GDC 99


		by Guido Henkel

	Many people ask me why we regularly cover the “Computer Game Developers Conference”, a show that gets hardly any attention form other publications and doesn’t seem to be immediately interesting for

the DVD community. The reason is quite simple. Game Developers drive technology. No one else in the entire computer business drives hardware developments and sales more than the “Quakes”, “Tomb Raiders”, “Wing Commanders” and other games of this world. OpenGL has been around for years but only when 3D games started to use OpenGL as their latest buzzword, this graphics API became a household name that every computer system needed to support. Where better to look what’s on the horizon for DVD than in the heart of this community? They don’t develop for DVD Video necessarily but they have some interesting developments and ideas that can easily affect DVD Video just as well.

Unlike last year, there was not much buzz surrounding DVD this year. It is here, it is on everyone’s mind and although hardly any games are being developed for the DVD format only, everyone is aware of the fact that it’s only a matter of time. Most of the developments we saw last year during this show are out in stores for sale these days and progress is made in little steps that help differentiate individual products.


	Nevertheless there were a few interesting things to be found, like VM Labs’ “Noun”, which was formerly known as the infamous Project X. “Nuon” is a technology that enables devices, such as DVD players or digital satellite dishes to become powerful gaming

consoles or multimedia centers with Internet connection. The heart of “Nuon” is a specially designed processor that is according to VM Labs - about 10 times as powerful as current gaming consoles. VM Labs have no intention to dig into Sony’s or Nintendo’s market however, targeting the casual gamers. People who would just like to do something different every once in a while, and the best way to think of “Nuon” is probably as a DVD player with gaming capabilities.


	VM Labs plans to roll out the first DVD players this fall, backed by six titles. Plans are to have another 20 to 25 titles on the shelves by the end of the year. Of course the Game Developers Conference is the perfect platform for VM Labs to showcase their technology as they are actively trying to court game developers and publishers alike to create content for their fledgling



	Yes, that is “Titanic” running on this monitor - from DVD

	technology. According to VM Labs’ Greg LaBrec currently 100 developers are currently evaluating “Nuon”, but he was unwilling to name and companies. Inside sources however told me that publishers like Activision, Psygnosis and Fox Interactive are some of the companies in possession of “Nuon” development kits.

	“Zoran” were at the show as well, showing their latest version of “SoftDVD”, a completely software based MPEG-2 decoder that has been around for a while already. The company was showing an amazingly clean and crisp “Titanic” trailer on DVD and I am ever so impressed how much better software decoded MPEG looks on PCs compared to the currently available hardware decoders. Mind you, I haven’t had the chance to see too many hardware decoders lately however and I am still stuck with the impression the Creative Labs Dxr2 gave me. The folks from “Zoran” told me that they are currently working on a new revision of their decoding code and the next version of “SoftDVD” should look even better than what is currently available.


	Speaking of Creative Labs. Of course I had to visit my friends there to see what they are up to these days. Very happy with the sales of their DVD-ROM kits, the company is currently preparing the roll-out of a new version of the DVD-RAM. Unlike the current version, the new one will get rid of the caddy. This way their DVD-RAM recorded media can be read in any ordinary DVD-ROM drive. Now that’s really cool because one of the things that distracted me the most about DVD-RAM so far was the inflexibility. With Creative Labs taking this step, I am sure DVD-RAM will find a much wider acceptance. We should see these new DVD-RAM kits hit the streets in the next few months.

	The biggest showstopper of this year’s Game Developers Conference was of course the Playstation II, also known as the PSX2. Unveiled for the first time in the US by Sony President Phil Harrison himself early Thursday morning, we had the chance to actually take a look at this wonder of technology first-handedly. Before we go any further, I want to assure you that everything

you heard about the Playstation II so far is true! This next generation gaming console is the most sophisticated piece of computer technology I have seen - and it features a DVD drive. Although Sony had only a prototype of the machine there for the demonstration, the real-time generated demos they were showing were truly breathtaking. Before I give you my personal impressions, let’s crunch some numbers and get into some of the machine’s amazing technical details.

