Just so you know, NForce chipsets came out for AMD first, and it let me played on low settings until I could afford a GPU, it was surprising for the times

Nice video! I spent some time before with the SiS Mirage iGPU (which is based on SiS 315) and didn't know you could turn off VSync in Windows 98 using registry tweaks.

@techdistractions

18 күн бұрын

Give it a shot! I have found it can be a bit of hit-or-miss as SIS were a little random with the IGP implementations

SiS 315 really did have HW T&L, and was the only company that pulled that off in that period besides nVIDIA and ATI. During that time, Matrox also tried to implement T&L unit in G550 but it failed and the feature was completely broken. S3 also had a similar T&L failure with Savage 2000 card.

@techdistractions

3 ай бұрын

It was definitely a selling feature! :)

@mirific87

Ай бұрын

pretty sure ArtX had T&L in its integrated chip.... but good luck finding a board with that chipset.

@alensabanovic747

Ай бұрын

@@mirific87 Yeah, I forgot that gem. ATI bought them later. That was a very interesting chip

Any generic geforce 2mx would have a S-Video out which was, very important back in the days (Divx movies for example) and in times of P2P and such. SIS where always the budget (crap) cards; it was a good choice when you paired a 6326 PCI with a pair of Voodoo2 cards.

@techdistractions

3 ай бұрын

I had a big wallet of divx on cd-rom back in the day! Matrix for the win

At least the drivers aren't terribly broken, it does what it needs to. I had a 9" mini-laptop with Pentium 3 ULV. It had the whole mainboard, SiS graphics (6326-derived), north bridge and south bridge integrated on one SiS chip, and this is probably the only way such a device could have been built. The display panel is beautiful, the colour, contrast and viewing angles are top notch, the slim enclosure is cast magnesium, this subnotebook was made by ASUS for JVC as a device for video editing on the go and most versions had FireWire to dump DV camcorders. Other early weird video chip highlights from before this from the 90s include Intel 740, which was fairly functional save for entirely lacking OpenGL support, and Permedia 2, which was a little slow but also wasn't causing trouble and was my main card for a time. The least favourite most disappointing chips of the 90s were for me ATI Rage - quite appropriately named. Fast enough but the broken drivers made them unusable. People like to hate on S3 Virge but for me given they cost effectively less than S3 Trio64, you didn't get much but you weren't supposed to expect much either, the very meagre 3D rendering capability came effectively for free on top of basic display adapter.

@hblanksjukebox

3 ай бұрын

i740 got an OpenGL ICD eventually, but early on you either got nothing at all or a D3D wrapper

@SianaGearz

3 ай бұрын

@@hblanksjukebox Yeah i got my hands on one within days of it coming out but i only borrowed it for testing, just to satisfy curiosity, i wasn't keeping it, just for a couple weeks. So it would have been well before the ICD came out! Still, new entrant in the space, and not being horribly broken this early on, i was actually impressed by that.

Is it just me or does there seem to be a lot of similarities between this card and the features of the 3Dfx VSA-101 Daytona? Same clock rates and memory support and the chip packages look VERY similar.

@techdistractions

3 ай бұрын

i reckon the pcb layout in particular is very common for the time

I've got a Pine Phantom XP Sis 315e with 32mb DDR memory (PCI), I wonder if it's faster. The full SiS 315 was a TNT2 with T&L for the masses. It was really interesting how it did the bilinear approximation which resulted in some strange textures in Quake 3 for example. It always applied the bilinear filtering to transparent textures correctly. The press at the time praised its FSAA but it wasn't without issues and some drivers disabled it. It was a strange card, plagued by drivers slightly better than S3 Savage but not by much.

@techdistractions

Ай бұрын

I reckon the full 315 was not that much faster but needed more expensive parts. I would like to see one with a proper T&L unit but everything I’ve seen either has it disabled or enabled, but not effective.

315e was a crappy card you'd throw into a pentium 2/3 or amd k6-2 it probably could have been fun there, trying to hold on with windows 98se at the end of that era.

fraps :D:D