If you want the texture maps on the ground and sky that show clouds and other terrain features with shading and better contrast you are going to have to buy a 3D accelerator board.
Stealth 3D 2000 is the only board that has MIP mapping, bilinear and trilinear filtering, alpha blend, sub-pixel accuracy, hardware lighting, gouraud shading, and hardware Z-buffer. Does not seem to offer some features, such as geometry setup, hard ware anti-aliasing, chromakey, and support for stereoscopic displays, that others, specifically the Creative PCI 3D Blaster does.
Direct3d will route the 3D graphics through the central processing unit. Be careful buying one of these because Direct3D from Microsoft may make these boards obsolete overnight, if they can only get the technology off the drawing board and into the machines. For now you have to buy the technology on the video board.
The board is not just for games since the higher color depth modes will not help games much but will be useful for desktop publishing.
Resolution maximums are 1152x864 in 64 thousand colors, 1280x1024 pixels with 256 colors, and 1152x864 pixels with 16.7 million colors.
Installation is true plug-and-play. Just insert the card in any open PCI slot, turn the machine on and wait for it to recognize the card, put the CD ROM in the drive and load the drivers.
The price of the Stealth 3D 2000 is $199. Customers may call our hotline, 1-800-4-MULTIMEDIA (1-800-468-5846) or directly to 408-325-7000.
Diamond also markets the Diamond EDGE 3D starting at $99, incorporating 2D, 3D, digital video, and hardware wavetable audio, bundled with Sega PC titles and a game pad.
The Monster 3D, which will be available in October, is a 3D-only pass-through card, that provides top-of-the-line 3D. It is based on the 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo graphics accelerator. We will sell that for between $249 and $279.
Review:
Loyd Case and Dave Salvator, Gaming in the Next Dimension, Computer
Gaming World, number 144, July, 1996, pg. 55-68.
Steve Wartofsky, The war for the desktop 3D begins, Computer Games
Strategy Plus, number 70, September , 1996, pg. 13.
Copyright 1990 Alfred Giovetti
Stealth 3D 2000