Worst Game Graphics Cards - Cirrus Logic Laguna3D
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- Retro review of 1st 3D card from Cirrus Logic named Laguna3D.
Big THANKS going to F2bnp for english voiceover and english editing.
Test in many other games can be found at vintage3d.org/c...
GlidFPS tool can be found at www.vogons.org...
Chapters:
Cirrus history - 0:57
Tested cards - 13:06
Drivers - 14:23
Final Reality (1997) - 15:05
3D Mark99MAX (1999) - 17:29
Tomb Raider 2 (1997) - 18:06
Forsaken (1998) - 19:45
Shadows of the Empire (1997) - 20:53
Warhammer Dark Omen (1998) - 22:39
Moto Racer (1997) - 24:29
Croc (1997) - 26:10
Sub Culture (1997) - 27:11
MDK (1997) - 28:13
Turok demo (1997) - 29:57
Wing Commander Prophecy (1997) - 31:12
Incoming (1998) - 33:17
Carmageddon 2 (1998) - 34:50
Shogo (1998) - 36:16
Wipeout 2097 (1997) - 37:27
Expendable (1999) - 38:19
Half-Life (1998) - 39:25
Aliens vs Predator (1999) - 40:51
Unreal (1998) - 41:59
Conclusion - 43:04
3DMark99 demo - 44:37
Tested on:
Intel Pentium III 1GHz, Coppermine
Gigabyte GA-60XET rev. 1, Intel 815EP
2x256MB SDR PC133, Western Digital WD800JB, IDE 80GB
Windows 98SE, resolution 640x480x16bit upscaled to 1920x1080.
Background music:
Mist by Odonis Odonis
Sunspots by Jeremy Blake
Love these deep dives into these largely uncharted and unknown historical pieces. Truly a unique part of PC gaming to be documenting!
PixelPipes Hey Nathan. Where did you disappear?) Still waiting for Voodoo 5500 vs Rage Fury MAXX battle man)
@PixelPipe hey, good to hear you comment here, I really appreciated your content :)
Oh I love this videos about weird graphics cards! Back then there was so much choice, every company trying to push the limit.
Cirrus Logic has a special place in my heart. I was building a PC for my dad out of parts collected from the junk yard. And had almost everything, all I needed was a Pci-E graphics card because the on-board VGA connector on the motherboard was broken. And I searched inside almost every PC that was thrown in the Junk but couldn't find any, until I come across this PCI Cirrus Logic 5440 with 1Mb of video memory. I took it only for fun, never had any experience back then with PCI video cards. And it worked just fine. I put it into the PCI slot of the motherboard and I managed to finish installing Win7 while running on 800x600 with 4-bit colors. It was crucial to have a picture on the monitor to verify the motherboard and other components were working. The system was later upgraded, of course, to a PCI-E Nvidia 7500LE for higher resolution and color depth. I was a nice project, I had fun and impressed my dad by building what he later used for a couple of years until it started to feel slow and then was thrown where it came from. The specs were nothing to brag, on the contrary, a Socket 775 motherboard with an C2D E8400, 2GB DDR2, 80Gb Hdd and the 7500LE. Fun times... :)
Great story. We're you a kid back then?
This series is incredibly underrated, it's always great to see more of it. Amazing work as always
The Laguna3D 4MB PCI was actually my first "gaming" graphics card. Not only performance was subpar but compatibility was an even bigger issue, games had glitches, crashes, some even refused to launch, many didn't even recognize the card as a valid 3D accelerator. Apparently those compatibility issues were solved with later drivers and various game patches but I didn't have the patience to wait for them, I grew tired of having to resort to software rendering more often than I would have liked and I eventually bought a Voodoo 1 and it was like a revelation. 😅
i worked on that chip. we told mangement what we should build. they told us what to build. it failed.
Hi, are you willing to give some small interview about working on it for my vgamuseum.info site? I always wanted to know more background info about designing those chips, but never had any contacts on people doing them. Things like what tools you used, how big was teams, hardships in making 1st 3d card, what people were working on it, how much time it took, what was goals, what went wrong, what do you did after, any funny or interesting stories etc. Basically everything that was at the time under NDA and only info available was few interviews with PR teams in some paper magazine. I think im not only one eager to hear some backstory from development, sadly theres noone to ask as names of engineers working on chips are not publicly known, unless they mention that fact on their linkedin resume.
the results weren't that bad
Ahh, the classic design-by-committee malarkey
Generally, a running theme of the Worst Game Graphics Cards series is companies from the 2D era jumping into the 3D accelerator market without the right vision. I mean, no customer was willing to spend $100 or $150 of their hard-earned money for a 3D accelerator that would fail to run games or run them very poorly (like their CPU already did), but the management of those companies was convinced that such a market existed.
