3rD time lucky
It's on the cards - 3D graphics are here to stay. Serious gamers willbe its first fans, but 3D graphics cards will become a part of mainstreamcomputing says Danny Bradbury.
Countless living rooms have by now been filled with disappointment when people have bought and loaded the latest 3D games, only to find that the performance is sluggish. Nothing is more annoying than buying a whizz-bang new Pentium machine with a fast hard drive and lots of memory, only to find that your copy of Mech Warrior still doesn't operate at lightning, arcade-quality speed.
There comes a point when no matter what clock speed your CPU is, your graphics will not operate much faster, because specialist technology is required to give it an extra performance boost. Enter 3D graphics cards.
3D graphics cards are designed to take some of the intensive number crunching required for computing 3D graphics away from the CPU and onto a specialist processor. This processor will handle tasks such as Z-buffering, which computes the depth of specific co-ordinates within 3D environments. It is Z-buffering which enables programs to decide whether the corner of one object is behind another or not. Apart from giving the software better 3D support, so that the graphics are processed faster, the 3D cards free up the CPU for other, more general instruction processing.
It is no surprise that 3D graphics cards are mainly used for the games market. Nick Harword, a director at graphics card vendor Orchid Micronics, says that sensational graphics - including enhanced colour and resolution - is ideal for the games market. "From the PC point of view, because it has more processing power, the 3D chip is taking off on the back of the kids' games that have been selling," he says.
It is questionable whether this market will expand into other areas.
Harwood likes to think that it will, with applications such as police fingerprinting. According to Patrick Jubb, spokesman for 3D graphics technology vendor Videologic, 3D world wide web access will also spur on the uptake of 3D graphics cards. The Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) is a language developed by Silicon Graphics in conjunction with some other vendors. It allows you to download an ASCII-based file which a browser then interprets as a walk-through 3D environment.
"Gaming first and foremost is how 3D is going to become an important part of your personal computer. However, more and more we will see 3D become more pervasive within web computing based on VRML. In order to see and walk through those 3D web sites you will require a 3D accelerator in your system. If you don't, you will go through them at something like one frame per second," warns Jubb.
He adds that the other applications that will benefit from 3D graphics cards are multi-dimensional databases and speadsheets, pointing out that 3D number-crunching does not always have to be used for the computing of graphics. This raises snorts of derision from other quarters, however.
Martin Briggs, managing director of independent retailer MCB Business Centre, says that the business-oriented aspect of 3D graphics cards is pie in the sky to him. "I don't see how any of these devices will help anyone in a business context at all. Lotus launched a multimedia product a few years ago which was a real non-starter. I haven't seriously considered any serious business applications for these 3D cards," he says.
Deciding which games players will be most attracted to the cards is something to which IBM has paid a lot of attention. Owen Roberts is the European retail manager for EMEA within IBM's PC Company, which uses the 3D Rage graphics technology from ATI in many of its machines. He explains that IBM has researched the market to find a demographic profile of the type of customer that would buy the cards. Although it told the company some things that it knew already - that most customers were gamers, for example - it revealed some other statistics. "It's definitely the higher income bracket and it is more the younger age group so it's between the 25-35 year-olds. It's not the market for people buying machines for their children at university," he says. Another statistic reveals that high-quality graphics are just as attractive to women as they are to men. "Computers are changing.
This macho image that men seem to be the be all and end all of computers is no longer true," he explains.
One thing which Roberts didn't discuss is the rate of uptake of 3D graphics cards. Retailers like Briggs say that the uptake is slow at the moment because of the lack of games available to support them. Roberts says that this will change: "I don't think that there is a huge abundance of applications, but I think it's coming and by the end of the first half of next year we will see a good selection of titles," he says.
Gaining software support for the cards is difficult, and ATI itself - which produces a card called 3D Rage, admits having to woo the software market with development funding. Harjinder Dulai, technical sales manager for the company, laments. "We bundle up to four games in our retail boxes.
The board conforms to Microsoft's Direct X 3D standard but because it takes a long time before someone can produce a game to a new standard we have had to fund development of some of these games to be ported to our interface."
Microsoft's Direct X 3D standard and the Talisman initiative may well save the day. Well known for its tendency to use its market clout when defining technological de facto standards, the company is working on a set of controls which will theoretically make it easier for all games developers to write support for a range of 3D cards. Direct X 3D is one set of APIs within the company's Direct X initiative. It works by acting as a multilingual software interpreter between the application and the hardware underneath using Microsoft's hardware application layer (HAL) interface.
