I was actually looking at Descent yesterday to see if it would be easy to port. I didn't realize it had been done. I found this press release on USENET:
NEWS RELEASE
--------------------------
3Dlabs Redefine PC Graphics with PERMEDIA Family of
Graphics Processors for Pervasive 3D
High-performance 2D, 3D, video and VGA acceleration on a single chip;
PERMEDIA boards will run Creative Labs 3D Blaster games
SAN JOSE, CA - October 23, 1995 - 3Dlabs Inc. today announced its
second-generation, low-cost 3D graphics accelerator family --
PERMEDIA(tm) -- that sets a new standard for integrated 2D, 3D and
video acceleration. PERMEDIA delivers 3D performance up to four times
greater than any other announced graphics chip or video games system -
at pricing equal to many 2D-only graphics boards. PERMEDIA will be
available to selected OEMs in the first quarter of 1996, and drives
the price of a complete multimedia graphics solution to below $250.
PERMEDIA generates 25 million texture-mapped pixels-per-second with
high quality, true per-pixel perspective correction and full bi-linear
filtering. PERMEDIA's well-balanced 3D capabilities also include
Gouraud shading, optional Z-buffering, fogging, blending,
translucency, overlays and stencils at a rate of up to 500,000 50
pixel triangles-per-second. PERMEDIA contains a compact and highly
optimized unified graphics engine, re-architected using technology
developed for 3Dlabs' GLINT(r) workstation-class graphics processors.
PERMEDIA is also protected with the same fundamental patent estate as
the GLINT product line.
"I believe that 3Dlabs is positioned to be the leading provider of 3-D
graphics in desktop PCs. The PERMEDIA chip strikes an impressive
price/performance balance and they have the strategic partners, like
Creative Labs, necessary to grow the market for entertainment-class
3-D graphics," said Geoff Ballew, semiconductor application market
industry analyst, at Dataquest.
Microsoft Corp. are using 3Dlabs-based hardware as a primary
development platform for the Direct 3D(tm) and Reality Lab real-time
3D APIs. PERMEDIA provides 100% hardware rasterization acceleration
for the Microsoft APIs under Windows(r) 95 - providing levels of 3D
performance far exceeding that of any games console on the market.
"3DLabs is a long established affiliate of Microsoft in bringing
hardware acceleration to our full range of 3D APIs, from Reality Lab
and Direct 3D(tm) to OpenGL(r)." said Kate Seekings, 3D technology
evangelist at Microsoft. "PERMEDIA is a significant step in making 3D
acceleration pervasive on the Windows-based desktop, with
unprecedented levels of performance and functionality. Microsoft
plans to support the PERMEDIA architecture, helping to ensure that
users of Windows can take full advantage of its capabilities through
Microsoft's 3D APIs."
"3Dlabs is the leading supplier of 3D silicon on the PC and we are now
redefining the dynamics of that market," said Osman Kent, president
and CEO of 3Dlabs. "With the introduction of PERMEDIA, 3Dlabs is
providing a mainstream, pervasive 3D/multimedia chip that can replace
not only today's high-end VGA products, but also any 3D game-oriented
silicon. While many companies are trying to bring their first game
silicon to life, we have already delivered robust silicon through
GLINT and 3D Blaster in both the professional and entertainment market
segments. Our vision now is to make world-class 3D available on every
new PC, be it in the home, office or plane. Our licensing program and
merchant chips in the PERMEDIA family are moving us aggressively
toward this goal."
The first-generation, low-cost 3D chip from 3Dlabs was used
exclusively by Creative Labs on their 3D Blaster(tm) board, which will
be shipping in volume this Christmas. Creative plans to use custom
versions of PERMEDIA for future boards in the 3D Blaster family.
Creative has been closely involved in the PERMEDIA design process and
has worked with 3Dlabs to make 3D Blaster titles run on any
PERMEDIA-based board without modification. This is possible due to
the functional compatibility between 3D Blaster and PERMEDIA, and
industry standard APIs - such as Microsoft's Reality Lab and Direct
3D. Many titles shipping today on 3D Blaster use Creative's CGL
graphics library. Creative has licensed CGL to 3Dlabs - enabling
CGL-based games titles to also run unmodified on PERMEDIA based cards.
