Tangentially related, that screenshot of Screamer 2 caught me off guard completely, I loved that game to death, and I feel I was the only one of my friends to have played it. Tremendous handling model and superb music.
The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.
Thank you! These things do pack in a ridiculous amount of functionality for what they do. Probably why they look so good but also why it took 30 years for a hardware re-implementation.
Yes but the Nvidia NV-1 preceding the Vooodoo was much more impressive. Using NURBS you could display perfectly round objects. Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today.
It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangles the NV-1 was immediately dead.
I exhausted my teenage savings to buy the Voodoo 1 due to the Linux support. Granted, I was running Red Hat at the time so the installation consisted of installing what, two RPMs? Played a lot of Q3 and Unreal on that card.
I tend to feel the same way, although I'm actively trying to move past it. I'm OK at writing, but thanks to a combination of educational background and natural aptitude, I'm darned near illiterate at higher math. That puts me behind the 8-ball as an engineer, even though I've been reasonably successful at both hardware and software work. I tend to miss tricks that are obvious to my peers, but when I do manage to come up with something useful, I'm able to communicate with my peers and connect with my customers. While I don't need or want LLM assistance with writing, I can't deny that recent models have been a godsend for getting me out of trouble in the math department.
Now, here's somebody who's clearly strong on the quantitative side of engineering, but presumably bad at communicating the results in English. I consider both skill sets to be of equal importance, so what right do I have to call them out for using AI to "cheat" at English when I rely on it myself to cover my own lack of math-fu? Is it just that I can conceal my use of leading-edge tools for research and reasoning, while they can't hide their own verbal handicap?
That doesn't sound fair. I would like to adopt a more progressive outlook with regard to this sort of thing, and would encourage others to do the same. This particular article isn't mindless slop and it shouldn't be rejected as such.
Besides all that, before long it won't be possible to call AI writing out anyway. We can get over it now or later. Either way, we'll have to get over it.
I have such fond memories of my old Voodoo card. Surprised how much nostalgia those pictures evoked - its rendering really had a unique look this that (LLM-generated?) FPGA captured quite well.
IIRC, it was a gigantic (for the time) beast that barely fit in my chassis - BUT it had great driver support for ppc32/macos9 (which was already on its way out), and actually kept my machine going for longer than it had any right to.
And then, like a month after I bought it, NVidia bought 3dfx and immediately stopped supporting the drivers, leaving me with an extremely performant paperweight when I finally upgraded my machine. Thanks Jensen.
I find it odd the author adds all these extra semantics to their input registers, rather than keeping the FIFOs, "drain + FIFOs", "float to fixed point converting register", etc as separate components, separate from the task of being memory mapped registers. The central problem they were running into was one where they let the external controller asynchronously change state in the middle of the compute unit using it.
I'm noting down this conetrace for the future though, seems like a useful tool, and they seem to be doing a closed beta of sorts.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that functionality is implemented in another component. The register bank only records the category of each register and implements the memory-mapped register functionality.
This list of registers and their categories are then imported in separate components which sit between incoming writes and the register bank. The advantage is that everything which describes the properties of the registers is in a single file. You don't have to look in three different places to find out how a register behaves.
Well still, why tie this kind of processing to the registers themselves? Sure having a shorthand to instantiate a queue of writes I could see, but float to fixed conversion has no place being part of a memory mapped register bank.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to have one module for converting the AXI-Lite (I presume?) memory map interface to the specific input format of your processor, and then have the processor pull data from this adaptor when it needs it?
That way still all handling of inputs is done in the same place.
Edit: maybe, what it comes down to is: Should the register bank be responsible for storing the state the compute unit is working on, or should the compute unit store that state itself? In my opinion, that responsibility lies with the compute unit. The compute unit shouldn't have to rely on the register bank not changing while its working.
You do have a nice point here. Then the compute unit can simply stall the commands coming out of the register bank. Without this I need to stall the write FIFO, which feels less elegant and has given me some pain in terms of combinational loops. The drawback though is that you have to duplicate a significant amount of registers in the compute unit.
I agree, but can't tell if it's the nostalgia speaking. Like, I just went and tried to figure exactly what model of PowerMac my Voodoo card was plugged into, and just got a dangerous rush of nostalgia for model names like "PowerPC 8600" - which is an objectively very boring name but I think it meant something profound to me at one point in my life.
Tangentially related, that screenshot of Screamer 2 caught me off guard completely, I loved that game to death, and I feel I was the only one of my friends to have played it. Tremendous handling model and superb music.
The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.
Thank you! These things do pack in a ridiculous amount of functionality for what they do. Probably why they look so good but also why it took 30 years for a hardware re-implementation.
I keep my Voodoo3 2000 with the idea to frame it, but I still haven't found a good way to do it.
You should just find a good shadow box for it, it'll look good
Yes but the Nvidia NV-1 preceding the Vooodoo was much more impressive. Using NURBS you could display perfectly round objects. Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today.
