By Loyd Case Design by Lam Huynh • Introduction • A Brief History • Today • Accelerating Transforms • Accelerated Lighting • Better Rendering • The Issue of Control • The Far Future • Glossary A few years ago, I'd work on one graphics-card roundup each year. Even then, products wouldn't always change year to year. Card manufacturers could rely on a product staying on the market long enough to generate sufficient revenue to recoup any development costs. Now, I'm doing two to three roundups a year, and I find myself scratching my head and wondering how anyone makes money in this business. RELATED LINKS Gamespot's Video Card Reviews 3D To Die For Card Expert TNT Speed Freaks: A 3D Card Roundup MORE ON ZDNET How to Buy 3D Graphics Cards For gamers, the net result has been an extraordinary advance in visual graphics and effects in 3D games. On top of that, the increasing ubiquity of 3D accelerators has enabled game developers in all genres to experiment. It's not just first-person shooters and flight sims that are 3D rendered anymore. It's strategy games, adventure games, and even role-playing games. But there are certainly warts in the picture. Put aside, if you will, the hulking size of Lara Croft's breasts and she still looks unrealistic. More recent titles have characters that have no necks, cubed heads, and a 2D appearance to clothes or hair. Try to fly 150 aircraft in an air war 1000 feet above a city, and your frame rate goes to hell in a handbasket. Walk into a foggy landscape in a game, and you soon realize that you're not really in the fog, but rather, looking at an ever-receding, transparent gray polygon. The good news is that graphics-chip designers are working closely with game programmers to deliver new silicon to increase the look and feel of full-on game immersion. Will we ever see truly photo-realistic 3D graphics? Perhaps, although not in the next generation. Even so, the latest generation promises to be a leap forward. We'll take a look at what you might be seeing in hardware and on your computer screens in the next year or two. A Brief History of 3D