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By:
Loyd Case
Designed By: Val Prusmack
"Moore's Law is for wimps," proclaims Sanford
Russell, product marketing manager for graphics chip company nVidia.
Moore's Law refers to Gordon Moore, who suggested that semiconductor
performance would double every 18 months. Moore was referring to
CPUs, but for the past three years, the computational power of graphics
chips has increased eightfold every 18 months. This pace clearly
can't be sustained, but it signals a shift in the fault lines of
the graphics business.
The State of Graphics Today
All personal computers shipping today -
to home users or businesses - have some 3D capability. And even
the most limited of these have far greater capabilities than those
first consumer chips, which shipped in 1995.
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On top of that, 2D graphics for business uses have become infinitely
fast; standard applications such as word processors and spreadsheets
don't suffer from slow graphics performance. That's not as true
for another graphics application more tuned to home than business
use: video. By video, we mean television in the form of NTSC
or PAL video. Translating analog video to the digital world of the
PC is a serious performance challenge for the CPU and the graphics
card. Video on the PC is perhaps more important than 3D graphics.
Applications such as teleconferencing, in-house training, and interactive
work aids need robust video capabilities. And on the home front,
DVD playback is gradually becoming important.
Still, 3D graphics capability has become a crucial
buying criterion for home users, particularly gamers. And the use
of 3D graphics in entertainment applications has progressed from
a few violent action games to a much broader range of strategy games
and even children's titles.
Recently, a spate of new 3D chips have appeared
on the scene. To help you understand these developments more fully,
we'll explore the components of some major 3D chip sets. Afterward,
we'll look at some other exciting developments on the graphics front.
3D Graphics Explained
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