Posted on Wednesday, May 06 2009 @ 12:20 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
There's a new site online named The Golden Era of 3D Acceleration, it has lots of pictures and details about graphics cards manufactured from 1994 to 2003. You can check it out
over here.
Why 1994 to 2003? 1994 was of course the year that the first small steps were made
towards dedicated 3D acceleration for the PC. I feel that 2003 was the end of the
classic/golden era, with a number of 3D engines like Valve's Source engine at E3 2003 and Crytek's CryENGINE in early 2004 (2003 hardware) delivering graphics like never seen before. After that (in my opinion) you never saw the same big leaps in 3D Graphics that we saw from 1994 to 2003.
Here's the oldest card in his collection, the 3DLabs GLINT 300SX. This was the first single-chip 3D capable graphics card that was shipped from multiple vendors. It was announced in April 1994.
