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To: Alex Balazs who wrote (2462)	11/23/1997 11:37:00 PM
From: Ali Chen	Respond to of 6843

Alex, <If this is the way games are written currently..> Yes, most of the current 3D games are written using Microsoft Direct3D API (Application Programming Interface). These API talk to 3D hardware using Direct3D-compliant driver. It is not a big deal for a system to probe the CPU ID and install proper Direct3D piece of code. If a game uses D3D API, it must be transparent for the game. Therefore, there are only few software components that need to be AMD-3D aware to provide that quoted 30% performance boost. If a game uses proprietary geometry set-up, some modifications must be done. However, this seems to be not a problem: similar situation is found with sound hardware, and many games have an option to reconfigure itself for a particular sound API and sound hardware. Some introduction to general 3D-pipeline can be found at: matrox.com Another reason to do geometry transformations in CPU is that this part of 3d-pipeline has the tightest connection with the game control block. Regards, Ali