this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
995 points (98.5% liked)
memes
10324 readers
2120 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think it just remapped the memory of the video process, but I could be way off...
Back then, there was less hardware acceleration for the regular desktop stuff. Probably it just copied the data from the software rendering, and there it just defined that this part of the screen was hardware accelerated and this region pointed to vram instead of regular RAM.
Yup. Wormholes in your memory.
I think this essentially predated GPUs?
I remember this from Win 95 and Win 98, maybe even XP? You usually had a GPU, but they were more simple than today's GPUs. Oftentimes they were on-board (in contrast to today's iGPUs that are part of the processor, not part of the mainboard).
In the very early times you had 3D cards like the 3Dfx Vodoo cards. Those could only render 3D. Your desktop and other programs were still rendered by your normal GPU or on-board graphics card. They did only render 3D. You had to put a small cable from the output of your regular GPU to your 3D card's input and then plug you monitor into the 3D card. While you didn't do 3D, the 3Dfx Vodoo would just output everything it received from your regular GPU. When you played a game, it would output whatever it rendered instead.