00:00SPEAKER- Did you see that thing Battle Frankie posted
00:01SPEAKERafter last week's episode?
00:03SPEAKER- Which one?
00:04SPEAKERA lot of people post a lot of things.
00:06SPEAKER- The normalized human time when you compare
00:09SPEAKERone clock cycle in a CPU at three gigahertz
00:12SPEAKERto one second of real world time.
00:15SPEAKER- Yeah, that thing was very eye-opening, let's say.
00:18SPEAKER- I did not, I understood this, I thought,
00:21SPEAKERbut this illustrates it in the best way I've ever seen.
00:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I knew all that stuff intuitively,
00:26SPEAKERbut to see it quantified is a very different thing.
00:29SPEAKERWhy don't you explain exactly what we're talking about here.
00:31SPEAKER- Yeah, it's hard to understand like what a nanosecond,
00:33SPEAKERhow a nanosecond relates to, say, a microsecond, right?
00:37SPEAKERSo on a three gigahertz clock cycle,
00:40SPEAKERone clock cycle takes about three tenths of a nanosecond.
00:44SPEAKERSo that's three 10 billionths of a second, I guess.
00:49SPEAKERAnd if you normalize that to one second,
00:52SPEAKERthen accessing the level one cache
00:54SPEAKERof the one that's built into the CPU takes three seconds.
00:58SPEAKERThe level two cache takes nine seconds,
01:01SPEAKERand the level three cache takes 43 seconds,
01:04SPEAKERwhich is bonkers.
01:05SPEAKERLike that's the big thing that we were talking about
01:07SPEAKERon the chip that holds the whole thing together.
01:11SPEAKERAccessing RAM, which takes between 70 and 100 nanoseconds,
01:15SPEAKERdepending on the clock speed and latency of your RAM,
01:18SPEAKERwould be equivalent to 3.5 to 5.5 minutes.
01:21SPEAKERSo it's like-
01:22SPEAKER- That was the part where my eyes flew wide open.
01:25SPEAKERLike the cache stuff makes sense.
01:26SPEAKERIt's like, yeah, okay, sure, the level three cache
01:27SPEAKERis gonna take a good number of clock cycles
01:30SPEAKERto possess the slowest one, of course.
01:32SPEAKERBut then once we hit the RAM one,
01:34SPEAKERand I was like, wait, system RAM's supposed
01:35SPEAKERto be very fast, right?
01:36SPEAKERLike that's the fastest thing outside of the CPU in-
01:39SPEAKER- It is. - Computer.
01:42SPEAKER- Yeah. - But this normalized figure
01:43SPEAKERbeing like five minutes to access was...
01:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so like the CPU wants something
01:49SPEAKERthat's in physical RAM on the motherboard,
01:52SPEAKERon the chips that you socket into your motherboard,
01:54SPEAKERand like it has to wait the equivalent of five minutes
01:56SPEAKERto get the answer back, that's bananas.
01:59SPEAKER- It's wild.
02:00SPEAKERWell, keep going. - It gets worse.
02:02SPEAKERTo access an NVMe SSD I/O,
02:05SPEAKERwhich is usually about between seven and 150 microseconds,
02:09SPEAKERthat's the equivalent of two hours to two days.
02:13SPEAKER- That's a long time.
02:14SPEAKER- It's like getting a letter.
02:17SPEAKERA rotational disk I/O-
02:20SPEAKER- Oh, you mean a hard drive.
02:21SPEAKER- A hard drive.
02:22SPEAKER- One to 10 milliseconds of computer time
02:24SPEAKERis equivalent to 11 days to four months.
02:27SPEAKER- That's...
02:28SPEAKER- Pony Express, man.
02:30SPEAKER- If that, maybe carrier pigeon, I don't know.
02:34SPEAKER- We've got to get this letter to Chisholm by October.
02:38SPEAKERDon't worry, the Pony Express has...
02:41SPEAKERInternet latency comes into play next.
02:43SPEAKERInternet San Francisco to New York City,
02:45SPEAKERabout a 40 millisecond ping, which is, I think, optimistic.
02:49SPEAKERThis is equivalent to about 1.2 years.
02:51SPEAKER- That's quite a while.
02:53SPEAKER- That's, yeah, that's...
02:55SPEAKERLook, some people, some people's whole life.
02:58SPEAKERThe internet from San Francisco to Australia,
03:01SPEAKER183 milliseconds is six years.
03:06SPEAKERRebooting your virtualized OS,
03:09SPEAKERlike if you have an OS running in a VM hypervisor
03:12SPEAKERon your machine, about four seconds on the PC, 127 years,
03:17SPEAKERcompared to the one cycle, one second clock time.
03:22SPEAKER- That's longer than a lifetime.
03:24SPEAKER- Rebooting the virtualization hypervisor,
03:26SPEAKERI assume that's what they're talking about here,
03:27SPEAKERis 40 seconds, that's 1,200 years.
03:30SPEAKERAnd mashing the reset button on your computer
03:33SPEAKERand letting it come back up,
03:34SPEAKERwhich takes about 90 seconds, three millennia.
03:39SPEAKER- So processor has seen some shit.
03:42SPEAKER- Yeah, this is some dark magic.
03:45SPEAKERI think that this was posted, I should have grabbed the link,
03:49SPEAKERbut this was in an article that they had linked
03:51SPEAKERto elsewhere, from elsewhere.
03:54SPEAKERAnd I found it incredibly informative.
03:57SPEAKER- It's kind of a disturbance, a little bit unsettling to me.
04:02SPEAKER- It's a little scary when you think about how much...
04:05SPEAKERThis is from a site called formulaceblack.com.
04:10SPEAKERAnd if you Google compute performance distance of data
04:13SPEAKERas measure of latency, it'll pop up for you.
04:17SPEAKERAnd we'll put a link in the show notes, too.
04:19SPEAKERBut yeah, this is like...
04:21SPEAKERWe spent a long time talking about how to visualize
04:24SPEAKERthis kind of time scale at Maximum PC,
04:26SPEAKERand this is easily the best,
04:27SPEAKERand should have been the most obvious solution for that.
04:31SPEAKERI don't think I would have trusted our math, frankly,
04:34SPEAKER'cause I would have gotten to the,
04:35SPEAKERoh, it takes 1.2 years to send a packet
04:37SPEAKERfrom New York to San Francisco, and been like,
04:39SPEAKERyeah, we probably didn't carry a zero right here somewhere.
04:42SPEAKERWe should go back and plug this back into the spreadsheets.
04:44SPEAKER- Yeah, but a site with formulace in the name,
04:46SPEAKERI think you can probably rest assured
04:48SPEAKERthat their data is good.
04:50SPEAKERI don't know, this is unsettling to me,
04:52SPEAKERboth from the standpoint of putting into relief
04:55SPEAKERhow much of our lives we are spending in front of computers.
04:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:59SPEAKER- And also just thinking about a CPU's experience of time
05:02SPEAKERlonger than you think will.
05:03SPEAKER- It's funny. - Longer than you think.
05:05SPEAKER- There's, in Neal Stephenson's "Seveneves,"
05:09SPEAKERwhich is one of my favorite books,
05:11SPEAKERhe, they talk about, like, there's a space-based society,
05:15SPEAKERand they talk about processors and memory
05:19SPEAKERand things like that that you can't build in outer space
05:21SPEAKERbecause of cosmic radiation messing.
05:23SPEAKERLike, there's a reason we still use, like,
05:26SPEAKER80 CPUs on a lot of space probes,
05:31SPEAKERand it's because they're higher process,
05:34SPEAKERyou know, very large processes by today's standards,
05:37SPEAKERso that a stray particle smashing into the CPU
05:41SPEAKERas it's flying through space doesn't jack up the mash
05:44SPEAKERand crash the whole thing, right?
05:46SPEAKER- Literally, you literally need a bigger surface area
05:48SPEAKERon the chip to try to be more resilient.
05:51SPEAKER- Wider pathways for the electrons are safer,
05:53SPEAKERis my understanding.
05:54SPEAKERI'm sure that somebody in the Discord will correct me
05:56SPEAKERwhen I'm wrong on that, but.
05:58SPEAKER- That's wild. - Yeah, it's a trip.
06:00SPEAKER- We do have people working in space technology there.
06:02SPEAKER- Exactly.
06:03SPEAKER- Last question, all right,
06:04SPEAKERthis is gonna be the longest cold opening history
06:06SPEAKERof this podcast.
06:07SPEAKER- Oh, we're not even close to that.
06:09SPEAKER- I take it, I take it you haven't read the jaunt.
06:11SPEAKERI don't think you got my reference a minute ago.
06:12SPEAKER- No.
06:13SPEAKER- Oh, man, okay. - What's the jaunt?
06:15SPEAKER- I can't, I shouldn't tell you,
06:17SPEAKER'cause I think you should read it.
06:18SPEAKERIt's a Stephen King short story about teleportation
06:22SPEAKERthat you should really read
06:24SPEAKERif you want to look at these numbers
06:25SPEAKERand feel that sense of creeping dread.
06:28SPEAKER(upbeat music)
06:39SPEAKER(upbeat music)
06:57SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."
06:59SPEAKERI'm Will.
07:00SPEAKER- Brad, hey, hello, hi.
07:01SPEAKER- Hi, hi, hello, hi, hi, hi, hi.
07:03SPEAKER- What's happening?
07:05SPEAKER- We're doing a podcast, Brad.
07:06SPEAKER- Oh, crap, oh, shit, I gotta go get my--
07:08SPEAKER- Yeah, when Mr. Softy, the ice cream truck, came to town,
07:10SPEAKERI put on a pair of dungarees last Thursday, so.
07:13SPEAKER- Fair, you don't wanna show your knees to the ice cream guy.
07:16SPEAKER- No.
07:17SPEAKER- You need some level of decorum when you go buy ice cream.
07:19SPEAKER- It is, like, if you are going to order
07:22SPEAKERa ridiculous ice cream cone for an adult,
07:24SPEAKERlike something rolled in sprinkles
07:25SPEAKERor dusted with Oreos ground up or something like that,
07:28SPEAKERyou need to have a certain modicum of decency, I think.
07:31SPEAKER- Gotta put on your business pants.
07:33SPEAKER- Exactly.
07:35SPEAKER- So we've got an interesting topic today.
07:39SPEAKER- Yes.
07:40SPEAKER- We were talking the other day about early video cards
07:44SPEAKERand I had, I guess I hadn't forgotten,
07:48SPEAKERbut I hadn't considered, there was once a time
07:52SPEAKERin the early days of 3D accelerators
07:55SPEAKERwhen there were at least seven or eight different vendors
07:58SPEAKERactively selling cards in that space.
08:03SPEAKER- Yeah, and I'm sad we didn't save this exercise
08:05SPEAKERfor this episode.
08:06SPEAKERWe played it out on Discord last night,
08:08SPEAKERbut we kind of, I tried to run down,
08:11SPEAKERkind of walk down memory lane
08:12SPEAKERand remember what all those companies were
08:13SPEAKERand now I kind of know what they are,
08:14SPEAKERbut we should try to recreate it here
08:16SPEAKERjust for the sake of the audience.
08:19SPEAKERAlso just a little bit of context for this episode,
08:21SPEAKERI don't know about you, but I think for me,
08:23SPEAKERI've just had this topic on the brain a lot
08:24SPEAKERbecause this is the first time in, I don't know,
08:28SPEAKERfour or five years at least that I felt genuinely excited
08:32SPEAKERabout new PC hardware between the 3080s
08:36SPEAKERand the new AMD, the new Ryzens and stuff.
08:40SPEAKERPC hardware for the longest time for me has just been like,
08:42SPEAKERah, I guess I'll get a new CPU, sure, why not?
08:44SPEAKERLike it's cheap enough right now, you know?
08:46SPEAKERLike there's not, there's just not been a lot
08:48SPEAKERto be excited about there.
08:49SPEAKERLike the 1080, I feel like was that,
08:51SPEAKERlike that was a big leap forward.
08:54SPEAKERLike, you know, maybe the RTX cards were interesting,
08:56SPEAKERbut not as fast as you wanted, the 20 series,
08:58SPEAKERbut like Reddit, we're at a sweet spot right now
09:00SPEAKERwhere I'm like, I'm actually staring at hardware builds
09:03SPEAKERa lot right now again and like fantasizing.
09:05SPEAKERSo that takes me back to the mid nineties
09:08SPEAKERand those heady days of 8,000 3D accelerators
09:11SPEAKERcoming out all the time.
09:12SPEAKER- Well, you'll see right now,
09:13SPEAKERyou'll see an actual real world performance improvement
09:16SPEAKERfor like spending money on new hardware, right?
09:22SPEAKERIn a way that you often don't, which is exciting.
09:26SPEAKERSo let's, I guess let's, let's start with,
09:31SPEAKERlike obviously everybody remembers 3D FX.
09:34SPEAKER- Yeah.
09:36SPEAKER- And then Nvidia had the Revo 128 early on.
09:40SPEAKERATI rolled out the 3D rage, well.
09:45SPEAKER- Hang on, I'm just gonna play act what I did last night.
09:47SPEAKEROkay, so what I was able to come up with
09:49SPEAKERoff the top of the head was the first one
09:52SPEAKERthat came to mind was the rendition verite.
