The progression of graphics cards in PCs

Voodoo 1

The voodoo 1 was released in 1996, it was the first ever 3D graphics card for PC, it allowed players to experience 3D gaming for the first time with ‘Quake’, also released in 1996. The Voodoo 1 used up a mega 4MB of RAM to play games (In comparison, Angry Birds on a mobile device uses around 30-40MB of ram to play...) it was a huge leap forward in gaming. IT also had 50 MHz of power and 0.043 Bt/s of speed, hardly impressive nowadays but back then this was revolutionary.

this is how quake looked on the Voodoo 1, amazing, I know. But in all seriousness ,this was the first ever 3d game on PC and it was revolutionary. you could walk around things, see your gun in front of you and when people died, real (squares) of blood flew out! it was amazing (for its time), of course it did not have any shadows or any differential in light for that matter, but what it did have was polygons, Polygons are used to make a mesh on the inside of a 3d character, the more polygons the more movement and interaction a character can have. Quake uses 200 polygons within its characters. The character skins look very flat, with hardly any texture or depth to the character, it is almost like the skin was a 2d image just flattened around the 3d mesh, and that is how the very first basic 3d characters were made.

Will Cafferkey! Unit 34

Geforce 8800

The Geforce 8800 was the next big step up in graphics cards and 3d PC gaming. it was released in 2006, 10 years after the Voodoo 1 and it has 768MB of ram, a huge step up from the voodoo. This graphics card also used a fan because it worked much harder and faster which causes it to heat up very quickly. The geforce 8800 has 578 MHz of power, which again is a big improvement from the Voodoo’s 50 MHz, also a huge improvement is its 36.8 Bt/s of speed, much faster and stronger than the Voodoo’s 0.045 BT/s which is obviously nothing compared.

Tom Clancy’s: Ghost Recon Advanced warfighter is a very popular game that excelled using the 8800, its graphics were improved greatly from the times of Quake, introducing moving and changing accurate shadows as you can see in the image on the right, dynamic interchanging lighting and of course much better detail in the environment and on character models. They used more than 15,000 polygons per Ghost (character), this was about the size of a whole map on an early PS1 game.

This was an incredibly big step up compared to the minuscule 200 polygons used to create Quake’s characters. You can however notice how the hand is merged to the gun and does not yet look entirely realistic.

Will Cafferkey! Unit 34

RADEON HD7990

In 2013 the Radeon Hd7990 was released, this is the benchmark best graphics card right now. Coming in with a whopping 6GB of Ram (6000MB) and 1GHZ of power. These cards play the newest games in the best quality possible, one example of this is the first person shooter franchise known for its incredible graphics, Battlefield. Battlefield 4 is an example of how good the radeon really is, for one character they used around 20,000 to 30,000 polygons for the ultimate realistic look. The shadows and light detail is amazing, the way light cuts around trees and other objects, even dust and debris can be seen floating in the light. With 1GHZ of power, more than the mac I am using right now, and 256 Bt/s of speed, the Radeon is the ultimate PC gaming experience.

Will Cafferkey! Unit 34