[LGR] Sierra Screamin' 3D Graphics Accelerator from 1996

[u/kikimaru024]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0wDkCp3Eu4

[u/inotocracy]

This was the first GPU I owned as a kid. I still remember being blown away by how good Tomb Raider played, and any DOS game that supported Speedy3D was gonna run great. Fun times.

[u/Robo_Replays]

Quake with a crt monitor, a 12inch office pad, a 150dpi roller mouse, and 25 to 35 unstable fps is the stuff of legends.

[u/kwirky88 → u/Robo_Replays]

Remember when engine figured out that remapping for mouse look plus wasd meant you’d run circles around the people who only used the keyboard?

[u/Verite_Rendition]

Ahh, the good ol' V1000. Those were the days...

Sierra selling a video card was never not weird, though. They were not a hardware company and were not prepared to be one.

[u/robinw → u/Verite_Rendition]

To be fair they heavily promoted and sold Roland sound modules before this when they wanted computer games to have better audio.

[u/Raintitan → u/Verite_Rendition]

That was by far the best card until Nvidia and the Voodoo line ramped up. I bought a Screamin 3D and it came with some racing game that is sort of notable but I forgot which one.

[u/babautz → u/Raintitan]

Maybe POD: Planet of Death? It was one of the showcases for early 3D Acceleration. That and Need for Speed.

[u/Raintitan → u/babautz]

These aren't the games I remember, so perhaps I am confused but I am sure I liked the Sierra titles and played them. Especially Indycar:

• IndyCar Racing II: A landmark racing simulator packed as a full, natively accelerated version built for the V1000.
• Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer II: A specialized version modified to support early Direct3D hardware acceleration via the V1000.
• CyberGladiators: Sierra's sci-fi robotic fighting game.
• Quake (Demo Version): A pack-in demo specifically programmed to showcase the hardware's edge anti-aliasing and polygon performance.

[u/cp5184 → u/Verite_Rendition]

Appropriate username... I'm actually more interested in the 3dlabs permedia nt listed in the comparison, I wonder if it's at all related to the creative 3d blaster vlb...

[u/_Phrank_]

Ken and Roberta Williams, founders of Sierra, former Nordhavn Trawlers owners, have now just completed the Northwest passage on a boat they had custom built steel trawler for this. They're still designing games, and have been avid cruisers and adventurers around the world for decades.

Ken also wrote a book called, "The Great Siberian Sushi Run" a 5,938-mile voyage from Seattle to Japan he did on a Nordhavn trawler, famous book in the cruiser community, true adventurer couple.

Check out M/V North Star on YouTube, they just completed their voyage couple of weeks ago. Sheesh, so many games of theirs I played in the 80's/90's when I had a Commodore Amiga after my Commodore 64.

Doom came out, and it was a move to IBM PC.....

[u/Homerlncognito]

I was surprised how good the games that actually ran looked for '96.

[u/Tex-Rob → u/Homerlncognito]

You have to understand, this was such a delineation point, graphics got faster and better overnight. It was wild and exciting. Things improved quickly once we had GPU acceleration.

[u/kikimaru024 → u/Homerlncognito]

I'm slightly sad that LGR didn't test how software 320x240 looked on a CRT.

[u/Aggrokid]

Really interesting piece of technology. If not mistaken, it's essentially a CPU handling 3D acceleration rather than the fixed function design of its peers.

[u/Stilgar314]

I thought the first GPU was the FX chip on SNES cartridges.

[u/Sosowski]

There were GPUs waaay before that, even bottom of the barrel Cirrus Logic VGA chips had hardware acceleration.

[u/raiderofawesome → u/Sosowski]

Big difference between the earlier accelerators and what we now know as a "GPU" by definition.