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A History of Military Flight Simulations on the PC
by Len "Viking 1" Hjalmarson The Mature Years: 1997-2000 1999 also saw the release of Nvidia’s Geforce chip and 3DFX V5000 series. Up to this time 3DFX held the lead in 3d acceleration, but Nvidia was hard on their heels. The release of the Nvidia TNT2 chip in 1998 gave them a large market share, but they competed with 3dfx Banshee chip, with both of these a single board solution for 2d and 3d acceleration. The release of the Geforce chip, billed as a GPU (graphics processing unit) seemed to place the game on another footing. Combined with an excessively long development cycle and other unknown business issues, 3dfx was on the decline. Meanwhile 3d acceleration was coming into its own and the graphical appeal and detailing of combat flight simulations was rapidly increasing. Virtual pilots now had two key decisions to make as they considered upgrading their hardware: which CPU to purchase, and which video board. |
Nvidia’s GeForce GPU chose a new track, one initiated years before by Rendition, by offloading the CPU from the tasks of transformation and lighting. T&L had been a CPU intensive task, and offloading texture processing and lighting to the video board was a way around the bottleneck of the PCI bus as well as a means to free processor cycles for other work. | |
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This article is copyright ThrustMaster and Leonard Hjalmarson. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without permission. Email MiGMan with your experiences or any information related to this sim. |
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The contents of this website are copyright © 1998 - 2007 by MiGMan |
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