3D Archive

3Dfx died in the fourth quarter of 2000 and Windows XP came to life a year after. But seven years after, drivers for 3dfx cards still appear. First of all, it is nearly incredible that enthusiast community managed to support an operating system which was still in the works. Secondly - it is incredible that drivers that support both 32- and 64-bit Windows have just came out.

"Last October we had compared the performance of the open-source R300 display driver against the closed-source fglrx driver for ATI Radeon graphics cards. In that comparison a Mobility Radeon X300 was used with X.Org 7.1, but we have decided to take another look at this driver comparison under X.Org 7.2. In this last comparison, the fglrx binary blob had greatly outperformed the open-source driver. While the fglrx driver remains faster, has the performance delta between these two drivers decreased?"

"Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with Nvidia Corp and is an X.Org project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far."

"DirectX 10 is probably the most important revolution in games development, at least since the introduction of the programmable shader in DirectX 8.0. Because of the way that Microsoft has designed the new driver model, DirectX 10 will only be available for Windows Vista users and there will not be a version released for Windows XP. Along with DirectX 10, Windows Vista will come with DirectX 9.0Ex - this is because pre-DirectX 10 hardware will not work under the new API due to the complete overhaul."

Graphics chip maker ATI Technologies has released HLSL2GLSL, an open source application designed to help programmers convert graphics code optimized for Windows’ DirectX 9 Application Programming Interface to OpenGL, which is used on the Mac. Binaries for Mac OS X and Windows are available for download.

"Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface (API) was first introduced in 1995. DirectX was designed to make life easier for software developers by providing a standard platform developers could use to easily make multimedia software and game programming for the Windows Platform." More here.

NVPerfKit is a comprehensive suite of performance tools to help debug and profile OpenGL and Direct3D applications. It gives you access to low-level performance counters inside the driver and hardware counters inside the GPU itself. The counters can be used to determine exactly how your application is using the GPU, identify performance issues, and confirm that performance problems have been resolved.

"Open-source support has appeared by default in X.Org 7.1 for R300 generation GPUs. While ATI does not officially support these R300 open-source drivers, this alternative have been gaining momentum with users largely due to the lack of GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support in fglrx. This extension is needed for the AIGLX desktop eye-candy. These drivers do lack TV-out support and many other features found within ATI's fglrx drivers, but how does its performance compare?"

ATI has released the 8.29.6 version of its proprietary Linux drivers, with the announcement that the 9000, 9100, and 9200 IGP and Mobility Radeon chipsets are no longer supported by the new version. Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100, 9200, and 9250 devices are also dropped from support. Thankfully, these models are supported in 2D/3D mode by the open source DRI driver.

Phoronix has published an article covering a majority of the changes that will be making their way into NVIDIA's next Linux display drivers: the 1.0-9XXX series. Of the changes to come is Quad SLI, improved nvidia-xsettings, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, OpenGL 2.1, GLSL 1.2, and other fixes. No release date is reported.

DirectX10 is not just another version of DirectX. This version has been re-built from the ground up to change the way applications think about material management and load balancing between the CPU and GPU. D3D10, as also DirectX10 is called, takes advantage of the improved communication between the CPU and GPU and efficiently manages the data transfer between them. Screenshots included.

"DirectX 10 is likely to see a number of point revisions during its lifespan and the first of these, imaginatively titled DirectX 10.1, will be the first of these. It may surprise some of you reading this, but the features which will be added by DirectX 10.1 have already been decided upon and information made available about them, so in this article we'll be taking a look through what we can expect to see in DirectX 10.1 compliant hardware."

A never-shipped 3dfx Voodoo5 6000 AGP graphics card has popped up on eBay to tempt fans of historical GPUs. Speaking of fans, this boy has four of 'em, one each for the four VSA-100 graphics chips the board sports - along with 128MB of frame-buffer memory. The full-length card requires a 3.3V AGP slot should the successful bidder care to try the thing out. It also requires a power feed from the host system's PSU. Later incarnations of the card were bundled with their own, external power supply brick. The GPUs are clocked to 166MHz.

"One project that I've been following quite closely lately is a project started by chip-designer Timothy Miller, called the Open Graphics Project. His goal, along with the rest of the project, known as the Open Graphics Foundation, is to make a 3D accelerated video card which is fully documented, free-licensed, and open source." We have already covered the OGP a few times, but this article gives a nice overview of the project.