The CD Revolution and Graphics By Sandra Prior At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Games were getting too big, and floppies too unreliable. A 35-inch floppy could hold a megabyte and a half, and it wasn't uncommon to get five or six of them for a game. Any one of them could be duff, making picking up a new game as much of a gamble as an investment. And even if they worked when you bought them, you never knew what might happen when you came back to it later.

CDs were a game-changer; literally. As well as giving developers more space than they could ever hope to fill - cough cough - they were seen as expensive enough to be pirate-proof; to the extent that the CD version of games would frequently remove the copy protection that forced floppy disk players to keep searching for keywords in manuals and other such tedious honesty checks.

The main push, however, came from games' sudden obsession with production values. Freed of space constraints, and desperate to be Hollywood producers, orchestral audio, fully-spoken text, and those dreaded words Full Motion Video raced into the industry, and things haven't been the same since. Interactive movies harnessed blue-screens and cheap actors to create some of the worst pieces of cinematic slurry in history.

Gameplay became a dirty word, with action turning almost entirely into multiple choice situations where two of the three options meant instant death, or bizarre 'My First Funbook' level puzzles, all wrapped in a desperate urge to be a horror epic (The 7th Guest) or Star Wars (Wing Commanders and 4), or simply gather souls for Satan (Plumbers Don't Wear Ties). The number of genuinely good interactive movies can be counted on the fingers of two insulting hand gestures. Gabriel Knight 2,The Pandora Directive and Spycroft. That is all.

Thankfully, developers quickly learned their lessons. Hollywood style is all very well, and speech and dynamic, balls-out action sequences, instead of simple text screens and blooping sprites have been with us ever since. The main reason was simple. We got something better than FMV. We got 3D, which could not only show you the cool stuff, but let you be an active participant in it.

Battle between 3DFX and PowerVR

In the mid 1990s, two graphics companies were locked in a bitter war: 3DFX and PowerVR. Both made 3D graphics accelerators, but only one could be the winner, since every game had to be specially coded for one or the other system. Both of the companies had high-profile supporters. PowerVR was the chip behind the Sega Dreamcast, at the time, still a hefty contender, while 3DFX had, well, increasingly everyone else. 3DFX's killer applications included the first Tomb Raider game and Quake, id's next big first person shooter game after Doom finally ran out of steam.

3D graphics took the pressure off the CPU, letting developers do far more with game worlds. To begin with, their presence wasn't guaranteed, so they were put to work adding an extra level of polish. Textures became clearer. Computers could handle higher resolutions, in turn helping the graphics to be sharper. Almost every game developed a chronic case of lens flare, with most overdosing on enough colored lighting to give the world's tackiest disco a headache. It was years before 3D cards became mandatory, with even technology showpieces like the original Unreal grudgingly allowing players without a card to take part - albeit in the increasingly foul ghetto of software model where even the most powerful PCs would choke on the number of calculations needed to produce 3D graphics and keep them moving at arcade speeds.

Like soundcards, almost every motherboard now comes with basic 3D support built-in. The difference is that unlike the audio side, you're not going to get decent performance out of it. Dedicated cards are still required, and as motherboard technology has advanced, they've taken a much more central role. The original 3DFX cards went into the PCI slot - in short, accessories. They moved up to the dedicated AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot in the late 1990s, giving them much more bandwidth to play with, and a dedicated route to the player. Current cards use the PCI Express slot, which offers better performance still.

The original 3D graphics cards couldn't handle 2D at all, relying on a whole separate card for those programs. Now, they can do everything. The next obvious addition is physics, which remains in much the same position as 3D graphics were back at the launch of Tomb Raider. Without a solid userbase, game developers can't risk building their latest titles with a built-in demand for full physics support. Without being able to make them a core part of the game, they're restricted to simple aesthetic effects.

But that's simply the next step in the PC's story, and one that's nowhere near over yet. Looking back at that original 8086 PC, with its simple green text and blinking text inputs, nobody could have predicted the three decades that would take it from new kid on the block, to plucky contender, to absolute master of the home desktop world, and now, the most important platform in the world.

Even if consoles win a few minor victories; get a few temporary success stories the personal computer will still be there, not only as a powerful system in its own right, but the birthplace of any new game and genre you care to mention. It's on PCs that those games are coded. It's on PC that the developers inevitably return to once the sheen has worn off the next big thing.

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