| Q: | What is AMD's 3DNow!™ technology?
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| A: | 3DNow! technology significantly enhances floating-point-intensive 3D graphics and multimedia performance for mainstream Microsoft® Windows® compatible personal computers. |
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| Q: | What are the benefits of 3DNow!™ technology?
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| A: | With 3DNow! technology users can implement more powerful hardware and software solutions to enable a richer visual computing experience. Examples include fast frame rates on high-resolution scenes, improved physical modeling of real-world environments, more objects with accurate physical characteristics displayed at lifelike speeds, sharp and more detailed 3D imaging, smooth video playback and near theatre-quality audio. |
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| Q: | Why does the industry need another new x86 CPU instruction set to accelerate 3D graphics? Why not do it all with 3D graphics accelerators?
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| A: | To enable the highest level of 3D multimedia performance, today's PCs require innovative technologies from both the 3D graphics accelerator and the host CPU. Consider the 3D graphics-processing pipeline. It begins with 3D physical modeling and geometry transformations, lighting and clipping, which are floating-point-intensive. It ends with integer-intensive rendering, which is done primarily by 3D graphics accelerator cards.
Today's graphics accelerators are improving so quickly that the CPU cannot always provide data fast enough. The result is a bottleneck; 3D graphics performance is limited by the earlier floating-point-intensive stages of the graphics pipeline. 3DNow! technology relieves the bottleneck by accelerating the floating-point and other calculations that occur early in the pipeline. Ultimately, 3DNow! technology and the 3D graphics accelerators complement one another. |
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| Q: | How are MMX™ and 3DNow! technology different?
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| A: | MMX technology was developed to improve the integer-intensive operations used in 3D rendering at the back end of the graphics pipeline. However, by the time MMX technology reached the market, 3D graphics accelerator performance had outpaced most of what MMX could do. While MMX technology can enhance integer-intensive applications, graphics accelerators provide an optimal performance boost for 3D rendering. 3DNow! technology complements and enhances the performance of these accelerator products by speeding up the floating-point-intensive, front-end stages of the graphics pipeline. |
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| Q: | What applications stand to benefit from 3DNow! technology?
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| A: | In addition to accelerating 3D games, the 3DNow! technology enhances the performance of 3D edutainment software, business productivity software, CAD/CAE viewers, 3D audio processing, speech recognition software, 3D imaging software, soft modems, soft DVD, MPEG2 video playback, and AC-3. |
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