Apple and Graphics chipmaker, Nvidia received honors in Game Developer Magazine’s Front Line award for the Titanium PowerBook and GeForce3 3D graphics architecture, respectively. Both were named in the Hardware of the Year category.
The magazine annually singles out select hardware and software companies for providing a breakthrough product that streamlines the game development process and awards them the Front Line award. Front Line Award winners are determined by a panel of game developers specializing in the fields relevant to each category. Products are nominated in the various categories by Game Developer’s editors, judges and readers, from which finalists are selected and evaluated based on criteria such as utility, value and innovation.
The Titanium PowerBook has been a consistent seller and award winner for Apple. In October, the company overhauled the PowerBook line with faster processors, larger hard drives and more. The new professional laptop line offers a significant performance boost with new PowerPC G4 processors up to 667MHz, a new system bus running up to 133MHz and built-in Gigabit Ethernet networking — the first time ever in a portable.
The GeForce3 chip, which came first to the Mac via an add-on board for the high-end desktop Power Mac systems, is also used as the graphics engine for Microsoft’s new Xbox gaming system. The new graphics chip from Nvidia sports the nfiniteFX engine, which provides programmers with the ability to program realistic, stylized special effects in their games and 3D applications using Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders.
“The Nvidia Shader Technology featured in the GeForce architecture takes image quality to new heights and will be in the hands of over 10 million users by the end of the year,” Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing for Nvidia said in accepting the award. “This award recognizes the wide adoption of Nvidia Shader Technology by the real experts in photo-realistic real-time rendering; the game developers.”
Another winner in the Front Line Awards was Alias|Wavefront’s Maya, which recently came to Mac OS X. Maya is the powerful 3D animation software. It won a spot in the Front Line Award’s art category.