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A History of Military Flight Simulations on the PC
by Len "Viking 1" Hjalmarson The Growth Years: 1990-1996 In 1996 3dfx released a dedicated 3d accelerator, and suddenly the graphical complexity of games leapt forward a generation. Up to this time memory on video boards was strictly framebuffer memory, with VGA boards sporting 512K of memory. There was no acceleration of texture rendering in 3d games, with the host processor doing all the work. 3dfx released their first "Voodoo" board with 2 MB of framebuffer memory, and 2 MB of texture memory. The additional framebuffer memory paved the way for higher color depths at higher resolutions, and the texture memory stored the surface images that are applied to the polygons that make up objects in games. 16 bit color and 3d acceleration had arrived for the PC. Not long afterward, EF 2000 v.2 was released with 3dfx support. The difference was stunning, and there was no going back. |
This article is copyright ThrustMaster and Leonard Hjalmarson. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without permission. Back to A History of Military Flight Simulations on the PC Email MiGMan with your experiences or any information related to this sim. |
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