3D Archive

C'mon, haven't you ever thought that it would be cool to write a game for the Xbox 360 or Windows, if only you had the time? Microsoft's new XNA Game Architecture is designed to make game development modular and easy. Throw in developer tools, such as XNA Express, and you have no excuses to create the next DOOM. Matthew David shows why game development is only a few key strokes away.

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.

A new nVIDIA display driver has been released which fixes the exploit reported last week. The driver was vulnerable to a buffer overflow that allowed an attacker to run arbitrary code as root. This bug could be exploited both locally as well as remotely (via a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page).

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.

Reuters reports that Nvidia shares climbed more than 8 percent on Wednesday amid speculation the graphics chipmaker could be acquired by Intel. "Investors have been speculating that Nvidia might be acquired since July, when AMD agreed to buy Nvidia rival ATI Technologies Inc. for USD 5.4 billion. Rumors of such a transaction resurfaced on Wednesday, spreading quickly across Wall Street trading desks, according to three options market participants."

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.

LXer has an interview with project lead and creator of the Open Graphics Project, Timothy Miller. "I'm not sure exactly how large that market is, but we seem to be creating a movement. Individuals and businesses interested in open hardware are coming to me all the time, asking about it."

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.

Statement by ATI: "For other markets, such as workstation and consumer, performance and feature differentiation are key metrics. Proprietary, patented optimizations are part of the value we provide to our customers and we have no plans to release these drivers to open source. In addition, multimedia elements such as content protection must not, by their very nature, be allowed to go open source."

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.

Will Backman speaks with Andy Ritger and Christian Zander from NVIDIA about the NVIDIA FreeBSD graphics driver. The interview gives an overview of the drivers current features, plans for future improvements, and a brief discussion about licensing and NVIDIA's open source efforts. Thanks to the FreeBSD guys themselves for this summary.

"When DirectX 10 rocks your PC with the release of Windows Vista early next year, it will come courtesy of a trio of forces: The graphics card companies obviously play a huge role, as do the game developers, but DirectX is Microsoft's baby. Ultimately it is up to Microsoft engineers to work together with IHVs and game developers to define the API. We managed to sneak some time into the busy schedules of two key Microsofties to find out what makes DX10 tick, and why they think you're going to want to migrate to a DX10-capable computer for the best experience the PC has to offer."

Computer-generated animation in film and television, as well as state-of-the-art video games, features realistic water, fire, and other natural effects. Many people new to computer graphics are astounded to learn that these realistic and complex models are simple triangles and pixels as far as computer graphics hardware is concerned. In this chapter, OpenGL Distilled covers the OpenGL primitive types and how to control their appearance with several basic rendering features.

"We have been overwhelmed with requests to take a serious look at the frame-rate performance differences between the various open-source and proprietary contenders. Our first article on this topic, which will likely be the first of a series of examinations, is looking at the differences between the X.Org open-source ATI Radeon driver and that of ATI's official but proprietary fglrx display driver."