Siggraph at a Glance

I'm going to LA!

At the end of the Bitboys August 2nd Glaze3D press release, they mentioned that they were going to have a Glaze3D presentation at siggraph. It took us a few seconds to decide FiringSquad had to be there. The entire FS staff volunteered me, the only FS writer with no life, to fly down to LA on a Sunday and hang out with a bunch of graphics people to try to find out as much as I could about the Glaze3D.

Bump mapping at work

Siggraph

What exactly is Siggraph? Well, siggraph is an international conference and exhibition on computer graphics. Think of it as E3 without all the games, cool hardware, and booth babes. Okay, it's just a convention for graphics professionals. siggraph's various conferences and exhibitions span several days, but I only stayed for Sunday's Eurographics Workshop. The conference runs from the 8th to the 13th, and the exhibition opens on the 10th and runs until the 12th. If you're in LA and you're interested in attending, check out the siggraph 99 website. Online registration is already closed, but you can still register at the event. It's $50 just to see the exhibition, and expect to pay $200 - $250 (student rate) or $200 - $760 (non-member rate) if you want to attend any conferences.

3dfx

I happened to bump into 3dfx's Gary Tarolli at the graphics workshop. On Monday (today), he's giving a presentation on the T-buffer, entitled "Real-Time Cinematic Effects on the PC: the 3dfx T-Buffer."

I tried to get some information about 3dfx's new upcoming Voodoo4, but I didn't get much. CBS' MarketWatch reported that 3dfx's CEO Greg Ballard said that the Voodoo 4 was "on schedule" for an October release. Tarolli easy dodged every question I threw at him. As far as we know, the card that might or might not have been code named Napalm might or might not have 32-bit color, a geometry engine, or onboard T&L. The only comment I could get out of him was that you can expect the Voodoo3->Voodoo4 performance jump to be similar to the previous jumps from Voodoo1->Voodoo2 and Voodoo2->Voodoo3.