Introduction

It’s that time of the year again. It’s the time when manufacturers begin showing off new and wonderful things to improve our lives. This year though, our lives will be improved in a fun and exciting way we have never before seen!

Actually, we have seen the technology, but we haven’t seen it in front of our eyes on our own computer systems. This is what I’ll be writing about today -- technology that enhances our enjoyment of using our PC’s.

Ground Breaking Black Magic

Back in the early days of personal computing, when our games side scrolled, beeped and thrilled us with MIDI sound, we were all shaken at the new types of games that were coming out. At the time when 2D ruled the scenes, games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and a handful of others started appearing on the shelves of computer stores everywhere and forecasted a technology that was being stirred, mixed, summoned and soon to be unleashed.

Soon after, in the memorable year of 1995, the witchdoctors at 3dfx Interactive brewed up the most amazing computer graphics that ever appeared on the personal computer. 3dfx has unleashed their spell on every video gamer out there. Whether you were a PC gamer, a console gamer, or a handheld cultural statement, the power of Voodoo 3D was in the process of changing your lives forever.

Let the Games Begin

3dfx’s technology became the centerpiece of every PC gamer out there and every gamer wanted their hands on it. All the great manufacturers of yore jumped onto the Voodoo bandwagon and began producing a mountain of video cards based on 3dfx’s technology. I’m talking about cherished companies like Diamond Multimedia with its legendary Monster3D card, Canopus, and STB just to name a few. All these companies along with some of the ones that are still in existence today, helped fuel the Voodoo brew and revolutionized gaming.

Games started coming out from developers everywhere with support for 3dfx graphics and these games played like no others before them. Silky smooth graphics, fully interactive environments, polygons everywhere, bilinear filtering here, mipmapping over there, games poured out like raging river and gamers everywhere embraced 3D.

True 3D

While older games like Doom 2 were called “3D”, they weren’t real 3D. These older games wrapped sprites onto frames placed on grids and generated their graphics that way, making the game seem 3D. It wasn’t until Quake came along and decided to change everything.

Games were now on an x, y, and z system and they weren’t looking back, ever. Besides 3dfx, everyone else was jumping on for the ride too! Long time players like ATI, Matrox and S3 started producing cards that had compelling feature sets but none of them succeeded quite as well as 3dfx. 3dfx definitely had it made and everyone else was left standing in the dust trying to figure what to do next.

The Coming of NVIDIA

One day, like a rainstorm out of nowhere, a company called NVIDIA walked in on 3dfx’s party and decided that they were going to be the ones to dethrone the 3D giant and break its spell. NVIDIA fought long and hard and eventually, 3dfx became the one that was left standing in the dust, wondering what to do.

With its arrival on the scene, NVIDIA introduced chips that were squarely aimed at 3dfx. Ever since its well-known competitive entry with the Riva 128 processor (NV1 was its first, but wasn't much competition), NVIDIA’s line of hardware became increasingly powerful with each generation. Unlike 3dfx’s shaky schedules and announcements, NVIDIA never missed its mark and now reigns as the number one manufacturer and developer of 3D graphics technology worldwide.

The Birth of GeForce2

That’s right, I said GeForce2 as in “Ge-Force-Two”. With its entry, NVIDIA introduced some important key features that will be on every other designer’s list of important features to include if they want to stay alive.

The GeForce2 series upped the ante on the original GeForce feature set by including what is known as the NSR or NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer. The NSR enabled game developers to add detail to their games without major performance hits.

Up to this point in time, virtually every 3D game out there has been designed on similar concept and techniques. Let’s use id Software’s latest creation as an example -- Quake 3, a prime example of cutting edge 3D done right in action. If you take a look at the marvelous graphics and then take a look at every other 3D game before it, you’ll begin (hopefully) to pick up on certain things that are missing. And virtually every game in existence right now is missing on one key feature.

The Need For Detail

A 3D game mainly consists of polygons and textures, and those textures are mapped onto polygons. Everything looks nice for a while until you begin to pay attention to detail. Suddenly the nice looking walls look flat, the floors look flat, the objects in the game look flat; just about everything in the game looks flat. There are bricks on the wall but they look flat. There are holes in the ground but there are no holes. There are grooves and bumps on the mech but the mech looks flat.

Basically it became apparent that a good-looking texture mapped onto a surface was no longer enough. Games needed more detail. Surfaces needed to look like what they were drawn to be. A brick needed to have the roughness of one. And orange needed to have its dimples and pores.

Attention to Detail

Because the questions needed to be heard and answered and no one was answering, Matrox decided that it would be the one to answer the questions. Matrox became the first company to successfully implement a method of increasing visual details on surfaces. They did it with a technology called Environment Mapped Bump Mapping. EMBM significantly added detail for textures and objects in a game while minimizing the power to do so.

Although EMBM was good, it wasn’t good enough and once again, the prowler known as NVIDIA came in.