1997 is a year of transition, and more like a new stage in the evolutionary cycle than a revolution. But the impact of this evolution is no less powerful than a revolution.

The greatest impact on the PC and simming world this year will come from 3d hardware making the transition to the main stream. The second greatest impact will come from a company known as AMD: American Micro Devices. Their product: the K6, an 8.8 million transistor bit of silicon that is rougly equivalent to the Pentium II, complete with Intels' own MMX coding, but at roughly HALF the price.

3d Hardware

Anyone over ten years of age who has Internet access already knows about the advent of 3d hardware. Even though S3 and ATI have dominated the market, the real hardware to date has come from Rendition and 3dfx. Both these chipsets are feature rich, with the nod going to the 3dfx Voodoo chipset, incarnated on such boards as the Orchid Righteous 3d and Diamond Monster 3d. Though initially quite expensive, recently the price has dropped as low as $149 US at Windsoronline.

The advantage of offloading texturing and filtering to the CPU is obvious: what 2d accelerators did for the PC is now being done for 3d. But the chipsets doing the 3d work are far more powerful and sophisticated than the 2d chipsets, and far more revolutionary in their effect. But perhaps the greatest advantage has been almost overlooked until now. Quite simply, these chipsets mean that the upgrade path well trodden by simulation enthusiasts need not be walked quite so often. Instead of spending a thousand dollars to gain 50% more processing power, a user can spend $200 to move to a new accelerator board to gain the same advantage.

Not that the most demanding users will upgrade less often. Habits die hard, and the sex appeal of new hardware will likely remain with us for quite some time.

Until now simulation designers have had to choose between detail and decent frame rates. 1997 is the year of liberation! 3d hardware acceleration will give us terrain detail, object detail, flight models AND frame rates unlike anything seen to date. Until recently, decent frame rates in high end sims seemed like a far off wonderland fantasy in itself. I have had the joy of testing the Graphics Plus patch for TactCom on my Orchid Righteous 3d, and I have seen the future! But TactCom was a port. A sim written natively to the Voodoo chipset will be more impressive still.

Screen shots from iF22 Raptor. Click here for an out the window cockpit shot: 75 K..

Look out the window...

The graphics world has changed forever. Fluidity in flight, especially in a realistically detailed world, is an experience in itself. Knife fights become goose-pimple experiences, and one can almost feel the pressure wave when merging with a mach 1.5 opponent. It is simply awesome. And no more slowdowns when multiple missiles and multiple bandits must be modelled. Ain't life grand!?

Object detail in 1996 hit new highs, and I still love the objects and environments of EF2000 and Janes Longbow. But we haven't seen anything yet! This summer and fall we will see bushes and trees, powerlines and incredible detail in buildings and similar stationary objects. Even better, the dynamism of ground objects will improve, often with their own AI systems coming into action when you enter their environment. All this and more is made possible by the offloading of the CPU, and it will only get better. For further discussion of the impact of 3d hardware on sims, see the March Editorial: Simulation Evolution.

So what will 1997 bring for 3d hardware? Like the six million dollar man, it will be "better, faster, stronger!" ATI's newest offering in the Rage Pro chip, for example, has built in support for Intels coming Accelerated Graphics Port, which means the chip will run at double the bus speed, up to 133 MHz!! Not only that, but the chip has a built in floating point set-up engine and DVD support. HOT!!

Meanwhile, NEC's PowerVR2, used on boards like Videologic's Apocalypse 3Dx, claims fill performance 40% higher than 3dfx Voodoo chipset, though from what I can tell the feature set is not quite as rich. But if the feature set is comparable and the speed 30% greater, for a few dollars more ($179 or so) this may be a viable option to the reigning king, 3dfx. Not that 3dfx will be twiddling their thumbs. Their own 2nd generation chipset, codenamed Banshee, will likely show up this summer.

Intel's AGP

So what about the Accelerated Graphics Port? AGP is a connector specification, a new video standard and a new way of handling graphics on your computer's bus. Its 133MHz speed represents a large increase over the current 33MHz PCI standard. Initially, it will be offered only on computers that use one of the new Intel Pentium II processors. Systems based on processors with AGP support should ship later this year.