I like to watch the comments list on those videos because they make me very happy with how nice you guys are! Credits go to vlaskcz for doing the grunt of the work on these, but I am very thankful that I can be a part of this. Thank you so much for the lovely comments, keep keeping it retro!
The Voodoo 1 performance just humiliated the Laguna 3D... 3dfx made something special those days.
Thanks for this great detailed episode.
I couldn't help but notice the video quality on the Voodoo card, it was surreal.
On the Turok example, the distance fog looks more correct on the cirrus card, on the other one there's simply a hard cutoff.
Yeah, I was surprised by that.
Same issue on expendable with a second look. The distance fog looks normal on both card in Subculture though. Maybe the were some issues with the fog functions on the Voodoo1 cards or their API implementations.
The 3dfx voodo capture looks like it has something off with the contrast but I presume that's just the capture.
@@olnnn Contrast might be issue with recording card or just circuits on tested cards getting old......
I worked on the CL5465 and the originator or named on most of the patents for this part, we were transistor limited to about 25 million transistors on the die as this was to be a low cost card.. so naturally it was missing a lot of features of later hardware. But we were first to do AGP and it was capable of a high 25 pixel triangle count of around 2.5 million triangle per second, but the setup engine was missing and we had to do it all on the host which limited our maximum output to around 200k triangles. The pentium was awful at floating point and the triangle setup was pretty intensive,.
Also... there was no D3D spec when this was designed, there was OpenGL but we didn't have the gate budget to go full OpenGL.. transparency required multipliers and a read back path which would also cost more in gates so it was a no go.
All in all it did as expected, you could bank textures in host memory and it operated as a true bus master for display list operations which is how we measured triangle performance. On a PCI bus it was capable of about 100 MB / sec which was near maximum for the time and there were some fairly complex memory optimizations for tiled memory and texture caching which were patented and eventually sold to Nvidia over time.
It's tragic that the Cirrus Logic bailed once Intel announced that they were entering the graphics space with the 740, CL gave up 500 million dollars in revenue on a 1 billion dollar company revenue. Most of our designers for the 5465 ended up at Nvidia and the Intel graphics market never really materialized.
The whole point of 3D accelerator cards is to offload floating-point-heavy tasks (such as triangle setup) to the ASIC circuitry of the card, if the management of Cirrus Logic didn't allow for enough transistors to do triangle setup on the card, that's on them, not on the Pentium (which had an impressive floating-point performance for its time). Also, did you ever consider faking transparency with a checkerboard pattern like the Matrox Mystique did? (see relevant video in this channel)
Really surprised Cirrus Logic actually developed something that actually worked in 3D, and ran much better than S3 and Trident!!
Too bad they decided to cut the loss, instead of continuing the development.
This is an improved 3DO M2 graphics processor, a canceled console supposed to replace the first 3DO in 1997. So this not really "developed" by CL, at least not from scratch.
I just finished the video, what can I say... a Masterpiece, covering so much games and explaining as many details as possible. I only hope to see more of these series, maybe doing a spinoff BEST Game Graphics Cards. Thanks.
Nope, best ones are mostly covered much better by well known youtubers. I have only rare graphics cards spinoff and doing this only to have some video to show on my pages :-)
Btw best ones from that era are Voodoo 1, Rush, Ati Rage Pro and Riva128.
And theres also another good reason for testing these bad ones - they are full of bugs and missing features :-) Sometimes is fun to watch them....
vlaskcz I understand, I have many cards in my collection, mostly 3dfx ones, I also have had pretty rare and unusual cards but I sell them because don't want to become a hoarder :)
If you have a list of cards you're looking for let me know, maybe I can help :)
@@registrazioniduemillaotton6030 Ofc i have one, who not? :-)
vgamuseum.info/index.php/trade/item/744-exchange-list#wanted
vlaskcz you run the Vga museum website? Wow, that is my Bible man! Find me on Amibay or Vogons as aaronkatrini and send me a PM. I have the V3 1000 and one Infograph card from your list. I've had some other cards that you're looking but unfortunately I've sold or traded them... Cheers!
This is the type of stuff we all need right now
Wow, what an absolute stinker that card was. The broken perspective correction is just hilarious. You don't see the AVGA chipset come up very often, but I do have one built into my Acer 386 motherboard. Thanks for another great, detailed video!
Thank you for the very in detail review of this card. It was a pleasure to dive in 3D gpu history and watch this awesome review.
Thank you again and looking forward for your next video (whatever it may be).
Thank you for great video. I expected this card to be much worse. Some minor issues to fix and increase speed could make this chip competitive in next generation.
I found this video while looking for drivers for this video card.
Great episode again. My gut feeling is the card suffers from poor drivers more than anything else. A lot of suppliers had this attitude that they supplied the chip, the vendors were responsible for the drivers. Downfall of many a chip.
