Direct quote from Trident website
 
3DImàge985™
(3D Accelerator)
Product Brief

 

 

Features

High Performance rCADE3D Accelerator

  • Point Sampled or Bi-Linear Filtered Texture Maps are palletized and/or perspective corrected
  • Gouraud or flat shading
  • OpenGL compliant blending operations
  • High performance: 1.2 million polygons/second and 67 million rendered pixels/second drawing rates
  • On-chip set-up engine: 1.4M polygon/s transform rate. Includes backface culling, tri-strip, and sub-pixel positioning

64-bit 2D GUI Accelerator

  • 256 Raster Operations (ROPs) for 8 bits per pixel (PseudoColor), 15/16 bits per pixel (HiColor), and 24/32 bits per pixel (True Color) graphic modes
  • Enhanced graphics engine for BitBLT’s, line draws, short stroke vector draws, clipping, and text transfers
  • Built-in hardware cursor and pattern register
  • 32-bit packed True Color acceleration

Integrated Features for ClearTV Display

  • NTSC/PAL interlaced display for 640x480 (NTSC) or 800x600 (PAL) resolutions, using standard Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 modes in all color depths
  • NTSC/PAL display for DOS games (320x240)
  • 3 Line Flicker Removal filter for output to interlaced monitors (NTSC/PAL)
  • Interpolated vertical scaling from 480 or 600 lines to 400 for NTSC or 576 for PAL resolutions
  • Overscan/underscan to TV display
  • Direct interface to external NTSC/PAL Encoder

Dual Video Windows for Videoconferencing

  • 2 independent scalers and CSCs for separate local and remote video window control
  • Video data path selection from video port or PCI bus

High Quality Video Accelerator

  • Accelerates DirectDraw functions with color keying, sprites, and double buffering for page flipping
  • On-chip Color Space Converter (CSC), TrueVideo® horizontal/vertical interpolation with proprietary edge recovery scaling, and overlay control for 30 fps software MPEG/video CODEC acceleration
  • Direct Interface to MPEG and Video Decoders with TrueVideo® Scaling
  • Anti-tearing support
  • Dual apertures for simultaneous access to graphics and video display memory areas
  • CCIR 656 and YUV planar

Extended Display Resolutions

  • High resolution non-interlaced display through 1600x1200X256, 1280x102464K, 1024x768X16M, 800x600X16M, or 640x480X16M colors
  • Extended text modes (80 or 132 columns by 25, 30, 43, or 60 rows)

Video Module Interface (VMI) and Vertical Blank Interval (VBI) Support

  • VMI compliant hardware interface to MPEG or video decoders for live video inputs (TV, Camera, VCR, etc.)
  • VBI (Intercast) interface can separate vertical blank interleaved data for transmission to the CPU

Highly Integrated Design

  • Fully integrated 24-bit True Color DAC with color look-up table, 230MHz clock synthesizer, read cache, command FIFO, 100% IBM compatible VGA core GUI and Video Accelerators
  • 256x18 color look-up table with HiColor and True Color bypass mode support
  • Two wire interface to EEPROM or VESA DDC

Enhanced AGP Bus Interface

  • Full 133MHz AGP support
  • Backward Compatibility to 33/66MHz PCI
  • DMA Mastering with Scatter Gather
  • Executive Model for Direct Textures
  • Pipelined AGP accesses through sideband

Packaging

  • 316 BGA

Overview

The 3DImàge product line brings together "best of breed" features in every category of VGA, 3D, 2D, MPEG I/II acceleration, Video Conferencing, and TV-Out. It establishes the highest level of 3D performance in the PC mass-market, creates a new bar to beat in 2D benchmark performance, produces sharp smooth dual video windows using Trident's famed TrueVideo® technology. Trident now introduces ClearTV technology, an innovation to place an entire CRT display into a PAL/NTSC mask without loss of edges or corners, and without flicker.

3D

The 3DImàge985 breaks the 3D bottleneck with new rCADE technology. It achieves a sustained 1.2MB polygon/second 3D rendering rate. Also, for the first time in an affordable mass-market graphics engine, an on-chip setup engine balances the 3D pipe by offloading the CPU of over 50% of the 3D computing task.

Texture features include mip-mapped lookup of palletized texels, which may be bi-linearly interpolated. Both depth-cued and constant fog effects are controlled by the hardware with OpenGL compliant blending operations. The 16-bit Z and image buffers can be fast-cleared using the block-write function of 83 or 100MHz SGRAMs. Careful conservation of bandwidth is attained using queue based pixel processing to maximize the time available for pixel drawing operations.

2D

Fast 2D GUI operation is increasingly important as refresh rates increase to 120Hz, resolutions to 1280x1024 and higher, and pixel depths to 16 and 24 bits per pixel. Standard innovations include deep FIFO's for maximum bandwidth utilization in its 256 BLT operations, single-cycle read/write support of 83/100MHz SGRAMs, transparent BLT and support for Windows® 95 font operations.

Video Conferencing

The 3DImàge985 offers two hardware video windows which reduce CPU loading and increase frame-rate by as much as 30% when processing the local and remote dual video conferencing data streams. Key applications include inter-home POTs (Plain-Old-Telephone) conferencing using inexpensive software that implements H.324, such as Intel's latest version of Proshare. Each 3DImàge985 window is independent with its own YUV to RGB conversion and on-the-fly display side scaling through TrueVideo® image enhancement hardware.

TV Output

On chip ClearTV technology in the 3DImàge985 scales the CRT image into an NTSC/PAL TV without loss of edge and corner data and without flicker. TV display is one of the compelling display devices to enable movement of PCs from the home study to the home living room.

Legacy VGA

The 3DImàge985 contains one of the fastest and proven VGA cores in the industry. Even as Direct3D (D3D) begins to attract 3D games developers, many developers continue to support legacy DOS modes for performance and backwards compatibility to the installed base of slower PCs. VGA innovations include single-cycle PCI bus transfers, single-cycle frame-buffer read/writes, and 64-bit operation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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