Video Hardware - Upgrading and Repairing PCs - page 798

A more processor-intensive (and much more effective) type of fill is called texture map-
ping . The 3D application includes patterns—or textures—in the form of small bitmaps
that it tiles onto the shapes in the image, just as you can tile a small bitmap to form the
wallpaper for your Windows desktop. The primary difference is that the 3D application
canmodifytheappearanceofeachtilebyapplyingperspectiveandshadingtoachieve3D
effects. When lighting effects that simulate fog, glare, directional shadows, and others are
added, the 3D animation comes close indeed to matching reality.
Untilthelate1990s,3Dapplicationshadtorelyonsupportfromsoftwareroutinestocon-
vert these abstractions into live images. This placed a heavy burden on the system pro-
cessor in the PC, which has a significant impact on the performance not only of the visual
display, but also of any other applications the computer might be running. Starting in the
period from 1996 to 1997, chipsets on most video adapters began to take on many of the
tasks involved in rendering 3D images, greatly lessening the load on the system processor
and boosting overall system performance.
There have been roughly 11 generations of 3D graphics hardware on PCs, a process that
has lasted more than a decade, as detailed in Table 12.16 .
Table 12.16 Brief History of 3D Acceleration
With virtually every recent graphics card on the market featuring DirectX 10 or greater
capabilities, you don't need to spend a fortune to achieve a reasonable level of 3D graph-