Euge’s Ramblings

Sing to the tune of John Lennon’s classic, Imagine.

Imagine there’s no 3D.
It’s easy if you try.
No AGP for us, inside your rig, only PCI.
Imagine all the world’s games
rendered in 2D…

Imagine there’s no Anti-Aliasing,
It isn’t hard to do,
Nothing to gib or frag for,
No Z-buffers too,
Imagine all the world’s games,
looking like Commander Keen…

Imagine no T&L,
I wonder if you can,
No need for 3dfx or NVIDIA,
Your computer’s just 2D trashcan,
Imagine all the world’s games,
sharing a chipset from S3…

You may say I’m a dreamer,
I might be the only one,
I hope some day you’ll buy a 3D card
And all 3D game fans can play as one.

ripped from http://archive.gamespy.com/halloffame/october00/voodoo1/index.shtm

Yes the voodoo1 was a revolutionary piece of hardware for its time.  Up until 1996 or so, there was no 3d in games; they all used the 2d card in your computer (and hence were really slow and ugly).  I remember the first time I ran GLQuake; not only did it look a thousand times better, but you could run higher resolutions for the same framerate as 2d.

Now video cards are more complex than CPUs; the latest 5870 from ATi has more than 2 billion transistors.  And they can do more things than just play video games; they can transcode video or crunch Seti many times faster than a CPU.  Pretty soon it will be hard to distinguish a game from the latest Pixar movie (here’s nVidia’s new GF100 architecture).

Truly a good time to be a gamer.