***QuickNews
Microsoft's Game Sampler 2
Just yesterday, Microsoft announced the shipment of the Games Sampler 2
for Windows 95. With 20 titles from top developers such as Activision,
Blizzard Entertainment, DreamWorks Interactive, Electronic Arts, Inscape,
and Looking Glass Technologies, among others, the Sampler shows the broad
industry support for both the Windows 95 platform and the DirectX
initiative. Overall, an estimated 300 Windows 95-based games titles are
expected to ship for the Christmas season: the day of the DOS-based game
is over.
ATI Ships One Millionth 3D RAGE
On Sept. 30, ATI Technologies announced the shipment of their one
millionth 3D RAGE accelerator chip. Previously, only S3 could make this
claim: they announced on July 18 that their ViRGE 3D chip had reached the
one million mark. Although S3 and ATI currently lead the pack, more than
10 other companies are already competing in the accelerator market, with
more coming on board continuously. Increasing competition from other key
players such as 3Dfx and now Cirrus Logic, as well as ATI's own recent
announcement of their second-generation RAGE II chip (WAVE #609, 9/27),
will quickly heat up the race in the consumer space, reducing both price
and product cycle time.
Correction: 3D Architectural CADD Shoot-Out
This event will take place at the World Trade Center in *Boston*, not NYC
as was reported in WAVE #609. The shoot-out will be on November 25 at
noon. More information can be found at:
members.aol.com/ShootOut3D/event.html.
Intergraph Intense3D Update
On October 10 Intergraph began the sales of its Intense 3D card to the
open market via Intergraph resellers. The card has drivers for Windows NT
3.51, 4.0 and Heidi (3D Studio MAX). An add-on geometry accelerator with
480 MFLOPS of performance is priced at $2400.
GameGen II for NT
MultiGen's GameGen II, the leading 3D authoring tool for entertainment
applications (PC and arcade), and previously only available on the SGI
platform, began shipping for Windows NT on Sept. 30, in yet another move
towards NT as a professional development environment. The NT version is
optimized to create applications for the PC, Macintosh, Nintendo 64 and
Sony Playstation. In addition to 3D modeling, rendering and animation,
GameGen II offers additional features specific to creating interactive
entertainment titles, including LOD model creation, drawing priority and
binary separating planes. Available through MultiGen's distributors and
VARs, GameGen II for Windows NT has an MSRP of $7,500 (SGI version:
$20,000).
www.multigen.com
Alternative to VRML?
OLiVR Corp., a Massachusetts start-up company, announced several weeks
ago that it was developing an authoring environment, client software and
a server platform for enabling real-time online 3D interaction. The
technology offers the same functionality as VRML 2.0, but with the
addition of streaming (unlike VRML worlds which must be downloaded). The
company feels their technology is superior to VRML due to this as well as
its ease-of-use which doesn't require programming skills; but with the
comming onslaught of user-friend VRML world builders from many
established companies, as well as the large amount of industry momentum
behind VRML, it's unlikely that OLiVR will pose a serious threat.
www.olivr.com
Wave Issue 9610 10/11/96 Article 1-01