• Member Since 10th Jun, 2015
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TheMajorTechie


Oh, look at me... you've got me tearing up again. ◈ Forget about coffee buy me a cup noodle.

More Blog Posts2545

Mar
16th
2023

more peak jank and a graphics card that doesn't really want to graphics card · 9:45pm Mar 16th, 2023

Comments ( 8 )

So, what version of OpenGL does it claim to support?

And I'm assuming it can't run Vulkan and vkCube...

--Sweetie Belle

5718451
The Alliance AT3D normally has no support for OpenGL at all. This is going through a translation layer that turns OpenGL calls into DirectX 6 API calls. The wrapper reports OpenGL 1.2 compatibility, and is another hardware renderer made by the Mesa Project, and is closely related to fxMesa (for OpenGL on 3DFx cards) and S3Mesa (for OpenGL on S3 ViRGE cards).

5718455
Makes sense! 1.2 compatibility rules out a lot of OpenGL programs, though...

--Sweetie Belle

5718472
not like it's capable of running much anyway lmao. despite supporting DX6, the Alliance AT3D has such a famously broken rendering pathway that it's far better off being used as a 2D-only card. i plan to post a separate video specifically on the AT3D after my ongoing project of throwing a bunch of low-end early 3D graphics cards against each other. AT3D stands on its own because it is quite literally The Worst™

5718475
Did it come out before most of the other ones, or was it worse then the competition when it came out?

(And is it any good at 2d?)

--Sweetie Belle

5718477
It came out around 1997 at the same time as other second-gen graphics cards (Voodoo 2 for example) so it was far from early. Alliance Semiconductor was (and still is) primarily a memory manufacturer, so I think I'd blame the terrible 3D rendering pathway on having apparently almost no experience whatsoever without any sign of pulling in external expertise like many other companies have. 3DFx, for example, had ex-employees of SGI at its helm, and so had plenty of experience in implementing 3D-capable rendering pipelines in hardware.

As for 2D... it's bottom of the barrel in that, too. Colors aren't great and the card isn't particularly speedy, and I made a followup video showing that you can draw on the desktop using the artifacting the card shows in 2D rendering:

(it'll do this in the BIOS sometimes too, though I'm not sure if that's just my specific card or if it's the entire AT3D line in general)

5718479
Alright, so just generally a bad card, then. I hope it was at least cheap at the time.

The name does sound more familiar for electronics than for graphic cards. I always thought it was a bit of a shame that we're mostly down to about 3 graphics processor makers at this point. I suppose it'd be pretty hard for someone new to compete with AMD and nVidia, though.

I do wonder if there's something in the setup it doesn't like as far as the artifacting, or, if there's an issue with the particular card. Could just be typical of the thing, tho'.

This review turned up when I was looking around for the card:
https://vintage3d.org/at3d.php#sthash.3kdoON4I.dpbs

--Sweetie Belle

5718480
Yup. That site is where I got the drivers for my card from. It's one of the best resources I know of for this card, and the screenshots provided there in its gallery are what drive me to think that the artifacting might've just been a normal thing for this card. The AT3D was Alliance Semiconductor's very first and very last 3D graphics card ever. They had a third-gen card in the works but ultimately scrapped it after the AT3D bombed as hard as it did.

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