Onze Russische vrienden van iXBT Labs hebben een flink artikel het internet op gezet over alle gebeurtenissen in 1999 op hardware gebied. Zeer leuk om eens na te lezen. Hieronder een stukkie over de videokaarten van het begin van '99.
But back to our business. In the end of winter and beginning of spring the graphics cards manufacturers presented the first results of their hard efforts not to be late with their solutions for the first chipset supporting AGP 4x, which was expected to come out in the beginning of summer. Everybody impatiently waited for i820. Here the most remarkable results showed S3, which appeared the first to announce its AGP 4x chip - Savage4 (and now remember who was the first in the end of summer to introduce a chip with the geometric coprocessor? We wonder if Savage2000 will accurately follow its predecessor in all other terms as well.).At that time 3dfx was planning the Voodoo3 cards family. In March NVIDIA announced its new TNT2 - a 0.25 micron TNT version, a bit faster and a bit different from the previous one. The first graphics cards on TNT2 Ultra went for $200-230. ATI decided not to announce any new chips and simply added AGP 4x to its already existing family: Rage 128 GL 4X and Rage 128 VR 4X. This time when everybody started presenting faster chips, this company again went along the most pragmatic way: they introduced Rage Fury MAXX with the two already available Rage 128 Pro. In February Videologic announced Neon250. Having survived numerous delays it finally started selling in mass in the very end of August, exactly a year later than it had been initially planned.