09:54SPEAKER- The original DirectX card, yeah.
09:57SPEAKER- The rendition verite, obviously the 3D effect,
09:59SPEAKERlike the Voodoo stuff was like the thing
10:01SPEAKERas soon as it came out, like nothing else mattered
10:03SPEAKERfor a while there.
10:05SPEAKER- Well, actually that's not true.
10:05SPEAKERIt wasn't until Quake came out
10:07SPEAKERthat the Voodoo stuff really mattered.
10:08SPEAKER- Well, yeah, GeoQuake was the thing
10:10SPEAKERthat made 3D accelerators a thing, frankly.
10:13SPEAKER- 'Cause like, I think you've got MechWarrior
10:15SPEAKERor something with your Voodoo card, MechWarrior 2,
10:18SPEAKERand it was like a lightly texture mapped version
10:21SPEAKERof the software rendered MechWarrior game.
10:24SPEAKER- Not that 3D accelerated also.
10:26SPEAKERI think I bought that game at a Sam's Club,
10:28SPEAKERso I really lost out there.
10:29SPEAKER- I bought it multiple times, I'm sure.
10:31SPEAKERI came with every video card you bought for a while there.
10:33SPEAKER- You know what, I would have bought it
10:34SPEAKERjust for that soundtrack multiple times.
10:36SPEAKERThat's totally fair.
10:37SPEAKER- A fine game.
10:38SPEAKER- So for whatever reason, I came up with rendition
10:40SPEAKERand 3D effects, and then I stalled out
10:42SPEAKERand started thinking about like Number 9 and Matrox,
10:44SPEAKERwhich I don't think fit into this conversation that well.
10:47SPEAKER- Well, so Number 9 never really released a 3D accelerator.
10:50SPEAKERThey were wholly focused on 2D and video,
10:53SPEAKERis my understanding, and they kind of disappeared.
10:55SPEAKERI think they got bought by somebody.
10:57SPEAKERI don't actually know what happened to Number 9.
11:00SPEAKERI also don't think that their bit of selling graphics cards
11:10SPEAKERwith Beatles tie-ins would probably fly in today's world.
11:16SPEAKER- Why not?
11:17SPEAKERI mean, I agree with you.
11:18SPEAKERIt was a bit too twee for my taste,
11:21SPEAKERbut I feel like the people at Apple Records
11:24SPEAKERwould probably have something to say about that now
11:26SPEAKERin a way that they would not have been aware of back then.
11:28SPEAKER- You're probably right.
11:29SPEAKERLike I'm sitting here looking at their Wikipedia page
11:31SPEAKERand some of their products
11:32SPEAKERfor people that are not familiar with Number 9.
11:35SPEAKERRevolution, Imagine, Pepper.
11:38SPEAKER- I feel like Revolution-
11:39SPEAKER- Ticket to Ride.
11:40SPEAKER- Yeah, Ticket to Ride was where they went off the rails
11:42SPEAKERin terms of like-
11:43SPEAKER- Naming a graphics card Ticket to Ride
11:45SPEAKERis like, yes, absolutely.
11:46SPEAKERThat is a bridge too far.
11:48SPEAKER- I mean, that said though,
11:48SPEAKERthere's a board game called Ticket to Ride, right?
11:51SPEAKER- Well, that's fine.
11:52SPEAKERI mean, that's probably got trains in it or something.
11:53SPEAKERI mean, I'm fine with that,
11:54SPEAKERbut that's not a video card, you know?
11:57SPEAKERSo yeah, I mean, we'll probably touch on it some more,
12:00SPEAKERbut for whatever reason, my mind went to Matrox and Number 9,
12:02SPEAKERwhich are more like 2D graphics cards,
12:04SPEAKERwhich is like for people who were not doing PC stuff
12:06SPEAKERin the nineties, yes,
12:07SPEAKERyou used to just have to buy a 2D graphics card.
12:10SPEAKER- Yeah, went in the VL bus slot.
12:12SPEAKER- Right, so you reminded me that ATI was active back then.
12:16SPEAKERFor whatever reason, in my mind, ATI was not a player
12:19SPEAKERuntil the Radeon stuff,
12:20SPEAKERbut obviously they were in it way before that.
12:22SPEAKER- So yeah, they made 2D cards.
12:25SPEAKERLike that's where they started,
12:25SPEAKER2D cards and video processing stuff.
12:27SPEAKERAnd they were like a real, they were,
12:33SPEAKERlike in the 2D graphics card realm,
12:36SPEAKERthere was like S3 kind of at the low end performant,
12:39SPEAKERbut not very good, maybe.
12:40SPEAKERNot like didn't the image quality, here's the fun thing.
12:43SPEAKER2D graphics cards, image quality mattered.
12:46SPEAKERLike some of them were better at it than others.
12:48SPEAKER- That's why, I mean, we're kind of getting back
12:51SPEAKERonto 2D cards and off the topic of 3D accelerators here,
12:53SPEAKERbut like I lusted after a Matrox millennium for so long.
12:58SPEAKERI think whatever like, whatever crappy,
13:00SPEAKERno name pre-built computer we had at home
13:02SPEAKERhad a similarly crappy, no name 2D card in it.
13:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
13:06SPEAKER- And desktop literally did not look great.
13:08SPEAKERLike I don't remember, I don't know how to qualify that
13:10SPEAKER'cause in my mind, like I can't call to mind
13:15SPEAKERwhat the desktop looked like,
13:16SPEAKERbut I think things were like maybe a little too fuzzy
13:17SPEAKERor like it was something about like the VGA output
13:20SPEAKERwas not clean enough or something like that, I forget.
13:22SPEAKER- So part of it was that the RAMDAC,
13:26SPEAKERthe thing that converted the digital signal
13:28SPEAKERinto an analog signal that went out across VGA,
13:32SPEAKERif they were slow or bad,
13:33SPEAKERyou'd get fuzzy signals on the VGA.
13:37SPEAKER- Also is about color reproduction and like window rendering
13:40SPEAKERspeed and stuff like that.
13:42SPEAKERLike in Windows 3.1 with the right video card,
13:45SPEAKERyou could preview the window while you drug it around.
13:48SPEAKER- Oh sure.
13:49SPEAKER- And if you didn't have the right video card,
13:50SPEAKERit would just be like an outline,
13:51SPEAKERa box outline of an empty window.
13:54SPEAKER- Yeah, the little dotted line outline.
13:55SPEAKER- And then you could watch it literally draw back in
13:58SPEAKERfrom the top to the bottom, if you had a slow video card.
14:01SPEAKER- Our card was not that bad, thankfully, but I remember,
14:04SPEAKERI remember wanting a millennium just because yeah,
14:06SPEAKERit accelerated Windows stuff more
14:08SPEAKERand it had very nicely clean, clean signal.
14:11SPEAKER- 32 bit baby.
14:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
14:13SPEAKER- Well, so the thing that happened
14:15SPEAKERaround the time 3D accelerator started taking off was
14:18SPEAKERthat the, what had previously been low
14:20SPEAKERin mid range 2D parts became pretty good,
14:25SPEAKERlike good enough, right?
14:26SPEAKERSo S3, ATI, Revolution was always on the high end or sorry,
14:32SPEAKERnumber nine was always on the high end, stuff like that.
14:35SPEAKERBut so, so Matrox and ATI, both fine Canadian companies.
14:39SPEAKER- Yes.
14:41SPEAKER- The Rage 2 was kind of,
14:43SPEAKERI think it was billed as a 3D accelerator
14:45SPEAKERand you could get it with a copy of a MechWarrior 2,
14:50SPEAKERbut it was like kind of lightly texture mapped,
14:54SPEAKERbut not really was the thing I recall on that one.
14:58SPEAKER- Was that their first major card, the Rage 2
15:00SPEAKERin the 3D space and was that an all-in-one card
15:03SPEAKERor was that an add-on?
15:03SPEAKER- It was an all-in, all of these were all-in-one cards,
15:05SPEAKERexcept for the 3DFX stuff, they were interesting.
15:10SPEAKER- And PowerVR, PowerVR was 3D only too.
15:13SPEAKER- Yeah, so we haven't, just to fully,
15:14SPEAKERbefore we move on, just to finish our little rundown
15:17SPEAKERof the roster here, S3, I guess was huge,
15:20SPEAKERbut I had completely in my mind, like glossed over the fact
15:24SPEAKERthat they even existed at that time.
15:27SPEAKER- S3 was a big deal.
15:28SPEAKER- Like it took me a minute, it took me a minute,
15:29SPEAKERbut the name S3 Verge finally floated back
15:32SPEAKERinto my consciousness.
15:34SPEAKER- V-I-R-G-E.
15:36SPEAKER- Right, but I couldn't remember if it was E-R or I-R.
15:38SPEAKERThat's how much I had forgotten it, but.
15:41SPEAKER- But loads of 2D cards into like Compaq and Packard Bell
15:45SPEAKERand like all the, they sold a lot to OEMs, the big OEMs.
15:51SPEAKERAnd they also would kind of run,
15:55SPEAKERso one of the defining gate for me on 3D accelerators
16:00SPEAKERin like 1996, '97, '98 was would it run Quake?
16:05SPEAKERLike in the days before DirectX, before Direct3D
16:09SPEAKERand more, well like the second wave of 3D accelerated games
16:13SPEAKERthat started in like '97, like it was,
16:16SPEAKERif it didn't run GLQuake,
16:17SPEAKERit didn't count as a 3D accelerator,
16:18SPEAKEReven if it did like a little bit of bit mip mapping
16:20SPEAKERand stuff like that on some textures.
16:23SPEAKERAnd the Rage 2 wouldn't run Quake.
16:26SPEAKERThe Matrox Millennium wouldn't run Quake.
16:28SPEAKERThe S3 cards wouldn't run Quake.
16:30SPEAKER- Just a 2D card, right?
16:32SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but I mean, yeah,
16:33SPEAKERit wasn't until the Mystique that Matrox had a card
16:36SPEAKERthat would run Quake, kind of.
16:37SPEAKER- They tried.
16:39SPEAKER- So the ATI's first Quake card was the Rage Pro,
16:43SPEAKERwhich was also one of the first AGP cards,
16:45SPEAKERwhich we'll get to in a minute.
16:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
16:48SPEAKER- Okay, so S3, I don't think S3 ever,
16:51SPEAKERin the time period that mattered,
16:52SPEAKERmade a compelling 3D card.
16:56SPEAKERWould you categorize them as an also ran in this space?
16:59SPEAKER- Well, so one of the things that's interesting about any,
17:01SPEAKERoh, hold on, we have a couple more.
17:02SPEAKERIntel was making 3D accelerators?
17:04SPEAKER- So Intel, when you threw that out there,
17:06SPEAKERI was like, wait, what?
17:07SPEAKERI don't remember that in the slightest.
17:10SPEAKER- So they made, they partnered with Lockheed
17:12SPEAKERand a company called Chips and Technologies
17:14SPEAKERthat Intel ended up buying a little bit later
17:18SPEAKERand released the i740, which was another early AGP card.
17:24SPEAKERAnd it was, if you recall, RAM was really expensive
17:27SPEAKERand hard to get then during that time period.
17:30SPEAKER- Vaguely.
17:32SPEAKER- So like there'd been some sort of disaster,
17:35SPEAKERan earthquake or a fire or something
17:36SPEAKERthat cratered RAM production in '93 or '94,
17:40SPEAKERand it took a long time to come back online
17:42SPEAKER'cause it was a different time back then.
17:44SPEAKERSo a lot of the AGP design was set up
17:49SPEAKERso that you could run video stuff out of system memory
17:53SPEAKERrather than having to have eight megabytes of RAM
17:58SPEAKERin the system and another four megabytes of RAM
18:00SPEAKERon the video card.
18:01SPEAKER- Which was an astronomical amount of RAM.
18:03SPEAKER- It's shocking, it was shocking.
18:05SPEAKER- Hundreds of dollars.
18:06SPEAKER- I might've had 16 megabytes on my PC at that point.
18:09SPEAKER- Oh really?
18:10SPEAKERI think I probably had eight and was pretty happy.
18:11SPEAKERAnyway.
18:12SPEAKER- Maybe it was eight, I forget,
18:13SPEAKERbut I mean, that's back when RAM was like $50 a megabyte.
18:18SPEAKER- More than that, at one point I paid 150 bucks per megabyte
18:21SPEAKERfor a two megabyte upgrade.
18:23SPEAKER- Wow, that is physically painful to hear.
18:26SPEAKER- That was in like '93 though.
18:28SPEAKER- Okay, yeah.
18:29SPEAKERSo I just glanced at the Intel, the i740 page,
18:32SPEAKERWikipedia page, and that came out of '98.
18:34SPEAKERSo we're kind of swinging back and forth
18:36SPEAKERacross a two, three year time span
18:38SPEAKERback and front here a little bit.
18:41SPEAKER- So yeah, it's a weird time
18:43SPEAKERbecause during the launch of the first version of,
18:46SPEAKERthe Revo 128 launched at a time
18:49SPEAKERwhen probably the only 3D accelerated things
18:51SPEAKERwere Quake and Unreal and maybe like terminal,
18:58SPEAKERthere were some, probably some 3D realms game,
19:00SPEAKERlike terminal reality or something
19:00SPEAKERthat was 3D accelerated at that point.
