Sunnyvale, California graphics chip designer S3 Inc introduced the ViRGE and ViRGE/VX Video and Rendering Graphics Engines to offer three dimensional graphics on personal computers. They are based on the firm’s S3d architecture – a triangle-based polygon rendering engine that is compatible with standard application programming interfaces. The engine provides support for using live video as a texture map and supports perspective correction and bilinear filtering, MIP-mapping and trilinear MIP-mapping to deliver images without visual artifacts. The ViRGE 64-bit dynamic RAM-based accelerator has 135MHz RAMDAC and clock synthesiser. It is SuperVGA-compatible and provides two dimensional graphical interface acceleration support for resolutions up to 1,280 by 1,024 by 256 colours at 75Hz. It will be $40 each in volume. The ViRGE/VX substitutes support for Video RAM and WindowsRAM, and increases the RAMDAC performance to 220MHz. It will be priced at $65.
