London's 3D-Day?

Electronics Times, Sept 18, 2000

This year's ECTS show saw an invasion of the latest 3D technology, reports Nick Flaherty

London has been invaded by the very latest in 3D technology for gaming with this year's ECTS show. The show had the latest chips such as Nvidia's GeForce Ultra and ATI Technology's Radeon chip that include new hardware to take the load off the central processor, as well as the latest UK-designed PowerVR chip.

But the landscape of 3D graphics is set to change. Intel has doubled the speed of its AGP graphics bus to give up to 2Gbit/s of bandwidth for its Pentium 4 processor, and the chip makers are looking at areas such as PDAs for the next boom in 3D. At the same time, the big chip designers are squaring up over the next generation of games console with 3D, with Nintendo's GameCube taking on the Microsoft X-box.

Not content with dominating the PC 3D market, Nvidia is now setting its sights on multimedia silicon for handheld devices.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, has been talking about the move to PDAs, saying that. during the next five to 10 years, he expects them to have the same capabilities as PCs equipped with the Nvidia GPUs such as GeForce, running video or playing a networked game. Nvidia has used semiconductor technology to the full, launching three generations of 3D chip during the past year, culminating in the GeForce2 Ultra

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, said: "Nvidia's core strategy is to deliver a breakthrough product every six months, doubling performance with each generation at a rate of essentially Moore's Law cubed. Our unique ability to innovate at this staggering pace is one of the key elements of our competitive advantage. Our consistency has made it possible for our partners to rely on our architecture and roadmap. GeForce2 Ultra exemplifies our commitment to help our partners build innovative and winning products."

One of the next steps is Intel's AGP 85 interface that aims to double the graphics processing speed of today's PC desktop and workstation platforms. AGP 85 doubles the speed to 533MHz over the same 32bit bus to give data rates of up to 2Gbit/s.

A draft specification is already available on the Web and the big players in the market - ATI Technologies, Matrox and Nvidia - are already working on AGP 85 development. The notable exceptions are certainly 3dfx Interactive, (although its current focus on the Macintosh market may explain that) and perhaps Imagination Technologies. S3, previously a leader that Intel would talk to, has been out of the running in its drawn-out sale to chipset designer VIA Technologies that finally completed last week.

ATI says AGP 85 will be a key element of the company's strategy to develop 3D products and `selected' future Radeon products will be ready with AGP 85 support when the new interface is released. The company was first with a fully-featured AGP 25 graphics controller, the Rage PRO, and supported the AGP 45 interface with the Rage 128 PRO graphics chip shortly after that specification was released.

Henry Quan, vice-president of corporate development, ATI, said: "ATI products will benefit greatly from the robust AGP 85 specification, largely because of the increased bandwidth the new interface will provide," said. "Future Radeon products are in development that we anticipate will provide cinema-quality 3D through the AGP 85 bus."

Nvidia, meanwhile, says it will be the first 3D graphics company ready to deliver a product to benefit from Intel's AGP 85 interface. Dan Vivoli, senior vice-president of marketing at Nvidia, said: "We are pleased to have worked with Intel to develop the AGP 85 specification and intend to fully support it in our future generation GPUs."

Matrox says the extra bandwidth will benefit the many graphics technologies being developed for future Matrox products, as much for home as for business applications.

Industry's First

It took a leading role in making AGP 45 a reality by providing major OEMs and chipset makers, including Intel, with the industry's first engineering samples of graphics chips supporting AGP 45 transfers. These helped validate the functionality of AGP 45-capable chipsets and systems.

At the show, VideoLogic, which is now the board and systems subsidiary of UK chip designer Imagination Technologies, launched a 3D graphics board based around its third-generation PowerVR chip. This chip, called Kyro, is made by STMicroelectronics (ST), allows the board to sell for the knock-down price of #99 ($150) but with the performance around that of the more expensive GeForce GTS from Nvidia.

VideoLogic's Vivid board with 32Mbytes of SDRAM for resolution of 1920 5 1440 is the first in a series of boards using the 115MHz Kryo chip to give over 20 million polygon/s. It has full scene anti-aliasing, 32bit Internal True Colour, support for eight-layer multi-texturing, DXTC texture compression and Direct3D compliant Environment Mapped Bump Mapping. The board product is expected to ship to distributors and OEMs in October.

The pricing is a notable result of the tiling architecture which gives a simpler, smaller chip, and this pricing is compatible with the ST strategy of getting the chip on Taiwanese motherboards. It also fits with Imagination's plans for PowerVR4 later this year at the high end and a higher price point that will include the same kid of geometry engine as GeForce. This may be an option for the next generation of Dreamcast console, with PowerVR2 powering the first version.