I was on the team that wrote the DirectX 3 and 5 drivers for the 740 (I wrote the vxds in assembly using MASM 6.11). It wasn't a GPU in today's terms (huge parallel vector engines), it was just a basic 3d pipeline: triangle pipe (with Gouraud lighting, 1st version didn't even have phong/specular) followed by rasterizer, with a 2D engine. You sent it triangles with aRGB color, and it interpolated and rasterized them. Dat's it. Total dud compared to Voodoo 3DFx or ATI Rage3D. But when we integrated it into the 810 chipset it became the main reason why 3D gaming was held back for a decade: it was the top selling graphics engine but it sucked so every game dev had to design for the lowest common denominator. It was never intended to be good. But it sure did result in the promotion of a lot of engineers to principal. (raises hand)
You sent it triangles with aRGB color, and it interpolated and rasterized them. Dat's it. Total dud compared to Voodoo 3DFx or ATI Rage3D
I don't get it - that was what all gfx chips were before shaders came along. That's not unlike how the PS2's GS chip worked too. Texturing and triangles was everything. What feature did the Voodoo have that the 740 didn't?