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ECTS 2000
by Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
COMBATSIM.COM European Bureau Chief

ECTS is a great trade show. It is not as overwhelming as E-3 nor as small as some of the regional shows. It takes two days to cover at minimum. I arrived on Saturday, the setup day, and managed to talk my way in past security (no press are permitted normally on Saturday). I spent about four hours walking the show. The chaos level was astounding. It seemed impossible that everyone would have their booths completed and be ready for the expected crowds of people on Sunday. I was on the look out for any new developers or manufacturers that might have appeared as I walked the show. I was rewarded with the discovery of one of each.

PowerVR Technologies (ST Kyro):

Day 1 started off with David Harold of PowerVR Technologies. This was a great place for me to begin working the show. Hardware is my true love and affliction. My wife laughs everytime she walks into my office and sees the piles of PC cards, motherboards, game controllers, and open installation manuals. PowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies. Imagination is very big in the console industry. In cooperation with their partner, STMicroelectronics, PowerVR is taking some of the wizardry required to build high performance console and arcade systems at very aggressive pricing and bringing it back to PCs.

The Vivid! video board from VideoLogic is one of the first video boards that will use the proprietary video graphics processor technology of a ST KYRO processor to deliver high performance video at entry level cost. The trick is their Tile Based Rendering approach that predetermines what data needs to be drawn in a video scene before it is sent to the video-processing chip. David's description of this technology to me used the term 'deferred rendering'. This simply means that the graphics are not rendered directly as the information on a scene is sent from a game or simulation. The processing is 'deferred' until the entire scene information is in memory. Then the proprietary STMicroelectronics processor determines the parts of the scene that are hidden and do not need to be rendered. The edited scene is sent to the GPU for processing. The memory and GPU processing can be reduced by as much as two thirds according to David. Look for the coming full review.

 

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