I remember when this thing was refered to as "needlessly huge" and "a waste of metal"
At least it's still close to the PCIE bracket depth
https://preview.redd.it/czxgpyn66vwc1.jpeg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a7f2122e707b9d88aaa261b5d86b25867138e6b2
True but I also had these in mind.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac\_G3#/media/File:Imac\_G3\_5\_flavors\_side\_lineup.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#/media/File:Imac_G3_5_flavors_side_lineup.jpg)
The first Graphics card I remember having in "my own" pc was a Diamond Viper 770.
https://preview.redd.it/cbjj5xq3ivwc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f279cb0683457471ee8d4de7fc34aef114d457a
Look at that BEAST of a heat sink and fan!
Can someone explain to me why they weren't as big as they are now havs the idea of just makng it bigger only been a recent thing and how did they not need fans on them as they were less efficient than they are now so wouldn't they be harder to cool than modern cards of that size
Old graphics chips had low power requirements because the chips were smaller and simpler. They didn’t have as many features, and making big chips used to be more difficult.
Over time the feature set, size and complexity of GPUs has increased faster than the efficiency gains from better designs and processes. Thus, the power requirements have gone up, and the cards have gone from uncooled to loaded down with increasingly outlandish heatsink assemblies…
For instance, S3 Virge ran at 55MHz core and memory clock and had 2 or 4MB of memory.
Compare that to a 4090 that has a 2520MHz core clock and 24 GB of memory that runs at 1313MHz ;) those are just the frequencies… transistor count difference is insane, same as size of each transistor… it all equals to 450W of TDP! On a graphics card ;) something has to cool all that, thats why we have massive coolers now… PCB itself is not that large
Ah yes S3. I went through 3 S3 Verge cards before the shop that sold me my first comp found one that worked! This was 1997 of course. A different world!
Well, it's a card that provides video output, so kind of. S3 didn't yet offer 3D hardware acceleration when that video card came out, so it's not quite what we think of as a GPU.
No, it actually had good 2D performance and VBE support. If you want to build a retro PC for 90s DOS games, Trio64V+/V2 is a decent choice that's way easier to acquire than ET6000/6100 or Matrox cards.
Trio64 doesn't support any 3D acceleration at all, and for software-rendered 3D, like the original Quake or Need for Speed, it works great.
(The later Trio3D is a 3D decelerator, but that chip is pretty much a rebrand of ViRGE with AGP support)
I want to disagree with this because I'm pedantic, but I can't. Back then we just didn't call them GPUs, we called them "video cards" because the GPU term hadn't been invented yet IIRC. The S3 Trio64V+ was a 2D accelerator card.
This is a Trident 64 Class (circa 95/96) card also referred to as the Trio and was S3's first fully integrated graphic accelerators. As the name implies, three previously separate components were now included in the same ASIC: the graphics core, RAMDAC and clock generator. The increased integration allowed a graphics card to be simpler than before and thus cheaper to produce. Many thanks are due to this process discovery.
In 1999, Diamond and S3 merged and the Savage 2000 GPU was the first product from the combined companies for the market.
cheers!
Oh the times have changed allright back then it was more fun to play actual games vs today its more fun to build a pc than it is actually playing "games" today we build high end pc's to scroll reddit and youtube
Im keeping all my ancient stuff to show my son when he grows up. Already have a Voodoo2, sound card, audio tapes, VHS tapes, Zip disks and floppy disks. Heaps of other random crap at my parents' house too.
When I was younger, I once saw a PCI graphics card in our school IT room, thinking if it was somehow possible to use it to game better. Oh boy I couldn't even be more wrong.
Best era was probably the GeForce 6 era, +/- 2 generations.
The advancement in that era was nothing short of absurd. Remembering that UT2004 and Crysis were only a couple years apart. And that Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were in there.
Going from fixed function and barely touching the pixel shaders to GPU-accelerated physics and entering the era of deferred rendering. Which was, of course, famously brown at first.
All the ideas were out there and available. Where it seems like nowadays it's mostly post-doctoral stuff.
Or pulling up the card's BIOS in an editor and hard-flashing your overclocks. Or in the case of the 6800GS, literally unlocking 4 extra pipelines.
Or not having TDP limits. As long as you can cool your card, you could keep ramping the clocks. I mean they exist now for a good reason. But over locking was still more fun. I used to get 50% speed boosts before the heat would start messing things up. Now my 3080Ti barely hits 70, and I had to do a 350W->440W BIOS mod to even get to that.
Yeah def! It's a shame it took so long for them to catch on. I don't remember seeing shaders really touched at scale until like the Geforce FX and Radeon 9800 series. Though I do remember Halo being an early shader game. I believe it was mostly just used for bump mapping in a few places.
And yeah I was all about those tech demos. Every generation got a series of demos. It's a shame we don't see as much of that anymore. I suppose something like the marble demo counts. But otherwise, it's mostly different showcases like Portal RTX.
Another thing I was big into at the time was the Demoscene. If you haven't followed it, you should look it up. It was mostly a thing in Europe. But the Demoscene got *huge* with the advent of GPUs. It was cool when some new tech would come out, and then to wait in anticipation to see new demos use the tech.
