Intense3D

Making a first public appearance was Intense3D, the former 3D graphics division of Intergraph. Intense3D is reputed to own about 32 per cent of the high-end graphics market, driving its share with the Wildcat controllers. At Siggraph, Intense3D announced the new Wildcat 4110 3D graphics accelerator. It's an AGP Pro product, and that means it's a big board, with a 3.2 GFLOPS geometry option, and 64 MBytes of Frame Buffer, and 64 MBytes of Texture Memory. Of course, PixelFusion is going to be able to go up to 1 Gigabyte of on-board memory with its boards, but in the meantime, memory loads aside, Wildcat is the high-end product to beat. It should deliver a sustained 6 million triangles/sec. and a peak texture fill rate of 143 Mpixel/sec. More to the point, with Intense3D now spun off from Intergraph, how long will it be before we see the company move into other parts of the PC graphics market? My guess is that it won't be long.

Epilogue

There were a lot of other interesting technologies and companies to review, but I haven't got around to them this time. I'll be on holiday next week, but when I get back, I'll try and dig deeper into the stuff going on here, and more on companies such as Advanced Rendering Technology , a company that has produced a hardware ray tracing engine which is very interesting. In addition, there is Mitsubishi's volumetric rendering product. At Siggraph, Mitsubishi was promoting its 3D graphics division, Real Time Visualization (rtviz ). Check both out. They're a real education in graphics technology.

On the software side, take a look at the Web3D Consortium , the former VRML Consortium. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. I started to look at Web based 3D technology in this week's Second Hand Smoke, but there are other companies out there, Shout Interactive , blaxxun Interactive , DRaW Computing and Hypercosm . If you are a budding 3D developer, you could do a lot worse then by starting off here. You should also check out Schmoozer for information on an interesting contest.

I also want to spend some time and look at the implications to the 3D market of what looks like the end of Fahrenheit. There might more to that then meets the eye. In the same vein, I'd like to get up close and personal with Java 3D. With Fahrenheit out of the way, and SGI looking a little uncertain, Sun has an opportunity to do something in the graphics space. Java 3D is an interesting technology, but whether Sun can fulfill its promise is another matter.