The only PC desktop accelerator that could be considered early depth testing would be tile based 1996 PowerVR. ATI introduced HyperZ in 2000 Radeon DDR (R100), Nvidia followed in 2001 with GeForce 3 LMA. From what I remember Radeon compressed Z gains were surprisingly minimal, like 10-20% when turning it on/off, but Im sure it became crucial later on when real shaders (2.0) started being used.
The idea that we should ever allow companies to gate how we use hardware is a joke. The sustainability here is just wildly off the charts impressive. We as a species have blanket legal right to fix things we buy. Any legal monkeying that that from is us an affront to all of us, and if applicable whatever god or gods that made us.
There's no good reason to get emotionally attached to obsolete hardware unless you are running a museum or just doing something cool. AMD doesn't hack on a Radeon R100 for the same reason everyone else doesn't: it's obsolete. It makes more sense to get a modern bargain-bin $30 fanless graphics card than to make your R100 work in any modern computer.
I agree that this is more silly than practical or useful. It's just that old. It's ridiculous.
Reciprocally though 10 even 15 year old GPUs (half as old) are actually often pretty good and useful, for a lot of people. And they're what some people have. Many have multiple 100's of GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is pretty potent even today! That they can be so much better and that they do keep getting better is pretty amazing.
The biggest downside imo is power efficiency. A lot of these cards are on older hotter processes. They lack modern instructions and have to brute force various features. Some signficiant downclocking, undervolting can help a lot for this!
Consumer GPUs have really slowed in progress a lot, especially since 3xxx. With the pressure to upgrade diminishing significantly, I feel like there's an increasing need to have good long term support and care. I don't see anyone but open source as willing able or interested in putting in long term care for products in general. And the broader hope of open source: those willing able and eager to keep making sure the street can find its own use for things. That we can go as far as we might dream.
Not require, just recommends Pentium 60 minimum. Like Quake Tomb Raider loves pipelined FPU, 30 fps on Pentium 60 vs 15 fps on 486DX2@66 and 20 on DX4@100.
> The FDIV bug affects the 60 and 66 MHz Pentium P5 800 in stepping levels prior to D1, and the 75, 90, and 100 MHz Pentium P54C 600 in steppings prior to B5. The 120 MHz P54C and P54CQS CPUs are unaffected.
In that era there definitely were killer deals that just spread like wildfire among people who knew. And ABit built their brand catering to overclockers/tweakers, much to the annoyance of Intel lol.
There was also that Hitachi 19" CRT that could do 1600x1200 rock solid, and had a nicer than most shadow mask CRT. A big lot of those went up for sale super cheap on ubid or some site like that and we all found out about it through Something Awful and similar forums. We lugged those 60 lb CRTs to our small dozen person group every other weekend, along with full size ATX towers as you did.
That combo with the Voodoo2 SLI was the king rig for quite some time.
I was one of the heretics that went from a Voodoo1 to a Riva TNT2 because I was also fooling around with 3d animation apps, and the TNT2 could at least try to make those go.
Iirc the only way of getting near 30fps on a socket 3 board is by bumping the bus to 50mhz, having fast cache and a 5x86 and enabling branch prediction and the fpu optimisations. And then wait for it to fault out. Never tried it with an Pentium overdrive though, maybe that will work but those do not like higher bus speeds. Might also be a nice difference in DX4s since the amd and cyrix parts have different fpu implementations to the intel ones.
Last week we had four train-truck collisions at Polish level crossings resulting in derailment and passenger death, and afaik 2 or 3 involved foreign truck drivers.
Kioxia is Toshiba, The most known company from the list, and it doesnt make any ram
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