Hercules Computer Technology Inc is shooting up in the graphics world with launch of the Superstation 3D, based on the Intel Corp 80860 RISC and the Texas Instruments Inc TMS34020 graphics processor, and claimed to be the industry’s first integrated real-time true-colour arithmetic accelerator display board for AT and EISA bus personal computers. The board is claimed to offer supercomputer-level computational abilities with high resolution, true colour and real-time rendering and is aimed at applications such as real-time computer-aided design, three-dimensional rendering, animation, multimedia and scientific visualisation. It comes with 2Mb to 16Mb program memory, and supports synchronisation of RGB output to international broadcast video standards. It supports up to 16.7m displayable colours with 16- and 24-bit colour depths, and up to 1,280 by 1,024 resolution at 8 bits per pixel, for a variety of modes including 72Hz non-interlaced frame refresh. It has display list drivers for real-time AutoCAD pan and zoom, true colour rendering for Autodesk 3D Studio and AutoShade, the Texas Instruments TIGA program interface, and Windows 3.0. It also includes VGA pass-through for 100% software compatibility and costs from $4,500 to $5,900 according to memory and ships should start next month. The Superstation 3D is the first product resulting from the technology agreement between Hercules and Santa Clara start-up AQuesT Inc, which was founded by key members of the original Intel 80860 team – and Berkeley, California-based Hercules and Intel are both major corporate investors in AQuesT. Hercules is buying the Superstation 3D board OEM from AQuesT (CI No 1,548).
