Konrad Zuse, the Quake engine and the Geforce 7800 GTX are born (PCGH Retro June 22nd)

… 1910: He was one of the most important computer pioneers – and he came from Germany: Konrad Zuse, born on June 22, 1910, was best known for his early calculating machines; As early as 1937 he had completed the Z1 in the living room of his parents’ house, a mechanical arithmetic unit with a working speed of one hertz, which, however, never worked reliably and fell victim to a bomb in the Second World War along with the construction plans. More important, however, was Zuse’s third model, called the Z3, which went into operation in May 1941: The machine did not yet work electronically, but it did binary calculations and could even be programmed with punched tape. This makes the Z3 the first functioning digital computer, so to speak the first computer in history – even if there are those who tend to attribute this title to the American ENIAC. Nevertheless: Zuse did important pioneering work in the field of computers; after the war with Zuse KG, which manufactured the world’s first commercial computer, the Z4. Zuse was honored with the Federal Cross of Merit for his life’s work in 1995 and died on December 18, 1995 at the age of 85.

… 1996: Games with reasonably realistic looking 3D graphics have been around for a long time. One of the pioneers in this area was Origin’s Ultima Underworld, which came out in 1992 and still featured 3D textured walls, another was id Software’s infamous shooter from the same year. But a truly three-dimensional game world is only provided by id Software’s latest game, which was released on June 22, 1996 (and is quickly indexed in Germany): the player can not only view the medieval-inspired world in it from every angle, to the ceiling and to the floor look, opponents made of polygons also stand in his way for the first time. Until then, figures and objects always consisted of simple 2D bitmaps, but only now do such elements appear really realistic. This technical milestone is thus the first “real” 3D shooter in gaming history, which not only shapes all upcoming games far beyond the borders of the shooter genre, but also inherits its engine to several titles: Based on the first Quake engine, under Among other things, the milestone Half-Life and its highly popular multiplayer modification Counterstrike, which even more than a decade later is still the most played multiplayer title on the Internet. In this respect, too, Counterstrike can be traced back to id Software’s 1996 masterpiece: The shooter was not only technically groundbreaking, it also made multiplayer duels via LAN or the Internet really popular. More than 15 years after its publication, the Federal Testing Agency removed Quake from the index on November 30th, 2011.

… 2005: Nvidia officially presents the Geforce 7800 GTX – and thus finally marks the claim to the graphics card throne years after the Geforce FX debacle. The new 110nm chip with 24 “pipelines” is significantly faster than its predecessor, the Geforce 6800 Ultra, due to a number of improvements. This was still rather mixed against the ATis X800/850 series. But the Geforce 7800 makes you forget these dangers – but only because Ati has production problems with the modern R520 chip, which was therefore late and was only released in October 2005 instead of May. Nvidia can now sit alone on the graphics card throne for almost four months.

… 2012: Happy Half-Birthday Tahitian – this is how AMD advertised the introduction of the HD 7970 in the GHz edition on June 22, 2012. It was officially the Tahiti XT2 chip, which is the normal XT, which is now half a year old a boost function was ahead. At a sufficiently low temperature, the chip clocked up by 50 MHz. This overclocked HD 7970 outperformed Nvidia Geforce GTX 680 in the PCGH test and put AMD ahead in terms of performance for many months.