Trident enters 3D graphics with 64-bit processor

Electronic News, June 12, 1995

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.--Trident Microsystems last week made its first foray into 3D graphics with a 64-bit processor that provides graphics and video acceleration in tow. Trident said the T3D2000 is also a precursor for an upcoming spin tailored for PC games.

What distinguishes the device from other 3D accelerators is its low cost and level of integration, said Rick Allen, Trident's product marketing manager. "This device really walks a fine line between the highend and being a games solution."

Packaged in a 208-pin PQFP, the new T3D2000 will be offered for $60 sample quantities in July and in volume starting in October. At the low end, an add- in board based on the 3D accelerator using a 1-Mbyte frame buffer will carry a $125 bill of materials cost and, according to Mr. Allen, using 4-Mbytes of memory, a board would typically cost $225 to manufacture.

Design flexibility of the device is said to give engineers several design paths to lower costs, he said. Between 1-and 16-Mbytes of video RAM or Windows RAM can be utilized for frame buffers and z-buffers. In systems using VRAM frame buffers, lowercost DRAM may be used for z-buffering.

The device integrates a 32-bit bus interface for PCI or VL bus architectures at speeds of up to 33- and 50MHz, respectively, without the need for external glue logic. Adding RAM and a RAMDAC are required to build a complete 3-D acceleration subsystem.

Designed to take advantage of the 3D support built into Windows NT and the upcoming Windows 95, the 3D rendering engine leverages a 64-bit pipelined architecture for real-time interaction with solid 3D models. The part performs Gouraud-shading, texture mapping, 24-bit or 16-bit hardware z-buffering and alpha blending--delivering an estimated 250,000, 100-pixel Gouraud-shaded triangles per second.

Also a GUI accelerator, the T3D2000 performs bit-BLT, linedraw, scrolling, fast frame clear and polygon fills with scaleable resolutions up to 1,600x1,280 and 24-bit color. The device also supports color dithering at 8-and 16-bit resolutions. Additionally, the device provides Window scaling and YUV-to-RGB color space conversion--now considered standard features in any hardware video accelerator.

Said Mr. Allen: "We're not just introducing a 3D part. This is also a very fast 2D part with video acceleration capabilities. There is a need for just about every piece of technology in this chip."

3Dlabs and Lockheed Martin also have introduced 3D acceleration devices, but they do not have video capability and they carry costs that make them best suited for high-end systems. 3Dlabs, however, said recently it is planning to introduce a lowcost version of its Glint chip for the PC.

Trident also hopes to launch a streamlined version of the T3D2000 tailored for mainstream PCs sometime next year. Targeting boards with a street price below $200, the next device will likely include an on-chip RAMDAC, discard certain features specific to the OpenGL API and offer resolutions no greater than 1,024x768. By then, software developers should start rolling out 3D titles based on the Windows 95 application programming interface, Mr. Allen said.

"What we'd like to do is create a part that is more specific to the games market in the future," he said. "3D is up and coming, similar to where video was two years ago."