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3D : A Brief History
Since the days of Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake the gaming industry has evolved from humble beginings to what we have today. Who would have thought that these small shareware games (Wolfenstein & Doom notably being available with only a few of the levels unless you paid to get the rest) that this would mold and shape the things to come.
Bottom end of it is the programers creating these engines to make life a bit easier when creating new games as they have the structure already there. Look at the most popular online game today : Counterstrike. Started off as a mod for HL and now it is world known and played by the masses.
First off these engines were run without the aid of our 3D generation cards, they were compiled to run in an environment that required little to no resources at all. Microsoft DOS, still used by a few companys today in business and the initial backbone of the Microsoft Empire.
Then everything changed, we saw the first generation 3D cards becoming available. Orchard Rightous and 3DFX (R.I.P) released a 3D accelerator known as the Voodoo 1. A patch was released for the first Quake game and it was accelerated to crisp beauty through the DOS environment. I remember seeing this running on the 3DFX for the first time, from the pixelated visuals of Quake to crisp clear rendered imagery, it looked amazing at the time.
We then started getting an influx of these rendered games right across the board. From Capcoms Resident Evil and even GTA 2 albeit that had to run through DOS for the acceleration. Still the new found power wasnt overly being used by developers just yet.
I remember reading in the magazines Epic Games were doing something special, that we had never seen before. This project was Unreal (literally), it could be run under standard software rendering, but if you were lucky enough to have a Voodoo card then this was going to look something special. Huge outdoor areas, fully rendered and accelerated through the first generation GPU.
However 3DFX had something new for us. The Voodoo 2, it came in 2 flavours 8 Mb and 12 Mb. However, we did have an option to power things up a bit more. SLI (Scan Line Interleave), this was where if you had either two 12 Mb cards or two 8 Mb cards they could be conected together internally (you couldnt mix them, it had to be two the same) and what happened was one card controlled horizontal and the other card controlled the vertical.
We started to see a big change in the way games were developed, games like Grim Fandango (Lucasarts), Resident Evil (Capcom) were using the Voodoo acceleration to tidy up everything onscreen and give us a better gaming experience.
We then had yet another change, AGP came in. Data transfer was made faster due to more pins to connect the card to the mainboard. This wasnt the first time AGP had been used, IBM had developed it many years before but it was to expensive at the time to implement so was put on the back burner for the time being.
This opened up a whole new area. N Vidia and ATI both released their fisrt generation cards. N Vidia released the Riva TNT and ATI released the RAGE chip. We musnt forget about S3, SIS and Intel also, they released accelerators at this time (S3 Savage, SIS 6346 & Intel 742) but the brands didnt really take of to well, N Vidia and ATI had the world watching. At this point in time Matrox stepped in also releasing their G400 card, the only real competitor to N Vidia and ATI. I bought one of these cards when they were released and remember it played really well.
From this moment things really started to heat up, we saw the N Vidia TNT2 Ultra edition released shortly after the standard TNT 2 and ATI released the Rage Pro 128. N Vidia took the lead over ATI, selling more units worldwide.
From here the battle was on for more power at affordable price. Games were becoming more detailed with this new found power and most released titles had the option to run in Software, 3DFX Glide or Direct3D.
These cards were the last of the first generation, N Vidia released their Geforce 256 and in 2000 ATI released their Radeon 32 Mb. 3DFX were still around at this time releasing their Voodoo 4 and 5 but the rumour mill was out that N Vidia was in the process of buying out 3DFX.
I know I havnt covered absolutely everything here, I did state brief, there are many other cards that deserve a mention, the Voodoo 3 for instance. Fantastic card that didnt require any additional card to run alongside it. There was the Kyro 1 & 2 chipset, PowerVR and S3 who always seemed to sit in the background now and again popping their head up with something new only to be knocked down by the giants N Vidia ans ATI.
Just like to thank the developers for their time to make the gaming world a better place today with their hardware, everything has to start somewhere and will always be remembered in the PC's history.
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Originally Posted by Dareos
The good old days 