19:02SPEAKER- Sure, that sounds right.
19:03SPEAKER- But it was like mostly-
19:05SPEAKER- Very limited.
19:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, and there were some flight sims.
19:08SPEAKERI feel like Falcon, wasn't Falcon 6.0 3D accelerated
19:11SPEAKERfor the first time maybe?
19:12SPEAKER- Oh, was it, was it that far along?
19:14SPEAKERI thought they were on like 3.0 that thing.
19:15SPEAKER- Or Windows 3.0.
19:16SPEAKERYeah, it was the one with the big binder.
19:18SPEAKER- Yeah, 3.0 came out in '91.
19:20SPEAKERDid they ever even get past 4.0?
19:22SPEAKERI thought that was the last Falcon.
19:23SPEAKER- Maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm conflating-
19:26SPEAKER- 4.0, 4.0 was '98.
19:28SPEAKERSo that was probably 3D accelerated at that point.
19:30SPEAKERSo, well, just to kind of start back at the start
19:33SPEAKERbefore we get too much into the AGP in the late '90s stuff,
19:36SPEAKERlike obviously like 3D effects,
19:38SPEAKERlike a friend of mine got a Voodoo card, you know,
19:41SPEAKERnot long after GL Quake came out and like,
19:44SPEAKERI went over to his house and saw it and fell out of my chair,
19:48SPEAKERyou know, like the defining moment in my history
19:50SPEAKERwith both technology and video games.
19:52SPEAKERBut like, you could,
19:53SPEAKERdid you have much contact with that stuff
19:55SPEAKERbefore the Voodoo came along?
19:56SPEAKERLike, I'm trying to get a sense of what there,
19:58SPEAKERwhat was in the market before the Voodoo,
20:00SPEAKERbut when that kind of, you know,
20:02SPEAKERobviously that revolutionized everything, but like-
20:05SPEAKER- Well, so like I bought a Rage 2 card
20:07SPEAKERwhen I built a PC the first time.
20:09SPEAKER- Okay.
20:10SPEAKER- Or, and put that in, it may have been even before that,
20:15SPEAKERit may have been in my, in the Pentium 60
20:18SPEAKERthat I bought when I went to UT.
20:20SPEAKERAnd like, I was kind of unimpressed with it.
20:23SPEAKERLike 3D accelerators until the Voodoo card
20:26SPEAKERseemed like kind of like,
20:28SPEAKERit seemed like a cool thing for SGI to do.
20:31SPEAKERAnd it seemed like something that wasn't real
20:33SPEAKERfor people at home.
20:34SPEAKERSo like, if you played like the rendition
20:38SPEAKERV Quake port that they made.
20:39SPEAKERSo the other thing that's important to note
20:41SPEAKERis that up until Quake,
20:44SPEAKERmost games only supported external,
20:48SPEAKERlike a proprietary vendor specific APIs.
20:51SPEAKERSo like Glide for 3FX.
20:53SPEAKER- Glide is the famous example.
20:54SPEAKER- Exactly, rendition wrote V Quake,
20:58SPEAKERwhich was for their Verite would be with that V1000.
21:01SPEAKER- Oh, V Quake.
21:02SPEAKER- And I think Carmack helped with that, obviously.
21:05SPEAKER- So I'm, not to derail, but I'm sitting here,
21:07SPEAKERthere is, of course, there is a GitHub repo
21:09SPEAKERthat has every plan file update he ever wrote.
21:14SPEAKERSo I'm just sitting here control F-ing it.
21:17SPEAKERAnd it's funny, like, so Quake came out in mid 96
21:19SPEAKERand I'm sitting here looking at an entry
21:20SPEAKERfor December 13th, 96, where he says for the record,
21:25SPEAKERhere is my impression of the 3D hardware
21:26SPEAKERI have worked with, blah, blah, blah.
21:28SPEAKER- This was a defining moment for me, this plan file.
21:31SPEAKER- So basically the two consumer cards on this list
21:35SPEAKERare the rendition Verite at $150
21:38SPEAKERand the 3D effects Voodoo at $300.
21:41SPEAKER- Yep.
21:42SPEAKER- And then like eight or 10 workstation cards
21:45SPEAKERthat no mortal could ever have contact with.
21:47SPEAKER- The 3D Labs one, the SGI Herrick stuff.
21:50SPEAKER- The Intergraph Intense 3D, the SGI 02,
21:53SPEAKERthe SGI Impact, the, let's see.
21:56SPEAKER- Just to be clear, the SGI 02 was like a $50,000 computer,
21:59SPEAKERas I recall.
22:00SPEAKER- Yes, that literally, this SGI Impact entry,
22:02SPEAKERhe said here a full system was literally 25 to $50,000.
22:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
22:06SPEAKER- And SGI Infinite Reality was over $100,000.
22:09SPEAKER- Yeah, and those machines, those boxes for those things
22:12SPEAKERwere huge, like they were like mini computer type spaces,
22:16SPEAKERnot PCs.
22:17SPEAKER- His quick write-up of the SGI Infinite Reality,
22:20SPEAKERwhich is the $100,000 workstation,
22:23SPEAKERfill rate from hell, polygons from hell,
22:26SPEAKERif you don't trip up on state changes,
22:27SPEAKERnothing will come within shouting distance of the system,
22:30SPEAKERyou would expect that.
22:31SPEAKER- Yeah, for 100%.
22:32SPEAKER- The reason I bring this up is that like,
22:34SPEAKERlike I said, outside of the Verite and the Voodoo,
22:37SPEAKERlike everything else on here is extremely high-end
22:39SPEAKERworkstation hardware, there just wasn't that much out there.
22:41SPEAKERSorry, there was one other card on here,
22:43SPEAKERthe 3D Labs Per Media for $300.
22:45SPEAKER- That was a workstation card.
22:47SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, yes.
22:48SPEAKER- A well-supported low-end OpenGL card,
22:51SPEAKERso I guess, yeah, that would be for workstation stuff.
22:53SPEAKER- So it was a thing, if I recall correctly,
22:55SPEAKERit had a, it was the least expensive way
22:58SPEAKERto get a fully fledged OpenGL stack,
23:00SPEAKERbecause the OpenGL driver for the 3D effects cards
23:06SPEAKERwas just a wrapper, so it wrapped the OpenGL calls
23:10SPEAKERto Glide calls.
23:11SPEAKER- Okay.
23:12SPEAKER- And it wasn't, like, it wasn't a full implementation,
23:14SPEAKERand because that card was a standalone 3D accelerator
23:16SPEAKERand couldn't do stuff in Windows, a lot of OpenGL stuff,
23:19SPEAKERlike you couldn't run your OpenGL CAD programs on that.
23:22SPEAKER- Right.
23:23SPEAKER- Also, probably 'cause it didn't have a memory.
23:25SPEAKER- And so that's why you were having to get
23:26SPEAKERa bespoke version of Quake for every card, right?
23:29SPEAKER- Exactly.
23:30SPEAKER- Quake, GLQuake, 'cause they were all being written
23:31SPEAKERdirectly to what those cards could do.
23:33SPEAKER- Well, so GLQuake was written for OpenGL.
23:35SPEAKER- Oh, right, right, yes, it would run on any GL hardware.
23:37SPEAKER- Yeah, VQuake, so Carmack did VQuake
23:40SPEAKERwith the rendition people, I think,
23:41SPEAKERand then after that, he was like,
23:43SPEAKER"I'm not building a bunch of proprietary Quakes.
23:47SPEAKER"There's no other, we're gonna do this in OpenGL."
23:49SPEAKERAnd like, that immediately made OpenGL a gaming API
23:53SPEAKERwhen it had previously been for the, like, workstations
23:58SPEAKERand CAD and stuff like that.
24:00SPEAKER- Previously had been for doing your effects
24:02SPEAKERin Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park.
24:03SPEAKER- Pretty much, yeah.
24:04SPEAKER- And stuff like that.
24:05SPEAKER- It was a weird, it was a weird time, like--
24:07SPEAKER- It was a really weird, interesting time
24:09SPEAKERwith all this stuff being very emergent
24:10SPEAKERand not well-defined, like, I'd not to,
24:12SPEAKERwe won't harp on his plan files for this whole episode,
24:15SPEAKERbut if you scroll down two more entries
24:17SPEAKERpast the one I was just reading from,
24:19SPEAKERyou get to what I consider
24:20SPEAKERprobably the seminal plan update.
24:22SPEAKER- Okay.
24:23SPEAKER- Which is December 23rd, 1996,
24:25SPEAKERentitled OpenGL versus Direct3D.
24:28SPEAKER- Oh, and this was when they were talking about,
24:29SPEAKERthis was before Direct3D was even out, right?
24:31SPEAKER- Right.
24:32SPEAKER- Or '96, you said?
24:34SPEAKER- Yeah, this was December '96,
24:35SPEAKERso that's like six-ish months after Quake came out.
24:38SPEAKER- Oh, so that's after, that's when Direct3D 3.0,
24:41SPEAKERDirectX 3.0 had launched in September of that year,
24:45SPEAKERand we were, like, DirectX 1 and 2
24:47SPEAKERwere kind of, like, not worth speaking of.
24:50SPEAKER- Right, and like, this is full-on, like, soapbox mode,
24:53SPEAKERhe's just here kinda opining about how these things work
24:58SPEAKERand how much he likes or hates them,
25:00SPEAKERand there's like straight-up,
25:01SPEAKERthere's straight-up code snippets in this thing
25:02SPEAKERof, like, showing how Vertex operations work
25:04SPEAKERin each one and stuff like this,
25:06SPEAKERbut it was just such a, it was such an early time,
25:09SPEAKERand the stuff was so ill-defined
25:10SPEAKERand, like, all over the place, you know?
25:12SPEAKER- Well, I mean, the big argument was that
25:15SPEAKERthe DirectX APIs kind of limited what you could do,
25:21SPEAKERlike, well, it didn't give you direct control
25:23SPEAKERover the hardware in a way that was,
25:25SPEAKERit abstracted things out a little bit further
25:27SPEAKERthan people like Carmack wanted.
25:30SPEAKERI think in the, with the idea that it would be easier
25:33SPEAKERfor normal human programmers that weren't John Carmack
25:36SPEAKERor Tim Sweeney or, you know, Charlie Brown
25:38SPEAKERor whoever to build off of.
25:40SPEAKER- Right, but also, it became necessary in a world
25:43SPEAKERwith, like, 800 different cards on the market, right?
25:46SPEAKERLike, at some point, you can't be writing directly
25:48SPEAKERto the hardware of every model of card out there.
25:50SPEAKER- Well, so then it shifted the burden from the developers
25:54SPEAKERto write for the individual hardware to the driver vendors
25:56SPEAKERto, like, not jack up the drivers.
25:58SPEAKER- Ah, yes, which led to our current state
26:01SPEAKERof 500-megabyte graphics driver downloads every two weeks.
26:04SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
26:06SPEAKER- That makes sense, but was there a lot of, like,
26:09SPEAKERFUD around Microsoft?
26:10SPEAKERI feel like I vaguely remember, like, Jesus.
26:14SPEAKERI mean, this was-
26:14SPEAKER- Was there FUD?
26:16SPEAKER- This was squarely in the middle of the, like,
26:18SPEAKERpeople writing Microsoft with a dollar sign in it era
26:21SPEAKERof people not trusting Microsoft.
26:23SPEAKER- This is when they were being,
26:24SPEAKERthis is when the antitrust suit was in the,
26:26SPEAKERin the bearish beginnings, right?
26:28SPEAKER- I guess so, yeah.
26:29SPEAKER- This is when they were doing the stuff
26:30SPEAKERthat got them sued by the federal government for-
26:33SPEAKER- That's fair.
26:34SPEAKER- Yeah.
26:35SPEAKERIt was-
26:36SPEAKER- Embrace, extend, extinguish.
26:37SPEAKER- Like, yeah, I feel like,
26:39SPEAKERI feel like a lot of the concern about,
26:42SPEAKERthe concern about Microsoft owning the APIs that drove 3D
26:45SPEAKERwas the same thing that we hear people talking about
26:47SPEAKERwith Facebook and VR right now, where, you know,
26:50SPEAKERyou didn't want this monolithic company to own
26:54SPEAKERthe thing that the future, you know,
26:56SPEAKERthe APIs that the future was built on.
26:59SPEAKERIt ended up, like, the thing that ended up happening is,
27:03SPEAKERas the hardware vendors coalesced into,
27:06SPEAKERfrom eight or nine vendors into two vendors,
27:09SPEAKERor maybe three if you count Intel,
27:12SPEAKERthe, it ended up being the hardware vendors
27:14SPEAKERdriving those APIs as much as Microsoft.
27:17SPEAKERSo it, like, it ended up working out.
27:19SPEAKERIf we had only ended up with one,
27:22SPEAKERif we only ended up with either Intel or AMD,
27:24SPEAKERATI and Intel, I think we'd be in a much different situation
27:29SPEAKERand we wouldn't be seeing the kind of performance
27:30SPEAKERthat we are on graphics today.
27:32SPEAKERSo it was lucky that those two companies survived.
27:35SPEAKER- 'Cause they pushed it forward so much.
27:38SPEAKER- They push each other, yeah.
