ATI and 3Dlabs team up with shaders in mind

BACK AT THE Game Developers Conference Europe, in late August 2002 ATI held its now infamous Mojo Day where we saw a rather progressive and interesting tool called RenderMonkey.

I spoke with many developers about this since they'll be the ones likely to use it.

Their opinion was that RenderMonkey is a nice tool that is a method for an artist to interact in development and contribute to shaders.

As always, the bad side of it was that it was ATI hardware optimised but this might just change now. Out of the clear blue sky, 3Dlabs -- part of the well known king of retail Creative Labs - has decided to join this initiative.

ATI will continue to evolve the core of RenderMonkey while both companies will be able to make its own plug-in for Microsoft HLSL or OpenGL 2.0. RenderMonkey is free of charge of course.

We assume that at CeBIT, 3Dlabs will introduce its DirectX 9 hardware and this story will then make much more sense.

How 3Dlabs even arrived at this idea is a real question that we're pondering in our brain as we prepare to brave the hot halls and cold air of CeBIT 2003. µ