GamePC Consortium
Encyclopedia
The GamePC Consortium was an ad-hoc PC industry standards organization in the mid-1990s. It was founded through the joint efforts of ATI
's Ken Nicholson
and Diamond Multimedia
's Glenn Coffman. The two competing companies shared a common interest in the evolution of PC games and agreed that the PC graphics industry was limited by a lack of standards. At that time, the vast majority of games for PCs were written for MSDOS and had no standardized way to access expanded memory, accelerated graphics or digital audio capabilities.
Based on the notion of "a rising tide lifts all boats" the two companies established the GamePC Consortium as a way for PC hardware manufacturers and PC game software publishers to combine their efforts to establish game API standards that would enable PCs to compete with successful console game systems such as the Sega Genesis.
The GamePC Consortium's member companies included 80 of the leading entertainment hardware and software PC companies of the time, including Intel, nVidia, Rendition, Sigma Designs, ATI, Diamond Multimedia, S3 Graphics
, Trident, Cirrus Logic, Rendermorphics and Lucas Arts. Microsoft, most notably, refused to recognize the GamePC Consortium though Alex St. John
, Microsoft's first game evangelist, spoke at several of the meetings.
One of the consortium's early efforts resulted in establishing a 2D graphics 'manifesto' that called for the creation of a Windows graphics API that offered the following new capabilities:
The consortium expressed its intent to create such an industry standard API for Windows if Microsoft did not. Microsoft embraced all of the proposed features of the manifesto and added considerably more with the first release of DirectDraw in DirectX
1.0.
The GamePC Consortium was significant in being one of the early examples of an industry consortium influencing the development of a standard API in the otherwise proprietary Windows operating system. It was also significant in prompting the game industry's rapid adoption of the nascent DirectX standard.
The GamePC Consortium disbanded when it became clear that Microsoft had begun to undertake the architectural, technical and marketing responsibilities necessary to further Windows game standards. In 2008, a similar organization called the PC Gaming Alliance
was formed.
ATI Technologies
ATI Technologies Inc. was a semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, Canada, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985 as Array Technologies Inc., the company was listed publicly in 1993 and was acquired by Advanced Micro...
's Ken Nicholson
Ken Nicholson
-Career:Nicholson is a video game developer and Windows graphics pioneer. He was the founder of GamePC Consortium and inventor of the technology used by Microsoft as the basis for Windows' DirectX graphics....
and Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia is a company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackStar, a PC add-on card which emulated Apple II computers...
's Glenn Coffman. The two competing companies shared a common interest in the evolution of PC games and agreed that the PC graphics industry was limited by a lack of standards. At that time, the vast majority of games for PCs were written for MSDOS and had no standardized way to access expanded memory, accelerated graphics or digital audio capabilities.
Based on the notion of "a rising tide lifts all boats" the two companies established the GamePC Consortium as a way for PC hardware manufacturers and PC game software publishers to combine their efforts to establish game API standards that would enable PCs to compete with successful console game systems such as the Sega Genesis.
The GamePC Consortium's member companies included 80 of the leading entertainment hardware and software PC companies of the time, including Intel, nVidia, Rendition, Sigma Designs, ATI, Diamond Multimedia, S3 Graphics
S3 Graphics
S3 Graphics, Ltd is an American company specializing in graphics chipsets. Although they do not have the large market share that they once had, they still produce graphics accelerators for home computers under the "S3 Chrome" brand name.-History:...
, Trident, Cirrus Logic, Rendermorphics and Lucas Arts. Microsoft, most notably, refused to recognize the GamePC Consortium though Alex St. John
Alex St. John
Alex St. John, along with Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, created the original Microsoft DirectX specification. Alex became a Windows game technology evangelist for DirectX through magazine articles and interviews on the newly created web....
, Microsoft's first game evangelist, spoke at several of the meetings.
One of the consortium's early efforts resulted in establishing a 2D graphics 'manifesto' that called for the creation of a Windows graphics API that offered the following new capabilities:
- The ability for games to change the display mode ot any supported display resolutionDisplay resolutionThe display resolution of a digital television or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by all different factors in cathode ray tube , flat panel or projection...
or color-depth without requiring a system reboot. - The ability for games to read and write graphics memory, including the framebufferFramebufferA framebuffer is a video output device that drives a video display from a memory buffer containing a complete frame of data.The information in the memory buffer typically consists of color values for every pixel on the screen...
. This allowed the CPU to draw directly onto the screen, hence the origin of the name "DirectDrawDirectDrawDirectDraw is part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to render graphics in applications where top performance is important. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration if...
." Direct access to screen memory was not possible under the Windows GDI architecture. - The ability for games to allocate offscreen memory and to store graphics data in offscreen memory.
- The ability for games to make use of the blitterBlitterIn a computer system, a blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, that is dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within that computer's memory...
- The abliity for games to utilize page flipping
- Support for transparent blts as a technique for implementing 2D Sprite (computer graphics)Sprite (computer graphics)In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene...
The consortium expressed its intent to create such an industry standard API for Windows if Microsoft did not. Microsoft embraced all of the proposed features of the manifesto and added considerably more with the first release of DirectDraw in DirectX
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
1.0.
The GamePC Consortium was significant in being one of the early examples of an industry consortium influencing the development of a standard API in the otherwise proprietary Windows operating system. It was also significant in prompting the game industry's rapid adoption of the nascent DirectX standard.
The GamePC Consortium disbanded when it became clear that Microsoft had begun to undertake the architectural, technical and marketing responsibilities necessary to further Windows game standards. In 2008, a similar organization called the PC Gaming Alliance
PC Gaming Alliance
The PC Gaming Alliance is a non-profit organization of hardware manufacturers, game developers, game publishers and others, with the goal of promoting and advancing the PC as a gaming platform....
was formed.