Video/graphics chip & board manufacturer, Number Nine Visual Technology Corp, last in the news after being bailed out to the tune of $9m by Silicon Graphics Inc (CI No 3,407) after three straight years of losses, has just announced the product that SGI’s loan enabled it to keep developing. The Ticket To Ride IV 128-bit graphics co-processor is the latest version of this product from the Lexington, Massachusetts based-company. The new co-processor offers up to 32MB SGRAM for 3D texture processing and full AGP X2 support – the company claims that data transfer is four times faster than with a PCI bus. Graphics data is channeled through into two separate 128-bit graphics engines-one dedicated to two dimensional graphics, one three dimensional/video input (the processor supports 30 frames per second MPEG 2 playback). The 128-bit digital to analog converter supports high definition television resolutions with 65,000 colors at 1920×1080. The processor supports DirectX 5.0 and 6.0, Direct3D and OpenGL. Ticket To Ride IV will begin sampling in the second quarter of this year with volume production in the third. The company has not yet given any prices on the product, which will presumably vary anyway, depending on how much onboard memory is specified. However, Number Nine, which claims to have produced the first-ever graphics board and the first true 128-bit board, has been feeling the competition bite in the increasingly crowded market of late and will need to keep a watchful eye on its pricing – that the company is already more conscious of this is indicated by the company’s price cut across the range of their high-end Revolution 3D graphics accelerators. Number Nine previously admitted that the boards were under extreme competitive pressure.
