hwertz
Posts: 644 +343
I was already running Linux back then; so for me a Rendition was a paperweight (neither Mesa or Utah GLX supported 3D on it.) Given how apparently slow the Windows OpenGL driver was, perhaps the hardware was just not well suited to how OpenGL did things.
I had a Voodoo (with a G400 for the 2D) which was quite nice. My friend got a G200 with the 3D add on. I eventually got a Radeon 7000 "VE" ("Value Edition" -- didn't realize Best Buy was importing basically half speed models from China. Bleh.) The Voodoo was particularly nice, after 3DFX got bought by Nvidia and Windows driver development halted, the Linux driver (which was open source) received 3DNow! and MMX support so I got like a doubling in FPS in the time I owned that card; always nice to have your existing hardware get massive speed boosts over time.
I ended up with a wide variety of 2D accelerator in the pre "everything is Intel, ATI/AMD, or Nvidia" era. Oak OTI-067, Cirrus Logic (5429 and 5434), ATI Mach 64, I had some Via board with like a S3 Unichrome built on (which in Linux had totally non-functional 3D, I think there was a driver but it never worked; but the 2D on it was "adequate"). The Matrox of course. Maybe some others. The Matrox I actually paid good money for (like $150 or so?), the rest I got when they were like $20-40 cards.
I kept upgrading both because in that time I went from ISA to VLB (VESA Local Bus) to PCI; and because in that time the cards went from "256KB VRAM, no acceleration, 8-bit color max" to "16-bit color and partial acceleration, also you might not have enough RAM to run 16-bit color at full resolution.." to "24-bit color, everything 2D is accelerated including video scaling" in just a few years.
I had a Voodoo (with a G400 for the 2D) which was quite nice. My friend got a G200 with the 3D add on. I eventually got a Radeon 7000 "VE" ("Value Edition" -- didn't realize Best Buy was importing basically half speed models from China. Bleh.) The Voodoo was particularly nice, after 3DFX got bought by Nvidia and Windows driver development halted, the Linux driver (which was open source) received 3DNow! and MMX support so I got like a doubling in FPS in the time I owned that card; always nice to have your existing hardware get massive speed boosts over time.
I ended up with a wide variety of 2D accelerator in the pre "everything is Intel, ATI/AMD, or Nvidia" era. Oak OTI-067, Cirrus Logic (5429 and 5434), ATI Mach 64, I had some Via board with like a S3 Unichrome built on (which in Linux had totally non-functional 3D, I think there was a driver but it never worked; but the 2D on it was "adequate"). The Matrox of course. Maybe some others. The Matrox I actually paid good money for (like $150 or so?), the rest I got when they were like $20-40 cards.
I kept upgrading both because in that time I went from ISA to VLB (VESA Local Bus) to PCI; and because in that time the cards went from "256KB VRAM, no acceleration, 8-bit color max" to "16-bit color and partial acceleration, also you might not have enough RAM to run 16-bit color at full resolution.." to "24-bit color, everything 2D is accelerated including video scaling" in just a few years.
