This guide is designed to help answer some of the questions you may have about Creative's Graphic Products! This page isn't intended to be a primer on graphics, so the information isn't extremely technical.
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Creative's 3D Blaster is the first affordable, consumer level 3D graphics accelerator for the PC. It accelerates common 2D and 3D functions, increasing your system's performance by leaps and bounds. In fact, adding the 3D Blaster to your 486DX2/66 VL-Bus system gives you more than TWICE the 3D pixel fill rate of a Pentium processor running at 90MHz!
3D games offer much richer, more immersive game play than the traditional "roll and scroll" games, like Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario Bros., found in arcades and consoles. You feel more involved in a game like DOOM or Descent because you are able to play from the character's point of view. Your monitor becomes your eyes to the 3D world developed by the game, and you experience the world in the first person.
Techniques like texture mapping, lighting effects and perspective correction, give the virtual world created by the game a much more realistic look and feel than the cartoon-like backgrounds found in traditional games. Because of this, more and more titles are moving to 3D in order to bring you closer to the action.
With the advent of new 3D programming standards, like Creative's CGL and Microsoft's Direct3D, even more applications will begin to use 3D. You'll be able to browse the World Wide Web in 3D, view your data in three dimensions, and move through new worlds and experience new frontiers. The future of multimedia is 3D, and with Creative's new 3D Blaster, the future is now.
Rendering even a single 3D scene is an extremely complex process, involving a tremendous amount of CPU power. There are two "stages" in the 3D rendering pipeline: the geomtery stage, where the mathematical descriptions of all the objects in the current scene are first projected into the 3D world and then mapped to the 2D screen coordinates; and the rendering stage, where lighting, perspective correction, texture mapping, etc. are applied to the resulting wireframe and the pixels are rendered and displayed on the screen. Every single object in every single frame must be calculated and rendered before it can be display on your monitor. To accomplish this, and maintain a realistic frame rate, is very difficult.
The 3D Blaster offloads the rendering stage of the 3D pipeline from the host CPU, freeing the CPU to handle the game's logic and geometry stage while the custom ASIC on the 3D Blaster handles the rest. By reducing the workload of the CPU and using specially designed hardware to perform the rendering, you're able to get higher resolutions, with more colors, and at a higher frame rate than possible with just the CPU. In fact, adding the 3D Blaster to your 486DX2/66 VL-Bus system gives you more than TWICE the 3D pixel fill rate of a Pentium processor running at 90MHz!
When you want to move to the next generation of PC-based entertainment -- without having to upgrade your entire system -- the fastest, most cost-effective route is Creative's new 3D Blaster.
Because of the tremendous processing power required to create and display 3D graphics, typical PC-based 3D games have been limited to a resolution of just 320x200 pixels and as few as 256 colors. The 3D Blaster, because it offloads the rendering from the host CPU, delivers frame rates as high as 30 frames per second at 640x400 resolution and 65,000 colors!
The increased resolution, color depth and frame rate all contribute to a much more realistic, more immersive experience. With a game like NASCAR Racing, which is one of five titles bundled with the 3D Blaster, you'll be able to run in SVGA mode, with all texture effects turned on, and keep your frame rate above the minimum acceptable level of 15 frames per second -- even on a 486!
Today's game consoles are extrememly limited when compared to the PC. Not only can you play games on your PC, you can run spreadheets, word processors, databases, communicate through email, surf the World Wide Web, and so on. The PC also gives you much more flexibility in selecting input devices to further enhance your experience.
You can connect a steering wheel and gas/brake pedals for Nascar, a yoke and rudder pedals for flight simulators, a joystick, throttle and rudder pedals for combat simulators, or even a mouse for games like Magic Carpet. Other high-performance add-in cards, like Creative's Sound Blaster AWE32, provide even more realism. With the AWE32, you get wavetable and MIDI sound effects, 3D Audio, 16-bit stereo FM sounds and even digital voice synthesis.
And if that weren't enough, you can compete in head-to-head competition with players from anywhere in the world through your modem or network connection. Try doing that with your Play Station or Saturn!
Creative's 3D Blaster is better for a number of reasons:
To take advantage of the special 3D rendering hardware found on a 3D accelerator, the software must know what the card's capabilities are, and how to "talk" to the card. A program can do this by writing directly to the 3D accelerator's hardware registers, or by using a Application Program Interface (or API, for short).
Unfortunately, there isn't a single API that works on all 3D accelerators. Some of the most popular APIs used today are:
CGL is a very thin layer that isolates the APIs and games from the hardware. A game written to run on the VL-Bus 3D Blaster using CGL will be able to run on the upcoming PCI-version, even though the two card use very different 3D chips. CGL is a small, Dynamic Link Library supplied by Creative that the game loads and uses to talk to the 3D Blaster.
There are over 200 game developers currently signed up in our 3D Developer's Program, with more than 50 titles currently in development using CGL.
THere are more than 50 titles being developed that support the 3D Blaster. For the latest list of previews, look in the Entertainment Arcade!
Also, because the 3D Blaster will support Microsoft's new Direct3d API for Windows 95, any 3D application written using Direct3D for Windows 95 will be able to get the full benefit of the 3D Blaster's acceleration.
In order to expand their market, many of the developers of arcade and console games are planning to port their titles to the PC. Our Developer Relations and Developer Support groups are working with them to make sure that as many as possible will support the 3D Blaster. Already, one of the most popular Sony Playstation titles -- Toshinden -- is being ported to the 3D Blaster.
Because Creative is working with virtually all of the major 3D APIs, you can expect to see many of the console/arcade ports supporting the 3D Blaster family.
At the 1995 Games Developers Conference, Microsoft announced their new Games SDK, consisiting of five APIs (collectively known as the DirectX architecture):
The VL-Bus is the first version of the 3D Blaster. The PCI version of the 3D Blaster is expected to ship in the Spring of 1996. Stay tuned to these Web pages for more information as we near the rollout of this exciting product.
The VL-Bus 3D Blaster works in conjunction with your present video card. If you have a high-end 64-bit graphics card, you can continue to use that with Windows and all your VGA-based 2D games, and the 3D Blaster will only take over when a 3D game is launched. There will be no changes to your current setup. On the other hand, if you don't have a graphics accelerator installed, the 3D Blaster has a complete 2D acceleration engine and ships with drivers for Windows 3.1, Windows NT and Windows 95.
The minimum system requirements are:
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