"The PERMEDIA architecture is the ideal platform for our continuing
relationship with 3Dlabs," said Hock Leow, vice president of the video
and graphics product group at Creative. "PERMEDIA not only provides
outstanding 3D performance for games and other pervasive 3D
applications, but also includes the high performance 2D and video
functionality we need to make our boards excel at accelerating all the
graphics applications used by our customers. We are committed to
working with 3Dlabs to make PERMEDIA the leading 3D architecture for
pervasive 3D. Licensing our software to 3Dlabs provides a tremendous
momentum to PERMEDIA by providing an immediate collection of top
quality games for PERMEDIA-based boards."
"By definition, pervasive 3D includes all the entertainment
applications," said Henry Choy, director of entertainment products at
3Dlabs. "We received a lot of positive feedback from the game
developer community about Creative's 3D Blaster board. We listened
carefully to their comments and integrated the performance and
functionality into PERMEDIA to make it the leading next-generation 3D
games accelerator."
While games have been the first high-volume 3D market segment, 3D
graphics will become even more pervasive during 1996 with 3D
capabilities being integrated into everyday applications such as 3D
Web browsers, multimedia navigators, digital publishing, financial
visualization, presentation packages and the graphic user interface
itself. 3Dlabs is working closely with many 3D applications
developers, ensuring that key vendors have access to hardware and
technical support, ensuring that software is optimally accelerated by
GLINT and PERMEDIA cards.
PERMEDIA's seamlessly integrated 2D performance exceeds that of
today's fastest accelerators for the Microsoft Windows 95 operating
system, and its video processing capabilities include MPEG-compatible
YUV color conversion and fully filtered, bi-linear scaling to provide
30fps video playback at full-screen resolution. In addition, video
can be freely used as a perspective texture, enabling real-time video
effects to be generated with ease - one example of how 3D-based chips
are inherently more powerful than the current generation of 2D-only
chips. On-chip VGA is also fully accelerated providing unmatched
performance for legacy VGA-based software and games.
PERMEDIA makes advanced 3D acceleration affordable and widespread,
fueling the growth of the market for 3D software. PERMEDIA is the
first pervasive 3D graphics chip that is both inexpensive enough to be
used in low-cost games boards, and has the performance and
functionality to be used for everyday 2D and 3D graphics tasks,
including personal productivity applications.
"With GLINT's leadership position in the professional segment, 3Dlabs
has been perceived as being a high-end only 3D chip company. With
PERMEDIA we now have merchant chips for both the professional and
pervasive 3D markets - that makes us unique in the PC industry," said
Neil Trevett, vice president of marketing at 3Dlabs. "We are fully
committed to extending the high-end 3D performance of the PC, and as
3D markets develop, we will continue to migrate and adapt our high-end
3D technologies into PERMEDIA-class devices."
3Dlabs is licensing the PERMEDIA technology to strategic partners
developing high-volume, consumer-class devices that require integrated
3D, 2D and video acceleration. Designed completely in VHDL, PERMEDIA
cores are totally portable and scaleable, allowing this
ground-breaking graphics technology to be easily integrated into
systems-on-silicon designs.
Silicon and Software Support for PERMEDIA
PERMEDIA can be used in conjunction with 3Dlabs' soon-to-be released
floating point 3D-pipeline processor. This combination allows up to
500,000 bilinear-filtered, texture-mapped, 50 pixel
triangles-per-second to be generated on desktop machines by offloading
much of the geometry pipeline from the host CPU. This chip
combination will provide a new level of price/performance for
demanding 3D delivery systems such as arcade games, simulation and
virtual reality.
IBM Microelectronics and 3Dlabs have closely cooperated during the
development of PERMEDIA and the newly-announced IBM RGB526DB LUT-DAC
is the result of this cooperative effort. Both IBM and 3Dlabs have
integrated functionality into their silicon that takes full advantage
of the product features designed into both chips. When the RGB526DB
LUT-DAC is used in conjunction with PERMEDIA, a graphics board can
offer high-quality double-buffering, in multiple independent windows -
an essential feature for pervasive 3D - with no extra memory or
supporting hardware.
3Dlabs will be supporting the widest range of 3D APIs in the industry
with the PERMEDIA architecture, including Reality Lab and Direct 3D.