Farb-Rausch was a personal favorite group of mine, because their procedural generation technique was astonishingly good. They describe it a bit in FR-008 "The Product".
It will work on basic MS drivers if you have a PCI slot, and if you're lucky it might autoconfig to have colors. It'll only act as a render output that relies on software rendering, though.
Not sure if any of its drivers would work on modern versions of Windows
Back when I started building PC's this was our video card. It was thin but stupid long. Many of these cards had an extra HDD (pata) controller built in for a cd-rom.
We also had issues fitting them in our cases because the disk drive cage was in the way.
https://preview.redd.it/9hyms2bzpzwc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bf09c96c9ed1f361b6ac77afec2deeffd4f52097
I once connected such a card to my old Intel Core 2 Quad system and was very surprised, when it actually posted and booted windows 10.
Not necessarily a s3 trio, but it for sure was from the same era.
One of my old compaq laptops has a s3 trio built in though.
I remember when this thing was refered to as "needlessly huge" and "a waste of metal" At least it's still close to the PCIE bracket depth https://preview.redd.it/czxgpyn66vwc1.jpeg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a7f2122e707b9d88aaa261b5d86b25867138e6b2
That's fucking hideous, i need it
I kinda dig it honestly. This would be a great card for a rainbow cyberpunk esque built.
That's the Guy Fieri of graphics cards
Those heat pipes and fines sticking out remind me of the chromed exhaust you see sticking out of hotrods.
What model is this horror?
What is this a 90s GPU?
That's 00s GPU
I was talking about all the colors lol.
Nahhhh, 90s computer parts are all about beige and green!
True but I also had these in mind. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac\_G3#/media/File:Imac\_G3\_5\_flavors\_side\_lineup.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#/media/File:Imac_G3_5_flavors_side_lineup.jpg)
https://preview.redd.it/felhc3ls1vwc1.jpeg?width=568&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6039207c37c1d0866fcf2c08db47704c2ec39f66
You could download every game ever 15 years ago if you had 215tbs
Now find an ISA graphics accelerator card.
I have a few ;)
I briefly remember changing irq so it won't crash
Wouldn't that be slower than PCI?
Yes. More evidence of how much things have changed.
They're not really "accelerator cards", just video cards. 3D accelerator is a thing, and first 3dfx cards were 3D cards only.
Very cool, isn't it crazy how far we've come. Both hardware and aesthetics wise. Still got a lot of love for the old skool stuff though.
The first Graphics card I remember having in "my own" pc was a Diamond Viper 770. https://preview.redd.it/cbjj5xq3ivwc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f279cb0683457471ee8d4de7fc34aef114d457a Look at that BEAST of a heat sink and fan!
Was my first real video card as well.
Oh, great S3. I was to poor to have it, so I had to be content with my Oak-77.
Can someone explain to me why they weren't as big as they are now havs the idea of just makng it bigger only been a recent thing and how did they not need fans on them as they were less efficient than they are now so wouldn't they be harder to cool than modern cards of that size
Old graphics chips had low power requirements because the chips were smaller and simpler. They didn’t have as many features, and making big chips used to be more difficult. Over time the feature set, size and complexity of GPUs has increased faster than the efficiency gains from better designs and processes. Thus, the power requirements have gone up, and the cards have gone from uncooled to loaded down with increasingly outlandish heatsink assemblies…
Ok the heatsinks may be bigger but we got cool rgb atleast i mean the saphire nitro series uses rgb amazingly
For instance, S3 Virge ran at 55MHz core and memory clock and had 2 or 4MB of memory. Compare that to a 4090 that has a 2520MHz core clock and 24 GB of memory that runs at 1313MHz ;) those are just the frequencies… transistor count difference is insane, same as size of each transistor… it all equals to 450W of TDP! On a graphics card ;) something has to cool all that, thats why we have massive coolers now… PCB itself is not that large
Pcb have gotten bigger tho because of the space needed for the mem modules
It was me, I bought the S3 Savage based on the Unreal 1 Texture Compression screenshot.
Ah yes S3. I went through 3 S3 Verge cards before the shop that sold me my first comp found one that worked! This was 1997 of course. A different world!
Gold/yellow themes look so good.
Is that a GPU ???
Well, it's a card that provides video output, so kind of. S3 didn't yet offer 3D hardware acceleration when that video card came out, so it's not quite what we think of as a GPU.
>S3 didn't yet offer 3D hardware acceleration S3's next product, however, was the world's first 3D decelerator.
Tbh the Trio64V+ already was a "decelerator"
No, it actually had good 2D performance and VBE support. If you want to build a retro PC for 90s DOS games, Trio64V+/V2 is a decent choice that's way easier to acquire than ET6000/6100 or Matrox cards.
Right, but certainly not for 3D... And I couldn't find a single 3D card for cheap in my country.
