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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, around that time there were quite a few "hopeful" 3D cards/chips that ultimately didn't quite cut it. I couldn't spare the cash for a 3dfx card at the time, but I wanted a 3D card, so I got an S3 ViRGE-based one. That chip later became infamous as a "3D decelerator" because with hardware 3D rendering most games were slower on a decent PC (albeit a little prettier) than with software rendering. The only game I ever played on it with 3D enabled was the bundled copy of Descent...

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In 1996 I had got my first PC, I wanted a 3D card but didn't have the technical knowledge to understand the difference between cards. I got a Matrox Mystique. It ran a couple of games well that it came with. It was completely incapable of playing GLQuake or any other titles I was interested in.

Sad thing is a salesmen had tried to convince me to get a 3dfx Monster3D, but I thought the passthrough dongle thing was trashy and cheap looking. Learned my lesson hard. To this day I research the crap out of anything I buy in the PC space before buying it.

That's the one I got for my first PC as well. I managed to out-do myself my pairing it with a Cyrix 686+. So not only did I have an unsupported gaming card, I had a CPU that didn't like doing floating point and ran quake like powerpoint. ...as you said,you learn from your mistakes.

I emailed Matrox and asked if support for GLQuake was coming and they emailed me back and said "We are currently working on the drivers" Total lie. The Mystique was completely incapable of supporting GLQuake. Live and learn. I had Voodoo 2 SLI like a year and a half later.

To be fair, 20 years later, I'm telling people "I'm aware of your issue and addressing it is on our backlog" [which currently extends beyond the collapse of the stars]

I remember being 11 years old and feverishly researching video cards to play unreal and quake 2 and basically was deciding between a power vr and a voodoo 2. This 3-4 month period, along with a few years later building a pc from parts contributed to my career in software more than anything else I can think of.

I got a version of Tomb Raider to run on the S3 decelerator also, not sure if it was the first, the sequel or both. Eventually a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee saved the day.

Intel's Iris Xe DG1 desktop card was not very performant either. Curious that they decide to build DG2 Arc/Alchemist 6nm Graphics cards at TSMC... I wonder why they chose not to build a CPU instead - an area where they are actually competitive.

Here's some nostalgia - https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2020-12-06-s3-virge-officially-sup...

I think that Intel is using TSMC because Intel having issues with their smaller process nodes. It probably helps that their lead GPU guy, Raja Koduri[0], worked at ATI (later AMD), so he's familiar with how TSMC does things (because TSMC has manufactured all of ATI/AMD's GPUs).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Koduri

And you get a nice bonus that every wafer Intel buys can't be used by AMD/Nvidia.

S3 Virge 3D rendering was faster than software rendering unless you wanted bilinear filtering - then it wasn't :)

Virge fastest modes were around Pentium 100MHz software rendering speed.

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