3Dlabs Demonstrates Geometry Acceleration in DirectX 7 at Meltdown 99

First public showing of hardware accelerated transform and lighting using Microsoft's newly enhanced graphics application programming interface

Seattle,  -  3Dlabs®, Inc. (NASDAQ:TDDD) provided the first public demonstration of accelerated geometry and lighting using Microsoft's newly-enhanced DirectX 7 application programming interface (API). The demonstration used the 3Dlabs Oxygen(tm) GVX1 board that provides high-speed geometry and rasterization acceleration on a single AGP card and included a demonstration of a highly-detailed flight simulator written by Simis, the well-known game developer. The demonstration showed that applications with complex geometry run up to three times faster due to the increased polygon throughput made possible by hardware geometry acceleration.

Geometry acceleration offloads the floating point intensive transformation and lighting calculations in the 3D graphics pipeline from the host CPU and processes them in high-speed hardware on the graphics board. Geometry acceleration hardware provides significantly higher geometry throughput than even the fastest CPU - while liberating the host CPU for faster application performance. 3Dlabs has been shipping OpenGL® geometry acceleration in its range of Oxygen workstation boards for over a year. DirectX 7 is the first version of Microsoft's 3D API that enables geometry acceleration and will allow games and consumer applications to deliver significantly enhanced visual complexity and realism.

"Microsoft has been working closely with the developer community to enhance the DirectX API, and one of the most important advances in DirectX 7 is to expose the geometry pipeline for hardware acceleration. We welcome the support from 3Dlabs that enables us to demonstrate the benefits of geometry acceleration on real hardware today," said Kevin Bachus, group product manager for DirectX at Microsoft. "Geometry acceleration will enable developers to create games with a significantly higher level of realism. We are looking forward to the software community taking advantage of this 3D graphics breakthrough."

"3Dlabs is a pioneer in delivering accelerated geometry for the Windows® platform and we are leveraging this technology lead to be the first graphics vendor to enable developers to experience the power of DirectX-based geometry acceleration first-hand," said Dinesh Sharma, director, strategic marketing at 3Dlabs. "3Dlabs will be working closely with Microsoft and the software development community to promote and enable hardware accelerated transform and lighting under DirectX 7 so that end-users will benefit from geometry-accelerated enhanced content as the technology reaches consumer price points."

"Simis continually works towards enhancing the level of realism in our flight simulation games," said Jonathan Newth, president and CTO at Simis. "This geometry acceleration technology breakthrough from Microsoft and 3Dlabs enables the most detailed aircraft and landscape representation to date. It is definitely going to provide the most realistic experience yet for our game players."

Article Posted On 06/07/99