The Rendition Vérité - The PC's first GPU
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- Опубликовано: 22 авг 2024
- Phew! This one took me a while to get done - I really hope you guys enjoy it! In this video I take a look at the Rendition Vérité, a deeply flawed card which had the distinction of being the first "programmable graphics processor" or GPU for the PC. It was also pretty much the only card that could compete with the Voodoo1 when it was released.. The GPU - you saw it here first!
#retrotech #gpu #rendition
3DFX did one thing very right. They reasoned that hardware T&L wasn’t needed; early games had to run in software mode which meant they had to have low polycounts; the cost of letting the processor do it was small. They also reasoned that everyone already had a 2D card on account of there being very little prior competition and most buyers upgrading an existing system. All the voodoo had to do was rasterize as many perspective correctly textured filtered pixel per second as possible. They lucked out with a big price drop in memory around the time of launch. 3DFX made a cheap and fast card with the minimum possible feature set.
Great documentary. Never heard about this GPU despite me reading all the magazines for 3d and "windows" accelerators back in the day.
The magazine snippets, actual capture footage and explanatory drawings truly elevate this video 👏
The story of Rendition I already knew, because I picked one up cheap back in the day. I had it in my AMD 5x86-133 and could impress my friends with Pentiums - but no 3D cards. Seemed like witchcraft how a 486 could produce smoother and better-looking images than the mighty Pentium 😊
When the first graphics card tests appeared in computer magazines, I always paid attention to error-free rendering of the games and good performance and that's where the Rendition Verite stood out.
I originally wanted a 2d/3d card, but none of it convinced me at the time, not even Voodoo Graphics because it was only a 3d accelerator. So I bought the cheapest 2d Cirrus Logic graphics card with 4 MiB that I could find to bridge the time in my brand new Pentium 2 266 MHz. The 486 I had before had no PCI slots.
And then came the Voodoo 2. It was so convincing with its 60 fps that I no longer looked for a 2D/3D combination.
I bought the Sierra version of this card and was happy with it. The Screamin 3d I think it was called. Thanks for the video and memories!
I still have my Diamond Stealth II 4 MB. Here is the impressive part; I had added heat sinks to all VRAM chips as well as a heatsink and fan to the GPU (thank you Radio Shack!) and was able to overclock the thing from 35 Mhz ----> 70 Mhz stable. It wouldn't post at 72 Mhz. Find me a graphics card that can pull a stable 200% OC today! Anyway...that was my first OC attempt back in '97...went well! Except for the superglue...don't use superglue! Not sure thermal paste was readily available back then, or I just didn't know about it! The card.........still runs!
Very informative. Especially the magazines excerpts from the era. Subbed to your channel at 1/4 into the video.
Thanks so much, and glad you enjoyed the video!
@@ohsoretro5612 same here! Motivated to test my V2100 on my Pentium 233MHz.
@@pascalmariany Do it! Do it! Its actually a pretty decent card when you get it all setup and working properly, and it has that "weird/rare" factor that you dont get with other cards! :)
Such an awesome video! Thank you for sharing this! I really need to enjoy some Descent II on the Verite. It's quite impressive to truly see side-by-side just how good that game looks when rendered in hardware. I really liked the fact that you described this card as the first GPU too--because it truly is! The Verite is something I've always loved--it's like if TIGA graphics or the Matrox Impression had matured, and were supported by more than just CAD software; it's a feature-rich GPU and you really highlighted just how much it could do! It'd be interesting to see what could've happened if Rendition stayed around. The Voodoo 1 really is a close match to this, and as compelling as it is to buy a Voodoo 2, for games that require DOS 3D acceleration support--and for those that don't appreciate the Voodoo 2 (to say the least)--this is a really nice alternative. I'd say I use my Rendition more than my Voodoo 1, and that the output on the Verite is sharper, even if using a Matrox as a 2D card on the Voodoo! Thank you again for this! What an awesome video, and I really loved how much more you covered than I did. I think the whole Z-buffering implementation issue (or really, tyhe utter lack thereof...) is such a cool thing to explain! As much as the Verite should take more load off the CPU, it doesn't in some circumstances, and that's probably when a Voodoo is the better bet!
You’ve sold me on collecting one of these cards. Never heard of them in the 90s, go figure! Great video!
My setup of back in the day. Had a Diamond Stealth II S220, loved that card, later i added a voodoo2 to the pc. After a year or so after buying the voodoo2 i exchanged the stealth for a matrox g200, for faster and better 2d graphics.
super well researched! i had a v2200 in those days and loved it, it was a great upgrade from the virge.
The PS1 also didn't have a Z buffer and yet it still ran 3D games fine.
very well presented and researched
I remember oogling the Rendition V1000. Thanks for this well produced and researched video. THOROUGHLY enjoyed it!
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed it :)
Tomb Raider did look wonderful with the Rendition card I had back then, and now I got one second hand and going to build me a retro pc to re enjoy all the games as I did back then with RENDITION card.
I could have sworn Renditions native api was the beginning of D3D, I remember a article covering how Direct X grew. When Rendition started falling Microsoft took their API and made it part of Direct X and making D3D a standard.
Great video! I have two slot 1 P266's and one has a Voodoo 2 8mb, and the other has the Diamond Stealth S220 Verite 2100 4mb and I absolutely love the Verite! It is fun to go between the two and see the differences. Yes the Voodoo 2 is a beefier card, but the Verite holds its own admirably. I actually play with the Verite more BECAUSE it is a lower powered card! It is perfect for games from 1997 and older, but I must say that I have not experienced many problems with DOS games. They seem to run just fine on mine, but I'm sure that there are some that won't.