David Weeks, Windows 95 product manager, says that as more Windows 95 games appear on the market, users will have more reason to buy 3D graphics cards. "Our developer team developed a set of APIs called DirectX. They give you direct access to the hardware on your machine. You can write to the soundcard, the graphics card etc. It frees up a lot of CPU time," he says. "DirectX 3D sits on top of the standard DirectX APIs. It gives access to the 3D cards. Obviously, 3D cards give you fast graphics and refresh rates so it is superb for the games environment. What the application will do is write to the HAL which then goes off and looks around the system to see if you have a 3D card. If you haven't got a DirectX-compatible 3D card, the HAL sends the processing to the hardware emulation layer and it will emulate 3D graphics in software." This is where Microsoft's hook comes in - if your card doesn't conform to its de facto standards, games will run slower because bits of your card's processing power won't be used, so gamers are less likely to buy it. But it does mean that more games companies will be able to support a multitude of 3D cards at once, which can only be good for the market.
The other exciting standard that Microsoft is working on is Talisman, a set of technical specifications that is designed to bring very high-end, almost Silicon Graphics workstation-level graphics to the low end.
The specification, which is being developed along with other hardware and software vendors, will work by compressing data down to as little as 10% of the original size, enabling it to be transferred along the PC bus architecture more quickly and therefore displayed on the screen faster.
MCB's Briggs nevertheless has lots of reservations about selling 3D cards.
He has to be in the market because everyone else is, but he laments the fact that product is very difficult to get hold of. "The strongest view that I have is on availability of product. For example, the Diamond Stealth 2000 3D card we can't get hold of at all. The Creative 3D Blaster again is plagued by massive supply problems," he says, adding that this is a problem endemic among card manufacturers of all shapes and sizes.
Another problem for him is the support costs involved in selling complicated 3D cards. He says that because many of the people who buy the cards are serious games enthusiasts with no real technical knowledge, they often experience problems installing their card. "The bane of the retailer's life I reckon is the serious gamer who also thinks of himself as a computer expert and is therefore very happy to take the six screws off his machine and dive in without a clue about what he is doing," he warns.
Briggs has now reached the stage where he will talk down customers' requirements, recommending that they take cards with a lower specification because there is less to go wrong with them. He says that he often feels as though the brand new 3D cards have been shipped without being tested in a real world environment because so many of them come back with technical queries.
The other option for customers who are not interested in installing their own 3D cards is to buy one inside the box. Some vendors such as IBM are increasing the number of machines that they sell with 3D graphics technology pre-installed and tested, and the company says that it will ship half the machines in its range with this added function next year.
Nevertheless, there are some PC companies that are not as enthusiastic.
While Videlogic and NEC have been crowing about Compaq selling the PowerVR 3D technology in its Presario 8000 boxes, Lisa Clark, senior product marketing manager at Compaq, admits that this has only been happening in the US market, pointing out that when it launched the initiative, it didn't feel as though the UK market was right for it. Clark explains: "Right now there is not a lot of content to take advantage of it. Generally, it takes a cycle or two for Compaq to offer US technology to UK customers. When we start loading up PCs with lots of expensive things, the demand drops because of the price increase," she says, pointing out that the US market is a much larger one than the UK, so it is more eclectic.
Compaq is likely to announce a deal under which it bundles Videologic PowerVR technology in its UK machines sometime early next year. "The number of titles that are available will grow rapidly. When we launched our products in August the amount of content wasn't there and we would want to launch our product with people being able to go out and buy many titles. We would like to launch with a number of titles from multiple vendors," she says.
When this happens, the inclusion of 3D technology in a UK box will be ideal because it will help the company to differentiate its product, she says.
The signs are that games supporting Videologic's PowerVR standard are being developed at a rapid pace. The company clubbed together with a number of games developers at Comdex in late November and announced 25 games that will work with its Apocalypse 3D card - effectively the same card that ships in the Compaq machines.
Although 3D graphics cards is still a product area that is restricted to high-end, serious gamers at the moment, next year will hopefully be the year when it fans out to a wider market. If developers take advantage of the DirectX 3D standard, then this will help the market to achieve critical mass, meaning that more people will buy the cards as more games will be available.