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Lately I've been pack-ratting quite a bit of info about the various upcoming 3D accelerators, which I refer to as third generation. I figured it was about time I share some of the info, and some of my thoughts on the various chipsets, with our readers.

But, before I get too far into this article, let me just drop a quick note to explain why I call them third generation. My personal views on the history of the development of 3D hardware cruises the following path: 3D accelerators were initially developed for military applications (by-today's-standards primitive flight simulators), and workstation class machines, like early SGI hardware and a few Intel compatible boards. I group these together as the first generation, primarily due to the incredibly high cost of the hardware, and the fact that the hardware was a long way from being consumer level.

Next, we have the second generation of 3D accelerators. We're currently still in the second generation, but if I had to pin the beginning down to a particular piece of hardware, I'd have to point to misguided NVidia chipset used in Edge3D cards. Second generation is unique in bringing noticable 3D acceleration to the PC platform (and gaming consoles, of course). While the cards of this generation have a pretty wide range of performance, I still lump them all together.

So, I guess the question is, "What makes the third generation the big number three?". Well, first off, the big noticable difference is support for AGP. The Accelerated Graphics Port adds a ton of potential performance to the accelerator market. Next, partially due to the boost AGP provides, and partially due to the natural evolution of developers' products, the average medium range card in the 3rd generation will probably exceed the performance of today's heavy hitters like the 3dfx Voodoo and VideoLogic PowerVR PCX2.

Let me cite a few examples though, to support my case. Currently, the top of the list in terms of performance is, without question, the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset. Not everyone agrees, but most would say that the most basic way to compare performance of accelerators is to compare fillrates. Fillrate is a value describing exactly how fast the video board can draw in the pixels of texture mapped polygons. The Voodoo has a fillrate of about 40 million textured pixels per second (Mps), which is pretty damned fast when you consider that most 3D accelerators on the market today have a fillrate of less than half that.

One last "big deal" is that most, if not all, of the upcoming generation of 3D chipsets will support OpenGL. This might not appear to be a big deal, but as a number of game developers (especially those using id's Quake engine) have chosen OpenGL as their jump-point to hardware acceleration, instead of Direct3D, OpenGL support is becoming increasingly important.

So what's the big to-do, then? Well, most of the upcoming generation of 3D accelerators boast fillrates of twice that figure or higher. I say boast, because vendor numbers can rarely be trusted, as they are often under special conditions and on the most powerful base hardware available. For example, saying the Righteous 3D (a Voodoo card) get 32Mps on my pitifully slow P133 is a great deal more significant than boasts of incredulous speeds on a P2-266. That's part of the reason that I've been testing all the video cards to date on the same machine. It gives a much safer baseline of comparison, and also gives a more realistic impression of what you readers might get performance wise, since not everyone is blessed with P200MMX machines, and the like.

Anyway, the easiest way to do this is with a sort of semi-brief roundup of what's to come in the next little while. Unless I state otherwise, assume the card/chipset is a 2D/3D combo, since nearly all are. So, on with the show:

• ATI: ATI has several new cards based around their upcoming 3D RAGE PRO chipset. This chipset, like the others I'll be listing here, will support AGP. The chipset supports MPEG-2 decoding, and triangle setup to speed up 3D a bit. ATI claims the chipset should achieve 1.2 million triangles per second (Mts), and a fillrate of 75Mps. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
  Paul, our Editor in Chief, had a chance to see the chipset at work demo'ing AGP's 2x mode at the recent Computer Game Developers' Conference. He saw it at work, running their new OpenGL drivers and chugging away at GLQuake. While it didn't seem to perform quite to the level of a 3Dfx card, he reports that it was pretty impressive nonetheless.
• Number Nine: The Ticket To Ride chipset has been the source of some rather interesting discussion. Before dropping the Verite chipset and choosing to use the ViRGE as their primary 3rd party 3D accelerator, #9 had quite an amazing reputation for top of the line hardware. Hopefully the Revolution 3D, a card based on the Ticket To Ride, will bring back the mainstream gamer market that they used to suck up their hardware like candy. While I haven't seen any fillrate press numbers, the WinMark ratings are quite high. It also will have both a triangle setup engine, and while it will support AGP, it will also make use of of a new proprietary bus architecture, Number Nine's WideBUS, to achieve data transfer speeds of (apparently) 1.56 GB/s. Yep, sounds insanely high, but that's what they claim.
• Trident: While little information is available as to the performance of Trident's 3D Image 975 chipset, it is known to support AGP, feature a triangle setup engine, accelerate video conferencing (??), and contain a TV-Tuner. This chipset will also feature 120Hz refresh rates (under what resolution wasn't specified), and is being manufactured by Jaton, among others. Since the quantity price for the chipset (quantity generally refers to manufacturers purchasing the chipset in lots of 10,000) is a mere $25, the cards should be quite inexpensive.
• 3Dlabs/Texas Instruments: While their original Permedia chipset was a bit too expensive to be practical for the gaming market, 3Dlabs is back, having joined forces with TI, to provide us with the Permedia 2. The P2 (not to be confused with the Pentium II, which also uses that abreviation) is a chipset that's an evolutionary step up from the original, while priced more reasonably. The P2 will support AGP, will support OpenGL like it's predecessor, claims to achieve 1Mts and a fillrate of 80Mps, will have a 230Mhz RAMDAC, and can do hardware MPEG-2 decoding. The P2 has been picked up by several companies, including Number Nine, IBM, Dell, Diamond, and STB so it should have fairly wide support. We have a preview performed on a P2 beta board if you want more information on how it appears to perform.
• 3Dfx: Well, coming from basicly nowhere a couple years back, 3Dfx ended up being the top 3D card manufacturer. Pretty impressive. After recently going public, 3Dfx admitted that their upcoming chipset, Banshee was in development. Not that that's an entire shock to me, since who figured 3Dfx would sit on their money and die? Anyway, 3Dfx isn't saying much about the Banshee, not even to confirm if it supports AGP (although they're an AGP developer, and it would be dumb to actually specifically not support AGP). About all that is known about the chipset is that it's reputed to perform about three times better than the current Voodoo, giving it a fillrate of around 120Mps, higher than anyone else's claims. These numbers can't really be trusted though, as I haven't seen anything "official" quoting them. As well, the Banshee will be a complete 2D/3D solution, and won't have to piggy-back on another company's 2D video board as the other 3Dfx chipsets currently have to.
  There are rumors that the Banshee will be later be renamed the Voodoo2, although there are other rumors (ones I have more reason to trust) that it is possible that the Voodoo2 is another chipset altogether, and is a type of add-in card as we originally saw with the Voodoo. If the add-in rumors are true, some of the other information that goes with it are interesting, such as the ability to render into a window on the system's 2D card. In addition, rumor has it that if you place two Voodoo2 cards in your system, you can get them to run together in parallel, and double your fillrate.
  Regardless of what's really going on, expect to start seeing some new hardware based on 3Dfx technology hitting the streets in late October.
  
