Pentium 4, Bethesda, Geforce 2 MX and SLI Release (PCGH-Retro June 28)

… 1986: Alongside Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, THQ, 2k Games, Zenimax Media is one of the few remaining heavyweights in the games publishing industry to have well-known giants like id Software under their wing. Zenimax Media emerged from the restructuring of Bethesda Softworks from a pure developer into a media group – and Bethesda Softworks became just on June 28th was founded in 1986. The developers known for the role-playing games of the Elder Scrolls series and from the third part also of the Fallout series taken over by Interplay have their roots in the genre of sports games and license conversions. Wayne Gretzky Hockey was considered one of the best sports games of its time and further money was made from licensed Terminator and Star Trek games before the Elder Scrolls titles split into Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim legendary RPG series created.

Further details on the well-known publisher Zenimax Media can be found in our detailed special.

… 2000: Nvidia announces a small revolution with the Geforce 2 MX, which will be officially presented on June 28th. While earlier mid-range and entry-level graphics cards lagged behind not only in terms of performance but also in terms of functionality, the Geforce 2 MX at least puts an end to the latter shortcoming – it is still much less fast than the high-end cards. However, this step by Nvidia was not entirely altruistic. In contrast to previous generations, which often simply expanded existing options (triangle setup on the graphics card, single-pass multitexturing), the hardware TnL of the Geforce cards required the special love of the programmers and was also one of the features that the Competition in the form of 3dfx not bot. But without direct support from the game, the technology lay idle. The Geforce 2 MX should encourage developers to use HTnL as it is more widespread in the mainstream. However, it took years for this to happen across the board. Ati pursued a similar strategy with the Radeon 9000/9200/9250/9280, which, despite being in the lower price segments, had pixel shaders 1.4 and vertex shaders 1.1, so at least the shader technology, even if not in the then current 2.0 version, became more widespread and at least got away from pure multitexturing. In addition, it was hoped that programmers would gain more acceptance, since the PS 1.4 phase concept and the expanded options compared to PS 1.1-1.3 were already more in the direction of DirectX 9’s 2.0 shader. Of course, the latter offered even greater possibilities.

… 2000: One of the most well-known brands in the PC sector, the “Pentium” turns 4. No, not 4 years, but for the fourth time. What the general public does not yet know at this point in time, when the CPU family codenamed Willamette was officially given the name Pentium 4: With the Pentium 4, Intel – probably due to the gigahertz race of recent years – is on the wrong track. The architecture is explicitly designed to achieve high clock frequencies and neglects good per-MHz performance. Initially, Intel is optimistic that it will eventually be able to elicit up to 10 gigahertz from the architecture, but the fastest series Pentium 4s should reach a maximum of 3.8 GHz and mutate into real heating stoves. Worse still: In contrast to its predecessor, the Pentium 3, the Pentium 4 is no longer advertised as speeding up the Internet.

So the best conditions for AMD to nibble at the dominance of the top dog Intel for a few years with the Ahtlon 64 called “Hammer”.

… 2004: As if a 500 euro graphics card wasn’t enough, from now on real enthusiasts and high-end gamers should buy the fattest (and later also not so fat) Geforce graphics cards in a double pack. Because if Nvidia has its way, with today’s presentation of SLI technology, twice the graphics power is now available per PC with PCI Express slots. SLI sounds like 3dfx’s scanline interleave, but although Nvidia owns the patents and trademarks of the former competitor, the new SLI now stands for Scalable Link Interface and initially connects two Geforce 6800 Ultra or GT with PCI Express connection. Nvidia finds a willing buyer for so much graphics performance in Tim Sweeney, who among other things is the maker of Unreal Engine 3. “The Unreal Engine 3,” says Sweeney, “has an insatiable appetite for fill rate and polygon throughput. Shader programs with 50 to 100 instructions for each individual pixel allow advanced…” and so on and so forth until he finally praises SLI , up to double the performance for next-gen games.