Glaze3D from the view of Pyramid3D developer (Score:2, Informative)
by sph on Tuesday August 03, @05:51PM EDT (#46)

Okay, this text is based on the conversation I had last October with a friend
of mine, who happened to be one of the Pyramid3D software developers at VLSI
Solution. I have to emphasize that all opinions are his, and this is heavily
from the P3D point of view, naturally. Unfortunately he is on holiday right
now, and I just have to relay his views here. 

Years ago Bitboys approached VLSI with the promise that they had designed a
3D-engine. When the money was assigned, it was found out that it was actually
only code directly from some game, and had no any real definitions behind it.
The actual P3D development was done by VLSI Solution, who had 20 people working
on it full-time since 1995, for over three years. Bitboys were bought out of
the project around 1997. 

After Bitboys no longer worked with P3D, Glaze3D appeared out of nowhere. [I
remember seeing mostly the same Glaze3D page on Bitboys web site way over a
year ago. Now it only has two new images, and probably some revised specs.] A
lot of Glaze3D's publicity material is actually from P3D demos, including some
of the screenshots on the page. Even if there is something real now, in the
beginning Bitboys were advertising technology that didn't exist with the demo
material from completely another project. 

In short: Glaze3D is most likely an illegal product that will probably never be
released. 

Pyramid3D does exist, and there are beta versions of the actual card. It was
demoed at Assembly '97, IIRC, and in summer 1998 it was nearly completed. But
as we know, TriTech dropped the project and P3D will never hit the shelves.
There may be some P3D-based products, like inexpensive video converters,
though. TriTech was supposed to do the marketing for P3D, but they actually
never did anything else than host a webpage. 

P3D would have had good 2D (300MHz RAMDAC), good 3D (probably not much chance
against today's cards), and both video-in and video-out that support basically
all usual formats (NTSC, PAL, SECAM) and their mutations. [I have seen some
NTSC->PAL conversions done with P3D, very good quality for real-time
conversion.] It was the first card to have ready DirectX6 drivers. Open source
drivers for Linux/FreeBSD were also developed. The target price was $100 with
16MB RAM. And this was early 1998. What a pity. 

Hope this clears some points about the relationship between Pyramid3D and
Glaze3D. 

-sph