• Silicon Reality: Silicon Reality's new chipset, the TAZ Core sounds pretty impressive. They claim fillrates of 75 Mps with 1.0 Mts (with every possible supported feature turned on). Somewhat impressive, especially when you consider that those are simulated speeds. The TAZ Core appears to be able to support either everyday PCI or AGP interfaces and is designed to support both OpenGL and Direct3D. As well, according to Silicon Reality's press info, it supports pretty much every current Direct3D feature, it has a polygon setup engine, and supports a variety of different memory types, including RAMBUS and SDRAM. Apparently two companies have signed on to make cards with the chipset and these cards should ship sometime this year. Silicon Reality ain't talkin as to who they might be though.
• Tritech: Tritech's entry into the race, the Pyramid 3D has been long delayed. Unlike most chipsets, the Pyramid is probably unique in having people desperate for it solely based on the who is in the development team. In case you haven't heard, the PC demo team from days of yore, Future Crew, are the designers. They're something like minor celebrities among long time gamers and demo fans. Unlike many of the 3D accelerators out there, the Pyramid will feature a Geometry engine as well (much more advanced than simple triangle setup). Whole scenes can be dumped to the geometry engine to speed things up. As well, much like the Verite, the Pyramid has a reprogrammable microcode core, so it could get sped up using firmware upgrade. Some advanced features (one not currently supported by Direct3D, but who cares I guess) are also included, such as bump mapping, environment mapping, and logic operations. Direct support for Direct3D Immediate and Retained mode is there, as well as OpenGL support. The chipset currently claims a fillrate of 50 Mps, and 1 Mts. Not too shabby. Support for DirectX 5 technologies is already built in, and even some DirectX 6 features are already included. Expect games that support this card natively to seriously rock the boat in terms of visual realism.
• NVidia: As I stated earlier, NVidia was pretty much the first onto the table with its NV1 chipset. Unfortunately, they were a bit too early, because the main acceleration focus of the chipset was quadric texture mapping. Quadric texture mapping is a method that allows for the approximation of curved surfaces using polygons. Unfortunately, Direct3D failed to include this feature, so the NV1 chipset was kind of left dead in the water for quite a while. Not that it was NVidia's fault though, since Direct3D wasn't exactly pinned down spec wise until after the NV1 was completed. The Riva 128 chipset should correct all that, though. The Riva 128 sounds like quite the chipset. It will support AGP (though only 1x mode has been announced so far), it'll feature a 5 GFLOP (Billion FLOating Point instructions per second) triangle setup engine, and a 15 GOP (the same, but integer) pixel engine. This chipset is supposed to chug out fillrates of around 100 Mps. The fact that this fillrate assumes only single speed AGP is extremely impressive. Who knows what we'll see if they can upgrade to faster AGP bus speeds.
  Some fairly cool extra features of the Riva are vertex caching, display list processing, a 1.6GB/s frame buffer bandwidth, non-AGP based caching of textures in system memory so texture memory is basically limitless even on PCI systems, MPEG-2 decoding, video i/o, and multimonitor support. STB has already announced support for the Riva 128 chipset in their upcoming Velocity 128 card, so watch for it when it comes out. Diamond as well should be producing a new card in the Viper line that makes extensive use of the Riva 128. Expect the first Riva 128 based cards to begin shipping in August.
• Rendition: After the great success of the Verite based cards, everyone knew that Rendition would be back with a winner. Well, they're currently putting the finishing touches on their next chipset, currently still codenamed the V2200 (the original Verite was the V1000). This new chipset should perform anywhere between 2x and 8x faster than the original. Good news for all of us game junkies. As well, it will be compatible with all software that is currently Rendition Ready. Improved video integration will be a major focus of the new Rendition chip, with new features such as video i/o, MPEG-2 decoding and DVD playback, the simultaneous display of several video windows, input from multiple video sources, and more. I also have reports that Rendition is currently alpha testing some of their 3rd generation 3D hardware, and reports are that the OpenGL performance of it is insanely fast.
• Intel:Intel, of all companies, is planning on introducing a 3D chipset, currently codenamed (or codenumbered I suppose you could say) the Intel740. Very little information is currently known about this chipset, except that it is supposed to be targeted more at workstations than home consumers. My personal guess is that the i740 is an evolution of Real3D's Real3D-100 chipset, which Intel originally planned to integrate into motherboards. The i740 will most likely make extensive use of AGP, and current rumors are that it's very speedy, but little actual fact is currently known about it.
• Oak Technologies: This once well known VGA card manufacturer has recently fallen far into the shadows of the current big guns. But Oak hopes to make a come back by entering the 3D market. To aid them is their upcoming Warp 5 chip. Most of the features of the Warp5 sound fairly ordinary, such as trilinear filtering and mipmapping, but two specific features caught my attention. First, is the apparently memory-less 24 bit Z-buffer. Using a new proprietary algorithm, FreeZe, Oak somehow keeps Z-buffer info inside the chip itself, apparently removing the need to move the information between the chip and memory. As well, the chip will perform sub-pixel antialiasing by dividing the screen into pixel sub-regions, providing for higher picture quality. Performance is supposed to be in the range of 50Mps, and no OpenGL support has currently been announced.
• S3: Little is known of S3's next forray into 3D chipsets. What is known is that their upcoming chipset, the ViRGE GX/2 is a sequel to the original, a fairly decent performer last seen on the STB Nitro3D. This new version is known to support AGP, and will presumably be somewhat faster than the current ViRGE GX. As well, it will feature TV output, dual monitor support, and DVD playback. STB, Diamond and Number Nine have signed on and praised the new chip, although no specific products using the chip have been announced yet.