A story that ran this week in WinInfo and several other computer industry
news magazines stated that Microsoft's Talisman graphics technology had
been cancelled by the company. Apparently, this is not true, so here's the
deal: Talisman is a graphics architecture. The project that was cancelled
is not Talisman itself, but rather a 'reference design' that existed
within this architecture.
Regardless, industry acceptance of Talisman is not expected to be broad.
Brian Hook, a programmer at id, makers of best-selling games like DOOM and
Quake, says that "[id] will be doing [things in 1999] that Microsoft cannot
even imagine. Talisman will not be the answer." Other factors that may
ultimately doom Talisman include Intel's MMX2 and AGP technologies.