![]() ![]() Add on the 3d accelerator of your choice (before the TNT came out and really did both at once - even the Riva 128 had various driver bugs early on, although the dos side worked fine) and you were golden. I had something like 50 of the things pass through my hands at various points - if you considered them a 2d VGA card, they were perfect. It was great if you used it for what it really should be used for, and unlike some of the competition (the Rendition cards, for instance), worked pretty much perfectly for what you needed it to do. EVERY store had a ViRGE or three there to pick up. There were also some really good ones that had hardware accelerated drawing functions that drastically sped up graphics processing.Ĭlick to expand.And to my point - they were easy to find back then (vs the Tseng Labs especially this was the early days at best of the internet), gave good 2d performance, and played well with, well, everything else you'd add in - as long as you didn't need 3d out of it. Not all 2D video cards were created equal, there were many terrible ones that were essentially dumb frame buffers that had the host CPU literally do everything. It is an erroneous assumption that just because you're not running a 3D game, that the video card doesn't matter. ![]() Good 2D video chips that did this in hardware resulted in buttery smooth frame rates. If the CPU had to blitter a masked texture over a solid background, or especially transparency, it would tank performance. Transparency and blitter were two of the biggest performance gains. These could result in huge gains in performance over a crappy entry level dumb frame buffer device. Many of the more advanced 2D video cards had things like wider memory buses, faster memory, faster bus connections (VLB or PCI) and accelerated drawing functions like hardware blitter, block transfers, shape drawing, transparency, page flipping and sprites. I have several Matrox cards which run Build engine games HORRIBLY, and will crash if you get too close to a transparent object on the screen. The Build engine uses VESA modes for rendering to the screen, and there were quite a few video chips that had poor/terrible/non-existent VESA support, Matrox being one of them. There were also some really good ones that had hardware accelerated drawing functions that drastically sped up graphics processing. Click to expand.It is an erroneous assumption that just because you're not running a 3D game, that the video card doesn't matter. ![]()
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