Although computer and video games have existed for fewer than 40 years, they are already serious business. Entertainment software, the entertainment industry's fastest growing segment, currently generates sales surpassing the film industry's gross revenues. Computer games have significantly affected personal computer sales, providing the initial application for CD-ROMs, driving advancements in graphics technology, and motivating the purchase of ever faster machines. Next-generation computer

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... consoles are extending this trend, with Sony and Toshiba spending $2 billion to develop the Playstation 2 and Microsoft planning to spend more than $500 million just to market its Xbox console [1]. These investments have paid off. In the past five years, the quality and complexity of computer games have advanced significantly. Computer graphics have shown the most noticeable improvement, with the number of polygons rendered in a scene increasing almost exponentially each year, significantly enhancing the games' realism. For example, the original Playstation, released in 1995, renders 300,000 polygons per second, while Sega's Dreamcast, released in 1999, renders 3 million polygons per second. The Playstation 2 sets the current standard, rendering 66 million polygons per second, while projections indicate the Xbox will render more than lOO million polygons per second. Thus, the images on today's $300 game consoles rival or surpass those available on the previous decade's $50,000 computers.