Productivity application APIs such as Silicon Graphics' OpenGL,
Autodesk's Heidi(tm), Apple's QuickDraw(tm) 3D will also be supported
- allowing any 3D application to be accelerated by a PERMEDIA board.
Technical Information
The PERMEDIA uses the industry-standard, low-cost SGRAM (Synchronous
Graphics RAM) memory architecture for all of its framebuffer and
ancillary buffers such as Z and texture. With a fully synchronous
64-bit external data path, the combination delivers a memory bandwidth
of up to 400 Mbytes/sec. Future devices in the PERMEDIA family using a
higher clock frequency will raise this bandwidth to 800 Mbytes/sec -
doubling graphics performance.
SGRAM is available from many DRAM vendors and is aggressively priced
as synchronous memory becomes the de-facto choice for EDO DRAM
replacement. PERMEDIA takes full advantage of SGRAM's advanced
features such as block write and bit-masking. As all graphics buffers
are kept in SGRAM, software has complete freedom over how the memory
is used - for example, if the PERMEDIA board is being used for pure 2D
work, then all the memory can be used to drive the highest possible
screen resolution.
PERMEDIA uses the innovative BGA (Ball Grid Array) package to achieve
ease-of-integration onto motherboards or graphics cards. PERMEDIA is
a 3.3V, 0.35 micron device with an initial clock frequency of 50MHz.
Company Information
3Dlabs is a worldwide supplier of merchant chips, enabling software
and technology for 3D graphics. The company's products and
technologies enable silicon, board and system vendors to integrate 3D
capabilities into their products for such applications as games,
multimedia, CAD, simulation, virtual reality and interactive TV.
3Dlabs products are protected by over 20 US and international patents.
The GLINT family of graphics processors is recognized as the
industry-standard accelerator architecture for workstation-class
high-performance 3D graphics on the PC, with over 40 companies having
incorporated GLINT into their 3D products. Referred to by the 'The
Red Herring' investment magazine as "the first member of the next
generation of chip vendors", 3Dlabs Inc. is headquartered in San Jose,
CA., was founded in April 1994, and is privately owned.
-30-
PERMEDIA(tm) Testimonials
====================
Market Analysts
"I believe that 3Dlabs is positioned to be the leading provider of 3-D
graphics in desktop PCs. The PERMEDIA chip strikes an impressive
price/performance balance and they have the strategic partners, like
Creative Labs, necessary to grow the market for entertainment-class
3-D graphics."
Geoff Ballew, semiconductor application market industry analyst for
Dataquest.
"The PERMEDIA is 3Dlabs' third generation 3D part. It is the type of
device we have predicted would be offered in 1996, a 3DVGC. 3Dlabs
has taken a leading and aggressive position with this new part."
Jon Peddie of the PC Graphics Report.
Software Developers
"3DLabs is a long established affiliate of Microsoft in bringing
hardware acceleration to our full range of 3D APIs, from Reality Lab
and Direct3D(tm) to OpenGL(r). PERMEDIA is a significant step in
making 3D acceleration pervasive on the Windows(r) - based desktop,
with unprecedented levels of performance and functionality. Microsoft
plans to support the PERMEDIA architecture, helping to ensure that
users of Windows can take full advantage of its capabilities through
Microsoft's 3D APIs."
Kate Seekings, 3D technology evangelist at Microsoft.
"Virgin has a number of truly outstanding games coming out in 1996
that use groundbreaking 3D graphics and texturing effects. With it's
super-console class 3D acceleration, the PERMEDIA will let us deliver
PC titles with levels of performance, responsiveness and 3D realism
that go way beyond what can be done today - which is cool for us and
great for game players."
Tony Fagelman, Internal Development Manager at Virgin Interactive
Entertainment.
"I found porting Descent to the 3D Blaster, which uses 3Dlabs'
technology, to have been easy and straightforward. The initial port
took only 1 week. You can now run Descent at 640x400/15 bit color
with excellent frame rates on a 486/66 based machine. The
specification of PERMEDIA looks even better - 3Dlabs have taken input
from developers and added features such as bilinear filtering and
higher fill rates."
Jay Patel, technical director at Interplay.
"Gremlin have invested heavily in 3D as the future of games with many
of our new products such as Actua Soccer, Fatal Racing and Normality
rely heavily on giving the impression of reality in a 3D world.
