rec.autos.simulators

Regards ,
Darren

1. The Lockheed Martin R3d/100
2. NVidia
3. Glint3D

1. The Lockheed Martin R3d/100

The R3D/100, is a graphics accelerator that provides high throughput,
high realism and sustained real-time
3D graphics response. Key performance attributes of the new chip set
include an  embedded 100 MFLOPS geometry
processor, pixel write rates of up to 33 million pixels per second,
up to 750,000 polygons per second, line processing
up to 1.5 million per second, and provides up to 192 color texture maps (128 x
128 mipmapped) in real-time. This
performance eliminates the jerky visual movement found in graphics products
that operate at less-than-real-time rates.
The R3D/100 chip set directly interfaces with Microsoft 3D/DDI and supports all
3D/DDI-compliant APIs, such as
OpenGL(tm) and comes with device driver software and a device driver kit.

The 3D/DDI - Direct Draw Interface - is probably what we need for nascar
and indycar under Win95.

2. NVidia , Diamond Multimedia had a Press Release about thier Stealth-NV1 which
will include this chip also Sega are doing there PC game conversions to this
chip.

This info taken from the July 31, 1995 - Sega/Diamond press release.

NVIDIA's president and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang said: "We are thrilled to
be working with Sega, the world's premier
interactive entertainment company. Sega's hit software titles will take
advantage of every facet of our technology and drive
us to our limits, and PC consumers are going to be stunned with the results of
our combined efforts."

Sega will reveal which of its hit arcade and consumer software titles it
is porting to the NV1 early this fall. Sega will bundle
NV1-compatible titles with multimedia products from leading add-in card
suppliers and PC OEMs in time for the Holiday
selling season.

NVidia is what we'll to play SEGA DAYTONA & SEGA RALLY at home.

3. GLint3D

The GLINT 300SX high performance graphics processor combines workstation class
3D graphics acceleration and
state-of-the-art 2D performance in a single chip.

GLINT is capable of processing 300,000 shaded, depth buffered and anti-aliased
polygons/second. The chip provides
complete 32-bit color, 2D and 3D acceleration, an on-chip PCI-compliant local bus
interface and integrated LUT-DAC
control, making a complete graphics subsystem possible with minimal chip count.

All the rendering operations of OpenGL are accelerated by the GLINT 300SX,
including Gouraud shading, depth
buffering, anti-aliasing, alpha blending, and texture mapping.

Implemented around a scalable memory architecture, the GLINT 300SX reduces the
cost and complexity of delivering
high performance 3D graphics within a windowing environment - making it ideal for
a wide range of graphics products,
from PC boards to high-end workstation accelerators.
3D ACCELERATION

     100% OpenGL compliant rendering operations in hardware
     Point, line, rectangle and polygon primitives
     Gouraud shading, depth buffering, anti-aliasing, dithering, depth cueing,
     texture map filtering and alpha blending
     2.5 Giga operations per second
     300K Gouraud shaded, depth buffered triangles/sec

2D AND GUI ACCELERATION

     True color acceleration of window systems such as Win32 and X11
     Accelerated bitBLT, line drawing, fills, text and window clipping

SPECIAL FEATURES

     64-bit hyper-pipelined architecture
     Vertex level interface
     112-bit pixel datapath to memory
     High quality 16 and 8-bpp dithering of 24-bit graphics images
     Fast frame and depth buffer clears
     Shared framebuffer interface for easy multimedia integration
     VRAM block fill and bit masking
     Anti-aliasing for high quality images at 4x4 and 8x8 sub-pixel resolution

HIGH SPEED PCI INTERFACE

     On-chip target & master DMA controller for fast host communication
     Input and output command FIFOs
     Boot EPROM interface
     High speed bypass for host based rendering direct to framebuffer

DISPLAY MODES

Resolutions up to 2560x2048
     8, 16 or 32-bits per pixel RGBA and 4 or 8-bit color indexed
     Packed 8, 16 and 32-bit pixels
     Supports advanced modes: double buffering, stereo and overlays

etc.. etc... etc....

And Now Do I really Need another card just to play F1GP-2

My money's going on any card that supports the 3D/DDI - Direct Draw Interface -
for Win95/NT.

