Thank you! These things do pack in a ridiculous amount of functionality for what they do. Probably why they look so good but also why it took 30 years for a hardware re-implementation.

I keep my Voodoo3 2000 with the idea to frame it, but I still haven't found a good way to do it.

Yes but the Nvidia NV-1 preceding the Vooodoo was much more impressive. Using NURBS you could display perfectly round objects. Also it had forward texture mapping which significantly improves cache utilization and would be beneficial even today.

It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangles the NV-1 was immediately dead.

I exhausted my teenage savings to buy the Voodoo 1 due to the Linux support. Granted, I was running Red Hat at the time so the installation consisted of installing what, two RPMs? Played a lot of Q3 and Unreal on that card.

I cannot even figure out what the "modern" part is. Like, "netlist aware tracing" ... sounds like state of the art from the 80s at best.

+1

I tend to feel the same way, although I'm actively trying to move past it. I'm OK at writing, but thanks to a combination of educational background and natural aptitude, I'm darned near illiterate at higher math. That puts me behind the 8-ball as an engineer, even though I've been reasonably successful at both hardware and software work. I tend to miss tricks that are obvious to my peers, but when I do manage to come up with something useful, I'm able to communicate with my peers and connect with my customers. While I don't need or want LLM assistance with writing, I can't deny that recent models have been a godsend for getting me out of trouble in the math department.

Now, here's somebody who's clearly strong on the quantitative side of engineering, but presumably bad at communicating the results in English. I consider both skill sets to be of equal importance, so what right do I have to call them out for using AI to "cheat" at English when I rely on it myself to cover my own lack of math-fu? Is it just that I can conceal my use of leading-edge tools for research and reasoning, while they can't hide their own verbal handicap?

That doesn't sound fair. I would like to adopt a more progressive outlook with regard to this sort of thing, and would encourage others to do the same. This particular article isn't mindless slop and it shouldn't be rejected as such.

Besides all that, before long it won't be possible to call AI writing out anyway. We can get over it now or later. Either way, we'll have to get over it.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that functionality is implemented in another component. The register bank only records the category of each register and implements the memory-mapped register functionality.

This list of registers and their categories are then imported in separate components which sit between incoming writes and the register bank. The advantage is that everything which describes the properties of the registers is in a single file. You don't have to look in three different places to find out how a register behaves.

I agree, but can't tell if it's the nostalgia speaking. Like, I just went and tried to figure exactly what model of PowerMac my Voodoo card was plugged into, and just got a dangerous rush of nostalgia for model names like "PowerPC 8600" - which is an objectively very boring name but I think it meant something profound to me at one point in my life.

The bar is a lot lower- it was practically implied that you were already an enthusiast if it was in your awareness at that time I think.