Great video. Looking forward to more videos like this. Btw Cirrus is pronounced ‘see-rus’. Cyrus was a famous Persian king.
Japanese computers from the 90s made by NEC, specifically some the NEC PC-9821 models, have Cirrus Logic chips built in. Interestingly enough, these chips are assembled in Windows 9x computers are break compatibility with many MS-DOS games.
Nice video! you deserve better subscribers my dude!
Looks like they had something, with some further refinements to improve on the framerates, they could have certainly been a real competitor to the upcoming Rage 128 and Voodoo 2
Wow, so his is how it achieved its performance. Cheap, low number precision. That Texture-warping and vertex-flickering looks ANCIENT. Even for back then.
I did not realise the history of the GD5465, I owned a 4MB one back in the day!
hwInfo added that card by your request? pretty cool! :D
Thanks for the review! I am also fond of old 3D accelerators, I have Expertcolor LA5440 (DSV5464) PCI 4Mb RDRAM. My opinion: it does not deserve a rating higher than 2. Numerous artifacts in games, low speed, no support OpenGL. There are many shortcomings, few advantages.
Hey, I've got that Video Seven Vega VGA card pictured at 2:32! Found it in an IBM 5170 that I bought from the original owner. I figured it was an upgrade card he installed at some point, and it's really cool cuz it'll drive CGA/EGA monitors as well as VGA.
very nice video dude!
3x slower, 3x cheaper. makes sense LOL
Makes you wonder if it had a low level API like glide how much better it would've done.
In honesty though, the colors look a lot better on the Cirrus card
your not wrong.
Turns out RDRAM was a disaster not only for CPU usage ... Cirrus Logic (just like Intel) got captivated by RDRAM bus speeds but totally forget about bus width. At 215 MHz and 8bit bus width, RDRAM it is just as capable as 64bit EDO at 26MHz ... (just raw estimation). That's why it struggles against Voodoo 1 which has the same texture fillrate (50 mtexels/sec). It simply bottlenecked by Vram performance, which is visible in more complicated scenes.
I wonder how much time and money they lost adopting this ridiculous technology ...
Nintendo didn't have any problems with it.
@@redleader6442 What? The N64 experiences frame rate drops precisely due to the RDRAM and its extremely high latency and narrow bus, which is also shared for the entire system.
Love the series. I have one question though: Rendition when? :^)
When i got into my hand verite 1000, then it goes into rare cards. Verite 2200 is too good to be considered as bad card and too common for rare ones....
@@vgamuseum That's what I would love to see. Real 2200s aren't really common though...
@@ShadowsBehindU Well these days maybe, but i think its mostly done on youtube already....unlike many other cards....
ruclips.net/video/qCGG-U1wxUc/видео.html
3DFX butchers texture resolution but renders so much smoother than the Cirrus.
Very interesting. As we can that Voodoo is number 1. Card from 1996 handle games from 98 and later. 95/96/97 very interesting era, so many different 3D accelerators, with their own api’s. One thing I don’t like in Voodoo 1 & 2 their to bright render. Of course like!
Yo, I thought you had stopped doing these videos
This is approximately what 3DO 2 graphics would have looked like. I'm sure the performance would be slightly higher without Direct3D weighing it down 😂
Of course, and the lack of optimization too. On the other hand, this is paired with a much, much faster CPU.
The 3DO 2 exists as an arcade Machine though. The Konami M2.
@@MalheirodsAlso the Voodoo Dreamcast as the Konami Viper
Honestly, I think I expected worse 😆 Back in the late 90s I would have been more than happy to play Turok on my PC at 15-20FPS
Would be interested in how it compares to the S3 Virge
You can see how it compares in the charts toward the end of the video.
AAAAAAAA!!!! Cirrus logic! Not Cyrus!!! Cirrus is a type of cloud.
It could always be worse, the ATI Rage would simply crash 90% of the time. Except for a handful of native titles that ran in 320x240 it was only good for playing software rendered DOS titles. Laguna looks a little janky but I would have been happy to play any 3D game at 15 fps at the time.
nice but driving me crazy with the pronunciation of cirrus 🤪
Cyrus🤣
maybe if this card had come out with 8mb of ram it would have played games better. sort of like the voodoo 1 with 8mb or the voodoo 2 with 12mb
@B3ro1080 Voodoo 1 came out with 4mb and 6mb. later an 8mb version came out with most made by skywell magic and they have a black pcb. they are rare but plenty of pictures
No this is mostly a driver issue. A lot of faster graphics chips were available with 4mb (Intel I740, Riva 128, PowerVR PCX1/2, 3DFX Voodoo...)