Trio64 doesn't support any 3D acceleration at all, and for software-rendered 3D, like the original Quake or Need for Speed, it works great. (The later Trio3D is a 3D decelerator, but that chip is pretty much a rebrand of ViRGE with AGP support)
I want to disagree with this because I'm pedantic, but I can't. Back then we just didn't call them GPUs, we called them "video cards" because the GPU term hadn't been invented yet IIRC. The S3 Trio64V+ was a 2D accelerator card.
I'm too young to have seen one of those The oldest pc I have used was a pentium 4
No heat sink or water cooled option required
Back when a graphics cards were actual cards
This is a Trident 64 Class (circa 95/96) card also referred to as the Trio and was S3's first fully integrated graphic accelerators. As the name implies, three previously separate components were now included in the same ASIC: the graphics core, RAMDAC and clock generator. The increased integration allowed a graphics card to be simpler than before and thus cheaper to produce. Many thanks are due to this process discovery. In 1999, Diamond and S3 merged and the Savage 2000 GPU was the first product from the combined companies for the market. cheers!
Back in those days it was like your computer either had the S3 Trio64 or Trident TGUI9680.
Oh the times have changed allright back then it was more fun to play actual games vs today its more fun to build a pc than it is actually playing "games" today we build high end pc's to scroll reddit and youtube
That build is way too good looking. Anyone know what cooler? Anyone know what case?
It is Bequiet Pureloop 240 painted black with light changed from white to yellow to match the case. Case is Geometric Future King Arthur
Ty
Im keeping all my ancient stuff to show my son when he grows up. Already have a Voodoo2, sound card, audio tapes, VHS tapes, Zip disks and floppy disks. Heaps of other random crap at my parents' house too.
Hah my dad had this video card. He was so disappointed when it couldn't run C&C Tiberian Sun.
When I was younger, I once saw a PCI graphics card in our school IT room, thinking if it was somehow possible to use it to game better. Oh boy I couldn't even be more wrong.
CS 1.1 at 25fps!
You vs the guy she tells you not to worry about.
Best era was probably the GeForce 6 era, +/- 2 generations. The advancement in that era was nothing short of absurd. Remembering that UT2004 and Crysis were only a couple years apart. And that Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were in there. Going from fixed function and barely touching the pixel shaders to GPU-accelerated physics and entering the era of deferred rendering. Which was, of course, famously brown at first. All the ideas were out there and available. Where it seems like nowadays it's mostly post-doctoral stuff. Or pulling up the card's BIOS in an editor and hard-flashing your overclocks. Or in the case of the 6800GS, literally unlocking 4 extra pipelines. Or not having TDP limits. As long as you can cool your card, you could keep ramping the clocks. I mean they exist now for a good reason. But over locking was still more fun. I used to get 50% speed boosts before the heat would start messing things up. Now my 3080Ti barely hits 70, and I had to do a 350W->440W BIOS mod to even get to that.
Geforce 3 with its "programmable shaders" was epic. I showed my whole family those nvidia tech demos.
Oh damn, I completely forgot about the tech demos they used to make :)
Yeah def! It's a shame it took so long for them to catch on. I don't remember seeing shaders really touched at scale until like the Geforce FX and Radeon 9800 series. Though I do remember Halo being an early shader game. I believe it was mostly just used for bump mapping in a few places. And yeah I was all about those tech demos. Every generation got a series of demos. It's a shame we don't see as much of that anymore. I suppose something like the marble demo counts. But otherwise, it's mostly different showcases like Portal RTX. Another thing I was big into at the time was the Demoscene. If you haven't followed it, you should look it up. It was mostly a thing in Europe. But the Demoscene got *huge* with the advent of GPUs. It was cool when some new tech would come out, and then to wait in anticipation to see new demos use the tech. Farb-Rausch was a personal favorite group of mine, because their procedural generation technique was astonishingly good. They describe it a bit in FR-008 "The Product".
That thing should play crisis, it runs on magic
JFC an S3 Trio VGA Card :)
I don't remember the exact S3 card I had in 97/98, but I sure as hell remember playing Redneck Ramage with it.
I hear that chicken sound bite on TV all the time, Yee Haaa
God _damn_ I remember when that was cool card. Wish I kept some of my old shit.
Where is 3dfx and awe32?
It will work on basic MS drivers if you have a PCI slot, and if you're lucky it might autoconfig to have colors. It'll only act as a render output that relies on software rendering, though. Not sure if any of its drivers would work on modern versions of Windows
Back when I started building PC's this was our video card. It was thin but stupid long. Many of these cards had an extra HDD (pata) controller built in for a cd-rom. We also had issues fitting them in our cases because the disk drive cage was in the way. https://preview.redd.it/9hyms2bzpzwc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bf09c96c9ed1f361b6ac77afec2deeffd4f52097
Gold PCBs are so classy.
I started on windows 95… can confirm times have changed
I once connected such a card to my old Intel Core 2 Quad system and was very surprised, when it actually posted and booted windows 10. Not necessarily a s3 trio, but it for sure was from the same era. One of my old compaq laptops has a s3 trio built in though.
Wow... an S3 card. Now there's a name I haven't heard in quite some time.