3D gaming market during this time period. One year later, ATI released their Radeon 7200, a true competing graphics card line. While all games of this period supported 16-bit color, many were adopting 32-bit color (really 24-bit color with an 8-bit alpha channel) as well. Soon, many benchmark sites began touting 32-bit as a standard. The Unreal Engine, used in a large number of FPS games since its release, was an important milestone at the time. It used the Glide API, specifically developed for 3dfx GPUs, instead of OpenGL. Probably the biggest reason for its popularity was that the engine architecture and the inclusion of a scripting language made it easy to mod it. One other improvement of Unreal compared to the previous generation of engines was its networking technology, which greatly improved the scalability of the engine on multiplayer. id Tech 3, first used for Quake III Arena, improved from its predecessor by allowing to store much more complex and smoother animations. It also had improved lighting and shadowing and introduced shaders and curved surfaces. Early 2000s: Increasing detail, outdoor environments, and rag-doll physics New graphics hardware provided new capabilities, allowing new engines to add various new effects, such as particle effects or fog, as well as increase texture and polygon detail. Many games featured large outdoor environments, vehicles, and rag-doll physics. Average Video Hardware requirements: a GPU with hardware T&L such as the DirectX 7.0 GeForce 2 or Radeon 7200 was typically required. The next-generation GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 were recommended due to their more efficient architecture, though their DirectX 8.0 vertex and pixel shaders were of little use. A handful of games still supported DirectX 6.0 chipsets such as RIVA TNT2 and Rage 128, and software rendering (with an integrated Intel GMA), though this was apparent that even a powerful CPU could not compensate for the lack of hardware T&L. Games engines originally developed for the PC platform, like the Unreal Engine 2.0, started to be adapted for sixth generation consoles like PlayStation 2 or GameCube, those now having the computer power to handle graphic-intensive video games. Mid 2000s: Lighting and pixel shaders, physics The new generation of graphics chips allowed pixel shader-based textures, bump mapping, and lighting and shadowing technologies to become common. Shader technologies included HLSL (for DirectX), GLSL (for OpenGL), or Cg. This resulted in the obsolescence of DirectX 7.0 graphics chips such