3Dlabs Gives DirectX 7 Geometry Acceleration Its First Public Demo

3Dlabs has run the first public demonstration of hardware geometry and lighting acceleration under Microsoft’s newly enhanced DirectX 7 API. The demo ran on the company’s Oxygen GVX1, an AGP card that handles both geometry and rasterization acceleration on a single board, and featured a highly detailed flight simulator written by game developer Simis. The claim: applications heavy on geometry run up to three times faster thanks to the added polygon throughput.

The trick is moving the transformation and lighting math, floating-point work that normally hammers the CPU, onto dedicated hardware on the graphics board. That pushes more polygons than even the fastest processor can manage on its own, and it frees the CPU for the rest of the application. 3Dlabs has shipped OpenGL geometry acceleration on its Oxygen workstation boards for over a year, but DirectX 7 is the first version of Microsoft’s 3D API that lets games and consumer software get at it. Once this reaches cards gamers actually buy, scene complexity is going to jump in a way you will see on screen.