NVIDIA Extends Technology Leadership with Transform and Lighting Feature for Future Products NVIDIA Unveils Technology Roadmap for PC Market For Immediate Release Transform and lighting are two of the major steps in the 3D graphics pipeline. Due to their mathematically intensive and highly repetitive nature they are ideally suited to dedicate, application-specific hardware like NVIDIA's graphics processors. "The developers and end-users have spoken, they're tired of poor-quality artificial intelligence, blocky characters, limited environments and other unnatural looking scenes," said David Kirk, chief technologist at NVIDIA. "This new graphics capability is the first step towards an interactive Toy Story or Jurassic Park." NVIDIA is the first 3D graphics processor company to embrace integrated transform and lighting, for the mainstream market. In the past, dedicated transform and lighting hardware subsystems have only been available in extremely expensive image generators and engineering workstations. Today's deep-sub-micron semiconductor process technology provides the transistor densities necessary to build these capabilities into a single device that is far less costly and runs significantly faster. "Shiny has invested years into extremely advanced tessellation, deformation and real time volumetric lighting," said David Perry, President and CEO at Shiny Entertainment. "Adding NVIDIA's transform and lighting technology breathes fresh life into our characters, increases their geometric fidelity and yields fun new gameplay ideas." By moving T&L calculations from the CPU to the graphics processor, there are more cycles available for modeling physics, artificial intelligence, character behavior and game play; areas that are severely lacking in modern applications. The benefit is two-fold, a world that both looks and behaves realistically. "Sophisticated artificial intelligence will be one of the key's to interactive gaming in our industry," said Peter Molyneux, CEO at Lionhead Studios. "Working with NVIDIA's new technology, we've been able to advance the graphical and behavioral features in 3D applications beyond what was ever expected and deliver the most realistic gaming experience with our upcoming game Black and White." NVIDIA Processors The NVIDIA Vanta(TM) 3D/2D processor is the first in a family of 3D processors designed for the enterprise PC market. Based on the RIVA TNT2 architecture, the NVIDIA Vanta processor is designed for Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 2000 and the burgeoning market for enterprise visualization applications. By leveraging their graphics technology and massive gate counts, all NVIDIA processors are able to deliver stunningly realistic, high frame rate 3D, along with benchmark winning 2D, VGA and video acceleration in single chip solutions. NVIDIA processors are optimized for both Direct3D(TM) and OpenGL(TM).
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