Vendors Resist Microsoft's 3-D Graphics Plan

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July 13, 1998 (11:01 AM EDT)

Vendors Resist Microsoft's 3-D Graphics Plan

At its Meltdown multimedia conference this week, Microsoft will tip plans to push polygon-based PC graphics from high-end simulation systems to low-end consumer gear via its DirectX application program interface (API).

As a first step in that direction, the company will disclose plans to bring DirectX broadly into its consumer-oriented Windows CE environment. The company has already quietly delivered a version of its multimedia interfaces to video-console maker Sega for the upcoming Windows CE-based Dreamcast console.

Bucking the Microsoft company profile master plan in the consumer space, at least two video-game console vendors are breaking ranks to establish a foothold in nonpolygon-based 3-D graphics technologies they say will empower title developers to push game realism to new levels.

"Graphics-chip vendors in Silicon Valley today are all doing the same thing; [they're] obsessed with the polygon race," said Ken Kutaragi, executive vice president and co-chief operating officer at Sony Computer Entertainment, Tokyo, developer of the popular PlayStation console. "Their R&D goals are so near-sighted that they are only paying attention to gradual changes in graphics technologies that can be developed in lockstep with the short-term PC product-development cycle."

Sony Computer Entertainment and start-up VM Labs independently said the graphics technologies used in their next-generation video game platforms will go far beyond the polygon-based 3-D graphics technologies pursued by the PC industry today.

Sony's Kutaragi said a Sony Computer Entertainment engineering team based in Tokyo is working on a whole new generation of real-time image-rendering technologies, from silicon to platform algorithms to software titles, for the next PlayStation. "Today's video game computer graphics look like computer graphics," he said. "Our goal is a film-like graphics quality that won't make viewers conscious of or annoyed [by the fact] that they are indeed looking at computer graphics."

Kutaragi said owning the silicon technology behind the next-generation console will be a key advantage for Sony as it faces off against Sega and other competitors that must use off-the-shelf PC silicon and software.

Though Sony declined to proffer a launch date for the PlayStation 2, the console is widely expected to hit the market sometime in 1999. It will compete with the Sega Dreamcast console, which will use Microsoft's Windows CE with an early version of DirectX APIs customized for the Dreamcast hardware.

At the Meltdown conference in Burlingame, Calif., Microsoft is expected to meet with developers to detail, on a non-disclosure basis, its early plans for putting DirectX on Windows CE for consumer devices. But Microsoft hasn't "announced any plans yet" to that effect, said Kevin Bachus, DirectX product manager at Microsoft.

"The OS we delivered to Sega is a version of CE with DirectX, but it is very tailored for that hardware," Bachus said.

Microsoft has, by contrast, been more forthcoming about its plans to boost the multimedia APIs for versions of Windows 98 and NT that will ship next year.

Among the companies pushing for a new direction in 3-D graphics is start-up VM Labs, Los Altos, Calif., with its Project X video game platform.

"Many top game developers are getting tired of the similar look and feel of today's 3-D video games,"
-- Bill Rehbock
VM Labs

"Many top game developers are getting tired of the similar look and feel of today's 3-D video games," said Bill Rehbock, a VM Labs vice president and a former head of R&D activities at Sony Computer Entertainment. "Those developers are asking how they can get out of the rut."

VM Labs was formed to create a media processor that would allow video-game developers the flexibility to change any aspect of the video-rendering pipeline, said CEO Richard Miller, who was R&D vice president at Atari when that company introduced a now-defunct 64-bit video-game system, called Jaguar, late in 1993.

In May, VM Labs announced its processor as part of its Project X platform, which aims to position DVD players as video-game consoles. The processor lets game developers experiment with a variety of advanced 3-D algorithms, such as Voxel rendering, real-time ray tracing, procedural textures, and parametric modeling, Miller said.

The implementation of new 3-D algorithms could result in a vastly different look and feel among Project X titles. Miller equated the potential difference to that among works of art rendered respectively in oils, watercolors, and pastels.

The prevailing PC APIs and 3-D graphics chips make no provisions for non-polygon-based 3-D graphics. The industry, to date, "has chosen polygon-based rendering, because it's relatively straight forward to accelerate in hardware, and it's easy to express in gates," said Miller.

Voxel rendering, for example, essentially manipulates 3-D textures rather than 2-D textures, and is considered an incremental architectural advancement. But Neil Trevett, vice president of marketing at 3Dlabs, San Jose, Calif., said not even that step is supported by today's hardware.

"The problem with volumetric rendering is that it hugely increases compute time," Trevett said. "Processing a 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 3-D texture can take up to 1,000 times as long as for a 1,024 x 1,024 texture."

Ray tracing, meanwhile, is a non-polygon method that renders a scene by computing each pixel in the scene in turn. The technique is designed to use a fast central processing unit. Again, however, the lack of existing commercial demand has prohibited its penetration of the PC platform thus far.

Trevett said he considers procedural texturing "an interesting technique that could fit quite well into existing hardware." Here, a graphics chip essentially would compute texture values rather than access them from memory, saving bandwidth. But a lack of APIs to drive that functionality has kept the approach from finding support among PC developers.

Image-based rendering gained some recognition among 3-D-hardware vendors when Microsoft proposed its Talisman project a few years ago, and the technique is believed to be exerting influence over the features being proposed for future versions of Direct3D.

But neither the Talisman project itself nor the various graphics-chip start-ups working on such techniques as "chunking" and "tiling" have ventured into the realm of such novel techniques as ray tracing. Rather, their objective has been to optimize memory usage of the traditional polygonal pipeline by reusing some of the rendered pixels.

One roadblock to non-traditional 3-D graphics technologies in the PC has been that the huge, open-PC platform requires maintenance of a uniform set of APIs. Talisman ultimately failed "because even Microsoft found they couldn't change the infrastructure of the entire industry overnight," said Trevett.

On the other hand, both Sony and VM Labs can afford to gamble on new 3-D graphics technologies because their respective platforms are closed. "Generational leaps can happen more quickly with Project X," said Miller of VM Labs.

One generational leap on which Sony is focusing, Kutaragi said, is synthesis of " 'emotion' in characters rendered in real time." To date, animators have been charged the task of imbuing game characters with an admittedly limited emotional range. Sony's "dream is to automate the process and synthesize it in real time on a game platform."

A technique known as motion capture is commonly used to capture and sample a character's motion data. But rendering a range of expression in real time would "take huge computational power," said Kutaragi.

One way to realize such functionality is to develop algorithms that describe a character's behavior, he said. "Once an algorithm [exists] that allows an image of a cat to behave like a cat, for example, real-time image rendering gets a lot easier."

Just how close Sony is to achieving that, however, has not been divulged.

Sony and VM Labs seem to agree on some basic ingredients for a next-generation game platform. For one, the developer must control its own silicon and APIs rather than use DirectX and off-the-shelf chips. It must also offer breakthrough graphics that will entice top game designers to write titles for its platform.

VM Labs' Rehbock said the flexibility allowed by its new media processor has "top game developers jazzed about a new opportunity to get creative and be different."

3Dlabs' Trevett said that console developers have more freedom than PC players to vary techniques, since each console platform is "closed." But "the consoles still rely on authoring tools that run on PCs, and developers need to be able to run tiles on both platforms," he said.

Trevett predicted "infrastructure and performance issues will bring them back to trusty polygons in the end."

-- Additional reporting by Rick Boyd-Merritt.