Santa Clara, California-based RasterOps Corp has introduced its graphics display technology code-named Mercury which enables the display and manipulation of large colour images up to 256Mb in size on the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh computer in real time. The first Mercury-based product is RasterOps’s Horizon 24 – a 24-bit colour graphics subsystem for the Macintosh that brings workstation-class performance to the desktop, the firm claims, by removing system bottlenecks through the integration of 24-bit colour display capability, QuickDraw acceleration, a signal processor engine, local RAM and a high-speed databus. The Horizon 24 daughterboard holds twin signal processors, which boost the performance of computationally intensive image processing functions such as Adobe PhotoShop filters. Licensed from Spectral Innovations of San Jose, California, a suite of Adobe-charged custom PhotoShop filters and effects enable the Horizon 24 to make special use of the AT&T Co 3210 signal processor processors and ARTA Apple Real Time Architecture. Horizon 24’s architecture features a high-performance data path that is 50 times faster than the Macintosh and virtually eliminates system bottlenecks, the firm says. Local memory can be expanded to 256Mb and is used for off-screen imaging. Horizon 24 comes in three configurations: a 4Mb, 16Mb and 64Mb image memory version for a suggested retail price of $5,000, $5,800 and $12,500, respectively.
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