What makes a 'pro' graphics card?

From...

June 2, 2000
Web posted at: 10:19 a.m. EDT (1419 GMT)

by David Read

(IDG) -- Alias/Wavefront's announcement that it plans to bring its Maya 3-D software to the Mac -- coupled with the recent news that graphics chipmaker Nvidia is also eyeing the Mac market -- has sparked debate among Mac users about the state of graphics acceleration on Apple hardware. A key question: Can graphics cards aimed largely at gamers also fulfill the needs of 3-D graphics professionals, the people who make their living as architects, artists, game developers, visual-effects specialists and the like?

To Neil Trevett, VP of marketing at 3D labs, the answer is "No." He sees a clear distinction between the needs of gamers and 3-D pros. His argument: Boards targeted at gamers, such as 3dfx's Voodoo family and ATI Technologies' Rage 128, are designed to maximize on-the-fly rendering speed using OpenGL algorithms. Compared with models used in movie scenes or CAD drawings, models in 3-D games use relatively few polygons and require high texture fill rates.

	MESSAGE BOARD
Hardware innovation Macintosh

As with the gaming cards, a board aimed at 3-D professionals must offer fast on-the-fly rendering. But instead of emphasizing texture fills, the pro cards aim to boost the speed of real-time lighting effects and geometry throughput. Designers can thus create, manipulate and preview complex scenes and models in real time.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE

IDG.net home page

Top 10 graphics board for gamers

Shoot-out at the 3D corral

3D-modeling muscle with MetaCreations Carrara

Nvidia might come to Mac

Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net

E-BusinessWorld

TechInformer

Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you

Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletters

Search IDG.net in 12 languages

News Radio

Fusion audio primers

Computerworld Minute

Trevett said that 3D labs is considering a Mac version of its Oxygen line of professional 3-D accelerators. The boards, based on the company's Glint R3 graphics processor, are available in configurations ranging from $179 to $1,999; the high-end Oxygen GVX210 features a 256-bit architecture. 3D labs also makes the PerMedia 3 chipset used in Formac Electronic's Proformance 3 and Proformance 3+ graphics cards.

Pro-gamer convergence?

Tom Harper, product manager for Maya and games development at Alias/Wavefront, agreed that professionals and gamers have different 3-D acceleration needs. But he suggested that there may be a convergence as the gaming cards adopt more advanced features. Additionally, the games themselves are beginning to use high-end functions. For example, Unreal Tournament uses relatively complex polygons to get a desired look.

Nvidia's GeForce2 GTS 3D graphics processing unit includes hardware-accelerated lighting and transform functions that are not traditionally handled by gaming graphics boards. The company told MacWEEK that it is considering a Mac version of the technology, which is popular among PC users. ATI's forthcoming Radeon 256 card also accelerates lighting and transform functions.

Harper noted that many game developers tend to work on the cards that will eventually drive their games. To that end, Alias/Wavefront has been working to ensure that Maya will run well on cards aimed at gamers.

As developers take full advantage of OpenGL -- a cross-platform API for 3-D graphics acceleration -- the distinction between pro and gaming cards will be a thing of the past, contended Bryan Speece, director of Macintosh business development for 3dfx.

Speece said that game board developers have optimized their products for the "Carmack Subset" of OpenGL, a set of OpenGL functions, named after John Carmack of id Software, that are considered most important to games. As a result, developers have offered relatively little support for the rest of the API.

"OpenGL is a set of libraries," Speece said. "If you implement them properly, there will be no rendering anomalies."

Ironically, the new Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 boards do not offer built-in texture and lighting acceleration, which means those operations must be handled by the CPU. Speece contended that the Mac system bus is poorly designed for such high-bandwidth transactions.

Speece believes that most customers of 3-D graphics boards on Power Mac systems will be creative professionals, and as a result any board aimed at the Mac market must satisfy their needs in addition to providing an outstanding gaming experience. To that end, Speece said that the next generation of 3dfx graphics cards will be all-purpose boards that support all of Apple's relevant APIs.

Why all the interest in professional 3-D on the Mac? Trevett noted that Apple has slowly addressed the issues that precluded the Mac from being a viable 3-D workstation. The PowerPC G4, he said, is "definitely a professional-grade processor for this application," and the adoption of AGP removed a serious video bottleneck. Mac OS X promises such important capabilities as intelligent multithreading and system-level support for OpenGL. And the arrival of Maya signals that the Mac has a critical mass of applications to support 3-D professionals.

Matrox G400 TV a graphics and video Marvel
April 12, 2000
Fantasy gaming on the Mac
April 10, 2000
Top 10 graphics boards for gamers
December 22, 1999
Home theater PC
December 2, 1999
Coming Attraction: HDTV on your PC
October 26, 1999
Get digital TV on your PC
October 20, 1999

New features for Photoshop 6?
(Macworld)
Top 10 graphics board for gamers
(PC World Online)
Shoot-out at the 3D corral
(PC World Online)
Creating Flash with substance
(Macworld)
3D-modeling muscle with MetaCreations Carrara
(PC World Online)
A flurry of Mac photo software
(Macworld)
Macromedia Fireworks 3.0: A Web graphics factory
(InfoWorld.com)
Nvidia might come to Mac
(Macworld)

Alias/Wavefront
3Dlabs Inc.
3dfx
ATI Technologies Inc.

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.