I'd argue that quake did far more for 3D graphics then it did for FPS. Like Doom is what got FPS into the spotlight even though Wolfenstein 3d came first. Like quake is pretty much what made real 3D possible and doable on the hardware of the time thanks to everything going on under the hood

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 3 weeks ago (11 children)

Absolutely, we didn't even have any special graphics cards at the time for 3D, I believe? I remember that started some time around Quake 2 but I am not sure, I might remember wrong.

[–] Qwazpoi@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

While I don't know much about video cards, the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) is often called the first video card and had a couple of contenders for first that were either designed earlier or released at almost the same time in 1981 and were all for displaying text only. The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999. I'm assuming there's some in between that were not really used by the public that would have been used in movies and whatnot.

The reason why nobody was selling GPUs before Quake was because quake was THE first 3D game. Doom and other games before Quake were 2.5D and didn't have 3D models only sprites. Games before Quake essentially mimicked 3D while Quake IS 3D

[–] scutiger@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999

3dfx cards like the Voodoo and Voodoo2 were 3d accelerators that predated nVidia's offerings.

And even from nVidia themselves, the Riva TNT was a GPU released before the GeForce models.

[–] Thaurin@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Ohhhh! I think the Riva TNT (or Riva TNT 2?) was my first 3D accelerated graphics card! What a time to be alive was that.

[–] scutiger@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The first PC that I bought myself has a TNT2 with 8mb of memory. I upgraded it some time later with a GeForce 2 and the difference was shocking.

[–] Thaurin@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I remember having a GeForce 2 as well. Yes, I was really into graphics at that time. :) Ever since Wolfenstein 3D, or DooM, to be honest.

Colored lighting in Unreal for the first time!

Did you have dreams of DooM back then? I remember opening doors in DooM with that iconic sound in my dreams, lol.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The term GPU wasn't used yet. It got applied as something of a marketing term to cards that had hardware transform and lighting, and that was indeed the GeForce 256. Before then, they were "3d accelerators".

You can see this on the Wiki page for the GeForce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256#Architecture

GeForce 256 was marketed as "the world's first 'GPU', or Graphics Processing Unit", a term Nvidia defined at the time as "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second".

So it kinda depends on perspective. If you take Nvidia's marketing at face value, then the GeForce 256 was, indeed, the first GPU. You could retroactively apply it to earlier 3d accelerators, including the SNES Super FX chip, but none of them used the term at the time.

[–] scutiger@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

At that point, what even is the purpose of defining it? It's such a specific term that was designed to only apply to their hardware. It's like creating a new word for a car because you added air conditioning to it.

Sure, they had the first GPU because they coined a term that only applied to one specific product.

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (7 replies)

load more comments (10 replies)