I am going to take a closer look at Nvidia's presentations, and give you an update on ATI in the next installment on Meltdown. Also, there was an interesting presentation from Matrox which may hint at what that company has up its sleeve for a future 3D product.

In the meantime, it's worth taking note that the graphics industry is opening up again. Slowly, and hesitantly, but it is opening up. First of all, we still don't enough about the underlying performance of next generation hardware. Games haven't begun to take advantage of their features, and as they do, we still have little idea of what the true performance advantages are going to be. It's going to be highly dependent on how the developer works it out. In most of the Meltdown presentations, the thrust of each presentation was that there are infinite permutations of how you can program the 3D pipe, and the developer is going to have to experiment to figure out what works for his game.

So, it's an open playing field. No fixed function features means that no graphics chip company is going to be looking to steal a march on the competition by forcing developers to go down a specific route that favors their hardware. In fact, no 3dfx approaches again. It's going to come down to educating developers on the techniques, and providing drivers, and coding help to facilitate the use of effects that may not be otherwise considered. Take a look at our Hard News section today, we have some new screen shots from ATI. At best, ATI has a lot of work to do to get developers to use all of the features it promises on the R200, no matter how cool they look.

This is an opportunity for the graphics wannabes. Whether you are a game developer or an IHV. The doors kind of open for innovation. The boundaries have been removed. For IHV's, particularly those chip companies looking in, the direction that DirectX sets is quite simple - you don't have to build a specialized graphics team to get in the game.

Programmable graphics processing is nothing new. Check out the TMS34020 from TI, or the i860 from Intel. Try a search on Google on both chips and you'll find a number of references. At one time, TI had the chance to rule the graphics world with the TMS34020. At one time, Intel's i860 was light years ahead of anything else on the PC or workstation.

These were programmable graphics chips in their time. TIGA, TI's graphics interface for the TMS34020, was your only API to the board. Intel actually licensed some 3D APIs from my old company, SPEA (the guys are now working as FireGL as a division of ATI), for the i860. DuPont, Evans and Sutherland (I think), a lot of research outfits, used the i860 and had their own 3D software libraries for it. So, in those days (wow, the early 90s) we didn't have any way of standardizing on these architectures, and neither TI nor Intel were the best companies to develop APIs or help software developers. Microsoft is good at both.

So, maybe its time for TI to get back in the game with its DSP expertise. Maybe Intel can get off its high horse about CPUs and take all that knowledge of registers and ALUs, and make a really powerful graphics co-processor tied to its CPUs. Microsoft has set it up for them.

It may not happen this year, but I have to believe that exposing the core functions of the graphics processor is exposing the graphics industry to new opportunities. Maybe there's a start-up brewing, or maybe there's a TI, or Intel waiting to jump back in. We're no way finished with 3D.