As 3D technology gains more and more ground in the common marketplace (even my neighbor’s dad wants a GF4), every industry conference is a potentialharvest of good tech news, and this year’sSIGGRAPHis no exception. Although the conference is traditionally more ‘industry-insider’ and academic in nature (meaning, notsoconsumer friendly), it has become more and more fantastic recently, and consumer-level 3D technology is gaining more and more of the spotlight. The big news to come out of SIGGRAPH this year relates to the NV30, NVIDIA’s next-gen answer to the company’s currently stinky stock price and ATI’s newcomer to the throne,the Radeon 9700. Some of the details divulged include the following:
- Vertex Shaders beyond DirectX 9 with up to 1024 static instructions, up to 65536 instructions executed in loops, branches and subroutines
- Pixel Shaders beyond DirectX 9 – up to 1024 instructions
- Support for OpenGL and DirectX HLSL via NVIDIA’s Cg
- 128-bit floating point color precision
- Support for high-speed DDR2 memories
- 8X AGP
- Built on 0.13-micron process technology
You can also find some information in thisHotHardware pre-pre-view. Full disclosure is still a while away, it seems. The conference also seemed to bode well for Matrox’s new offering, theParhelia. In particular, they were found guilty of temping conference-goers with their TripleHead display.
