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1997: A year in Review Part I

© Dan Finkelstein

A few weeks ago, this Suite 101 section celebrated its one-year anniversary. I'd just like to take a minute and thank all of the regular visitors to this page, and say that I hope you will continue to visit into the New Year. Because it's been a year, I thought I'd write an article on the year in computer gaming: what happened, and what are my predictions for the future.

I think it would be hard to argue that one new technology emerged in 1997 that will change computer gaming forever. That technology is the emergence of high-performance, low-cost 3D graphics accelerates, and the influx of games to the market that supported them. This surge in 3D graphics can probably be attributed to one company, whose vision a year ago was committed to making high-end graphics cards for professional workstations. However, when it was determined that they could give the same technology to personal computers, 3Dfx knew they had a winner on their hands with the Voodoo chipset. While 3Dfx has an ongoing battle with Microsoft's DirectX API, and games originally only partially supported the chip or supported it poorly, now the tides are turning and developers learning to take full advantage of the power of the Voodoo chip. This will continue into next year, where the gaming industry will get one step closer of their goal of making home games look just as good, graphically, as arcade games.

Intel can be credited with developing, marketing, and releasing their Pentium II processor, the next generation of high-end, relatively low-cost processors for PCs. Once again, Intel has proved to be the dominant leaders in chip development, with a chip that is blindingly fast. If you don't have a Pentium II already, now is the time to upgrade, as next year's games will start to require faster processors.

Microsoft's DirectX evolved to an (almost) functional level in 1997, with the company releasing version 4, and later 5, of the API. Billed to developers as a solution to the problem of accessing individual hardware on the user's computer, DirectX sounded better on paper than it functioned. The war between Direct3D and SGI's GL was a big part of the DirectX package, and, I believe, in 1998 the two companies will team up, with Microsoft integrating GL into DirectX. It may be a year or two, and several more DirectX versions before all software developers embrace the API, but I believe that DirectX has potential. While I would never have said this last year, I really do now believe that the era of DOS games are over. Windows 95 (and hopefully, Windows 98 later this year) is here to stay. If you are still using Windows 3.1, it's time to cave in and upgrade.

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