Striking out into the world of really fancy graphics for personal computers, Mountain View, California-based Trident Microsystems Inc hass announced its first ever three-dimensional graphics accelerator that’s also its fastest-ever product. Already known for two-dimensional graphics accelerators, the company describes the 64-bit T3D2000 as its flagship product. It enables real-time, three-dimensional rendering and includes graphics accelerator, VGA controller, bus interface and memory controller that provide three-dimensional and video playback acceleration, hardware rendering and image enhancement, all integrated onto a single chip. Product marketing manager Rick Allen reckons Just as workstations took over functions that were once the exclusive domain of mainframes and minicomputers, we believe that computer-aided design and engineering workstation applications may move to personal computers because of the strength of new capabilites offered by three-dimensional chips designed for them. It said that deals in Europe with Ing C Olivetti SpA, and in the US with NEC Corp, have propelled it into the big league and boosted both revenues and profits; until then its major market was Japan. The company said the accelerator has been designed to be flexible so system designers can select from 1Mb to 16Mb of Video RAM and Windows RAM, said to be three times faster than Video RAM and pioneered by Micron Semiconductor Inc, which introduced it in March 1994 under licence from Samsung Electronics Co, for frame buffers and Z-buffers. Its integrated bus interface enables 32-bit interfacing to PCI bus architectures at up to 33MHz and VL bus architectures at up to 50MHz. The graphical user interface accelerator supports resolutions of 640 by 480, 800 by 600, 1,280 by 1,024 and 1,600 by 1,280 at 8-bit, 16-bit and 24-bit colour depths. The 64-bit pipelined architecture is said to accelerate three-dimensional rendering in hardware, providing real-time interaction with solid three-dimensional models. It will also work with the promised three-dimensional support in Windows95 and Windows NT. The video acceleration consists of scaling, which enables video images to be blown up to full screen size without compromising the resolution; colour space conversion, which transforms video source s’ YUV formats into RGB for display on personal computers; and dithering, which improves performance and image quality, for true-colour quality at 8-bit and 16-bit colour depths at any resolution. The company has first silicon of the new chip and is curren tly waiting for the second rev. Samples should be available this month and production is expected in October, which it admits will be late for the Christmas games market, an important source of income for all manufacturers vying for a slice of the fun and games pie. Nevertheless, it reckons system vendors and board makers will be keen on the chip. Initial pricing is $60 each. Trident’s plans for new the technology include a highly-integrated version to create an even cheaper chip.
