Short review from the creator:
This page is to remember and find new information about first generation of gaming 3D cards. What is first gen? Well there are many definitions, common one would probably define three early generations of early 3d gaming chips: first geometry accelerators like Millennium or Imagine 128 II, than first texture mappers like Gaming Glint or Virge and finally "mature" architectures like Verite and Voodoo. I want to cover all of this range from very first accelerators (if possible) to anything released before Voodoo2. From there on 3d chipsets were having more and more comprehensive reviews and are therefore well known. I want to show barely tested chips in extensive collection of real games. The benchmark suite currently consist of around 40 games from 1996 to 1999 and 2-3 artificial benchmarks. Reviews are not done from user perspective. I am trying to examine and compare performance, which means no proprietary APIs. Cards are tested with latest or best available drivers and in a system saturating video accelerators with power unreachable at that time. In the future I might build a low end rig to examine performance in budget PC. Main purpose is to learn about chips which where not reviewed extensively in ways we are used to now. In fact, information about gaming performance of most first generation cards is remembered almost only through word of mouth. I am not professional hardware reviewer, neither graphics technology expert, but I will try to do my best to reveal real capabilities of vintage 3D cards.
My benchmarking practices are definitely not the best. I don't run the tests more times unless the results seems off. I simply don't have enough time. Also most of the old boards lack the option to disable vsync despite trying various tweakers. Because of this I run all the tests with vsync, unless the application itself can disable it. This shouldn't be much of a problem with some high speed CRT, but I have only LCDs now. Therefore 75 Hz is used. Still the results have value, since vsync is almost always on by default and most of users don't change video settings. The performance corresponds with user experience, however speed differences between cards can be skewed.