27:39SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
27:40SPEAKER- The competition's good, it turns out.
27:41SPEAKER- Yeah, before we move on too much
27:43SPEAKERfrom the beginnings here,
27:44SPEAKERI happen to have the rendition Wikipedia page
27:46SPEAKERin front of me, and I just have to mention the naming
27:49SPEAKERon some of this stuff.
27:50SPEAKER- Yeah.
27:51SPEAKER- They had an API for DOS called Speedy 3D.
27:54SPEAKER- That sounds great.
27:55SPEAKERHow fast was it?
27:56SPEAKERWas it speedy? - I don't know, I just,
27:58SPEAKERlike I just can't help thinking about
27:59SPEAKERlike Speedy Gonzalez here,
28:01SPEAKERscrolling down some of the products
28:05SPEAKERthat were released to Sierra.
28:07SPEAKERWait, that can't be, that's not the game maker Sierra.
28:09SPEAKERThat's gotta be, really?
28:10SPEAKER- I think that's somebody else.
28:11SPEAKERI think that's what became Sierra's logic maybe.
28:13SPEAKER- No, it totally links to the Sierra online Wikipedia page.
28:17SPEAKERApparently Sierra put out a rendition card
28:19SPEAKERcalled the Screamin' 3D.
28:21SPEAKER- Oh yeah, we had one of those in the lab at maximum PC.
28:24SPEAKER- Really?
28:25SPEAKER- It was the box was on the wall.
28:26SPEAKER- I totally am sitting here Googling the box art
28:29SPEAKERfor Screamin' 3D right now.
28:31SPEAKERI need to see that.
28:32SPEAKER- Oh, the box art for these was all bad.
28:35SPEAKER- If you think video card boxes are ridiculous now,
28:37SPEAKERgo back to the mid nineties.
28:39SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
28:41SPEAKER- But anyway, so yeah, like I don't know
28:45SPEAKERwhere to go with this.
28:46SPEAKERI mean, rendition was out there like in my mind,
28:48SPEAKERlike some months before the Voodoo came along,
28:51SPEAKERthe quake was a thing.
28:52SPEAKER- That's correct, yeah.
28:53SPEAKER- And then the Voodoo came along
28:54SPEAKERand like changed everything of course,
28:56SPEAKERbut to touch on something you mentioned earlier,
28:58SPEAKERI did not realize that it was the,
29:01SPEAKERI didn't realize the Voodoo was the exception
29:02SPEAKERto the rule about being an all-in-one integrated card.
29:04SPEAKERLike 'cause the Voodoo was an add-in card
29:07SPEAKERand you had to run a literal analog pass-through cable.
29:10SPEAKER- You plug your video, you had a little short VGA cable
29:13SPEAKERthat plugged from your main video card into the Voodoo card.
29:15SPEAKER- Yeah, your desktop card.
29:17SPEAKER- Yeah, and then you plugged the monitor
29:18SPEAKERinto the Voodoo card and then literally do a state switch.
29:22SPEAKERLike the Voodoo card would detect
29:23SPEAKERthat you'd launched something that used Glide
29:24SPEAKERand it would turn off the pass-through
29:27SPEAKERand just render itself.
29:28SPEAKER- You would, at least with the card I had,
29:30SPEAKERwhich I believe was the Orchid Righteous 3D is the one I had.
29:33SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that was one of the two.
29:35SPEAKERIt was that or the Diamond Monster 3D.
29:37SPEAKER- It was not the Diamond Monster,
29:38SPEAKERwhich was the gold standard to most people, but-
29:40SPEAKER- I think they were both exactly the same cards,
29:42SPEAKERjust to be clear.
29:43SPEAKER- They were all practically the same,
29:44SPEAKERexcept now seems like the time to touch on my teenage lust
29:47SPEAKERfor the Canopus Pure 3D.
29:49SPEAKER- No, that was a card.
29:50SPEAKER- Which was just a Voodoo card,
29:51SPEAKERexcept it had two extra megabytes of memory.
29:54SPEAKERI think it had six megabytes of memory on it.
29:55SPEAKER- Well, Canopus did some other weird stuff too,
29:57SPEAKER'cause they had an integrated card
29:59SPEAKERthat was like a 2D card with a daughter card on it
30:04SPEAKERthat was the 3D FX card.
30:06SPEAKERSo it was all in one thing and it,
30:08SPEAKERalso Canopus did internal pass-throughs
30:12SPEAKERif you had a Canopus 2D card and a Canopus 3D card.
30:15SPEAKER- Maybe that's what I was interested in.
30:17SPEAKERThey were, I believe that was a Japanese company.
30:20SPEAKER- So yeah, they made arcade boards
30:22SPEAKERwas the other thing they did,
30:23SPEAKER'cause they did those obsidian,
30:27SPEAKERI wanna say, what was that jet,
30:30SPEAKERthe jet ski race game, the arcade game?
30:39SPEAKERAnyway.
30:40SPEAKER- Just pretend we remembered.
30:41SPEAKER- Yeah, they made,
30:42SPEAKERpeople are screaming at their radios right now,
30:44SPEAKERbut they made a bunch of,
30:46SPEAKERthey made the 3D,
30:48SPEAKERlike for a lot of those early arcade cabinets
30:51SPEAKERthat were driven by 3D FX hardware,
30:54SPEAKERthey made those boards and put enough RAM on them
30:56SPEAKERthat they could run at like arcade resolutions.
31:00SPEAKERAnd they would also jam multiple texturing units on,
31:03SPEAKERwhich is like, that's the interesting thing about the,
31:07SPEAKERso first off, all of these cards are passively cooled.
31:09SPEAKERAt most they had a heat sink,
31:11SPEAKERwhich was sometimes viewed as a negative
31:13SPEAKERin the press at the time.
31:15SPEAKER- Right.
31:16SPEAKERI'm sitting here looking at the Canopus Wikipedia page,
31:19SPEAKERwhich is very short, it's like three paragraphs,
31:21SPEAKERbut it says when the Voodoo 2 was released,
31:23SPEAKERthe Canopus Pure 3D 2 was praised for the fact
31:26SPEAKERthat their cards were shorter
31:27SPEAKERthan the competitors Voodoo 2 cards.
31:29SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it fit in more cases.
31:30SPEAKERWell, like, so I had an AST Pentium 60 at that point,
31:35SPEAKERI think, and that card was a pizza box case.
31:38SPEAKERAnd like, there were a small number,
31:40SPEAKERlike if you had a giant long chonker video card,
31:43SPEAKERit just wouldn't go in there.
31:45SPEAKER- Right, but God was like, was the mentality basically
31:48SPEAKERthat if you need a heat sink on your card,
31:49SPEAKERyou have screwed up on the design end somehow?
31:51SPEAKER- Pretty much, yeah.
31:52SPEAKERLike my Pentium 60 didn't have a heat sink.
31:54SPEAKERIt was just a bare chip.
31:55SPEAKER- My Pentium 75 did not either,
31:57SPEAKERand that machine became quite unstable over time.
31:59SPEAKER- Shocking that, who knew?
32:01SPEAKER- Granted, to be fair, I had overclocked it to 75,
32:03SPEAKERso that probably, or no, no, no, I'm sorry.
32:05SPEAKERIt was a 75 to 90.
32:06SPEAKER- Yeah, that was the job.
32:07SPEAKER- I had a 75, and it was not stable at 100,
32:10SPEAKERbut I could overclock it to 90,
32:12SPEAKERand then it became borderline unusable after about a year.
32:16SPEAKER- Yeah, weird, weird that.
32:18SPEAKER- I was gonna mention with the pass-through
32:21SPEAKERon the Voodoo cards,
32:23SPEAKERI don't know if it was just the one I had,
32:24SPEAKERor maybe they all did this,
32:25SPEAKERbut you would hear that good solid metallic thunk sound
32:29SPEAKERevery time it switched over to the 3D card.
32:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that was in the monitor though, wasn't it?
32:34SPEAKER'Cause it was a refresh change, probably.
32:35SPEAKER- Maybe it was the monitor, I swear.
32:36SPEAKER- It was like a kachunk.
32:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
32:40SPEAKER- There wasn't like a physical switch in the cards though.
32:42SPEAKER- No, no, no, no.
32:43SPEAKER- There was no solenoid popping or anything like that.
32:44SPEAKER- You think it was more of a kachunk than a thunk?
32:46SPEAKER- So they did, 3DFX did the,
32:49SPEAKERthere's a lot, it was a weird time because it also,
32:55SPEAKERso what a 3D, these things weren't called GPUs
32:59SPEAKER'cause there wasn't a lot of processing.
33:00SPEAKERBasically they were just texture mapping engines on a card.
33:03SPEAKER- I think 3D accelerator was the accepted term back then.
33:06SPEAKER- That's what we called them, yeah.
33:08SPEAKERAnd they would, basically the CPU would do
33:12SPEAKERall the triangle setup and all that stuff,
33:14SPEAKERand it would establish a mesh,
33:15SPEAKERand then the video cards would handle Z buffering,
33:18SPEAKERso they'd see what was visible in that scene,
33:21SPEAKERand then they'd apply textures to it.
33:23SPEAKERAnd there were a wide variety of approaches to that.
33:27SPEAKERPower VR did this tile-based thing
33:30SPEAKERwhere they didn't do visibility checks
33:35SPEAKERon the whole scene at once.
33:36SPEAKERThey would just do the little chunks,
33:38SPEAKERand then that would save them a buttload
33:40SPEAKERof memory bandwidth, basically,
33:41SPEAKER'cause they were only pulling textures
33:43SPEAKERfor things that they would actually map.
33:45SPEAKERAs I recall, that was also one of the ones
33:47SPEAKERthat had problems in their OpenGL stack
33:50SPEAKERwhere there were giant cracks in the world
33:52SPEAKERwhere the tiles didn't line up right or something.
33:54SPEAKERI don't know exactly what was happening there,
33:56SPEAKERbut I remember in that instance it was bad.
34:01SPEAKERThe other thing that was weird about Power VR
34:02SPEAKERwas it was a standalone 3D accelerator,
34:05SPEAKERbut you could do 3D in a window on that
34:09SPEAKERbecause it passed over to the 2D cards frame buffer
34:14SPEAKERacross PCI. - Oh, interesting.
34:16SPEAKERRight, I don't know if we mentioned it.
34:17SPEAKERThat was another limitation of the Voodoo
34:18SPEAKERwas that it could not do window 3D, only full screen.
34:21SPEAKER- No window 3D on the Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2,
34:23SPEAKERonly on the Rush and the Banshee and the 3D eventually.
34:26SPEAKER- Right, right, those were their integrated cards.
34:28SPEAKERThe other downside that I didn't mention of,
34:30SPEAKERand then maybe this was also model-specific,
34:32SPEAKERbut it made my 2D desktop look like shit.
34:34SPEAKER- It made everything fuzzy, yeah.
34:35SPEAKER- Which made me want to die
34:37SPEAKERbecause that was right after I got a Matrox millennium.
34:40SPEAKERI finally got the good 2D desktop card
34:43SPEAKERthat made everything nice and sharp and smooth.
34:44SPEAKER- Oh no. - And then I got a Voodoo
34:46SPEAKERand it made it look like shit again.
34:48SPEAKER- So the other thing about all of these cards
34:50SPEAKERis that they were really low resolution.
34:52SPEAKERLike at a time when a normal desktop
34:55SPEAKERwas probably 800 by 600,
34:57SPEAKERI don't think you could run a Voodoo 1 card
34:59SPEAKERabove 640 by 480.
35:01SPEAKER- No, definitely not at any, maybe not at all,
35:04SPEAKERbut definitely not at any level of performance.
35:06SPEAKER- Yeah, sure. - Yeah, and like,
35:11SPEAKERthe thing that was amazing about those early cards
35:14SPEAKERis you went from like these kind of not grainy exactly,
35:18SPEAKERbut it just felt, it was real grungy.
35:21SPEAKERSoftware rendering in Quake,
35:22SPEAKERwhile a technical Marvel was kind of scuzzy feeling.
35:28SPEAKERAnd then when you loaded up something
35:30SPEAKERthat could do mipmapping on the textures,
35:32SPEAKERwhich is basically where it looks,
35:34SPEAKERit has different resolutions of the texture
35:36SPEAKERand the video card knows to drop the right one
35:39SPEAKERin at the right distances.
35:41SPEAKERYou got these unbelievably clear textures.
35:43SPEAKERYou're like, wait,
35:43SPEAKERis this what this game is supposed to look like?
35:45SPEAKERAnd I played it all the way through not looking like this?
35:48SPEAKERThis is kind of magic.
35:50SPEAKERAnd then games like, and still,
35:54SPEAKERlike if you're looking at a texture
35:55SPEAKERthat would have had multiple mipmap levels across,
35:59SPEAKERlike if you're looking down the length of a wall, right?
36:02SPEAKERYou would get one of the mipmap levels in the wall
36:04SPEAKER'cause we didn't have a nice tropic filtering
36:06SPEAKERor trilinear filtering or anything like that
36:07SPEAKERon the cards at that point.
36:08SPEAKERSo it wasn't able to sample different mip levels
36:10SPEAKERbased on where the,
36:14SPEAKERfor the different distances of that same texture
36:17SPEAKERthat you were looking at.
