Honorable Mentions

Elsa Incorporates Glint Chip for Accelerated 3-D

The Elsa America Gloria 4 (our best-overall card) comes with a Glint 300SX chip with a big heat sink on the board. The Glint 3-D accelerator, from 3DLabs, implements sophisticated rendering operations in silicon, including Gouraud shading, depth buffering, antialiasing, and texture mapping.

While the first high-volume 3-D market segment was games, Elsa is using the Glint chip to provide Unix workstation CAD/CAM performance on PCs. New applications, such as 3-D World Wide Web browsers a nd multimedia navigators, are expected to increase the need for 3-D hardware acceleration this year.

The Glint accelerator is the first chip to support the Internet 3-D graphics standard called Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which integrates 3-D viewing, navigating, and browsing on the Internet. 3DLabs has tried to cover all its API angles, because the Glint chip also supports all the rendering operations of Silicon Graphics' OpenGL, and drivers are available for Microsoft's new Reality Lab 3D and 3D Studio Max.

---

Of the 18 graphics cards reviewed here, 14 support the DirectDraw API for Windows 95 ( see the figure ). With DirectDraw, graphics applications can write directly to video memory surfaces instead of making calls to the Windows Graphical Device Interface (GDI), thus avoiding the GDI bottleneck. Developers can also build pages in off-screen memory and then instruct the hardware to switch to the prebuilt screen when appropriate. To support DirectDraw, hardware vendors write a device driver that exposes the hardware's function to DirectDraw's hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Softwa re developers then write to the HAL. This way, developers don't need to write special code to support specific graphics accelerators, and they automatically support graphics cards with DirectDraw drivers.

---

DirectDraw API for Windows 95 Support

illustration_link (9 Kbytes)

---

Glint Chip Provides More Than a Glimmer of VRML

photo_link (21 Kbytes)