Old Creative 3DBlaster for VLB...
Brian Keener
length VLB card for 486 systems... Only a couple of games ran on it, I
believe.
Anyway, what kind of performance did that card have compared to, say, a
Voodoo 1?
Brian K
Nghia Diep
<sk...@webmail.bellsouth.net> wrote:
>Anyway, what kind of performance did that card have compared to, say, a
>Voodoo 1?
Roughly the speed of an S3 ViRGE. But it had built in sound and
quadratic rendering(?).
So much worse than a Voodoo1.
Brian Keener
Nghia Diep <nmd...@uclink4.berkeley.edu> wrote in message
news:SAlYOPSHhrgJ7=cn3CMDs...@4ax.com...
Hmm, I believe that was the Diamond card with the Sega gameports, with the
first Nvidia chip (the NV1 or something like that...)
But maybe you're right, I'm still looking...
Brian K
Nghia Diep
<sk...@webmail.bellsouth.net> wrote:
>> Roughly the speed of an S3 ViRGE. But it had built in sound and
>> quadratic rendering(?).
>> So much worse than a Voodoo1.
>Hmm, I believe that was the Diamond card with the Sega gameports, with the
>first Nvidia chip (the NV1 or something like that...)
>But maybe you're right, I'm still looking...
Oops, my bad. That Creative 3D Blaster used a chip from 3Dlabs. I
was confused because they (NV1 and 3D Blaster) both had Nascar and
Battle Arena Toshiden ported to them.
Better than a ViRGE.
But it's still worse than a Voodoo 1.
Brian Keener
Still looking...
Brian K
Lurker #15 <ye...@right.com> wrote in message
news:38592629...@netnews.worldnet.att.net...
> There are a few Creative "3D Blasters"
>
> The only VLB one I know of used the Rendition Verite1000
> I dont think any of them used a chipset from 3DLabs, altough the
> GraphicsBlaster Exxtreme used the Permedia2(v) from 3DLabs...
>
>
> The Diamond Edge3D used the First Nvidia Chipset (I think it was the
> NV1, some used the same chip but 'Fabbed' by SGS-Thomson) and had
> built in Wave-Table Sound and Sega Gameports...
>
> _______
> Lurker
Brian Keener
September 20, 1995
3D Blaster Brings 3-D Graphics to Gamers
The competition for 3-D gaming on the PC kicked into high gear as the
world's largest sound card company introduced a new graphics board that may
surpass the 3-D graphics power of Sega and Sony's newest 32-bit game boxes.
Creative Labs' $349 3D Blaster is only the first of a number of consumer
3-D boards expected to arrive by Christmas, most of which are designed to
harnass the multimedia environment offered by Windows 95. At least one board
expected to ship this fall is based on nVidea's NV1 Media Accelerator chip,
and others will arrive that are built upon the Yamaha 3D Rendering Polygon
Accelerator. The ATI Graphics Pro Turbo and the Matrox MGA Impression Plus
high-end consumer boards are already available.
The new accelerator boards go far beyond the chunky Doom-style 3-D graphics
running on standard graphics boards. By unloading the polygon rendering load
of the CPU, they offer better resolution, higher frame rates, greater color
depth and better 3-D effects like texture mapping and Gouraud shading.
The 3D Blaster is based on a trimmed-down version of 3Dlabs'
professional-level Glint 300SX chip. Creative Labs and 3Dlabs co-developed
the new chip, which can display 200,000 triangles per second, with pixel
fill rates up to 25 million pixels per second. The 3D Blaster features what
Creative calls 3D True Texture, offering true perspective texture mapping,
Z-buffering, advanced fog and alpha blending, and texture anti-aliasing.
Creative Labs claims it can display 16-bit, 640-by-480 double-buffered
graphics at 30fps, though the demo it showed at the launch was running at
17-20fps. The board also accelerates 2-D graphics.
The initial version appearing in November will be a VL-bus version aimed at
users of 66MHz 486 systems with 4MB of RAM, the minimum configuration.
"There's still life in the 486," said Hock Leow, Creative Labs' vice
president of product marketing for the 3D Blaster. "We have a large
installed base of 486 users. We don't want to penalize them."
A PCI version for the Pentium is due in late 1Q `96, and a version that
includes their AWE32 wavetable audio board will appear in mid-1996. In early
'97 they plan to introduce a version that also integrates a 28.8Kbps modem
built in for multiplayer gaming.
The 3D Blaster's 2MB of memory (1MB DRAM and 1MB VRAM) enables 16-bit
Z-buffering, important for tracking hidden moving objects such as jet
fighters. The design of the architecture enables developers to choose
whether they want to devote more memory to Z-buffering or texture mapping.
"If you have 100 fighter planes coming at you, you might not want to presort
[on the CPU]; you might want to let the 3-D engine sort it for you," said
Leow. "In this case, you would have to sacrifice texture mapping. In a
fighter game, that's probably OK since most of fighter planes are
flat-shaded anyway. Anything that is artifically designed is usually flat or
Gouraud; anything organic is texture mapped. The ISVs have to make that
trade off."
The $349 price includes six games that Creative Labs values at $250:
EA/Bullfrog's Magic Carpet Plus, Mindscape's Cybersled and Azreal's Tear,
Papyrus' NASCAR, PF Magic's Ballz Out! and Looking Glass' Flight Unlimited.