It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangles the NV-1 was immediately dead.
My first video card.
Getting it working in linux in ~1999 was really not easy, especially for a teenager with no linux experience.
My networking card wasn't working either, so I had to run to a friend's house for dial-up internet access, searching for help on Altavista.
Very cool project. Way above my head, still!
I exhausted my teenage savings to buy the Voodoo 1 due to the Linux support. Granted, I was running Red Hat at the time so the installation consisted of installing what, two RPMs? Played a lot of Q3 and Unreal on that card.
My first as well, getting drivers working on *nix I. The mid 90’s.. was always a fun challenge.
Also had the issue with modem, paging through the manual figured out the initialisation string
AT&FX1
The project is cool, but the LLM generated blog bothers my brain.
I cannot even figure out what the "modern" part is. Like, "netlist aware tracing" ... sounds like state of the art from the 80s at best.
I tend to feel the same way, although I'm actively trying to move past it. I'm OK at writing, but thanks to a combination of educational background and natural aptitude, I'm darned near illiterate at higher math. That puts me behind the 8-ball as an engineer, even though I've been reasonably successful at both hardware and software work. I tend to miss tricks that are obvious to my peers, but when I do manage to come up with something useful, I'm able to communicate with my peers and connect with my customers. While I don't need or want LLM assistance with writing, I can't deny that recent models have been a godsend for getting me out of trouble in the math department.
Now, here's somebody who's clearly strong on the quantitative side of engineering, but presumably bad at communicating the results in English. I consider both skill sets to be of equal importance, so what right do I have to call them out for using AI to "cheat" at English when I rely on it myself to cover my own lack of math-fu? Is it just that I can conceal my use of leading-edge tools for research and reasoning, while they can't hide their own verbal handicap?
That doesn't sound fair. I would like to adopt a more progressive outlook with regard to this sort of thing, and would encourage others to do the same. This particular article isn't mindless slop and it shouldn't be rejected as such.
Besides all that, before long it won't be possible to call AI writing out anyway. We can get over it now or later. Either way, we'll have to get over it.
+1
I have such fond memories of my old Voodoo card. Surprised how much nostalgia those pictures evoked - its rendering really had a unique look this that (LLM-generated?) FPGA captured quite well.
IIRC, it was a gigantic (for the time) beast that barely fit in my chassis - BUT it had great driver support for ppc32/macos9 (which was already on its way out), and actually kept my machine going for longer than it had any right to.
And then, like a month after I bought it, NVidia bought 3dfx and immediately stopped supporting the drivers, leaving me with an extremely performant paperweight when I finally upgraded my machine. Thanks Jensen.
I miss the box art more than the actual GPUs.
https://lockbooks.net/pages/overclocked-launch
I find it odd the author adds all these extra semantics to their input registers, rather than keeping the FIFOs, "drain + FIFOs", "float to fixed point converting register", etc as separate components, separate from the task of being memory mapped registers. The central problem they were running into was one where they let the external controller asynchronously change state in the middle of the compute unit using it.
I'm noting down this conetrace for the future though, seems like a useful tool, and they seem to be doing a closed beta of sorts.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that functionality is implemented in another component. The register bank only records the category of each register and implements the memory-mapped register functionality.
This list of registers and their categories are then imported in separate components which sit between incoming writes and the register bank. The advantage is that everything which describes the properties of the registers is in a single file. You don't have to look in three different places to find out how a register behaves.
Well still, why tie this kind of processing to the registers themselves? Sure having a shorthand to instantiate a queue of writes I could see, but float to fixed conversion has no place being part of a memory mapped register bank.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to have one module for converting the AXI-Lite (I presume?) memory map interface to the specific input format of your processor, and then have the processor pull data from this adaptor when it needs it? That way still all handling of inputs is done in the same place.
Edit: maybe, what it comes down to is: Should the register bank be responsible for storing the state the compute unit is working on, or should the compute unit store that state itself? In my opinion, that responsibility lies with the compute unit. The compute unit shouldn't have to rely on the register bank not changing while its working.
You do have a nice point here. Then the compute unit can simply stall the commands coming out of the register bank. Without this I need to stall the write FIFO, which feels less elegant and has given me some pain in terms of combinational loops. The drawback though is that you have to duplicate a significant amount of registers in the compute unit.
I love the names and branding of that era. Technology today is far more advanced but it doesn’t have that same excitement for consumers.
I agree, but can't tell if it's the nostalgia speaking. Like, I just went and tried to figure exactly what model of PowerMac my Voodoo card was plugged into, and just got a dangerous rush of nostalgia for model names like "PowerPC 8600" - which is an objectively very boring name but I think it meant something profound to me at one point in my life.
The bar is a lot lower- it was practically implied that you were already an enthusiast if it was in your awareness at that time I think.