Real3D

» see real3d.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Real3D was the company Lockheed Martin set up in January 1995 to sell military simulator graphics to civilians. Its engineers came mostly from GE Aerospace, a group whose first system was the visual docking simulator for Project Apollo, which Wikipedia calls the first full-color 3D computer generated image system. In the 1980s the same people built the texture-mapped graphics of the M1 tank simulator.

The route to Lockheed ran through two sales. Jack Welch took over General Electric in 1981 and demanded that every division be first or second in its industry, and GE Aerospace went to Martin Marietta in 1992. Martin Marietta then merged with Lockheed, a deal completed in 1995. The new defense giant decided that its simulation group should find customers outside the Pentagon.

It already had one. Sega's Model 2 arcade board used the group's texture mapping, and the Model 3 of 1996 ran on a Real3D design called the Pro-1000. Wikipedia counts over 200,000 Model 2 and Model 3 systems with its hardware inside, which covers the cabinets for Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter 3.

Those cabinets stood in arcades in Turkey as they did everywhere in the 1990s. Nobody feeding coins into a Sega racing machine was told that the picture came from a defense contractor in Florida.

~ the case file ~

~ auburn ~

The PC project was codenamed Auburn. Real3D designed it with Intel and Chips and Technologies, and Intel released it in February 1998 as the Intel740. Intel wanted a showcase for its new Accelerated Graphics Port, so the card kept its textures in system memory and pulled them across the AGP bus, one of several design decisions that Wikipedia says hampered the product. I was about fourteen that year and newly online over a dial-up modem. The i740 was the budget AGP card of that moment, bought on price. Wikipedia gives it less than a year on the market before the remaining stock was sold off under the StarFighter and Lightspeed names, and Custom PC magazine has Intel discontinuing it by the summer of 1999.

~ fourteen days in october ~

By 1999 both partnerships were ending and Lockheed Martin was turning back to its military business. Real3D closed on 1 October 1999. On 14 October Intel bought the assets, which the CPU Shack museum describes as mainly intellectual property. ATI hired many of the remaining employees and opened an Orlando office around them.

Intel kept using what it had bought. CPU Shack traces the integrated graphics of the i810 and i815 chipsets back to the Real3D work.

~ the patents kept fighting ~

3dfx Interactive had sued Real3D over patents, and the purchase made Intel the defendant. Intel settled by selling the intellectual property on to 3dfx. A second front opened through SGI, which had held a 10% share of Real3D. Nvidia acquired SGI's graphics development resources and that share along with them, and the lawsuits that followed, joined by ATI, ran until a cross-licensing settlement in 2001. 3dfx did not see it. It had sold its own assets to Nvidia in December 2000.

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