Unveiled in the summer of 2004, SLI (Scaleable Link Interface) is Nvidia's revolutionary approach to 3D graphics scalability which exploits the additional bandwidth and features of the PCI Express bus architecture to allow two graphics … [Read more...]

Fahrenheit was another Microsoft initiative eventually to founder in the rapidly changing, quixotic multimedia graphics technology arena. It emerged out of the battle between Silicon Graphics' and Microsoft's 3D computer graphics APIs in … [Read more...]

Unveiled at Siggraph 1996, Talisman was a Microsoft initiative to improve the quality, performance and integration of audio and video media technologies on the PC. Its eventual aim was a single PCI expansion board which integrated … [Read more...]

The key to the way Direct3D (D3D) allows the game developer to author games independently of PC's hardware is its Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), which has the effect of making the software device independent. The HAL provides an … [Read more...]

Initiated in 1992 by Silicon Graphics as a general CAD and 3D API for Unix-based X-terminals, OpenGL evolved out of SGI's proprietary graphics library, IrisGL. Originally, use of OpenGL was restricted to business applications, such as … [Read more...]

Graphics technology is a particularly fast-developing area of the PC industry, with new chipsets, new revisions of chipsets and even entirely new technologies appearing at an alarming rate. This presents a problem for applications wishing … [Read more...]

The Unified Display Interface Special Interest Group (UDI SIG) was announced in December 2005, with a membership which includes Silicon Image Inc., Intel, Apple Computer, LG, Samsung and NVIDIA. The group finalised its V1.0a specification in July 2006, proposing a digital video … [Read more...]

Announced in May 2006, the new DisplayPort standard was developed by a VESA Task Group comprised of leading companies in the display silicon, connector, computer monitor, TV display, projector, and PC industry segments. Key objectives were to specify an open, licence-free … [Read more...]

HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is the first industry-supported, uncompressed, all-digital audio/video interface. While it carries the same video signal as DVI, the big difference with its predecessor is that instead of using the remaining pins for an … [Read more...]

High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection is effectively a copy protection scheme designed to eliminate the possibility of intercepting digital data midstream between the source to the display. Using hardware on both the graphics adapter card and the monitor, HDCP will encrypt … [Read more...]