These earlier cards didn't need more VRAM than 4-6MB. What they desperately needed was better drivers most of the time and less errors in design (like RDRAM? srsly? lol). Voodoo 1 worked just fine with 2MB framebuffer and 2MB texture memory. For 1996-1997 it was sufficient enough for playing early 3D-accelerated games at 640*480*16bpp.
Great review! but... isn't it unfair to compare it to cards that cost two or three times as much?
Nope, its made for fans of retrogaming. Today you can buy cheap almost any card from that era. These videos are made as warning - and ofc so you can compare how much Voodoo/ Riva128 is better.
If i wanted to compare these cards by their price i had to also use period correct pentium 1 PC, because these cards had also different requirements of cpu to show their true performance.
Since i guess that today is anyone able to use any CPU, i choosed very strong one, so not a single card will be limited by cpu. Just to show their real maximum performance.
@@vgamuseum understood!
@@vgamuseum Well mostly cheap except for the some 3D accelerators like the Rendition Verite V1000 cards,nVidia NV1 cards,PowerVR cards and a few others.
I sold a Sierra Screamin 3D new in the retail box unopened for $860 USD on eBay.
I had purchased it a year before on eBay for $5 USD and $18 USD shipping and I was the only bidder and got lucky.
gotta vs this thing against S3 virge..
Great job, subbed
21:22 slippedi n a 3070 there 999 fps! the future was then! 3dfx was secretly a 3070 lol
Seer us logic, not psy rus logic.
Cirrus, like the clouds.
Imagine it being a Wrecking Ball... no that's Cyrus.
Personally i was seared like a well done piece of steak.
I believe that MDK uses voxel 3D engine, thus its not 3D accelerated. No wonder that FPS is roughly the same running with the same CPU.
I don't think it's voxel based.
Aaaaah. i had the laguna 3d. And then a Trident 3D Image 9700. And then went to a voodoo2.
Would be funny to overclock the shit out of it
Yeah, but its kinda hard, because no overclocking tools for these were made. And im not that good to be able programm my own.....not talking about missing programming manuals....or datasheets.....
ikr?
Would like to get a pci dvd decoder just to overclock it.
Another thing to add to the list of stupid shit i overclocked :P
@@vgamuseum changing the crystal could work
final reality (remix edition)
edit: what version of wipeout is that?
Wipeout 2097
@@vgamuseum thanks. I need to check it out.
A 3d deaccelator.
I always find a video like this, right after I commit to buying some that has the exact thing that I find out will suck before it even gets delivered... It's a Toshiba Satellite laptop that has an 8mb.. oops, I remembered as I type this, it as an 8mb Trident AGP video chip . Never mind 😹😹
Imagine betting the farm on a whizbang 3d technology from a big player, and it turns out they sold you a lame horse.
the whizbang was a whizpop followed by a fizzle.
My ATi Xpert@play was just a little better than the CIRRUS logic
voodoo²x2, all the way up to 2000...
titulky tentokrat nemame? :(
Nemáme, ale budou. Nejdřív musím přidat a načasovat anglické a následně přeložím do češtiny. Když to půjde dobře, tak to snad bude ve středu.
Super, teším sa :) Dúfam, že bude čoskoro ukázaná aj nejaká ďalšia karta
It might have been a bad performer but I prefer the image colours and contrast. The 3DFX looks very washed out
It can be fixed with gamma settings though, which are available in 3dfx drivers settings in Windows and as environment variables in DOS. For some reason many reviewers always leave it at default values and by default these settings are unnaturally high for some reason, which ends up with washed out picture. On earlier cards they were even higher by default, but then someone at 3dfx came to their senses and lowered them a little, but still the default gamma was higher than needed. I remember I lowered the values to 1.1 first thing after installing the Voodoo card in both DOS and Windows environments and it always looked much better than the default values (1.3 or 1.6 depending on the card and drivers).
Look at the Turok footage - it might be more than just a gamma issue. The 3DFX side seems to be missing a number of vertex-shading effects.
@@darkfalzxYeah, I noticed there are at least some problems rendering fog correctly on the Voodoo in this particular footage. I don't know what's up with that. Turok is a Glide game, I myself played it on Voodoo many years ago. Everything should work just fine, every effect should be rendered correctly. In this case it might be a driver issue, or some compatibility problem (for example, the CPU might be too fast for Voodoo 1)
It's no comparison when viewed on a decent CRT of the time. The Laguna3D was a piece of e-waste from the moment it left the factory floor.
Diky super video
My grandmas/grandpa pc: "are you challenging me?"
you are czech you using windows 95 in czech
When showing graphics comparisons it helps to have the gameplay synced so you can compare scene for scene and texture for texture. This was borderline useless.
My RTX3070 gets 42.86 Reality Marks in Final Reality.
its ser-us logic
Still better then consoles
Idk man my Atari looks faster than this
this card is total rubbish :D
Это самые крутые видеокарты были во времена ms-dos.