IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 09/10/2009

Elite Bastards retro: The Evolution of 3D Gaming

While much of our gamingآ talk these days is obsessed with shaders, game engines and pixel processing power, it's easy to forget that that there was once a simpler time before the birth of the 3D graphics card - Those days of yore when you had to work a lot harder and smarter as a developerآ if you wanted to create a playable 3D environment for gamers.

To celebrate those pioneers and innovators that brought 3D to the masses in the infancy of gaming, our retro head honcho Layden has compiled a list of sixteen seminal classics from the pre-3Dfx era, thus charting the birth of the kind of in-game experiences we all take for granted.

This is a landmark title.آ No more 2D "Space Invaders" or "Asteroids", Battlezone offered a full 3D landscape for the player to travel in.آ Taking control of a tank (with authentic forward/reverse levers for each tread), the player must simply destroy enemy vehicles on the landscape.آ The graphics are very simple.آ Green vectors on a black background.آ Strangely, the graphics still look rather neat, probably due to their sleekness (the minimalist approach also leaves much to the imagination, which helps).آ Also important, enemy vehicles explode in a rather satisfying way!آ The gameplay is equally slick - kill or be killed.آ While it is simple, the feeling of being in a tank in a hostile terrain is convincing.آ It was so groundbreaking at the time that the US Military used a customised version for training.

The Evolution of 3D Gaming

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NVIDIA's Ujesh Desai talks DirectX 11

During the mass of coverage surrounding the launch of AMD's Radeon HD 5800 series graphics boards, it wasn't particularly surprising to hear NVIDIA questioning the importance of DirectX 11.آ Since then however, the company have of course announced their own DirectX 11 capable architecture, codenamed Fermi.آ So, have they changed their tune?آ Tweak Town have talked to the company'sآ Vice President of Product Marketing, Ujesh Desai, to see what they have to say.

As I've stated earlier, DX11 is a very good thing. Anything that makes the PC gaming experience better is great.

We believe that innovation is good for gamers and not innovating punishes gamers. We support open standards plus standards that allow NVIDIA to innovate in a timely fashion, the way CUDA and PhysX does. We want great features to come to games as quickly as possible. Via DirectX, OpenCL, Bullet or PhysX, it does not matter; we are still happy. We do not prefer one over the other.

The difference is that PhysX and CUDA are here TODAY. Even if no standard is available, we will continue to innovate for our gaming customers. It is a big differentiator for us. NVIDIA GPUs offer great graphics plus great features such as CUDA, PhysX, 3D Vision and SLI.

You can read this interview in full here.

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