Chasing Pixels
Keep up to date on graphics chips, controllers and processors, that are changing the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry.
Recent Articles
By Dr. Jon Peddie
1998 was the high point in the PC graphics chip industry, and 47 companies were designing or offering graphics chips for the PC. The Internet bubble crested, and the PC graphics chip market hit 130 million units—more than the shipments of PC. That was because gamers, engineers, and programmers were installing two graphics add-in boards (AIBs) int...
By Jon Peddie
Summary: In early 2018, Nvidia showcased real-time ray tracing using their DGX station supercomputer and the DXR API. The Turing architecture introduced in late 2018 had significant improvements enabling real-time ray-tracing. The RTX AIBs featured fixed-function RT inference cores for ray tracing acceleration. Nvidia also introduced DLSS, leveragi...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
In 1983, NCR formed a team of six to design a graphics controller that could be used in NCR products and sold to other companies. The team designed a two-chip approach: a graphics controller and a memory interface controller tied together by a propriety pixel bus. The team incorporated a frame buffer and text by using a dual-text mode technique, al...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
ATI had been experimenting with the concepts of a unified shader since the mid-2000s. ATI, like Nvidia and Microsoft, knew it was extravagant to have a shader, or even worse, an array of shaders dedicated to one function, and then sit idle when processing that function wasn't called for. Making all shaders the same would not only make manufacturing...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Intel surprised the industry in 2018 when word got out that the company would launch a discrete GPU product line. Intel had tried to enter the discrete graphics chip market before and, with the failure of the infamous i740 in 1999, vowed never again. But it was a socket Intel didn't have, so they gave it another go and launched the Larrabee project...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Once the domain of specialists with high-powered computers, CAE is becoming a workstation application for designers. Earlier this year, Jon Peddie Research conducted a series of interviews with leading CAE software vendors such as Altair, Ansys, Dassault Systèmes, Hexagon, and Siemens Digital Industries Software. JPR also worked with Nvidia to und...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
EVGA was founded in 1998 and entered the PC graphics add-in board (AIB) market in 2000 when it developed the first highly efficient cooler for Nvidia's GeForce MX440, affectionately called the banana because of its color and shape. Over the years, EVGA became the largest AIB supplier of Nvidia GPU-based boards in North America, and the predominant ...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation (MC) have been extensively used for video frame interpolation systems since the turn of the century. However, typical solutions are power-hungry and introduce interpolation errors. Pixelworks, a video alchemist skunkworks in San Jose, California, has been quietly developing a new back-end mobile proces...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Commodore, developer of the popular PET computer (1977), one of the first microcomputers with bitmapped graphics, acquired Amiga Corporation in 1984.
The Commodore Amiga was a low-cost landmark machine when it launched in 1985. It had high color graphics and displayed 4,096 colors simultaneously (using the Amiga Hold-And-Modify (HAM) display mode)...
By Karen Moltenbrey
Did you know there is a Thank God It's Monday Day? It was January 3. Blue Monday? January 17. No Brainer Day? February 27. National Awkward Moments Day? For many of us, that is nearly every day. Officially, it is March 18—which seems fitting as it comes the day after St. Patrick's Day, when the Irish celebrate big, and those who aren't Irish cele...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Imagination Technologies has introduced its latest ray tracing IP, the IMG CXT for its flagship B-series GPU IP. The announcement marked the debut of Imagination's PowerVR Photon ray tracing architecture.
Photon, said Imagination, is the industry's most advanced ray tracing architecture, bringing desktop-quality visuals to mobile and embedded appl...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
The chip that changed the world
Thanks to pioneering work by TI's Jack Kilby (see TechWatch), and Fairchild's Robert Noyce in the mid-1950s, the concept and practice of integrated circuits came to be—the incorporation of multiple transistors in logic gates. in a single device. That led to James Buie at TRW who developed the first TTL IC, and t...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Founded by Jack Hsiao Nan Tseng and John J. Gibbons in Newtown, Pennsylvania, Tseng Labs developed a chipset for graphics AIBs for the IBM PC and compatibles from 1983 to December 1997. The company was best-known for the ET3000, s ET4000, and ET6000 VGA-compatible graphics chips. When Microsoft Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, the Tseng Lab's contro...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Alphamosaic Ltd was a UK semiconductor company founded by Robert Swann and Steve Barlow in 2000 in Cambridge, UK. The company was a spin-out from Cambridge Consultants, and they developed low-power mobile multimedia processors based on their VideoCore architecture.
The VC01 chip centered around a novel 2D DSP architecture for low-power processing ...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Reality Simulation Systems (RSSI) was founded in 1993 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Venture Creations, RPI's incubator in Troy, NY by Mike Lewis. Lewis was a recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His pal and fellow graduate, Stephen (Steve) Morein graduated with him and was the lead designer of the chip. Their goal was to dev...
By Jon Peddie
As the web becomes more visual, images and other rich media have become a major factor in page load time. According to HTTPArchive, in 2020 images made up as much as 50% of average bytes downloaded by web visitors. ...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
The term GPU has been in use since at least the 1980s. Nvidia popularized it in 1999 by marketing the GeForce 256 add-in board (AIB) as the world’s first GPU....
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Founded in early 1993, Nvidia set out to revolutionize the PC and console gaming market with 3D. They succeeded beyond even their wildest dreams, but not without a few bumps and bruises. It just made them smarter and stronger....
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Yamaha was a developer of video display controllers or processors (VDP) in the late 1980s. The company made IBM compatible CGA display controllers such as the YGY603. ...
By Dr. Jon Peddie
Intel has a long history in PC graphics chips and in late 2020 announced a new discrete GPU (dGPU), the Xe Max. The company has taken several runs building a discrete graphics chip to take on the market leader but has had a challenging time. They never seemed to address building a dGPU with the same seriousness and resources as the CPU....
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About the Author
Dr. Jon Peddie is one of the pioneers of the graphics industry and formed Jon Peddie Research (JPR) to provide customer intimate consulting and market forecasting services where he explores the developments in computer graphics technology to advance economic inclusion and improve resource efficiency.
Recently named one of the most influential analysts, Peddie regularly advises investors in the technology sector. He is an advisor to the U.N., several companies in the computer graphics industry, an advisor to the Siggraph Executive Committee, and in 2018 he was accepted as an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Peddie is a senior and lifetime member of IEEE, and a former chair of the IEEE Super Computer Committee, and the former president of The Siggraph Pioneers. In 2015 he was given the Life Time Achievement award from the CAAD society.
Recently named one of the most influential analysts, Peddie regularly advises investors in the technology sector. He is an advisor to the U.N., several companies in the computer graphics industry, an advisor to the Siggraph Executive Committee, and in 2018 he was accepted as an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Peddie is a senior and lifetime member of IEEE, and a former chair of the IEEE Super Computer Committee, and the former president of The Siggraph Pioneers. In 2015 he was given the Life Time Achievement award from the CAAD society.
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