MacBook Pro's Form Factor

PowerBook G4 Titanium (L), MacBook Pro with Retina (R)

Although I've been a die-hard desktop computer user up until last year with the purchase of my first MacBook Air, I still remember being impressed when Apple released the PowerBook G4 Titanium in 2001.

It offered a 400 or 500MHz G4 processor, ATI Rage Mobility 128 graphics processor, 15.2-inch "mega-widescreen" display and a slot-loading DVD drive, all wrapped in a gorgeous Titanium enclosure exactly one inch thick. Price? $2,599 for the 400MHz and $3,499 for the 500MHz version.

I thought this classic, rectangular, one-inch form factor remained virtually unmodified until Apple released the MacBook Pro with Retina display last week with a height of 0.71 inches and a tapered bottom. However, it was actually the MacBook Pro unibody released in 2008 that had the first true redesign. It too had a tapered bottom and redesigned hinge but with a reduced height of 0.95 inches.

At this rate, we'll be typing on electronic, luminesent sheets of transparent paper by the next decade.

GeForce GTX 690 and A New Dawn

Since moving on to buying all Apple hardware, I haven't been following the custom gaming PC market. However, today I came across the news of a new Nvidia tech demo, A New Dawn, which intrigued me.

A New Dawn.

To showcase Nvidia's latest flagship 3D graphics card, the GeForce GTX 690, they chose to update an earlier demo named Dawn, originally used for the GeForce FX product launch in 2003.

The original Dawn, created by 3D artist Steven Giesler of Final Fantasy fame, was a real-time 3D modeled fairy housed inside a 2D cubic environment map. It was and still is a great demo of realistic shading and life-like animation.

A New Dawn highlights improvements to her skin, hair and overall geometry of the scene through DirectX tessellation as well as additional post-processing effects like depth-of-field focus and light blooms.

The original Dawn.

The making of the GTX 690 is an interesting read. Nvidia seems to have held nothing back on the industrial design which includes two Kepler GPUs, multiple metal alloys for the frame and housing, laser-etched LED lighting and custom vapor heatsinks which use purified water in a self contained enclosure.

Unlike the GeForce FX which was infamous for its Hoover-like fan which ran annoyingly loud, the Kepler architecture was designed for increased power efficiency with the goal of reducing heat and noise without sacrificing 3D performance.

The GeForce FX (2003) vs the GeForce GTX 690 (2012)

As a side note, check out this rig with two 690's in SLI mode. Amazing. Currently, one GTX 690 will run you about $1,300 on Amazon.

Matrox Millennium - The Non-3D Graphics Card?

While rummaging through some paperwork, I came across a packing slip dated March of 1996 from ComputAbility (now PCMall) for a Matrox Millennium 3D 4MB WRAM PCI card. The unit price was $439 plus $20 postage and handling which is about $673 in today's dollars.

Why pay so much for a graphics card?

Well, it was because I purchased Caligari's trueSpace 2 several months earlier. One of the highlighted features of trueSpace was "real-time manipulation of texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded objects". You'd have to remember that at the time, working with solid objects in 3D modeling applications was more common in ultra-expensive SGI workstations than ordinary desktop PCs. In fact, working with wireframes that didn't degrade to bounding boxes in real-time was considered amazing.

Comparison of solid render and wireframe modes in trueSpace3.

Here's a clip from Caligari's marketing materials:

New Solids and 3D Accelerated Graphics 

Offering workstation-class modeling performance for the first time under Windows, trueSpace 2.0 enables the real-time rendering of 3D objects as solids. Wireframe views are still invaluable for point-editing, but real-time rendering permits users to display objects as realistic solids, rather than as meshes, in either true perspective space or for reference in sub-windows. trueSpace's real-time solid rendering capabilities are further designed to take advantage of the new breed of 3D acceleration chips and graphics boards.

To make real-time solid rendering possible, Caligari chose to implement Intel's 3DR programming interface over the nascent OpenGL and Direct3D APIs. In order to take advantage of this render mode, a user had to purchase a graphics card that supported 3DR and the recently released Matrox Millennium was considered the best on the market for this.

Shipped in June of 1995, the Millennium boasted 16.7 million color 2D graphics, digital video and 3D acceleration, all on a single 64-bit chip for a suggested retail price of $379 for 2MB of WRAM and $549 for 4MB of WRAM.

Great. So what was the problem?

Well, the Millennium worked as advertised for real-time rendering while working in trueSpace. I just remember that working in solid mode wasn't as useful as I thought. I would still switch to wireframe mode for precise editing and just do a software render when I needed to see my progress. Later, after the next generation of 3D cards were released, claims were brought up that the Millennium wasn't a "true 3D" card after all. In a sense this was true, the Millennium was terrible for 3D games because it didn't have any texture or transparency support. But for solid rendering in 3D applications, it did the job.

Interesting to note that Caligari had implied support of the Millennium in 1995 with the following system requirement specification for trueSpace 2:

A graphics card that supports at least 256 colors (Super-VGA) is required for Solid Rendered mode. A fast local-bus or PCI graphics accelerator will increase the performance of trueSpace2, while a 3D accelerator that supports Intel 3DR will offer the best performance possible. 

But reversed their stance by 1998 with the release of trueSpace 4:

MATROX Millennium
This popular older card claims to have 3D acceleration but in reality it is mostly a 2D card. Consequently, trueSpace4 will run very slowly on this card, both in D3D and in OpenGL mode. Do not confuse this one with the newer MilleniumG200. 

The lesson learned? Technology moves on and you just gotta roll with the punches. ;)