I'll glad if anyone's got more info on these card's like RELEASE dates...
gee that sounds just like some other posts.(like whats the release date for
.......)

One thing that has not been specifically stated is whether these boards
replace your existing graphics card (presumably they do), rather than
working through the feature connector (I don't really know what a
feature connector is, except that I got the idea somewhere that it can
be used to provide input for the graphics card).

This is something which would be helpful to clear up as if they do
replace your existing graphics card then it would be foolish to go
out and buy a new graphics card just before these boards are released.
Therefore, can anyone confirm that these cards do replace your existing
graphics cards? I note that a number of people on this newsgroup are
talking about getting a new graphics card so they may be thankful to
find out that it may be redundant very soon.

 Yeap ,  November they say for more info checkout

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

My guess is they will be a full replacement , the blaster card at least is
VL-bus only with PCI next year.

Denis , you are so right - redundant in about a week - see the annoucement from
microsoft from earlier this week , re the 3Dblaster !

Cards like the matrox are about to be surpassed

Also from the creative Page...
supported by >all the major game and software developers. You'll see dozens of
incredible 3D titles from
Acclaim
EA/Bullfrog
Fenris
Wolf
GameTek
Gremlin
Infogrammes Interplay
Lucas Arts
Maverick Simulation
Microsoft
Mindscape
Ocean
Papyrus     ***************
***

Some questions for Rick Genter ,
as Papyrus is a "registered 3D Blaster developer", (well so says the
 announcment from microsoft/creative)

If you could please tell us which 3d cards are Papyrus doing
development for the win95 / dos versions on ?

are you using the low-level hardware bashing API called Direct3D.
or the higher level 3D/DDI / Direct Draw API

And which 3d card is likey to run Nascar / indycar the best ?

1. 3DBlaster from Creative , 3Dlabs based Glint300sx.

snipit from release
 " Creative's 3D Blaster is the first affordable accelerated graphics
  Windows 95 and Direct 3D APIs to exploit all the capabilities of 3D Blaster
  will enable developers to bring stunning games to market very quickly. "

 This card will ship in November.
 Creative are using a customised version of GLINT which includes hardware
 texture mapping, i.e. texture maps are held on the board.  However. to get a
 board price of $349, it has features removed which are necessary for OpenGL,
 but are not required for games.  (thanks to Chris Harris from 3D labs )

2. The Lockheed Martin REAL3D(tm) R3D/100.
   The R3D/100 chip set directly interfaces with Microsoft 3D/DDI and supports  
   all 3D/DDI-compliant APIs, such asOpenGL(tm)
   performance is figures are pixel write rates of up to 33 million pixels
   per second, up to 750,000   polygons per second

  This card is very simliar to the Sega Model 2-based card used
  in arcade games such as the top-selling Daytona USA (tm), Desert
  Tank(tm), Virtua Cop(tm), Virtua Fighter II(tm), and the virtual
  reality theme  park ride system, VR-1(tm).

3. Diamond Multimedia, NV1-NVida
   Anyone heard anymore about this card , as sega are doing to PC convserions
   based on this NVida chip.
   It has the 3D/DDI api at least.
   Hopefully an offering like a Stealth64 coupled with the NV1 3D hardware,    
  won't be far off.

4. Matrox ,Mellenium
   Have the  3d-ddi   drivers for the Matrox shipped yet ?
   I wonder how this card will shape up as the others hit the market

Although how do you compare 3d performance
   * Pixels per second
   * texture maps per second (and what size texture maps)

If anyones is after more info on PC 3D Graphics Accelerators
checkout the FAQ

http://www.racesimcentral.net/~bm/3dcards/3d-cards1.html
or
ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/bm/3d-cards.1

Looking forward to later this year
New video card here we go , now all we have to do is decided which one !

Geoff

Out probably in Oct/Nov. in PCI or VLB and either DRAM or VRAM.
Price from about $200-$400. Supposed to come with a Domark and Interplay
game.  Another company is also using the chip so they may have a different
bundle of stuff.

--

http://widget.ecn.purdue.edu/~fmah