May 11, 1998, TechWeb News
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3-D Moves Into The Professional Arena
By Kelly Spang
Boston -- As 3-D applications become more complex, graphics makers are developing products to extend existing technology to serve higher-performing solutions.
In recent weeks, several graphics vendors rolled out products for resellers integrating 3-D technology in professional applications. Business software still lags behind gaming applications, though resellers can expect to find more office applications, including spreadsheets and presentations, which incorporate 3-D images.
On the hardware side, S3 Inc. and Matrox Graphics Inc. rolled out 2-D/3-D graphics accelerators and boards supporting the new chip. Both companies are striving to offer more realistic-looking images, more texture manipulation, higher resolution and vivid colors.
Additionally, graphics chip makers are introducing technology to increase bandwidth. For example, Montreal-based Matrox introduced its 128-bit DualBus architecture with its MGA-G200 graphics chip. By using two independent 64-bit buses operating in parallel, Matrox officials said 2-D performance is nearly double that of single-bus implementations.
The MGA-G200 chip will be available to resellers on Matrox's new Millennium G200 card, slated for availability next month or in July. The card supports the 2X mode of the AGP, as well as 3-D rendering. Available with 8 Mbytes or 16 Mbytes of SGRAM, the 8-Mbyte version will be priced at $169.
With its new Savage 3D accelerator, Santa Clara, Calif.-based S3 is looking to increase the throughput of AGP, said Glenn Schuster, director of marketing for desktop graphics.
"The AGP bus is becoming the bottleneck again," he said. AGP was introduced last summer to provide a direct bus between the graphics controller and system memory, however, Schuster said latency problems with AGP can cause the graphics system to stall waiting for textures.
To remedy that situation, the S3 Savage 3D requests textures well before they are needed. "Most AGP solutions don't request far enough in advance to prevent stalls when the CPU goes out to system memory," he said.
The first add-in cards based on the Savage 3D should be available early next quarter with a street price ranging from $149 to $249, depending on the amount of graphics memory, Schuster said.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
