Out in Front: March 28, 1996

The computer community is racing to develop widespread 3-D graphics capability. Some late-breaking developments follow:

Philips Semiconductor launched the SAA7101 3D-Master at the CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany. The device uses two virtual 64-bit buses to simultaneously access DRAM and VRAM. The dual-bus structure allows the device to generate 1 million 50-pixel polygons/sec. The device enables designs of add-on cards to interact over the PCI bus with graphics-display cards. This interaction lets the 3-D-graphics capability serve as an addition to rather than a replacement of graphics boards. The add-on cards can cost less than $200.

Apple Computer released its QuickDraw 3D rendering-acceleration virtual engine (RAVE) application-programming interface (API) for Windows 95 and the Mac operating systems and plans to ship a Windows NT version in the second quarter. The RAVE API allows developers to code 3-D hardware directly with functions for rendering and texture mapping. RAVE is available as both a driver-development kit for hardware designers and a software-development kit for application programmers. There is no licensing fee for developers.

NEC Electronics announced a family of 3-D-graphics processors based on architecture developed at NEC and VideoLogic (San Bruno, CA). The PowerVR family includes a chip set for video-arcade designs and the PCX1 for PCs. The arcade chip set has an image-synthesis processor (ISP) and a texture-shading processor (TSP). The PCX1 incorporates both functions with a PCI-bus interface on one chip. The devices use an architecture that processes pixels in parallel and eliminates the need for z-buffering. The ISP handles the hidden-surface removal and depth cueing, allowing the texture processor to operate only on visible pixels. As a result, the set's texture and frame-buffer bandwidth needs remain low. The basic performance of the family is 257,000 100-pixel triangles/sec with all features (shading, texture, and lighting) active. The arcade chip set allows performance scaling by adding ISP chips. Arcade chip sets are now sampling for $210, and the PCX1 is scheduled for sampling in the second quarter.
—by Richard A Quinnell

Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA. (800) 462-4396.

NEC Electronics, Mountain View, CA. (800) 366-9782.

Philips Semiconductors, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 31 40 2 722091.