|
a few decades ago I used to do annual trips to the ECTS trade show in London to visit various hardware vendors, try to blag new video cards for 'QA' purposes (e.g. beating the qa team at lunchtime quake sessions) and it was fun stuff. matrox, s3, 3dfx, ati and nvidia (ha, rubbish)... one year the nvidia guys were all excited and like 'guess what guys, hardware tnl', and they were right. it worked and it was good. it was the future. ati reps looked a bit sad but said they had stuff in the pipeline. matrox laughed and claimed it was a passing fad, the future was having multiple monitors at once! oh how we chuckled at them. anyway, s3. now s3 were a funny lot, i'll get to them. 3dfx - they were a stuck up bunch of asshats cos they currently had the no1 slot, the voodoo3 or something. they viewed nvidia suspiciously, and said 'wait til next year'. next year came and they revealed their grand plan - strap 4 voodoo4s together , and have each one render a frame and then blend them together and you have sort of antialiasing and motion blur, but no hardware tnl, a funny burning plastic smell, and an electric bill that foreshadowed the coming crypto craze by a decade. anyway s3... so most of the reps we met were a boring bunch of muppets with a couple of exceptions. ati and s3. thezse guys were young and liked to party, and literally had expense accounts to get devs drunk so they would maybe be disposed to implement CustomFunction for their cards. they listened to the devs pointing at the hardware tnl anmd saying 'do that guys'. only.. s3. you se, people didnt go out and buy an s3. not if they really had a choice. but s3 did supply the oem market with cheap kit, so you would often get an s3 whether you wanted one or not. and they were... ok. nothing flashy or top end, tho at this time it was many fish in a small pond fighting over hardcore pc gamers. yes, it smelt bad. anyway, roll on the year after. s3 guys are there looking a bit sad. we try to blag free hardware, they give us the sideye, then invite us to the hotels where they have bathtubs full of beer. classic distraction techniques. the new card looks good, but everyone looks sad, turns out they rushed the production of the chip, some designers quit, who knows, but the upshot is there was a hard crash in the tnl clipping and the cards were useless. they hosed up big style, and that was that. ati were the only other ones to add hardware tnl that year, and the rest is history. E: Protip if you ever get sent to these sort of things. give your business card to each and every HW manufacturer like candy, and big up how you need to test stuff. Then you get loads of free gear turn up. thats not the trick - the trick is you immediately take them to tech support yourself, and with the right nudges and winks you make sure they get kitted out, get yourself the pick of the crop too, then you can team up against the poor QA boys on their s3s and intels. OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Jul 29, 2022 |
#
¿
Jul 29, 2022 09:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 12:38 |
|