VideoLogic Group Plc has signed a letter of intent to sell its new PowerVR games technology to a major unnamed games company. The games company will develop a system and games around the technology and commercial systems could be on the market in early 1996. VideoLogic says that the PowerVR three-dimensional games and virtual reality technology will take computer games into the next generation because it will enable games to have picture quality on a par with the graphics of the Jurassic Park movie. The King’s Langley-based company says the technology is also scalable so that it can be used on anything from a handheld game to a high end arcade system. The games and system developer will be able to offer these improved features, which it says are comparable with what you can do on an expensive Silicon Graphics Inc workstation, at a price competitive with current home games systems. Another feature is the ability to create real life shadowing effects, something marketing manager Neil Davison said is not possible in any other games available. Unlimited decision paths are possible because of the way the amount of memory and capacity necessary for each image has been reduced. The player will not have to go through the same set of screens every time he plays the game. The technology VideoLogic has developed consists of a chip set made up of two chips, the object-oriented software and the applications programming interface for the software. VideoLogic has applied to patent the technology, but is keeping the technical details of the system pretty much under its belt. It does say that it is object-based and requires only a fraction of the memory and processing capacity of conventional games systems. Unlike current systems, each object on the screen can be built and then manipulated by the programmer, and can assume any attitude as the game is played. The system eliminates the need for a Z-buffer to store the next frame. Conventional wireframe-based systems require each polygon of each visual object to be processed and every time the object moves every polygon has to be re-drawn, which adds to the processing power required. Under VideoLogic’s framework agreement with NEC Corp, NEC will fabricate the hot new VideoLogic chips and take responsibility for selling them to the games industry (CI No 2,566).
