The Graphics Card - More Players: Matrox, SiS and 3dfx
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Matrox Once a major player in the 3-D graphics industry, Matrox has taken a backseat to Nvidia and ATI. Its Mystique and M3D cards were gems in the mid-to-late 1990s, but with its shift to its Millennium line it gradually faded into the background. Today, Matrox cards are better suited for workstations than for gaming.
Matrox tried to make a comeback with its Parhelia graphics card in mid-2002. Although its specs looked promising, the card’s performance proved to be lackluster compared to parts based on late-model ATI and Nvidia chipsets. Its major claim to fame is “surround gaming,” enabled by its unique support for three displays. However, only a handful of games supports surround gaming, and the technology has failed to make waves in the gaming market.
SiS
A fairly recent combatant in the 3-D acceleration arena, SiS’s latest chipsets travel under the moniker Xabre. The latest Xabre is the Xabre 600, a follow up to the Xabre 400 (shown in Figure 3-3).
Figure 3-3 A SiS Xabre 400 reference card
The Xabre family attempts to be a full-featured, AGP 8X, DirectX 9 group of chipsets available at a budget price. Unfortunately, Xabre chipsets perform like budget parts, so they’re unable to compete with current-generation solutions from Nvidia and ATI. As such, SiS’s graphics chipsets have made little headway in capturing the market from the two major powerhouses.
Due to their lackluster performance, we don’t recommend cards based on Xabre chipsets.
Gone but Not Forgotten: 3dfx 3dfx is out of business. Why do we include it here? Because it paved the way for 3-D gaming as it stands today.
3dfx’s Voodoo Graphics chipset, released in 1997 and available at the time on a huge variety of cards, was the first truly powerful 3-D accelerator. Before Voodoo Graphics, 3-D acceleration was mired in proprietary APIs, 3-D games were generally released with software-based 3-D engines, and special hardware accelerated versions of the games were bundled with 3-D cards. It was difficult to find an off-the-shelf game that featured a hardware assisted 3-D engine. All too often, 3-D games actually ran more slowly on 3-D hardware than they did in software.
The Voodoo Graphics chipset, with its own OpenGL-derived API, Glide, brought raw power to the mix. Embraced by Id Software for GLQuake, the Voodoo Graphics chipset was widely accepted by gamers and managed to secure a respectable install base, big enough for Glide to take off as the most supported 3-D API of its time.
Both the Voodoo Graphics chipset and its follow-up, the Voodoo2, were designed for graphics add-on cards. They worked in conjunction with a 2-D/3-D card and were unable to dish out 2-D graphics, such as a Windows desktop, on their own. Subsequent chipsets, the Voodoo3 and Voodoo4/5, were full-featured AGP solutions that didn’t need another graphics card in the system.
3dfx continued to produce cutting-edge graphics technology until it sold out to Nvidia and went out of business in late 2000. 3dfx may not be around anymore, but it’s undeniable that it paved the way for 3-D gaming as we enjoy it today.
 This chapter is from Build Your Own High Performance Gamers' Mod PC, by Chen and Durham (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072229012). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now. |
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