Vendors will offer AGP in two configurations: some will use add-in cards and others will socket AGP directly on the motherboard. AGP will improve the performance of virtually all graphics-intensive applications. Intel sources claim improvements could be as great as 30 percent, but graphics board suppliers estimate an increase of about 20 percent. BUT, because the technology is scalable, the more video memory and system memory your new computer has, the better its performance.

In essence, AGP is a physical data-transfer pipe that connects the video controller back to memory. It allows your system to dedicate unused system memory and bandwidth to processing graphics. In other words, with AGP your graphics board can access your main memory for as much room as it needs. Intel says that the AGP bus has up to 10 times the memory bandwidth of the traditional PCI bus. Although AGP operates at a clock speed of only 66MHz, it sustains most of its operations on the two edges of the clock cycles, where it transfers 4 bytes (32 bits) of data at twice that speed, up to 133MHz.

AGP's cost will depend on the type of system you use. If you buy a new 233MHz or 266MHz Klamath-equipped desktop with a motherboard from Intel, AGP will be built in. If you purchase a system with an AGP connector you'll need an appropriate add-in card. Diamond Multimedia predicts that these cards with either 2MB of VRAM will cost less than $250. For more info on AGP, click HERE...

AMD and the PII

But perhaps the biggest news of this year will be neither 3d hardware nor the AGP. AMD is poised like David before Goliath, about to release a processor comparable in power to the PII, complete with Intels own MMX extension, at roughly HALF the cost. And AMD is already committed to supporting the AGP.

This is good news for everyone, but sim fans are going to really benefit. If you have been waiting to upgrade, this will be the time. And if you are getting into military simulations for the first time, especially flight sims, which are by far the most demanding, what a ride you will have!

Whats the big deal? For one thing, we are talking about a price reduction of somewhere around $500 US over a PII system. Some vendors are talking about offering COMPLETE K6 systems by the end of the year for around $1200 US. So read on!

The K6's principal advantage comes from its much lower-cost PC design and assembly. Where the Pentium Pro and its offspring are forcing costly new design changes to existing PC motherboards, the K6 processor is designed to slot into EXISTING Pentium motherboards with a few small modifications.

Though performance to the PII is similar, AMD has chosen a different approach to the design of the K6. The chip uses larger level 1 caches than its competitor, 32KB for data and 32KB for instructions, for a 64KB total. In comparison the P Pro uses twin 8KB caches, and the upcoming Pentium II processor will still have two 16KB caches for a total of only 32KB.

The AMD processor has seven parallel execution units (including the floating-point and MMX units), and it uses the latest branch prediction, speculative execution and out-of-order execution technologies. It also has a unique 8,192-entry branch history table, which combines with return address stack to deliver a branch prediction accuracy of more than 95 percent-the Pentium Pro averages 90 percent branch prediction accuracy.

As a new design, the K6 will not have the heat issues that the Pentium Pro is facing. The 5.5-million transistor P Pro fights power and heat problems that weren't a consideration in the early days of lower clock speeds. The 8.8 million transistor K6 design is free of these problems; it will be a prime candidate for overclocking, and AMD isnt' likely to mind very much!

So, picture this. You can spend around $1000 for a PII CPU, or around $500 for a K6. The PII might run at 266 MHz. The K6 will be released at 233. No problem, clock that baby up to 266, if someone will design a mainboard to do it. You would likely be running your bus at 83MHz, and you could only get away with this with SDRAM.

But I can already picture a K6 system clipping along at this speed, with a Righteous 3d board in the slot, or perhaps the ATI Rage II in an AGP slot. Dynamite! Would you believe Falcon 4.0 at 25 or 30 fps at 1024x768 and 16 bit color? We are THAT close!

As if that weren't enough, Cyrix stands poised to introduce their own version of PPro technology, labelled the M2. (Recently the chip was renamed to 6x86MMX). This chip promises PPro performance for even less than the AMD K6. Watch out, this will be a year for speed!

So kick back with your new 17 or 20" monitor around Christmas time, or if you have a couple extra thousand, check out Forte's coming 640x480 head tracking VR headset, complete with stereoscopic effect.... Rev up the latest F22 sim and lock the door. If you don't hear from me in three weeks, don't send the posse, just pass me another case of Coke....

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Last Updated May 15th, 1997