Really enjoying your content and keep up the great work!
I gave thumbs up, despite the music in the background ;-)
I wish I could find a first gen Verite to run IndyCar Racing II on, but at least here in Germany it looks like the market is empty.
Awesome documentary! I remember wanting a Rendition Verite, but I couldn't afford one at the time. I didnt get a 3D graphics card until I was able to get a Voodoo 1 second hand and by that time the Voodoo 2 was already available. The Voodoo 1 still amazed me!
I had an S220 back in the day. Bought it just so I could play NFS3 at a reasonable frame rate. It did no disappoint. Pretty good and it was really cheap.
Great informative video, now I need to find myself one of these cards too 🙂
I was never a fan of straight bilinear filtering. Without trilinear it had sharp and ugly mipmap borders. Without anisotropic filtering it was tremendously blurry on any surface not directly facing the player. The standard remedy for this at the time was to jack up the resolution; but even 1024x768 bilinear looked like ass compared to 640x480 with AF. Games like Quake and Half-life didn’t have the detail to jack up resolutions that high without it looking out of place.
I still have ths video card somewhere in my garage. I used it for playing id Quake and Quake 2.
Technically a GPU also does Hardware Texture and Lighting. I had a Rendition Verite V2200 8MB and I played a lot of games with it back in the day.
Not really the first, but the first to be aimed at the general consumer segment. The professional / workstation segment already offered a few cards at the time(by 3DLabs, Intergraph and others).
I had a Verite 3D Blaster back in the day. Believe it or not, I was able to run OpenGL games with it, even GLQuake. For the life of me, I can't remember how I did it. I do remember searching all over the Net for a solution. It may very well have been a beta driver from Rendition, but I'm not sure. Maybe even an unofficial solution from some random programer out there. It could be that it had something to do with its programmability, but again I can't remember. :( That card lasted me until I got a Voodoo 5500. Yep, I sure knew how to pick 'em, eh? :P
Thanks for the view! Yes, the first Verite's definitely could run OpenGL games, they were just hampered by their lack of a hardware z-buffer, so performance probably wouldn't have been great. I ran GLQuake on my v2100 here (which has a hardware z-buffer) and it actually got higher frame rates than vquake!
Great video. Don't know if you count GPU as programmable chip, I think something similar were the TiGA cards way back in early 90s (TMS04010 & 20 chips) but I may be wrong here
I owned a 3d blaster PCI (V1000) and was great!!
I bought a Sierra Screamin 3D version of the Rendition Verite v1000E I think it was back in 2017 on eBay. It was completely new and shrink wrapped unopened in the box and I was the only bidder on the item. I bought it for $5 USD and a few months later I sold it for nearly $1,000 USD to a collector from Germany. I hated selling it though because it was so special.
I guess you at least made a very nice profit, but I can imagine that was a difficult one to sell! Thanks for the story, and the view!
good video, never had a chance of trying or owning one of these.
Thanks for the kind words! They are pretty cool cards, pity about the delays though - they could have much better remembered if they came out 6 months earlier
Nice video!
Hi, what is the name of the music in the background? Nice video btw :)
Someone really needs to write a Verite emulation for DOSBox.
There is one. RReady Rendition Verité available on the Vogons forums or the Microsoft Store.
There is one, RReady Rendition Verité, available on The Vogons forums or the Microsoft Store. Runs all 13 RRedline games and a lot of the Speedy3D games. I'm the developer BTW, shamelessly plugging my code.
Never heard of it! I thought the first was the geforce 256
I also did!.. until I started looking into the way the vérité worked!
nvidia riva 128 1997 was the real first fully supported 3d card already ahead of rendition2 then followed by next generation tnt and tnt 2 ultra then g256 was the first programmable gpu 1999
@1:11 GamerInVoid whole channel is full of low quality stolen footage & meme compilation garbage. "Evolution of Video Game Graphics | PS1 - PS5 | 1996 - 2020" clip you took this from has both PS1 and PS2 segments done in emulator. This isnt how 3D looked on PS1.
@1:25 Descent 2 might be a weak argument for "vastly improved floating point calculation speed of Pentium" because Descent 1 looks and runs the same? while using exclusively fixed point math :-)
@13:40 is that spinning cube running in Verite accelerate mode? Something is seriously wrong with perspective correction, there is none. Did they disable it in their own demo? :o
@13:50 45 fps? That would most likely be Voodoo2. Voodoo1 plus fast CPU on default settings 512x384 mode gets up to ~30fps, 640x480 is ~25. Unless you tweak everything to absolute ugly minimum, then you can get up to ~55fps in 640x480.
@1:11 - thanks, I didnt know that about that channel, I was just looking for footage of arcade machines and PS1. I never actually had a PS1 so I don't really know what it actually looked like, but I'll make a note of your comments for future videos!
@1:25 - it wasn't really meant that way, I just meant that there were newer, more advanced games coming out at that time. I could have/should have used quake but the rest of the video was already pretty quake-heavy so I wanted something different.
@13:40 - yes that is the Rendini demo from the "Take it to the RRedline" completion. It does look pretty weird I know but I always try to show the Demo Scene some love in my videos if I can.
@13:45 - Thats a fair comment, and I did actually make a mistake about the resolution here - I was actually playing in 512x384 for most of my quake stuff, so its not 640x480. But, depending on the speed of your processor you could quite easily get 45fps on the voodoo with a few performance tweaks, which I remember using back in the day when I ran GL quake.. see here for more info: www.soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/compare1.htm
but yes, on default settings you would be only getting around 30fps on the voodoo 1, you are correct :)