GigaPixel

The GigaPixel Booth

While walking around the Comdex floor in the Sands Convention Center, I stumbled across GigaPixel. In fact, I probably wouldn't have noticed them if they hadn't been displaying Q3test in their booth. (So sue me, it's a natural instinct of mine!) In any case, while I was there they were demonstrating their GP-1 graphics processor against a Voodoo3. Whoever set up their Voodoo3 obviously didn't spend any time testing it, as it was displaying all kinds of visual artifacts that were quite obvious to spot; I'd bet anyone walking by who had never played Q3test thought the game had serious graphics issues!

In any case, let me start by introducing GigaPixel. GigaPixel doesn't build the graphics chips and boards for their products, they simply develop a design and license it out to a manufacturer who is then responsible for building the product and marketing it. To date, I'm not aware of any company that has licensed their previous product, the GP-1, but I was told by one of their representatives (unfortunately I don't remember his name) that they have a few deals lined up with unnamed companies.

GigaPixel's next design, the GP-2 is based on their Giga3D tiling architecture. Gigapixel feels that the memory bandwidth saved with a tiling architecture will allow them to support features such as triple buffering at higher resolutions. In fact, another cool feature their product supports is full scene anti-aliasing. (AA) Gigapixel was demonstrating the difference full scene AA can make in today's games with their Quake3 demonstration. As I mentioned earlier, on display was their GP-1 against a Voodoo3 in Q3test on the q3tourney map. When walking up stairs, the jagged edges displayed by the Voodoo3 were quite noticeable compared to the GP-1 which also supports full scene anti-aliasing.

Unfortunately, the framerate counter was disabled during my demonstration. However, I didn't notice any serious framerate difference between the GP-1 and Voodoo3. Of course, this doesn't mean that the GP-1 was getting equivalent framerates, as I wasn't allowed to touch either system. When I asked for numbers, the GigaPixel representative stated that they were more concerned with visual quality than framerate, so that's their official position for right now. Before I left, I was able to grab the spec sheet for their next product, the GP-2. Here are its notable features:

Fully compatible with Direct3D and OpenGL
Tri-linear mip-mapping
Full scene anti-aliasing (No speed penalty)
32-bit color rendering
Full Triangle setup
Supports triangle strips and fans
On chip Z-buffer
Specular highlights and diffuse shading
Alpha blending
Fog-Vertex and table based
128-bit wide internal bus
732 Mpixel/sec at 183MHz fill-rate
10M polygons/sec
Low gate count
Extremely low memory bandwidth
Direct3D and OpenGL drivers
Supports all memory types
Supports different CPU's (x86 and others)