In addition, Creative said 200 developers plan to support the board. "We
expect 35 to 50 titles will support the board by Christmas," said Leow. "We
already have seeded 75 developers for a year, and they have been working on
titles since then."
Some of the first games will be Windows 95 games and exploit Microsoft's new
game SDK. Others will use Creative Labs' own CGL API for DOS and Windows
3.1-based games. The board supports all the major 3D gaming APIs:
Microsoft/RenderMorphics' Reality Lab, Criterion's RenderWare, Argonaut's
BRender, and Intel's 3DR.
This fall, the 3D Blaster's chief competition is expected to come from
boards built upon the nVidea NV1 Media Accelerator chip. The NV1 uses a
radical new approach to 3-D based on quadratic curved surfaces--rather than
concentrating on rendering individual polygons, it defines 9 control points
to realistically display a curved surface. nVidea claims the quadratic
approach removes stress from the CPU, leading to faster frame rates of up to
30fps. It also lets you perform tricks like manipulating a curved 3-D object
mapped with digital video.
While boards based on the nVidea chip will probably offer a less rigorous
3-D graphics implementation than the 3D Blaster--at least using traditional
3-D guidelines--the nVidea provides a more complete multimedia solution. In
addition to accelerating 3-D and 2-D graphics, the nVidea chip also
integrates 16-bit wavetable audio and can play back MPEG, Cinepak and other
video formats as texture maps at 30fps. (Creative Labs' Leow said he expects
they will add a video texture map capability sometime in 1996.) One other
advantage for an nVidea solution: Sega announced that it would begin porting
some of its Saturn games to the platform starting this fall.
Still, by the sheer weight of its marketing muscle and installed base,
Creative Labs' 3DBlaster is likely to be the top-selling 3-D graphics board
by year's end. At the August 16th launch, Sim Wong Hoo, the chairman of
Creative Labs' Singapore-based parent company, Creative Technology Ltd.,
announced that it had recently become the first billion dollar company in
the multimedia business, with revenues of $1.2 billion this year. The
company ships 1 million Sound Blaster devices per month, through 100
distributors worldwide, and products are sold in 35,000 stores in the U.S.
alone.
Assuming the 3D Blaster technology is as good as it looks on first glance,
Creative Labs is the favorite to dominate the 3-D playback market the way it
has the sound card market, where it enjoys a market share somewhere between
60 and 70 percent. There is a possibility, however, that Creative's 486/66
target platform might be slicing it too thin. The early adopter PC gamers
expected to buy the board, primarily men in their 30's and 40's playing
flight and race car simultation games, may have already upgraded to a
Pentium, the vast majority of which have PCI buses. In that case, Creative
Labs has opened a six-month window of opportunity for cheaper, more
powerful, or more multifaceted contenders to establish themselves on the
Pentium.
Still, Creative's 486 VL-bus strategy gets high marks from Fred Dunn, vice
president at John Peddie Associates (415/435-1775). "The installed base of
486 machines is huge," said Dunn. He went on to note that selling a total
multimedia package on a single board is not without its own peculiar risks.
"Do you duplicate functionality? Many people have sound in their systems
today. Putting myself in a consumer shoes, I don't want to pay for something
I already have unless it's clearly better."
While Dunn expects the 3D Blaster to be the front-runner this holiday
season, he expects overall sales of consumer 3D graphics accelerators for
the PC to be relatively small compared to the game console business. While
Creative Labs and its competitors can expect to sell a combined total of
"hundreds of thousands" of units by year's end, Sega sold a couple of
hundred thousand Saturns in its first few days on the market. Dunn said PC
game titles sales represent only 7 to 8 percent of of the game market. "Part
of that is a question of availability," said Dunn. "Creative Labs won't have
the production levels by Christmas to match the console companies. Also a
$349 street price is a bit pricey for an impulse buy."
In any case, Dunn doubts that the new boards will eat into the profits of
Sega, Sony, and Nintendo. "They make their money selling games, and they'll
make the money whether it's playing on a console or a PC." said Dunn, noting
Sega's nVidea announcement. "In the end they'll end up selling more games."
On the other hand, according to Creative's Mr. Sim (as the chairman is
referred to by the Creative Labs staff), hardware sales for games may move
quickly to the PC. "With set-tops [game consoles], the technology is fixed
for three to five years," said Sim. "But with the PC, it keeps growing and
growing."
--Eric Brown
Creative Labs, Inc. 408/428-6600
3Dlabs, Inc. (408) 436-3456; www.3Dlabs.com/3Dlabs
kweir2
combo my beast was faster than any pentium/video card combo at that time.
Ran the game Magic Carpet with ease at full detail. Forget what the racing
game was but it too ran smooth as silk. Though the did SCREW US OVER when
it came to D3D drivers. By the time they hit the airways the trusty old
combo couldn't handle the games.
Brian Keener <sk...@webmail.bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:839aeu$e1b$1...@mailint03.im.hou.compaq.com...
Brian Keener
below...
Apparantly Creative expected this same chipset to last up to 1997, virtually
unchanged except for added sound and modem...
If that were true, we'd be lucky if we were up to Voodoo1 performance right
now...
Brian K
lar...@imagex.com
card but they were buggy. Does anybody know if the drivers were ever
officially released?
In article <3iW54.8646$TT4.4...@news1.rdc2.on.home.com>,
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Brian Keener
those on a "bargain bin" sale maybe two years ago... i should've picked it
up just for the hell of it...
Brian K
<lar...@imagex.com> wrote in message news:850dr4$hlj$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...