God their video cards were just junk for games and way over priced as I recall. I do recall my disappointment
Intel and AMD have a cross-licensing agreement. Intel gets to use AMD's 64-bit extensions, and AMD gets to build x86-compatible chips.
Why jess, I did install 64-bit Mint Cinnamon. Reaching back into history...by goom, I recall AMD using 64-bits before any other x86 hard and software to help push their processors ahead of Shmintel. You go AMD! People seem to think that AMD's newest CPU's may be better than Intel's. Oh wah! Thanks for the memory jogs, Gizmo!
I'm cautiously optimistic about Zen (AMD's new CPU). The fact that Intel just recently released a Core i3 that is a quad-core chip (the only one in their i3 lineup) that is also multiplier-unlocked, as well as cutting prices on some of their other chips, suggests to me that Intel is not completely confident that the Kabby Lake and forth-coming Cannon Lake chips can compete at their current price points. That's good news. While I would LOVE for AMD to have a product that beats Intel, I will be quite content if AMD simply has a product that's competitive. All indications so far seem to suggest that they will.
As LutaWicasa failed to copy write his post and Gizmo did it first, not me!! OS: Win 3.0 CPU:Intel Mobo: - RAM: - Hard Drive: 25 megs Video Card: I can't remember it's name,(Rivia?) but it was cheap and fast and led the world into 3d rendering. I used it on Quake, Tomb raider. Before I bought it Laura was a series of small boxes roughly in the shape of a person. After I installed it Laura actually resembled a human being!! Audio Card: - Case:Standard Power Supply: - Yeah it had one about all I know about it. Sorry if I got any of this wrong...it's been many years! ":O} Monitor: -
Wowsa, those itsy bitsy HDD's of olden days sure had a lot of storage space, didn't they? I recall that Dan tried many different data compression programs and that most messed up the data. I spent many happy hours with Quake and Tomb Raider. I was so bad at gaming that I HAD to use cheat codes. Always something.
The video card (regardless of whether it is used for 3D rendering or not) is responsible for taking data in memory and converting it to something that can be displayed. At its simplest, it's some logic to retrieve data from memory, and a character PROM which maps the character codes retrieved from memory into a signal to send to the monitor, and indeed that's exactly what the earliest video 'cards' were (think the built-in video of e.g. the Timex Sinclair). As things got more sophisticated, the video card started carrying it's own on-board RAM, developed on on-board controller (a very primitive thing that only knew how to draw lines), and offered multiple character sets, and color displays. Eventually, we got up to cards that had significant onboard acceleration for drawing lines on the screen, moving chunks of memory (bitblt), collision detection (when one element overlaps another), and even supported some of the Windows GDI commands (draw a window, etc). Now, of course, we have 3D acceleration and all kinds of goodies.
