Post #2587940

2026-05-03 18:15 UTC

@Kiki@chaos.social I am not an expert, but my informal understanding of graphics card hardware progression over time: * 1980's: 2d graphics support via cga -> ega -> vga progression; hardware so that your computer could display pictures that weren't a terminal; as more memory was available then it could switch from low color/palettes to 256 colors? * SNES Mode 7 Graphics is sort of an inbetween; hardware support to matrix transform a 2d buffer to make it appear 3d * opengl / 3dfx voodoo cards: framebuffer support (for depth buffered polygon drawings) and texture mapping units to perspective transform 2d textures onto polygons; these early cards didn't support 2d graphics either so you'd also need one of those; this eventually led into fixed-function pipelines, where there's a set of vertex/pixel shader transforms that you can control knobs for and have set variables you can tweak, but aren't programmatic. The Nintendo Wii is in this category as an advanced example.

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@picklish@weirder.earth 2026-05-03 18:18

@Kiki@chaos.social * somewhere in here I'd also say that integrated graphics became a thing, where motherboards got shipped with 2d graphics so you wouldn't need a separate video card, and these increased in capabilities from no 3d, to software 3d pipelines, to some hardware 3d * shaders: the step after fixed-function pipeline is programmable vertex/pixel shaders, where you can submit geometry and then transform it semi-arbitrarily, and similarly write a program to transform the pixels going to screen; this started with like GeForce 3/xbox era * highly parallelized etc: I'm out of the loop these days but this is like the era of nvidia cuda things, of highly parallelized uniform microprocessors that can perform arbitrary tasks. They can obviously do the things that the more static vertex/pixel shaders could do, but are infinitely more flexible.

Open ##2587941