Re: Windows 3D accleration

Jan Hardenbergh ([email protected])
Fri, 19 May 95 14:27:00 E


> There is NO card that will give you appreciable 3D acceleration at the
> present time. Somebody will have to write a driver that will accelerate
> the underlying Open GL implementation Template is using.

> A standard Window accelerator will give you very little performance
> enhancement.

While the second statement is true, the first is not.

Microsoft is an OpenGL licensee and started shipping it with NT 3.5.
In NT 3.51 there is a 3D device driver, (3D-DDI) that allows for
hardware acceleration. We have such a board and driver, See
http://www.oki.com/products/TrianGL.html . I am a little embarrased to
admit that our PCI version for this card is still a couple of months out.
The card we have now is a VL-BUS card. It does make WebSpace
on NT run faster, by a very noticable difference.

Microsoft recently purchased RenderMorphics, makers of Reality Labs (RL).
This was the basis of the original Labyrinth browser, and tcc recently had
them listed as friends, so perhaps Intervista is still using that. On NT RL
uses 3D-DDI, too.

We have plenty of competitors. I do not feel obligated to point them all
out, however, http://www.sgi.com/Technology/openGL/opengl.html has many
of them.

For Win9X, the focus will be on games. MS is creating a net set of
interfaces, DirectDraw, DirectSound, etc. They claim to be integrating
3D-DDI into this suite as Direct3D. Since 3D-DDI is not a great API and
OpenGL/RL are fairly high level, Direct3D might work. 3D-DDI will be on
Win9X at some point, (where it will be there on FCS has been a ping-pong
type decision, anyone know?)

It will probably be the case that an OpenGL driver that goes directly
to the hardware will out perform one that uses 3D-DDI, but the incremental
effort will also be large, perhaps much larger than the incremental gain.

I have no idea where WFW fits into this scheme.

YON, [email protected], Jan C. Hardenbergh, Oki Advanced Products 508-460-8655
http://www.oki.com/people/jch/ =|= 100 Nickerson Rd. Marlborough, MA 01776
Imagination is more important than knowledge - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)