Yamaha announces support for Direct3D.SAN JOSE San Jose, city, United StatesSan Jose (sănəzā`, săn hōzā`), city (1990 pop. 782,248), seat of Santa Clara co., W central Calif.; founded 1777, inc. 1850. , Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 1996--Yamaha today announced support for Microsoft's Direct3D(TM) API and availability of Direct 3D drivers for the RPA RPA Remote Patron Authentication RPA Rural Payments Agency (UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) RPA Replication Protein A RPA RNAse Protection Assay RPA Regional Plan Association RPA Random-Phase Approximation (TM) family of 3D graphics accelerators. Yamaha will make Direct3D drivers available to their OEMs, Content Developers and selected beta test A test of new or revised hardware or software that is performed by users at their facilities under normal operating conditions. Beta testing follows alpha testing. Vendors of packaged software often offer their customers the opportunity of beta testing new releases or versions, and the sites effective immediately. Yamaha's drivers will take full advantage of the RPA hardware enabling games, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) A 3D graphics language used on the Web. After downloading a VRML page, its contents can be viewed, rotated and manipulated. Simulated rooms can be "walked into." The VRML viewer is launched from within the Web browser. , and other 3D applications to deliver high-performance 3D graphics to mainstream PCs. Based on a polygonal architecture, the RPA family fits well into the Direct3D framework. The RPA2 is the first of the RPA family to support Direct3D, while future generations will take advantage of backward compatibility See backward compatible. (jargon) backward compatibility - Able to share data or commands with older versions of itself, or sometimes other older systems, particularly systems it intends to supplant. with the RPA2 as well as specific driver updates. "Our continued commitment to higher performance successors to the RPA2 will lay the framework for more and more sophisticated 3D applications," stated Robert Starr, general manager of sales and marketing for Yamaha Systems Technology Inc. The goal of the RPA family is to provide high-quality, real-time 3D graphics without compromising the responsiveness of the application. Direct3D complements this goal by providing a path from the application to the RPA's hardware. The RPA hardware is able to draw triangles up to 10X faster than software, thus freeing the CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. to be more responsive to the application itself. The RPA has many features that lend themselves to the Direct3D model. The integrated triangle setup In 3D graphics rendering, computing the rate of change of RGB color values between the points of each triangle (vertices) so that the triangles can be filled with color properly in the rasterization stage. In the 3D world, each object is represented as a collection of triangles. unit in the RPA frees the CPU from the task of triangle setup, which engineering estimates indicate consume over 30% of a CPU's time. The texture mapping unit Texture mapping units (also known as graphical pipelines) is a component in a video card. A TMU rotates and resizes a bitmap to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D object -- a "texture". draws to the screen at over 10 million textured pixels per second. With a highly pipelined triangle engine, the RPA2 can draw simple shaded triangles at over 300k per second. "The Yamaha RPA2 is an ideal complement to Microsoft's Direct3D technology," said Brad Chase, general manager, Internet platform and tools division, Microsoft Corp. "We are pleased that Yamaha has consistently developed their RPA products to be fully compatible with DirectX(TM)," he concluded. "We have tested our first Direct3D drivers and are excited by their initial performance," stated Giri GIRI Guide d'Initiation à la Recherche dans l'Internet (French: Guide of Essential Internet Research) GIRI Gray Iron Research Institute (Columbus, Ohio; now Iron Casting Research Institute) Venkat, graphics product marketing manager for Yamaha. "Users who have purchased RPA-based boards will be able to take advantage of our drivers at the earliest possible time." Game developers interested in joining the RPA Direct3D Beta Program can contact Yamaha directly. Yamaha Systems Technology Inc. was founded to manufacture and market integrated circuits, board level products and complete systems to OEMs and distributors. The product line includes custom and semicustom ASICs, standard circuits for graphics, communications and audio applications, and CD Recorder products. -0- Note to Editors: RPA is a trademark of Yamaha Systems Technology Inc. Direct3D and DirectX are trademarks of Microsoft Corp. CONTACT: Yamaha Systems Technology Inc., San Jose Giri Venkat, 408/467-2300 gvenkat@yamaha.com or The Lekas Group Sandra Park, 415/948-8907 sandrapark@aol.com |
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