I was just reading Sierra's propaganda rag...er, magazine today, and they
had an article in there about 3D graphics cards. They specifically
mentioned that a few of their games are already 3D-ready, like Indycar2.
They also specifically mentioned the Rendition chipset for 3D. I also do
GP2, which is pretty unplayable on my system right now, and ICR2 is barely
playable.
Now, I know that when more Win95 games come out with DirectX support, this
question will be moot, but right now most games are DOS, along with all of
the lack of video graphics services available in that operating system that
implies.
I'm about ready to upgrade my trusty old 486 system to a relatively late
generation Pentium-class (though not necessarily an Intel CPU) machine.
I'll need to get a new PCI video card, and it might as well have a 3D
engine in it too. I'm particularly partisan towards ATI video cards, not
that I haven't experienced my share bugs with them, but I've been using ATI
cards ever since my old PC-XT (do any of you know what that is?), and I'd
like to stick with them. ATI has its own Rage3D engine. My question is
twofold.
(1) Are these DOS-based 3D games generic enough to handle any graphics
accelerator, i.e. through a common UniVBE VESA 2.0 BIOS interface for
example? I'm not too sure if VESA 2.0 implements any graphics acceleration
features, let alone 3D graphics acceleration features. Can somebody confirm
or deny this?
(2) provided that they aren't just designing for a particular 3D chipset,
is the ATI Rage3D any good? Acceptable at least?
Yousuf Khan
--
Yousuf J. Khan
Ottawa, Ont, Canada
Nation's capital
Currently no. DOS games must be written directly for an individual 3D
card.
I assume your talking about the new RageII. Over all it is an average
card, but not a great 3D solution. Like all ATI cards it is quite slow
in DOS, has less than half the polygon throughput of the Rendition
cards, and similar fill rates. According to PC magazine the ATI card
was "significantly slower than this roundup's top performer,
Intergraph's Reactor, on every test".
See http://www5.zdnet.com/products/content/special/current/3d.html for
lots of reviews.
--
Emory University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Nascar Setups Page: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ebusch/
