Evans & Sutherland Announces Lightning Board for Low-Cost, High-Performance "REALimage" Graphics

Business Wire, March 18, 1999

HANNOVER, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 18, 1999--

E&S Lightning 1200 strikes at mid-range graphics applications

with Pentium III-ready DYNAMICgeometry software

Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp. (E&S(R)) (NASDAQ: ESCC) Thursday announced the E&S Lightning 1200(TM) graphics subsystem, the company's first low-cost fully featured REALimage(TM)-based graphics board.

With an estimated street price of $699, the new board is targeted primarily at professional users of mid-level mechanical CAD and entry-level digital content creation applications. The E&S Lightning 1200 with E&S DYNAMICgeometry(TM) software drivers fully exploits Intel(R) Pentium(R) III processors with Streaming SIMD Extensions.

"Until now, many graphics professionals had to make a difficult `either/or' choice," said Niraj Swarup, E&S Workstation Graphics vice president of marketing. "Either they got the performance they wanted, but at a cost of $1,500 to $2,000. Or they bought low-end 2D/3D accelerators based on consumer chipsets with poor OpenGL performance or limited OpenGL functionality.

"For a large segment of the professional user community, the E&S Lighting 1200 is a no-compromise product that fills a gaping price/performance void in the marketplace."

The E&S Lightning 1200 is based on the new REALimage 1200 chipset from Evans & Sutherland. The chipset retains all key REALimage graphics features and functions, such as full-speed antialiasing and transparency, bilinear texturing, stencils, overlays, and full-screen 1280 x1024 resolution.

Unlike solutions from other graphics companies, the E&S Lighting 1200's performance does not degrade when all graphics features are active simultaneously. It delivers up to 3.3 million triangles or antialiased vectors per second, and supports sustained textured pixel fill rates of 70 Megapixels per second.

"To achieve the combination of image quality, screen resolution, and performance needed by professional users, the components required frequently pushed the price of even entry-level professional graphics cards to over $1,000," said Peter ffoulkes, Dataquest's principal analyst for advanced desktop and workstation computing.

"To achieve the levels of performance required, most graphics cards vendors frequently offered dedicated processors to perform the floating-point math functions required in geometry processing."

At $699, the E&S Lightning 1200 with DYNAMICgeometry software allows geometry processing to scale automatically with future higher-performance microprocessors and with the addition of multiple processors. Intelligence built into the programmable driver architecture checks workstation resources.

If a Pentium III processor is present the driver software will use the streaming SIMD instructions, and if multiple processors are present it will use the streaming SIMD instructions in all of them. In this way processing loads are dynamically allocated in order to extract maximum graphics performance from the system. -0-

Benchmark Results (Tests performed on 500MHz Pentium III system,
1280x1024, 75Hz. Higher scores are better.)

Board                     Est. Price     ProCDRS     DX-03

E&S Lightning 1200          $699          19.10      20.33

3D Labs GMX 2000          $1,699           8.34      20.34

Diamond Viper 550           $149           3.66      10.34

     (E&S Lightning 1200 was tested using DYNAMICgeometry 1.1 drivers,
which will be available in April for free download. DYNAMIC geometry
1.0 drivers, which are currently shipping with AccelGALAXY graphics
boards, are available now for E&S Lightning 1200; customers may
purchase the board today and begin using it immediately.)

The Lightning 1200 graphics system provides powerful OpenGL acceleration performance to the expanding base of mid-range mechanical CAD applications as well as entry-level content creation applications such as Lightwave and 3D Studio MAX.

With its support of all high-end OpenGL features, this card is also an excellent choice for price-conscious users of high-end applications such as PRO/Engineer, Unigraphics, SDRC, Softimage and Maya.

Board comparisons using real applications illustrate pronounced performance differences, particularly between low-cost commodity boards and a true professional card. In tests against the Diamond Viper 550 based on the nVidia RIVA TNT chip, the E&S Lightning 1200 performed 400% better on SolidWorks and PRO/Engineer tests, and 1000% better on 3D Studio MAX.

Results were obtained using the latest "Detonator" driver from nVidia, which claims special Pentium III support running at 1280x1024 and 75Hz refresh.

"This clearly shows that while low-end boards claim to have OpenGL support, OpenGL application performance is an entirely different story. The E&S Lightning 1200 brings the high performance of true OpenGL boards at price points that will appeal to professionals who now use inexpensive, mainstream boards due to budget constraints," said Swarup.

E&S Lightning 1200 may be ordered now. Product shipments will begin this month.