36:19SPEAKERBut it was still kind of incredible.
36:21SPEAKERAnd then when the Voodoo 2 came out,
36:24SPEAKERall of a sudden you had multi-texturing
36:25SPEAKERthat could happen in one pass.
36:28SPEAKERSo like each frame could have multiple,
36:30SPEAKERtwo textures applied to each surface.
36:33SPEAKERSo you'd have like a lighting texture and a picture texture.
36:38SPEAKERRight?
36:38SPEAKEROkay.
36:40SPEAKERTrying to think of some other
36:41SPEAKERlike real world use cases for that.
36:42SPEAKERI mean, is that when you were able to start applying
36:44SPEAKERlike decals to walls, like bullet holes and blood
36:46SPEAKERand stuff like that, or?
36:47SPEAKERThat was probably later.
36:48SPEAKER'Cause I feel like the Voodoo 2 actually had,
36:50SPEAKERlike there were three chips on the texture, on the chip.
36:52SPEAKERThere was one that was the main, the FX chip,
36:55SPEAKERand then there were two TX chips
36:57SPEAKERthat each was responsible for one texture pass
37:00SPEAKERper cycle per frame.
37:02SPEAKERSo you could do that before,
37:06SPEAKERbut it would take multiple passes on each frame to do it.
37:12SPEAKERTo do a multi-texturing pass is my understanding,
37:14SPEAKERbut I could be wrong.
37:15SPEAKERI don't know.
37:16SPEAKERThis was from a time before
37:18SPEAKERwhen people talked about this stuff.
37:19SPEAKERLike now Nvidia and ATI, when they release new GPUs,
37:24SPEAKERthey dump, they sit down with all the tech press
37:26SPEAKERand they're like, okay, here's exactly how this stuff works.
37:28SPEAKERHere's how deep the pipelines go.
37:30SPEAKERHere's how much cache each part has.
37:32SPEAKERHere's what the programmable parts
37:34SPEAKERof the pipeline are capable of.
37:36SPEAKERAnd back then they just released the cards
37:38SPEAKERand there was a like one page spec sheet
37:39SPEAKERthat they handed out to people at Comdex
37:42SPEAKERwhen they wanted to buy, when they came in
37:44SPEAKERand like compact rolled in and they're like,
37:46SPEAKERwell, here's what our new video card can do.
37:48SPEAKERIt's like, it costs this much.
37:50SPEAKERIt's gonna get this many blit marks and it'll run Quake.
37:57SPEAKERAnd people are like, okay.
37:58SPEAKERAnd we're putting that in every compact
38:00SPEAKERthat we're shipping this year.
38:01SPEAKER- Good enough.
38:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:03SPEAKER- Ship it.
38:04SPEAKER- It was a weird time, for sure.
38:07SPEAKER- Was the Voodoo 2 another pass-through card?
38:09SPEAKERThat was still not a full one.
38:10SPEAKER- Voodoo 2 was a pass-through card.
38:11SPEAKER- Still not a full desktop card, right?
38:13SPEAKER- But also the Voodoo 2 had an internal SLI port
38:16SPEAKERso you could put two of them in.
38:18SPEAKER- Oh God, is that when SLI started?
38:19SPEAKER- That's when SLI started and it would let you play it,
38:21SPEAKERI think, 1280, 1024 by 768 if you had two of them in SLI.
38:27SPEAKERAnd the funny thing is, because of the way that card worked,
38:30SPEAKERit is maybe the last time that adding a second video card
38:33SPEAKERto your system gave you a one-to-one increase
38:36SPEAKERin performance for each,
38:37SPEAKERlike you get double the performance for each.
38:39SPEAKERAssuming, again, because all of the triangle setup
38:43SPEAKERand all of that stuff was done on the CPU,
38:44SPEAKERassuming your CPUs had a fast enough floating point
38:47SPEAKERto do that.
38:48SPEAKER- So they set very poor expectations for SLI early on
38:51SPEAKERthat it never lived up to again.
38:52SPEAKER- Well, but also, when I upgraded from a Voodoo 1
38:56SPEAKERto a Voodoo 2, I was on a K6, like 166 or 200
39:01SPEAKERor something that had bad floating point
39:02SPEAKERbut good integer math.
39:04SPEAKERAnd it turned out that I saw no performance increase
39:08SPEAKERgoing from the Voodoo 1 to the Voodoo 2
39:11SPEAKERbecause the CPU couldn't keep up with the card at all.
39:15SPEAKEREverything was CPU bound then.
39:17SPEAKER- So, hmm, like there's a couple of stories here.
39:21SPEAKERI mean, there's the thing where 80% of these companies
39:25SPEAKERjust fell away and either got acquired
39:27SPEAKERor went out of business or whatever.
39:29SPEAKER- Well, that happens when there's a big shift in the way,
39:32SPEAKERlike it happened with phones too, right?
39:35SPEAKERLike when the iPhone came out and Android rolled out,
39:38SPEAKERNokia and Motorola and all those companies
39:42SPEAKERthat had been making dumb phones for 10, 15, 20 years,
39:47SPEAKERa lot of them didn't survive that transition.
39:50SPEAKER- I mean, I guess it's the natural evolution
39:51SPEAKERof a new market being created essentially, right?
39:53SPEAKER'Cause that's what happened with phones
39:54SPEAKERand that's what happened here.
39:56SPEAKERThere was no market for 3D accelerators and then there was.
39:58SPEAKERAnd so everybody tried to get in
39:59SPEAKERand then only a couple of them made it out.
40:01SPEAKER- Well, and even the ones that did make it out,
40:05SPEAKERlike 3D effects got bought by Nvidia
40:07SPEAKERin the early 2000s, right?
40:09SPEAKER- So that's like, there are two stories here.
40:11SPEAKERThere's the story of when I got a TNT
40:13SPEAKERand like everything changed.
40:14SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
40:15SPEAKER- That was, that like the Voodoo
40:17SPEAKERwas like an amazing proof of concept
40:18SPEAKERbut the TNT was the first Nvidia card
40:21SPEAKERfor people who don't know.
40:23SPEAKERSo like those are the kind of twin narratives here
40:25SPEAKERare I got my first Nvidia card and granted,
40:28SPEAKERI had sounds like the first couple of Nvidia cards
40:30SPEAKERwere not amazing,
40:31SPEAKERbut the TNT was kind of mind blowing at the time.
40:34SPEAKERSo there's like kind of the rise of Nvidia
40:36SPEAKERand the all-in-one card that was actually very good.
40:38SPEAKERAnd then there is the like meteoric rise
40:41SPEAKERand fall of 3D effects.
40:43SPEAKERLike 3D effects went from the name in 3D graphics
40:45SPEAKERto not even a going concern in the space of like,
40:49SPEAKERwhat, four years?
40:50SPEAKER- Five years, I think, yeah.
40:51SPEAKER- Like they got, I think they got acquired
40:53SPEAKERby Nvidia in 2000 ish.
40:55SPEAKER- It was right when I started at Maximum PC, as I recall,
40:58SPEAKER'cause they sent us a Voodoo five 6,000.
41:03SPEAKER- Right.
41:03SPEAKER- Like a proto board with like wires dangling off of it
41:06SPEAKERthat where it was an engineering sample.
41:08SPEAKER- Like the Voodoo five even make it to market?
41:10SPEAKER- Never made it, maybe the low end version did,
41:13SPEAKERbut the big, the four processor one
41:15SPEAKERnever made it to market.
41:16SPEAKER- Right, so like for them to go from the card to get
41:20SPEAKERin the Voodoo and Voodoo two era to like,
41:23SPEAKERI assume they basically sold at fire sale prices
41:25SPEAKERto Nvidia.
41:27SPEAKER- I mean, I think they bought IP and engineers
41:29SPEAKERand that was it.
41:30SPEAKER- Right, right.
41:31SPEAKER- So the thing that's, the TNT is an interesting card
41:35SPEAKER'cause like TNT and Rage Pro,
41:38SPEAKERlike both of those are really important.
41:39SPEAKERRage Pro was in a lot of gateway machines, as I recall,
41:43SPEAKERand Dell machines.
41:44SPEAKERSo like if you were buying computers for,
41:48SPEAKER(sneezes)
41:49SPEAKERExcuse me, say a computer lab in 2000, '98, '99,
41:54SPEAKERall of a sudden, like a commodity computer could run Quake.
41:58SPEAKERRight, so it wasn't like you needed some weird add-in
42:01SPEAKERvideo card that made your 2D desktop look like crap
42:03SPEAKERand was gonna have all sorts of weird requirements.
42:08SPEAKERIt just worked.
42:10SPEAKER- And that was GLQuake?
42:11SPEAKER- That was GLQuake, yeah.
42:13SPEAKERThe TNT was the higher end version of that.
42:16SPEAKERThe TNT was a really compelling part at,
42:19SPEAKERlike when the Revo 128 launched,
42:21SPEAKERthere was, I think I sent you last night,
42:23SPEAKERwas there was a big interview in boot in like '96,
42:26SPEAKERI guess, or '97, maybe even '98,
42:29SPEAKERwhere David Kirk, who was the chief scientist at Nvidia
42:32SPEAKERfor a long time, was basically doing the apology tour
42:36SPEAKERfor Revo 128 driver problems
42:39SPEAKERand overall shortcomings in that part.
42:41SPEAKERAnd then they rolled out the TNT,
42:43SPEAKERwhich he had hinted at in that interview.
42:46SPEAKERAnd it was, A, the drivers were really solid,
42:49SPEAKERwhich it was a lesson Nvidia learned early
42:51SPEAKERthat without good drivers,
42:53SPEAKERit didn't matter how fast the hardware was.
42:56SPEAKERAnd two, it really ripped, like it was fast.
43:00SPEAKERYou could run Quake in a window, you could play GLQuake,
43:03SPEAKEReverything, and it was performant,
43:06SPEAKERand you could play at high resolutions even.
43:09SPEAKER- That was my Quake 2 card, is my memory of the TNT.
43:12SPEAKERA TNT maybe sometime after Quake 2 came out,
43:15SPEAKERand it was also, it was an all-in-one card,
43:18SPEAKERso it was nice to just have one card that did desktop
43:21SPEAKERand really nice 3D graphics, but also, yeah,
43:23SPEAKERit was fast as hell in my memory.
43:27SPEAKER- So it's funny, for a long time,
43:28SPEAKERI had a TNT card and a Voodoo card in my computer
43:32SPEAKERat the same time, just because it was still,
43:36SPEAKERlike Quake 1 still worked better on the Voodoo card
43:39SPEAKERthan it did on the TNT card
43:40SPEAKERbecause of driver implementation weirdness.
43:43SPEAKER- Okay, sure.
43:43SPEAKER- And I was still playing competitive Quake 1
43:46SPEAKERon the LPB leagues at that point.
43:49SPEAKER- Sure.
43:50SPEAKER- Or the HPB leagues, sorry, the hyping people leagues.
43:54SPEAKER- You're talking to somebody who got,
43:56SPEAKERI got a 3DFX card and started playing Quake on that
43:59SPEAKERbecause my Pentium 75 couldn't run it for shit in software,
44:02SPEAKERbut then I got a Pentium 200 later,
44:04SPEAKERand I was getting such a high frame rate
44:05SPEAKERin software Quake on that thing
44:07SPEAKERthat I went back to software Quake
44:08SPEAKERbecause I would rather have the frame rate.
44:10SPEAKER- You were probably one of those people
44:10SPEAKERthat would have played NetQuake instead of Quake World.
44:13SPEAKER- I'm not quite gonna go that far.
44:16SPEAKER- We talked about those Carmack plan updates,
44:17SPEAKERbut I remember you'd see a new plan update from Carmack
44:20SPEAKERand you're like, "Is this gonna be about Quake World?
44:22SPEAKER"Is this gonna be about GLQuake?"
44:23SPEAKEREither one was fine.
44:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I was reading about the Quake World announcement.
44:27SPEAKERI was reading that post last night
44:29SPEAKERwhen he basically almost had in hand
44:33SPEAKERcame in front of the Quake community
44:34SPEAKERand was just like, in so many words,
44:36SPEAKERwas just like, look, we get it, the internet performance
44:40SPEAKERfor NetQuake is unacceptable.
44:43SPEAKERI'm going to fork the code base and start over
44:46SPEAKERand deliver a new online client for people.
44:48SPEAKERAlso, there's an amazing line in there.
44:52SPEAKERGosh, I don't know if I can find it
44:53SPEAKERoff the top of the head right now.
44:55SPEAKER- The first time I played Quake World was at my dad's office
44:59SPEAKER'cause it came out while I was home on Christmas break,
45:02SPEAKERand I drove, literally got in the car
45:03SPEAKERand drove to the office and downloaded it
45:05SPEAKERand put it on his work computer
45:08SPEAKERand played software Quake World on his modem there
45:11SPEAKER'cause we didn't have a computer at the house
45:12SPEAKERat mom and dad's house at that point.
45:14SPEAKERAnd I was just like, oh God, I can play this on the modem.
45:16SPEAKERThis is just a whole new world.
45:19SPEAKER- Actually playable, it felt like a real video game.
45:21SPEAKERThis is the line from the plan file
45:24SPEAKERwhere he basically reveals the existence of Quake World
45:27SPEAKERwhere he describes it as a pet research project.
