The Pixel Revolution
August 27th, 2009
More than a decade ago, old-school game coders urged their peers to reject the one true way of a fixed graphics pipeline, as embodied by the combination of Microsoft’s emerging DirectX API and the first wave of bolt-on PC graphical processing units (GPUs). The old school lost, which was initially good news for gamers. The semi-standardisation of the graphics pipeline underwrote a leap forward in the visual quality of first PC games and then consoles, from Xbox to PlayStation 3.