AMD urged developers to optimize for 3DNow!, their floating point instruction set, and offered updated tools to help developers do so. They also showed off their roadmap, which you can see in our AMD Roadmap here. Intel did pretty much the same thing, offering tools to developers so they can optimize their software. Intel also supplied Pentium 4 test machines on which developers could try their software.

There was also some talk about what DirectX 9 would be. The most interesting feature we heard about is called displacement maps. Bump maps make surfaces on screen look bumpy but if you look at that bumpy surface from the side you will see that it is a flat surface with bumps drawn on. Displacement mapping will make true bumps on a surface. You could have two surfaces, one with a bump map and one with a displacement map, that look very similar dead-on, but if you look at them on their side, the displacement mapped surface will look like it has bumps. Lara Croft could get a 3D mole without robbing any polygon power from other parts of her anatomy.

All we ever needed to know about DirectX 8, we learned at Microsoft's Meltdown 2000. (Except for when it will actually arrive packed inside a game.) A wide variety of new features are coming down the pike. With DirectX 8, Microsoft is catching up with the hardware. The main features of today's hardware, programmable T&L engines, programmable pixel shaders, and programmable multi-sample rendering, are going to be more accessible through hardware, which means we will see more games taking advantage of the technology. We think the future has some beautiful graphics in store for us all.

By
Jon Simon, Editor
and
Benjamin Hirsch, Technical Analyst