45:30SPEAKER"If it looks feasible,
45:31SPEAKER"I would like to see internet-focused gaming
45:33SPEAKER"become a justifiable biz direction for us.
45:36SPEAKER"It's definitely cool, but it is uncertain
45:37SPEAKER"if people can actually make money at it."
45:40SPEAKER- So I'm sure when he says it's uncertain
45:42SPEAKERpeople can actually make money at it,
45:43SPEAKERthey were looking at those pay-to-play modem dial-in services
45:47SPEAKERlike Duango where you paid like five bucks a month
45:51SPEAKERand you could dial into a local thing
45:52SPEAKERand play Doom against other people in your town.
45:55SPEAKER- Yes, obviously there were early attempts
45:57SPEAKERat monetizing that kind of stuff,
45:59SPEAKERbut it's just in light of history
46:00SPEAKERand where things have gone seeing somebody say,
46:03SPEAKER"I don't know if you can make money at online gaming,
46:05SPEAKER"but we're gonna mess with it."
46:06SPEAKER- I don't know, man, maybe.
46:08SPEAKER- Kind of amusing.
46:10SPEAKER- But yeah, so we were talking about consolidation.
46:12SPEAKERIf we go down this list of the eight companies,
46:14SPEAKERso we have 3DFX, PowerBR, Nvidia, ATI,
46:17SPEAKERMatrox, S3, Intel, and Rendition.
46:20SPEAKERRendition's gone.
46:23SPEAKERI actually don't know what happened to them.
46:24SPEAKER- Let me see here. - I'm sure they got bought
46:26SPEAKERby somebody, but 3DFX got bought by Nvidia
46:29SPEAKERin the early 2000s, mostly for patents and engineers,
46:34SPEAKERis my understanding.
46:35SPEAKER- Micron purchased Rendition.
46:38SPEAKER- Micron, the memory manufacturer?
46:40SPEAKER- That's what this says.
46:41SPEAKER- Wow, interesting.
46:43SPEAKER- As a source of embedded graphics solutions
46:45SPEAKERfor their own line of motherboards.
46:48SPEAKER- There you go.
46:51SPEAKERPowerVR ended up focusing on mobile,
46:54SPEAKERand they are one of the main SOC GPU vendors
46:59SPEAKERfor ARM processors.
47:02SPEAKER- To this day, right? - To this day.
47:03SPEAKER- That name still exists.
47:05SPEAKERWith a little detour into the Dreamcast.
47:08SPEAKER- That's true, yeah, they did.
47:09SPEAKERThe V2 version of the TileVR architecture
47:12SPEAKERwas the thing that made the Dreamcast work.
47:15SPEAKERLook, there was a lot of scene drama around the Dreamcast,
47:17SPEAKER'cause everybody thought they were going,
47:19SPEAKERSega had everybody thinking they were going
47:20SPEAKERin the Dreamcast.
47:21SPEAKER3DFX sued them for $155 million.
47:24SPEAKER- What?
47:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
47:26SPEAKERBecause they had given proprietary hardware information
47:29SPEAKERbecause they thought 3DFX was gonna power the Dreamcast.
47:33SPEAKER3DFX did a lot of arcade boards for Sega,
47:35SPEAKERis my understanding, in that time period.
47:37SPEAKER- I think that's right, yeah.
47:38SPEAKER- I feel like somebody else also thought
47:41SPEAKERthey were going in the Dreamcast,
47:43SPEAKERand then it turned out, going in the Dreamcast
47:45SPEAKERwouldn't have helped anyone, really, probably.
47:47SPEAKER- Nah, not so much.
47:48SPEAKERThat console lasted, what, about a year and a half?
47:51SPEAKER- If that, yeah.
47:52SPEAKER- Roughly.
47:54SPEAKER- Okay, so PowerVR, Nvidia obviously is Nvidia,
47:57SPEAKERand they're powering the future.
47:59SPEAKERATI got bought by AMD in 2006.
48:02SPEAKERThey spun out, they had bought BitBoy's Oi,
48:06SPEAKERwhich was one of those hushed tones on message boards
48:09SPEAKERand used net companies. - Oh my god, dude.
48:12SPEAKERThe game that BitBoy's was talking about,
48:14SPEAKERtheir forthcoming product that never materialized.
48:16SPEAKER- Well, and they came out of the demo scene,
48:19SPEAKERlike Swedish demo scene.
48:20SPEAKER- Yes, yes, they were from Scandinavia, right?
48:22SPEAKERSo they were a bunch of 64K coders and stuff like that,
48:25SPEAKERand I'm trying to remember what claims they were making.
48:27SPEAKERI just-- - That part doesn't matter.
48:29SPEAKER- They were quoting numbers and performance metrics
48:33SPEAKERthat sounded completely impossible.
48:34SPEAKER- They were talking about next-gen,
48:36SPEAKERit was the equivalent of them talking about ray tracing
48:38SPEAKERin 2005, right? - Right, right.
48:41SPEAKERAnd the fact that they never actually shipped a product.
48:44SPEAKER- So they got bought by ATI right before AMD bought ATI,
48:48SPEAKERand then when AMD bought ATI for five billion dollars
48:53SPEAKERor whatever, which was an enormous amount of money then,
48:56SPEAKERthey spun BitBoy's back out to Qualcomm,
49:00SPEAKERwho then developed the thing that they were talking about
49:02SPEAKERinto the Adreno processor, which also is in a lot of,
49:06SPEAKERlike that's Qualcomm's GPU SOC component.
49:09SPEAKER- So the BitBoy's people actually shipped a product.
49:11SPEAKER- And hey, look at those letters in Adreno, Brad.
49:15SPEAKER- Yeah? - Is it an anagram?
49:18SPEAKER- Maybe, maybe.
49:21SPEAKER- For a popular ATI graphics processor.
49:24SPEAKER- Oh hey, look at that. - Yeah.
49:26SPEAKER- Who would've thought?
49:27SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think everybody feels good about that.
49:30SPEAKERArtX was another one of those companies
49:31SPEAKERthat was like in the 30 companies
49:34SPEAKERthat were developing 3D accelerator technologies
49:36SPEAKERin like the late '90s that ended up getting bought by ATI.
49:40SPEAKERThat's what ended up in the Dolphin, I guess,
49:43SPEAKERwhich became the GameCube, yeah.
49:45SPEAKER- Which reminded me that GameCubes
49:46SPEAKERstraight up have an ATI sticker on them.
49:48SPEAKER- Don't they?
49:49SPEAKER- Hell yeah, yeah, right on the front, purple spot.
49:51SPEAKER- If I remember just like the drink guest
49:53SPEAKERhad a Windows CE logo on there somewhere.
49:55SPEAKER- Yep, yep, I mean, let's see,
49:58SPEAKERMatrox still makes graphics video processing stuff
50:02SPEAKERand like video wall installations and stuff like that.
50:06SPEAKER- I was sure that Matrox would have been
50:07SPEAKERone of those casualties of this era,
50:08SPEAKERbut yeah, they're still out there.
50:10SPEAKERYeah, like they make a lot of embedded solutions
50:12SPEAKERfor like if you've got some giant video wall
50:13SPEAKERyou need to power.
50:14SPEAKER- Well, so Matrox always, they came around
50:17SPEAKERin like the early 2000s to maximum PC.
50:19SPEAKERThey were the first ones who were like,
50:21SPEAKER"Hey, we think this multi-monitor thing
50:23SPEAKER"is gonna be a big deal.
50:26SPEAKER"And here's a solution that will let you play
50:29SPEAKER"your video game across three monitors stretched around."
50:33SPEAKERAnd of course they were like CRTs with big fat bezels
50:35SPEAKERand stuff like that, so it was kinda goofy at the time.
50:38SPEAKER- It was too expensive and too bulky to be feasible back then.
50:42SPEAKER- Drive it really, 'cause it's 20 pixels.
50:44SPEAKER- Yeah, but they weren't wrong.
50:45SPEAKER- They were not wrong.
50:47SPEAKER- S3 was bought by...
50:54SPEAKEROh God, I can't remember who bought them.
50:56SPEAKERI wanna say Intel, but I don't think that's right.
51:00SPEAKER- I looked it up last night
51:01SPEAKERand I am totally forgetting here.
51:02SPEAKERLet me just...
51:04SPEAKER- Intel, obviously.
51:06SPEAKER- Oh, they're owned by HTC.
51:07SPEAKER- HTC, that's right.
51:08SPEAKER- And in fact, the S3 name I believe is still in use.
51:13SPEAKER- On mobile parts, probably?
51:17SPEAKER- I might be wrong about that, actually.
51:20SPEAKER- Well, so Intel, after the i740 and the i752,
51:24SPEAKERwhich was the follow-up, they did multiple other,
51:28SPEAKERlike they went through the whole Larrabee thing
51:29SPEAKERwhere they were gonna revolutionize the graphics pipeline
51:31SPEAKERwith a bunch of low-fi x86 cores.
51:35SPEAKER- Right.
51:36SPEAKER- And then it just basically disappeared.
51:40SPEAKERAnd rendition, you said, ended up at...
51:44SPEAKER- I've already forgotten.
51:45SPEAKERIt's so hard to keep all this stuff, Micron.
51:46SPEAKER- Micron, yeah, that's right.
51:47SPEAKER- Yes.
51:48SPEAKER- So yeah, it was a weird...
51:51SPEAKERAnd during this time, there were so many...
51:53SPEAKEREverybody looked at what the hardware was capable of
51:56SPEAKERand where the market was going,
51:57SPEAKERand they decided different approaches
52:00SPEAKERto how to feed those markets.
52:03SPEAKERSo rendition and Intel were looking at the price of memory
52:07SPEAKERand were like, "Well, nobody's gonna put lots and lots
52:09SPEAKERof memory on these cards ever.
52:11SPEAKERSo we should just roll out these high-speed interfaces
52:17SPEAKERto system memory and let everybody do everything
52:19SPEAKERout of system memory."
52:20SPEAKERAnd NVIDIA and ATI looked at what the CPUs were capable of
52:25SPEAKERin terms of triangle setup.
52:26SPEAKERMore like, "We're gonna hit a wall on this really fast,
52:28SPEAKERso we need to get some computation on these processors
52:32SPEAKERso it's not just doing mipmapping and trilinear filtering."
52:35SPEAKER- Thus the dawn of hardware transform and lighting.
52:38SPEAKER- Then yeah, that's when the GPU,
52:40SPEAKERwhen NVIDIA launched the GeForce 256
52:42SPEAKERand ATI launched the Radeon six months later,
52:45SPEAKERit was a transformative moment.
52:49SPEAKER- Totally, I didn't know that, I'm sorry.
52:51SPEAKER- Oh no, no, I mean, in that like,
52:53SPEAKERthe computationally expensive part of playing games
52:56SPEAKERon these 3D accelerators suddenly moved off of the CPU
53:00SPEAKERand onto the GPU.
53:01SPEAKER- Right, like that conceptually is the beginning
53:03SPEAKERof the modern era of the GPU, right?
53:05SPEAKER- I think so, yeah.
53:07SPEAKER- I didn't realize the Radeon was that close to the GeForce
53:09SPEAKERin getting to market.
53:10SPEAKER- So I started at Maximum PC.
53:12SPEAKERThis is easy for me to remember.
53:13SPEAKERI started at Maximum PC in June of 2000
53:16SPEAKERand my first meeting with a vendor
53:18SPEAKERwhile as a Maximum PC employee was a Radeon meeting
53:22SPEAKERlike the second day I was there.
53:24SPEAKERAnd so they probably didn't roll it out
53:26SPEAKERfor another three months at that point
53:27SPEAKER'cause everybody brought us stuff super early
53:29SPEAKERso we could have timely coverage.
53:32SPEAKERBut that was a big deal.
53:35SPEAKER- In my mind, I mean, this is probably
53:36SPEAKERbecause I always bought NVIDIA products,
53:38SPEAKERso that's just what I remember.
53:39SPEAKERBut like in my mind, I don't remember the Radeon name
53:41SPEAKERbeing out there until Half-Life 2,
53:42SPEAKERbut that's obviously a marketing.
53:43SPEAKERThat's a legacy.
53:44SPEAKER- That was way later, yeah.
53:45SPEAKER- They're marketing, right?
53:46SPEAKERThey obviously were around way before that, so.
53:48SPEAKER- So the thing about, the thing about,
53:51SPEAKERso one of the things that NVIDIA did
53:53SPEAKERthat turned out to be really smart
53:55SPEAKERbecause of the thing that you just said
53:56SPEAKERis that they rolled out, DDR memory was late coming.
54:00SPEAKERSo they just rolled out an SDR version of the GeForce
54:03SPEAKERlike six months before the DDR cards.
54:05SPEAKER- I was still on a TNT1, so I bought an SDR GeForce
54:09SPEAKERbecause I needed, I was desperate to have it.
54:13SPEAKER'Cause that was the era of Quake 3
54:15SPEAKERand I really needed Quake 3 to run better.
54:18SPEAKER- It turns out the DDR cards,
54:19SPEAKERsince everything was fill rate limited,
54:20SPEAKERwere almost twice as fast as the SDR cards.
54:22SPEAKER- Yeah, that was perhaps a hasty decision.
