And then there was the Quake 2 engine which gave us Deus Ex, American McGee’s Alice and then (through the modified GoldSrc version) Half-Life, Counter Strike and countless others! The family tree of 3D engines is really interesting.
Comment on What games popularized certain mechanics?
Qwazpoi@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoI’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
cook_pass_babtridge@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
mPony@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
and the Unreal engine which gave us I don’t have any idea how many but just a staggering number. Both solid games on their own, but long-term the engines were the real rock stars
H1jAcK@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
That may be what I was thinking of. I actually never played Quake, I just knew it was groundbreaking
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
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.
Thaurin@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
This is correct. I remember running Quake II in software mode with hardware effects (could that have been OpenGL already?). It ran at like 1 frames per second, because I didn’t have a 3D graphics card. Although the lighting looked lovely when you shot a rocket through a hallway.
Qwazpoi@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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 4 weeks ago
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 4 weeks ago
Ohhhh! I think the Riva TNT was my first 3D accelerated graphics card!
frezik@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
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: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256#Architecture
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.
dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
No it wasn’t. Rendition had the Verite back in 1996 that was true 3D and 2D on the same single video card. At the same time as the Verite was the 3DFX Voodoo (released 1995), but it was 3D only and needed a second card for 2D. Rendition was also the only 3D accelerator natively supported by Quake.
frezik@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
Nvidia did indeed market it as the first GPU at the time. You can retroactively apply the term, but it didn’t exist before then.