Press Releases 3D Emotion

OCTOBER 1997

CALIFORNIA GRAPHICS PIONEERS THIRD GENERATION OF GRAPHICS CARDS WITH REAL 3D

Share the experience of real three dimensional gaming on a TV screen

California Graphics, the 3D performance specialist, has brought real three dimensional viewing from the workstation to the desktop with the launch of its new 3D Emotion PCI graphics card, based on the highly popular 3Dfx Voodoo Rush 3D accelerator. State-of-the-art liquid crystal glasses can be used to deliver a different image to each eye so that objects leap out of the computer or TV screen in full colour with a real sense of depth. This high performance graphics card also delivers resolutions of 1600x1200 in 65,536 colours and 1280x1024 in true colour, with a performance in Ziff-Davis' 3D Winbench 97 of 183 that is nearly double that of the average 3D card.
"This three dimensional technology has been pioneered on high end workstations for professional CAD/CAM applications ranging from mechanical drawing to molecular chemistry," explained Vincenzo Coccoli, CEO of California Graphics. "We are one of the first, if not the first, to combine this real depth of stereo viewing with 3Dfx's outstanding Voodoo Rush chipset. The result is true immersion in a full screen, interactive world within the PC, with near arcade speed and performance with up to 35 frames per second that beats a games console.
"This can be made even more stunning by our other innovative feature of TV output so that the screen of a TV can be used for a larger display and for several people to view the three dimensional images at the same time. Game play has never been so realistic or entertaining with things leaping out of the screen. Business users also benefit in that they can walk through 3D illustrations of new buildings or view computer generated 3D images of a new product from all angles before a prototype is even made. And all users will benefit from the high quality MPEG1 and MMX optimised MPEG2 (DVD) display that can be achieved using this board.
"Our unique choice of the 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo Rush accelerator and the ProMotion-AT 25 accelerator for this board not only gives leading edge 2D and 3D graphics but it also enables users to benefit from the vast number of games titles that are being created by over 300 developers who have joined the 3Dfx development program. Currently over 200 games titles are being developed for the 3Dfx including Quake and GL Quake, Tomb Raider 2, Hexen 2, Formula 1, Wipeout XL, MDK, Motoracer, Ultimate Race and Pod from developers such as Microsoft, Psygnosis, Sega Interactive, Virgin Interactive, and Electronic Arts."
A significant performance improvement has been made by California Graphics' choice of the new Alliance Semiconductors' AT25 2D graphics accelerator. This provides better performance as it has been optimised for 2D only, unlike the AT3D 2D & 3D accelerator that is used by most other Voodoo Rush graphics cards and includes 3D that is not used and weaker 2D.

Stereo Vision
The 3D Emotion supports the H3D PC system from H3D Entertainment, Inc., which uses two liquid crystal shutters mounted in a lightweight pair of glasses. These shutters rapidly turn from opaque to transparent in synch with alternating left and right images being displayed on the screen. The left eye thus sees only the images created for the left eye whilst the right eye only sees images for the right eye. The brain combines these two slightly different sets of images together in the normal way to give stereoscopic vision with depth perception. The result is that the images on screen look just like real life with some object nearby and some far away.
There are no annoying cables as the glasses are linked to the computer by infra red signals from a tiny transmitter that is placed on top of the screen. This approach also means that several pairs of glasses can be used at the same time on a big screen TV for a shared viewing experience. They work with H3D-enabled PC games, still images (Internet/CD-ROM), video and DVD, supporting refresh rates up to 120Hz.
"This is a logical development of the processing that takes place within the 3D graphics pipeline of the PC," explained Bob Raikes, Displays Editor of leading PC Graphics market research firm, Jon Peddie Associates and Managing Editor of Display Monitor. "The computer can work out the relative positions of all objects in three dimensions and the different perspective of each eye on the whole scene. The low cost and weight make LCD shutter glasses the best stereo viewing solution for most games."

The Chipset
The 3D Emotion uses a 3Dfx Voodoo Rush 3D graphics chipset, Alliance Semiconductors' high performance 128-bit ProMotion AT25 2D accelerator and integrates a 175MHz RAMDAC giving very stable refresh rates up to 200 Hz.
The Voodoo Rush uses a triangle-based graphics engine as the basis for both object rendering and texture mapping. It derives the parameters needed for its triangle engine internally. This frees the CPU from calculating these parameters and eliminates the need to transfer them over the PCI bus.
The Voodoo Rush uses a 64-bit "VR" interface, which was jointly developed with Alliance Semiconductors, to connect to the ProMotion AT25 2D graphics accelerator and the shared memory buffer. The 2D graphics accelerator provides ordinary DOS and Windows functionality, while passing 3D rendering commands to Voodoo Rush through a shared-memory command buffer. Voodoo Rush then renders the commands directly to the shared frame buffer memory. This shared-memory approach gives a simpler and more affordable interface, and reduces the total amount of display memory required. In a Voodoo Rush system, 3D games can be played full-screen or in a window, unlike stand-alone 3D subsystems that generally allow only full-screen game play.
The card has a 45 Mpixels/sec sustained fill rate for bi-linear and tri-linear filtered textures with LOD (Level Of Detail) MIP-mapping, Z-buffering, alpha-blending and fogging. Its innovative advanced 3D functions include depth buffering (16-bit linear, 22-bit effective), texture compositing, morphing, animation, linear frame buffer access, and per-pixel special effects such as fog, transparency, and translucency.
TV output is handled by a Chrontel CH7002. This high quality encoder converts VGA signals into NTSC or PAL TV format with a special flicker filter, enabling images to be displayed simultaneously on a monitor and a TV screen. There is also S-Video output from the card to give the highest possible quality of TV display.

Industry standard API support
Microsoft's Direct3D and 3Dfx Glide APIs are supported as are Criterion Renderware, OpenGL, and Apple Quickdraw 3D RAVE API's. VESA VBE 2.0 is supported for superb DOS games performance.

Games
3D Emotion de-luxe version is packed with an exciting games collection, including best-seller as:
1) MDK Mission Laguna Beach (3DFX OEM version)
2) Carmageddon (3DFX Full version)
3) Tomb Raider (3DFX OEM version)
4) Terracide (3DFX Full version)

Additional information
The ProMotion-AT25 is a high-performance integrated 2D and video accelerator. It incorporates an advanced rendering engine with a powerful Windows graphical user interface accelerator engine, unique motion video acceleration hardware and a high-precision DAC and clock generator - all in a single package.
The chip's 128-bit internal architecture and ultra high performance memory interface give the AT25 a superior performance for a low-cost mainstream Windows accelerator. A hardware scaler with bi-linear filter and full line buffer smoothly scales playback or capture windows from native size up to full screen at full speed.

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