54:25SPEAKERI was always off cycle for whatever reason.
54:26SPEAKERI got a Voodoo 1, but then I tried to stretch my hardware
54:30SPEAKERas long as I could, just for money reasons.
54:31SPEAKERSo I skipped the Voodoo 2 and I got a TNT1,
54:38SPEAKERand then the TNT2 came along, it was dramatically better.
54:41SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:43SPEAKER- Then I got a GeForce 256 SDR because I was due for a card
54:47SPEAKERand then the DDR version came out, it was massively better.
54:49SPEAKERAnd then the GeForce 2 was even better than that.
54:53SPEAKERI think I stayed on that, I'm trying to remember.
54:56SPEAKERI want to say I stayed on that GeForce 256
55:01SPEAKERuntil the GeForce 4.
55:02SPEAKER- Probably three or four would have been
55:03SPEAKERthe next smart upgrade, yeah.
55:05SPEAKER- I skipped the GeForce 3
55:07SPEAKER'cause that was when I started a GameSpot.
55:08SPEAKERSo I was playing a ton of games on consoles,
55:10SPEAKER'cause that was my coverage beat.
55:13SPEAKERSo I didn't get a, I think I got like the low end GeForce 4
55:16SPEAKERwas my next card after that.
55:17SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say the weird,
55:19SPEAKERso that's when the GeForce 4,
55:23SPEAKERI think is when they started differentiating,
55:26SPEAKERlike they started having multiple SKUs
55:29SPEAKERthat weren't just clocked down versions of the same chip.
55:32SPEAKERThey were like versions of the chip that didn't bin
55:34SPEAKERor that parts were burned out on or something.
55:37SPEAKERAnd like they had the GeForce MX,
55:39SPEAKERI think was the low end version of those cards.
55:41SPEAKERAnd then the TI's were the high ends
55:42SPEAKERand then the regular ones were just the G forces.
55:45SPEAKER- I had a, I believe I had a TI 4200.
55:48SPEAKER- That was a fine card, all right,
55:50SPEAKERthey did numbers on those, I forgot.
55:51SPEAKER- Yes, so which was the low end of there was,
55:54SPEAKERit was the TI 4200, 4400 and 4600, so.
55:58SPEAKER- Well, so that was a weird time
55:59SPEAKERbecause the pipelines were still fixed functions.
56:01SPEAKERSo it wasn't like a general purpose compute pipeline.
56:03SPEAKERLike if they wanted to add new features,
56:05SPEAKERthen they had to put Silicon on for it
56:07SPEAKERor you had to do it on the CPU.
56:09SPEAKERAnd it wasn't until the 5 series with the leaf blower,
56:13SPEAKERthe 5800 that that changed, which was a few years later.
56:18SPEAKERSo, and that's when the general purpose compute pipeline
56:22SPEAKERhappened on the GPU really, that's when that started.
56:24SPEAKERLike they weren't feature complete
56:25SPEAKERfor a few more years after that,
56:27SPEAKER'cause they didn't have like, they didn't have full
56:29SPEAKERif and XOR, all the different gates that you need.
56:34SPEAKERBut it was pretty cool.
56:36SPEAKER- So that pretty much takes us into the modern era,
56:38SPEAKERboth in terms of like the internal design of what a GPU is
56:41SPEAKERand also in the market dominance
56:43SPEAKERof the companies that made it through.
56:44SPEAKERBut the last thing I wanted to touch on real quick
56:47SPEAKERor just expand on was if you have a good sense
56:51SPEAKERof why 3D effects cratered so hard and so fast.
56:54SPEAKER- Yeah, they never made a compelling 2D, 3D part.
56:58SPEAKER- Is that all it was?
56:59SPEAKER- I mean, it was first mover disadvantage, right?
57:04SPEAKERSo they established the market and they set it up
57:07SPEAKERand then they didn't ever have a,
57:10SPEAKERlike their products were always niche products
57:13SPEAKERin a market that needed to be mainstream
57:14SPEAKERand Nvidia and ATI had mainstream parts immediately.
57:18SPEAKER- They couldn't go in commodity PCs
57:20SPEAKERbecause they were an extra part, not a replacement part.
57:24SPEAKERLike they couldn't replace the desktop card,
57:25SPEAKERthey had to be there in addition to a desktop card.
57:27SPEAKER- Yeah, so instead of adding like four bucks
57:29SPEAKERto the cost of the thing for Compaq or Packard Bell
57:32SPEAKERor e-machines or whoever, it was another 150 bucks
57:36SPEAKERto the OEM and they weren't,
57:38SPEAKERlike unless they could sell it into gamers, it wasn't.
57:42SPEAKERLike if you look at it from a,
57:44SPEAKERif you're the purchaser for Compaq
57:45SPEAKERwho's selling 2 million PCs a year or something
57:48SPEAKERand you're looking at ATI with the Rage Pro
57:50SPEAKERand Nvidia with the TNT2 and 3D effects
57:54SPEAKERwith a TNT2 plus a Voodoo 2 or Voodoo Banshee,
57:59SPEAKERwhatever, Voodoo 3.
58:01SPEAKERTheir Voodoo 3 performance was never very good, right?
58:04SPEAKERLike those cards couldn't compete
58:06SPEAKERwith the TNT2 and the Rage Pro.
58:09SPEAKER- Voodoo 3 was an all-in-one, to be clear.
58:12SPEAKER- Yeah, everything after Voodoo 2 was an all-in-one.
58:14SPEAKER- Okay, the Banshee was just straight up bad, right?
58:16SPEAKER- Banshee was straight up bad.
58:18SPEAKERThe Voodoo Rush was really bad.
58:19SPEAKERThe Banshee was an okay 2D card
58:22SPEAKERthat had kind of passable 3D on it.
58:25SPEAKERThe Voodoo 3 was fine.
58:28SPEAKERLike it was not a bad card necessarily.
58:30SPEAKERIt just wasn't, like it wasn't as competitive with Nvidia.
58:33SPEAKERAnd I think they, I feel like they also leaned on Glide
58:36SPEAKERlonger than they should have
58:37SPEAKERwhere Nvidia was building robust direct 3D
58:40SPEAKERand OpenGL drivers that were native.
58:43SPEAKERVoodoo was using the Glide wrapper for OpenGL
58:46SPEAKERfor a long time.
58:46SPEAKER- I think now that you mentioned it,
58:48SPEAKERI think that was another revelation of getting that TNT
58:50SPEAKERwas that it just played a lot more games.
58:52SPEAKER- Like I said, the Revo 128 was a real wake-up call,
58:55SPEAKERI feel like, at Nvidia, where they were like,
58:58SPEAKER"Oh, right, it doesn't matter how good our hardware is
59:00SPEAKER"if the drivers suck."
59:02SPEAKERAnd like they invested--
59:03SPEAKER- API support is lacking.
59:05SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, they've spent a lot of time.
59:08SPEAKERI mean, if you look at the size of their dev rel org
59:11SPEAKERin Nvidia versus other comparable companies then,
59:14SPEAKERand even probably now, it's pretty astounding
59:18SPEAKERhow aggressively they spend money on that.
59:21SPEAKERAnd it makes a lot of sense.
59:22SPEAKER- That reputation persists to this day,
59:24SPEAKERlike you see it on message boards all the time.
59:25SPEAKERAnd in fact, like that's, in the back of my mind,
59:27SPEAKERlike Nvidia's the one with the good drivers.
59:29SPEAKERLike that's a big part of the reason
59:30SPEAKERthat I always bought their cards.
59:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
59:37SPEAKERI thought we were gonna talk about direct 3D and OpenGL
59:39SPEAKERin this, we kind of skipped past this,
59:41SPEAKERbut at the same time, the undercurrent behind all of this
59:43SPEAKERwas like, what's gonna be the future of 3D rendering?
59:47SPEAKERIs it gonna be this weird open consortium
59:49SPEAKERor is it gonna be direct 3D?
59:50SPEAKERAnd it turns out that the open consortium
59:54SPEAKERnever was able to move fast enough
59:56SPEAKERto support the new hardware.
59:57SPEAKERSo like people, like vendors were always writing
1:00:00SPEAKEROpenGL extensions to support the new,
1:00:02SPEAKERlike the hardware transform and lighting
1:00:04SPEAKERand the bump mapping and the normal maps and all that stuff.
1:00:07SPEAKERAnd just never landed on the OpenGL side.
1:00:13SPEAKERIt made supporting OpenGL really difficult.
1:00:15SPEAKER- Right, and like that dynamic persists to this day, right?
1:00:18SPEAKERLike DX 12 was robust and mature and on the market for ages
1:00:22SPEAKERbefore Vulkan really became a thing, right?
1:00:24SPEAKER- It's...
1:00:26SPEAKER- I don't know if those are
1:00:26SPEAKERas directly comparable in this case.
1:00:28SPEAKER- Yeah, Vulkan is complicated for whole other reasons, but...
1:00:33SPEAKER- I came upon a Twitter thread of graphics programmers
1:00:36SPEAKERthe other day kind of grousing about Vulkan
1:00:38SPEAKERin a way that I hadn't seen before.
1:00:40SPEAKERMaybe think maybe my understanding of Vulkan
1:00:42SPEAKERis not as complete as it could be.
1:00:44SPEAKER- Was it the one about the,
1:00:45SPEAKERhere's the number of lines of code it takes
1:00:47SPEAKERto draw a triangle in Vulkan?
1:00:48SPEAKER- Something like that?
1:00:49SPEAKER- Yeah. - Yeah.
1:00:51SPEAKER- The other weird thing about Direct3D,
1:00:53SPEAKERlike they iterated Direct3D so fast at that time period.
1:00:57SPEAKERLike they never released Direct3D.
1:00:59SPEAKERThere was no Direct3D 1.
1:01:01SPEAKERDirect3D 2.0 launched in June of 1996.
1:01:04SPEAKERDirect3D 3.0 launched in September of that same year.
1:01:08SPEAKER- Wow.
1:01:09SPEAKER- So like four months, five months, right?
1:01:12SPEAKERAnd like, I think the only Direct3D 2 game
1:01:15SPEAKERI ever remember playing was Tom Clancy's "SSN",
1:01:17SPEAKERthat submarine, like the underwater piloting game
1:01:22SPEAKERwhere you flew the submarine like a plane.
1:01:25SPEAKERAnd they, like, they didn't really,
1:01:30SPEAKERlike Microsoft was iterating that so quickly
1:01:32SPEAKERthat they were releasing Direct3D 3.0 A, 3.0 B, 3.0 C,
1:01:37SPEAKERmonth to month to month.
1:01:39SPEAKERSo you're always downloading these new things.
1:01:41SPEAKERBut as a result, by the time they got to five or six,
1:01:45SPEAKERI guess by the time they got to five,
1:01:47SPEAKER'cause they skipped four, it was robust and like worked.
1:01:51SPEAKER- I feel like I remember DirectX 5
1:01:54SPEAKERlasting for a very long time.
1:01:55SPEAKER- Five. - Irritatively.
1:01:56SPEAKER- Five was for a while.
1:01:58SPEAKEREight was when they added the programmable pipeline stuff.
1:02:01SPEAKER- Yeah, those are like five, eight, 11, and 12
1:02:05SPEAKERare the big milestones in my memory.
1:02:07SPEAKER- Yeah, so the other big hardware thing,
1:02:10SPEAKERthe early hardware feature that made a huge impact
1:02:12SPEAKERon like visual quality that we haven't talked about yet
1:02:16SPEAKERwas the G, the Matrox G400, which was the Post Mystique.
1:02:20SPEAKERIt was like their Rage Pro competitor, I guess,
1:02:23SPEAKERor Rage 128 maybe competitor,
1:02:26SPEAKERaround the same time as the TNT.
1:02:28SPEAKERAnd it had bump map, it had hardware bump mapping support.
1:02:30SPEAKER- Oh, huh.
1:02:31SPEAKER- Which was really novel and literally no one used it, so.
1:02:36SPEAKER- 'Cause it was the only card that had it.
1:02:37SPEAKER- It was the only card that had it, yeah.
1:02:38SPEAKER- But, I mean, that kind of thing came back around
1:02:40SPEAKERwith the GeForce 3, right?
1:02:43SPEAKER- Yeah, GeForce 3 was the first one
1:02:45SPEAKERthat had bump mapping on the Nvidia side, I think.
1:02:47SPEAKERThe G400 might've been later when I think,
1:02:49SPEAKERI might've reviewed that when I was at Maximum PC,
1:02:51SPEAKERwhen I think about it.
1:02:53SPEAKERI'd have to-- - It was a fun time.
1:02:54SPEAKER- It's been a while.
1:02:57SPEAKER- It was a big mess.
1:03:00SPEAKERIt was easy to place the wrong bet back then
1:03:02SPEAKER'cause there were so many products on the market
1:03:03SPEAKERand everything was so immature.
1:03:05SPEAKER- Well, on the other hand,
1:03:06SPEAKERthe cards were really cheap compared to today.
1:03:09SPEAKERLike the cards were 200 bucks at the high end.
1:03:11SPEAKER- Yes, that's fair.
1:03:12SPEAKERThings have gotten a little pricier
1:03:14SPEAKERnow that you mentioned it.
