ATI, Diamond push buffer envelope

Electronic News, Sept 2, 1996 by Andrew MacLellan

Mountain View, Calif.--Pushing the DRAM buffer envelope just five months after taking the wraps off their 3-D product lines at WinHEC (EN, April 8), both ATI Technologies and Diamond Multimedia are loading up their graphics accelerators with 4MB of frame buffer memory. The separate graphics board introductions are aimed at adding storage for z-buffering and enhanced texture mapping.

In addition to larger frame buffer capability, the new ATI board, which will be unveiled next week, will feature the company's new ImpacTV TV out chip and a revamped version of its 3D RAGE IC which is claimed to add MPEG playback and twice the 3-D performance of the earlier chip.

Diamond has rolled out a beefier iteration of its Stealth 3D 2000 board, which will continue to incorporate S3's ViRGE chip featuring 3-D rendering, a 2-D GUI and video acceleration, as well as enhanced software drivers for improved 2-D performance in Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51 operating systems.

The Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 carries an estimated price tag of $169 in 2MB capacity and $199 in 4MB capacity. A $49 upgrade from 2MB to 4MB also is available. The new drivers are claimed to improve Windows performance by 20 percent and fully support Direct3D and a version of Diamond's InControl Tools 95 desktop productivity utility.

The increase in frame buffer capacity comes on the heels of a steep dive in DRAM prices which earlier this year saw much of the graphics industry move from 1MB to 2MB buffers. Both the ATI and Diamond boards come in 4MB fixed and 2-4MB expandable versions.

The Stealth 3D 2000, when fully populated with 4MB of 40-nanosecond Silicon Magic EDO DRAM is claimed to provide true-color at 1,024x768 resolution or 16-bit color at 1,280x1,024. Currently, standard EDO DRAM is available only through OEM channels.

Meanwhile, ATI claims its new 3D RAGE II chip delivers 28 million pixels/second for 16-bit z-buffering and palletized textures, PCI bus mastering with scatter gather and a 20 percent improvement in 2D performance.

Other 3-D features on the 3D RAGE II include full-screen or window double buffering, flat and Gouraud shading and special effects such as 8-bit alpha blending, fog and full support of Microsoft's Direct3D texture lighting. More than 50 game titles will support the 3D RAGE family by Christmas, according to the company. The 3D RAGE II chip is priced at $30 each in 10,000-unit quantities.

Pin-compatible with its predecessor, the new 3-D engine supports full-screen software MPEG and Video CD 2.0 playback, with both horizontal and vertical scaling and full MPEG decode and planar data conversion functions for 30-frame/second video and 44KHz stereo audio on a Pentium-class system.

Designed for converging computing and home theater applications such as gaming and interactive TV over the Internet, the addition of the ImpacTV IC allows output directly to a PAL or NTSC TV screen for simultaneous display on a TV and PC. Using Composite, S-Video or SCART formats, the chip offers programmable timing and scaling for support of from 320x200 to 800x600 resolution and includes Windows utilities for control of image size, position, contrast, color saturation and filtering.

The chip interfaces to the 3D RAGE II engine on both the motherboard and add-in card using ATI's Multimedia Channel, and will be incorporated into Sony Electronics' Sony PC. Sold separately, the ImpacTV IC is priced at $15 in 10,000-unit quantities.