Innovations like the new PERMEDIA graphics accelerator are a major
benefit to the games developer and games playing world and can be
nothing but great news, ensuring that longed-for-escapism is as real
as possible."
James North-Hearn, Product Director at Gremlin.
"The PERMEDIA is a truly wonderful chip, our VRML-based browsers have
been waiting for this level of performance to be available at this
price. With the 3D Blaster and now PERMEDIA, low-cost 3D hardware
will become widespread and 3D Web access will be truly enabled. We
will be working closely with 3Dlabs to take full advantage of the full
range of the their silicon - from PERMEDIA to GLINT."
Tony Parisi, co-inventor of VRML and president of InterVista Software.
"We selected 3Dlabs as a 3D acceleration partner for Heidi, and we are
getting great performance on GLINT-based boards with applications such
as 3D Studio MAX. Though not required, 3D hardware enables Heidi to
run at its absolute best, and PERMEDIA will further decrease the cost
to users who want to use 3D accelerators. We look forward to working
closely with 3Dlabs to ensure Heidi is fully supported and optimized
for PERMEDIA-based boards."
Eric Wagner, director of the graphics development group at Autodesk.
Hardware Manufacturers
"The PERMEDIA architecture is the ideal platform for our continuing
relationship with 3Dlabs. PERMEDIA not only provides outstanding 3D
performance for games and other pervasive 3D applications, but also
includes the high performance 2D and video functionality we need to
make our boards excel at accelerating all the graphics applications
used by our customers. We are committed to working with 3Dlabs to
make PERMEDIA the leading 3D architecture for pervasive 3D. Licensing
CGL to 3Dlabs provides a tremendous momentum to PERMEDIA by providing
an immediate collection of top quality games for PERMEDIA-based
boards."
Hock Leow, vice president of the video and graphics product group at
Creative.
"As the number one supplier of immersive Virtual Reality entertainment
equipment, Virtuality lead the field in real-time playing action using
high quality texture mapped 3D graphics. With 3D such a vital part of
our success, the levels of performance PERMEDIA offers can only
enhance the perceptual experience Virtuality users have come to
expect. 3Dlabs have demonstrated that they can deliver to spec. and
we look forward to the availability of PERMEDIA."
Dr. Jonathan D. Waldern, Managing Director, Virtuality Group plc.
"We are committed to use PERMEDIA in our new range of 3D graphics
boards. PERMEDIA provides an unbeatable level of performance and
integration, and being able to leverage Creative's games titles will
give us a very fast start into the 3D games market."
Isaac Levanon, executive vice president of Televideo.
Silicon Manufacturers
"We are excited to add such significant value to boards using PERMEDIA
- per window double buffering is a feature that is extremely valuable
to end-users. It is unusual for graphics chip and LUTDAC vendors to
work so closely together to take advantage of each others products.
From the success of this collaboration we look forward to undertaking
similar projects with 3Dlabs in the future."
Carlos Bielicki, product marketing manager at IBM Microelectronics.
"The PERMEDIA is tremendous endorsement for the SGRAM architecture,
and a truly innovative 3D accelerator that is leading the industry.
Use of SGRAM provides a crucial advantage over burst EDO DRAM as SGRAM
will be easily scaled to single cycle access times up to 100MHz -
something that 3Dlabs will take advantage of. Our company looks
forward to working with 3Dlabs and its PERMEDIA customers to create
the next generation of low-cost graphics cards."
Mueez Deen, Sr. Marketing Manager at Samsung.
"The driving force behind SGRAM is bandwidth, and the rapid emergence
of 3D is a major driver. With 3D graphics accelerators like 3Dlabs'
PERMEDIA chip hitting volume in 1996, Micron's SGRAM with it's
excellent performance-to-cost ratio, is well placed to take advantage
of this growing market."
Paul Watkins, technical marketing & applications manager at Micron.
3Dlabs and PERMEDIA are trademarks, and GLINT is a registered
trademark of 3Dlabs Inc. Ltd. 3D Blaster is a trademark of Creative
Labs. Microsoft, Windows and Direct 3D are either registered
trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States
and/or other countries. OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon
Graphics Inc. QuickDraw is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc. All
other trademarks are acknowledged.
I asked Brian Fargo about the patch. His answer: "I’m too old to remember that!"