1:03:15SPEAKER- I mean, 200 bucks was worth more then,
1:03:17SPEAKERbut when I went, I remember going to Electronics Boutique
1:03:21SPEAKERto buy a Voodoo 2, I had pre-ordered,
1:03:24SPEAKERI was one of two people in Knoxville, Tennessee
1:03:26SPEAKERwho pre-ordered a Voodoo 2 from our Electronics Boutique
1:03:29SPEAKERand I got a Creative Labs 3DFX Voodoo 2 card
1:03:33SPEAKERthat the serial number was like 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
1:03:36SPEAKER32.
1:03:38SPEAKER- What?
1:03:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:39SPEAKER- Do you still have it?
1:03:40SPEAKER- No, I got rid of it years ago.
1:03:41SPEAKERI know.
1:03:42SPEAKER- It might be worth something.
1:03:43SPEAKER- I probably have a picture.
1:03:44SPEAKERIt wasn't, I looked.
1:03:45SPEAKER- Oh, that was the last thing I wanted to mention
1:03:46SPEAKERbefore we probably wrap this thing up,
1:03:48SPEAKERbut do you remember the weird,
1:03:51SPEAKERI hesitate to use the word cult,
1:03:52SPEAKERbut there was like an insanely diehard fan base
1:03:55SPEAKERaround three effects,
1:03:57SPEAKERlike way longer than there should have been.
1:03:58SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:03:59SPEAKER- There were people clinging to their Voodoos
1:04:01SPEAKERway after it was clear that the industry had moved on.
1:04:03SPEAKER- Look, I had a Voodoo 2 card in my machine
1:04:07SPEAKERwell into the Quake 3 era, right?
1:04:09SPEAKER- Okay, yeah.
1:04:10SPEAKER- Yeah, it was...
1:04:12SPEAKER- Like if you Google, I should pull this up,
1:04:14SPEAKERlike if you Google images of the Voodoo 5,
1:04:17SPEAKERwhat an obscene thing that is.
1:04:19SPEAKER- Oh.
1:04:20SPEAKER- The Voodoo 5 was the one that was gonna plug
1:04:20SPEAKERstraight into the wall, right?
1:04:21SPEAKER- Voodoo 5 6000, like I said,
1:04:23SPEAKERwe got an engineering sample and it had a power brick
1:04:26SPEAKERthat was the size of like a gaming laptop power brick
1:04:29SPEAKERthat you plugged into a,
1:04:30SPEAKERlike a dipole port on the back of the card.
1:04:33SPEAKER- Right, and then into the wall, right?
1:04:34SPEAKER- Into the wall, yeah.
1:04:36SPEAKER- Like directly into the wall,
1:04:37SPEAKERdid not run off the PC's power supply.
1:04:38SPEAKER- No, and it was an incredibly,
1:04:41SPEAKERit was like a workstation length card.
1:04:43SPEAKERIt was really, really long.
1:04:45SPEAKER- Like if you Google pictures of this thing,
1:04:46SPEAKERit looks Photoshopped.
1:04:47SPEAKERIt looks like somebody has copy pasted a video card
1:04:49SPEAKERon top of itself.
1:04:50SPEAKER- It had four of those, like,
1:04:53SPEAKERI don't even know what those fans were called,
1:04:54SPEAKERbut it was like a really specific size heat sink fan combo
1:04:58SPEAKERand it had four of them on it, as I recall.
1:05:00SPEAKER- It's gigantic.
1:05:01SPEAKERIt's got a handle on it.
1:05:02SPEAKERThe other end of the card has a handle on it.
1:05:04SPEAKER- So that was supposed to,
1:05:05SPEAKERso in the olden days, there were slots,
1:05:08SPEAKERlike there was a slot that the screw went in
1:05:10SPEAKERand then the other end of the case for a full length,
1:05:13SPEAKERfor a full length card,
1:05:14SPEAKERthere was a slot that the other end would go in
1:05:18SPEAKERto support both sides of the card.
1:05:20SPEAKERAnd that's what that handle was.
1:05:22SPEAKER- That's amazing.
1:05:23SPEAKER- It was to make it reach.
1:05:24SPEAKER- And then the reason I bring it up is I just,
1:05:26SPEAKERI have this memory and this may have been like 100 people,
1:05:28SPEAKERI don't know, and not that big a deal,
1:05:32SPEAKERbut there was this weird boutique community of people
1:05:34SPEAKERtrying to get their hands on like the Voodoo 5 samples
1:05:37SPEAKERthat had gotten out into the wild.
1:05:38SPEAKER- Oh, they were highly desirable, yeah.
1:05:40SPEAKER- And there was like a user effort
1:05:42SPEAKERto maintain Glide and bring it forward
1:05:44SPEAKERso they could keep playing games on 3D effects,
1:05:45SPEAKEReven after that was no longer a going concern.
1:05:47SPEAKERThey really should have just bought an Nvidia or an ATI card,
1:05:50SPEAKERbut they were just like desperately trying
1:05:52SPEAKERto keep 3D effects on life support.
1:05:54SPEAKER- I wonder if somebody ever made like a DirectX or OpenGL
1:05:57SPEAKERto Glide wrapper to go the other way
1:06:00SPEAKERso you can play Glide games on OpenGL cards
1:06:03SPEAKERor direct 3D cards.
1:06:04SPEAKER- If there's anything I've learned about the internet
1:06:06SPEAKERis that if you have to ask, I wonder if ever someone did X,
1:06:10SPEAKERthe answer is yes.
1:06:11SPEAKER- It was a fascinating time because stuff
1:06:16SPEAKERwas happening constantly.
1:06:17SPEAKERLike you would look at plan files for, like I said,
1:06:20SPEAKERlike the people who are doing graphics programming
1:06:22SPEAKERat 3D Realms and ID and Epic and places like that, Valve.
1:06:29SPEAKERAnd you would see all sorts of amazing stories come out
1:06:34SPEAKERas a result of that.
1:06:35SPEAKER- Yeah, things were just iterating way faster back then
1:06:38SPEAKERthan they do now.
1:06:38SPEAKER- We have a couple of friends of the pod
1:06:40SPEAKERwho are like X 3D effects folk
1:06:43SPEAKERthat are probably far enough out of NDAs
1:06:45SPEAKERnow that we might be able to get them on to talk.
1:06:47SPEAKERSo I'll have to ask around.
1:06:48SPEAKER- That would be fun.
1:06:50SPEAKER- But that time, like those guys,
1:06:55SPEAKERthey were in Texas and they built this thing.
1:06:57SPEAKERAnd I don't think at the beginning,
1:06:59SPEAKERthey didn't realize what they had.
1:07:01SPEAKERAnd then I think they had more,
1:07:02SPEAKERthey thought they had more than they did real quickly.
1:07:05SPEAKER- Everything's bigger in Texas, right?
1:07:07SPEAKER- Something like that.
1:07:09SPEAKERBut yeah, it was a fun time to be an enthusiast.
1:07:13SPEAKER- For sure.
1:07:14SPEAKER- I guess that's it for today.
1:07:16SPEAKER- Yeah, we'll walk down memory lane.
1:07:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess we've reached the point in the show
1:07:22SPEAKERwhere we talk about the Patreon.
1:07:27SPEAKERIf you would like to support Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod,
1:07:33SPEAKERyou can by going to patreon.com/techpod.
1:07:35SPEAKERFor as little as two bucks a month,
1:07:37SPEAKERyou will get access to the fabulous Tech Pod Discord
1:07:41SPEAKERwhere you find out things like how long time is
1:07:47SPEAKERfor a CPU versus human scale.
1:07:49SPEAKERAnd let's see what else we've talked about.
1:07:52SPEAKERWe got a shout out.
1:07:56SPEAKERI idly asked a question in chat the other day
1:07:58SPEAKERand then one of our fabulous users made an app,
1:08:02SPEAKERweb app that does that thing.
1:08:04SPEAKER- Literally coded a solution for us
1:08:08SPEAKERto fulfill a very specific need that we had.
1:08:10SPEAKERI cannot express my gratitude enough.
1:08:13SPEAKERYou know who you are.
1:08:14SPEAKER- I think we can out them, right?
1:08:16SPEAKERChris Tarn?
1:08:17SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:08:18SPEAKER- Made beep30.com.
1:08:20SPEAKERIf you do a podcast and you need to sync it,
1:08:22SPEAKERwe've tried it this week.
1:08:23SPEAKERI'll let you know how it goes next week, I guess.
1:08:24SPEAKERI don't know if you want to bring that much load to that.
1:08:26SPEAKERI don't know how much capacity he's got to serve that page.
1:08:29SPEAKER- Look, I'm comfortable.
1:08:32SPEAKER- You want to out this thing?
1:08:33SPEAKER- This is a burgeoning business.
1:08:34SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess so.
1:08:36SPEAKER- I want to support all of our fabulous patrons.
1:08:42SPEAKERAnd yeah, there's just interesting conversations
1:08:45SPEAKERbasically every day in there.
1:08:46SPEAKERIt's a fabulous place to hang out.
1:08:49SPEAKERI have enjoyed having human contact
1:08:53SPEAKERduring these dark times.
1:08:55SPEAKER- Helps for sure.
1:08:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a lovely spot.
1:09:00SPEAKERAnd as always, we thank all of our patrons.
1:09:02SPEAKERFor more, if you spend five bucks a month,
1:09:04SPEAKERyou get access to the monthly patron exclusive episode
1:09:08SPEAKERwhere we usually talk about projects.
1:09:11SPEAKERI moved everything over to home assistant last week
1:09:13SPEAKER'cause smart things goes away today.
1:09:15SPEAKER- I am following, let's say four to six weeks
1:09:20SPEAKERbehind in your footsteps.
1:09:22SPEAKERHow's it going? - I also just,
1:09:24SPEAKERlet's say I spent a lot of last weekend
1:09:25SPEAKERmessing with home assistant on my NAS.
1:09:29SPEAKER- It's really neat.
1:09:30SPEAKER- And then, well, no, not on the NAS, it's not.
1:09:32SPEAKER- Oh no, the NAS is a pain in the ass.
1:09:33SPEAKERI just bought a Raspberry Pi 'cause it was way easier.
1:09:35SPEAKER- Not in FreeBSD, so yes, I too just bought
1:09:37SPEAKERa Raspberry Pi 4 to do things like that on
1:09:41SPEAKERbecause it's not going to happen in BSD.
1:09:45SPEAKERBut we got the Pi 4 here.
1:09:47SPEAKERWhat do you, well, we should save this.
1:09:49SPEAKERThis episode's long already.
1:09:50SPEAKER- Yeah, we'll talk about it.
1:09:51SPEAKERI'm debating whether to put Raspbian or Ubuntu on that thing.
1:09:54SPEAKER- I did Raspbian.
1:09:55SPEAKERRaspbian's easier to maintain.
1:09:57SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.
1:10:00SPEAKER- As always, thank you to all of our patrons,
1:10:02SPEAKERbut especially our executive producer level patrons,
1:10:04SPEAKERJacob Chappell, Andrew Cotton, and David Allen.
1:10:07SPEAKERWithout all of your all support,
1:10:08SPEAKERwe wouldn't still be making the podcast.
1:10:10SPEAKERSo thank you all so much.
1:10:12SPEAKERWe would just be having these conversations in Discord
1:10:14SPEAKERand it would be just for us and we'd be completely wasted.
1:10:17SPEAKERSo we appreciate you all a bunch.
1:10:21SPEAKERAnd thanks to Julian for doing transcripts
1:10:25SPEAKERevery week for the show.
1:10:26SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds awesome.
1:10:27SPEAKER- If you have friends who are deaf or hard of hearing
1:10:29SPEAKERand you think that they would be interested in the show,
1:10:31SPEAKERyou can share it with them.
1:10:32SPEAKERThe transcripts are available at techpod.content.counttown.
1:10:36SPEAKERThere's a big transcripts button there.
1:10:38SPEAKERAnd we have them for like the last eight,
1:10:40SPEAKERfive or six episodes, seven episodes now, I think.
1:10:42SPEAKERSo that is awesome.
1:10:44SPEAKERAnd if you like them, please let us know
1:10:45SPEAKERso we keep doing them 'cause like if nobody uses them,
1:10:48SPEAKERwe're probably gonna not, you know.
1:10:51SPEAKERBut if anybody's finding them useful, we would like to know.
1:10:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:10:57SPEAKER- I guess that's it for us.
1:10:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:10:59SPEAKERWe'll fire up some GLQuake.
1:11:01SPEAKER- I kinda wanna, yeah, can we play some GLQuake?
1:11:03SPEAKER- Is the master server still up?
1:11:05SPEAKERI don't know.
1:11:06SPEAKER- I think we can just, look, I know your IP,
1:11:08SPEAKERyou know my IP, we can put our IPs together and--
1:11:10SPEAKER- That's true.
1:11:11SPEAKER- The question is who gets the ping advantage?
1:11:13SPEAKERI don't know, I'm happy to host, that's all I'm saying.
1:11:16SPEAKER- We'll have to shoot for it.
1:11:17SPEAKER- Okay, okay.
1:11:19SPEAKERSee you all next week.
1:11:19SPEAKERThanks for listening everybody, bye.
1:11:20SPEAKERHave a good one.
1:11:21SPEAKER(upbeat music)