At the heart of the PSX2 sits a 128bit RISC CPU clocked at 300 MHz with a bus that is capable of handling 3.2 GB/sec. The machine will contain 32 MB of RAM, sitting on a dedicated RAM bus that runs at 800 MHz. If these numbers strike you fantastic, believe me, they are absolutely out of this world. The machine will also contain a graphic synthesizer and a dynamic sound processor. To achieve the superior 3D capabilities of the console, Sony is supporting the CPU with a floating point unit, capable of doing 6.2 GFlops, and 2 separate vector units that can do geometry calculations at 66 million polygons/sec. To round it all up, the console will also be able to do MPEG-2 decoding single-handedly.

One of the machine’s most sophisticated elements is the graphic synthesizer running at 150 MHz. It has 4MB of on-chip RAM and sits on a 48 GB/sec bus. It is utilizing 64 bit pixels, which are made up of a 24 bit RGB value, an 8 bit alpha channel and a 32 bit Z-buffer information. The graphic synthesizer will be able to display and deal with anything you can imagine from polygons, meshes, quadsprites, regular bitmap objects... anything. Even with all the features like lighting, bump mapping, volumetric lights, etc. turned on, the machine will still be able to crank out 25 million polygons per second.

Quite frankly, the Playstation 2 is the most sophisticated gaming machine the world has ever seen, and seeing it perform during Harrison’s presentation was almost frightening. Just to put the numbers above into some context, according to Sony the Playstation 2 is more powerful in its 3D department than any Silicon Graphics workstation currently is. Imagine taking a full Softimage scene and displaying it in real-time with all detail, and you start to understand what kind of a powerhouse the Playstation 2 is. The machine will even contain software based NURBS capabilities. Why software instead of hardware, you ask? Because the machine is so powerful it doesn’t need hardware to do it. The coprocessors can take care of that on the side! With the PSX2 you get to the point that the software can hardly out-stress the hardware any more. With only 32 MB of memory, it’s obvious that the 3D geometry you want to display quickly hits the memory limits, long before the hardware can show any signs of slow-downs. It will be interesting to see how Sony intents to address this problem. Whether they will increase the machine’s memory, whether the geometry is shared with the coprocessors’



	Flat widescreen displays wherever you look

memory or whether the machine will be so powerful to actually stream geometry from disc in real-time remains to be seen, but no matter what, the Playstation 2 will change the way games look.

Since the machine will feature a DVD drive, the question is inevitable. Will you be able to use the Playstation as a DVD Video player? Especially if the machine will retail around the $200-$250 mark as it is rumored, it would beat every stand-alone DVD player in its tracks. Well, while this may seem interesting, the answer is no, not really. First of all, Sony has no plans currently to add DVD Video capabilities to the machine at this point. However, with the power of the machine it would be easy enough to write



	The latest... Dolby Digital 5.1 sound from a PC soundboard

a software application that does the job. More importantly for real video fans however, you will not get the convenience out of this machine that you are getting from a stand-alone DVD player. There’s no remote control, who knows what happens to 5.1 channel Dolby Digital soundtracks, no one knows what video outputs the machine will have, and so on. By the time the machine hits the shelves, which will be around the Christmas season of 2000 here in the US, DVD players have presumable come down in price just as much, that there won’t be a real competition between the two. One thing it will do for sure however, it will drive prices for DVD drives and DVD replication down to new lows, when this machine and the software start shipping in the gazillions.

That’s about it for this year. There have been more developments, but most of them mostly to further the current state of the industry. More video boards with MPEG-2 decoding will hit the shelves and finally soundboards will also start to make use of the Dolby Digital format.


	As a side note before I go, you might also be pleased to hear that none of the DVD-ROM manufacturers I talked to harbors any plans to support the "Divx enhanced" DVD format for their drives or decoders.


		March 30, 1998


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