3Dlabs Redefines PC Graphics with PERMEDIA Family of Graphics Processors for Pervasive 3D; High-performance 2D, 3D, video and VGA acceleration on a single chip; PERMEDIA boards will run Creative Labs 3D Blaster games

Business Wire, Oct 23, 1995

"By definition, pervasive 3D includes all the entertainment applications," said Henry Choy, director of entertainment products at 3Dlabs. "We received a lot of positive feedback from the game developer community about Creative's 3D Blaster board. We listened carefully to their comments and integrated the performance and functionality into PERMEDIA to make it the leading next-generation 3D games accelerator."

While games have been the first high-volume 3D market segment, 3D graphics will become even more pervasive during 1996 with 3D capabilities being integrated into everyday applications such as 3D Web browsers, multimedia navigators, digital publishing, financial visualization, presentation packages and the graphic user interface itself. 3Dlabs is working closely with many 3D applications developers, ensuring that key vendors have access to hardware and technical support, and that software is optimally accelerated by GLINT and PERMEDIA cards.

PERMEDIA's seamlessly integrated 2D performance exceeds that of today's fastest accelerators for the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system, and its video processing capabilities include MPEG-compatible YUV color conversion and fully filtered, bi-linear scaling to provide 30fps video playback at full-screen resolution. In addition, video can be freely used as a perspective texture, enabling real-time video effects to be generated with ease - one example of how 3D-based chips are inherently more powerful than the current generation of 2D-only chips. On-chip VGA is also fully accelerated, providing unmatched performance for legacy VGA-based software and games.

PERMEDIA makes advanced 3D acceleration affordable and widespread, fueling the growth of the market for 3D software. PERMEDIA is the first pervasive 3D graphics chip that is both inexpensive enough to be used in low-cost games boards, and has the performance and functionality to be used for everyday 2D and 3D graphics tasks, including personal productivity applications.

"With GLINT's leadership position in the professional segment, 3Dlabs has been perceived as being a high-end only 3D chip company. With PERMEDIA we now have merchant chips for both the professional and pervasive 3D markets - that makes us unique in the PC industry," said Neil Trevett, vice president of marketing at 3Dlabs. "We are fully committed to extending the high-end 3D performance of the PC, and as 3D markets develop, we will continue to migrate and adapt our high-end 3D technologies into PERMEDIA-class devices."

3Dlabs is licensing the PERMEDIA technology to strategic partners developing high-volume, consumer-class devices that require integrated 3D, 2D and video acceleration. Designed completely in VHDL, PERMEDIA cores are totally portable and scaleable, allowing this ground-breaking graphics technology to be easily integrated into systems-on-silicon designs.

Silicon and Software Support for PERMEDIA

PERMEDIA can be used in conjunction with 3Dlabs' soon-to-be released floating point 3D-pipeline processor. This combination allows up to 500,000 bilinear-filtered, texture-mapped, 50 pixel triangles-per-second to be generated on desktop machines by offloading much of the geometry pipeline from the host CPU. This chip combination will provide a new level of price/performance for demanding 3D delivery systems such as arcade games, simulation and virtual reality.