dig for the photo again but it popped up in my feeds last week that someone had completely bypassed emulating 3DFX silicon in an FPGA and opted to instead graft a chip onto a new card with a bridge and a PCI Express slot. No, this is not the guy who made a Voodoo5 work on a PCIe to AGP bridge board.
In fact, I've seen a LOT of repro 3DFX cards coming out lately that are using original 3DFX chips, so either they have access to a lot of unused tray chips or they are already actively stealing them from original boards rather than starting over from scratch.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/323658511158

Still available brand new , the VSA 100 is what was used in the Voodoo 4 and 5