Originally posted by: Steg55
Oh and a message for GTaudiophile
Fanboyism is more or less accepted these days - everyone is biased towards either nVidia or ATi in some way. Obvious fan boys posts will be shuned by the otherside and accepted by the side you support. However, insulting the genius of 3DFX will get you nowhere, and the community will happily stand together and support 3DFX, nVidia or ATi fanboy alike. 3DFX will forever remain as the best EVER producer of graphics processing units and holding the most 'Firsts' in the graphics industry. Hell, every time your machine renders a textured polygon its using techniques first developed by 3DFX with the first ever 3D proccessor. This may well be a fanboy post - but the difference is that EVERYONE can respect the might of 3DFX.
Steg
It's always fun to read a fanboy's post directed to another alleged fanboy from the "other camp".
Anyways, if you were to study your computer-graphics history, you might realise that SGI's work in 3D rendering predates 3Dfx's, probably by more than a decade, actually. As far as advanced hardware 3D ASICs go, 3DLabs (not 3Dfx) was there first too, with full hardware-acceleration of the OpenGL pipeline. (SGI's solutions, afaik, were not single dedicated ASICs, but rather whole dedicated subsystems.)
Oh yeah, SGI invented GL. (This was before it was renamed "OpenGL", and became multi-platform.)
What 3Dfx did though, and I give them full credit for this - is to jump-start the consumer PC market for advanced 3D hardware accelleration on the desktop. They were in fact the first true PC 3D "accelerator", especially in that they were dedicated for 3D rendering only, and required to piggy-back onto a regular 2D graphics card as well.
So while 3Dfx may have been pioneers in their own right, and I give them the respect that they are/were due, they did not invent 3D graphics themselves.
What brought about their downfall too, was ironically their own arrogance, and their belief that they could do no wrong, which is unfortunately a belief shared by many of their supporters. They refused to *really* innovate, sticking with 16-bit color instead of introducing 32-bit color support like their competitors, and stuck with PCI and a PCI-like AGP implementation, instead of embracing the AGP standard's full feature-set like their competitors. Indeed, I see NV's resurgent interest in "SLI" technology, to be a hallmark of true innovation here. Even though the technology was pioneered on the PC by 3Dfx in this case (although this new version is actually different technology, load-balancing instead of true SLI), the fact that NV is willing to go the extra mile to support it, ahead of their competitors that don't (yet) have an equivalent feature, is IMHO "innovative", and sets them ahead of the pack, for now.
I really hope that the concept of "load-balancing" in general, on the PC hardware platform, gets a lot more interest. It's one of the features that SGI's graphics subsystems were IMHO famous for, in that they could dynamically vary the 3D rendering load of their graphics systems, in order to maintain a steady frame-rate, by reducing lesser details from the scene during periods of heavy load.
No doubt that if companies like ATI tried this, they would be blasted by claimed of "cheating" in their driver-set, even if doing such would lead to an advantage during gameplay, where smooth framerates are critical. The way things stand today, games have varying "loads" that they place on the PC's graphics subsystems, and that in order to maintain a smooth minimum framerate under those maximum loads, they have to over-specific their graphics power, simply to handle these smaller peak loads. It would be much better if the loads could be dynamically reduced, in order to maintain a smooth framerate instead. Therefore you wouldn't have to break the bank on the fastest accelerator out there. Then again, that might cut into profit margins on the high-end cards, so that is another reason why current PC graphics companies don't add that feature to their drivers.
If some company ever does though, I nominate to call it "SmoothFrame" support.
In fact, depending on how NV and/or AW is doing their load-balancing between cards in their driver set, they could apply similar techniques to reduce loads on a single graphics card.