Graphics, IC board market heats up

Electronic News, August 11, 1997 by Peter Brown

Los Angeles--The graphics IC and board market for PC workstations continued to heat up last week as Orlando, Fla.-based Real 3-D, here at the Siggraph '97 conference, entered the PC workstation graphics market with its Lightning/110 board targeted at visually demanding and time-sensitive applications including CAD and 3-D animation.

Real 3D's Lightning board capped a barrage of announcements regarding boards and processors targeted specifically at enabling multimedia graphics on PC workstations. Other highlights from Siggraph '97 involved numerous design wins and joint agreements providing a platform for the advance of this hot technology within the workstation industry.

According to John S. Lenyo, director of marketing for Real 3D, the Lightning/110 board is designed specifically for Windows and Pentium environments offering advanced texture mapping, real-time animation, and improved realism. Real 3D is planning on shipping the board in 3Q97 priced at $1,995.

"The board is also designed for OpenGL. Although it supports other APIs, we have geared the board so that it works best under the OpenGL specification," said Mr. Lenyo. "Real 3D sees a tremendous growth in PC workstations and PC graphics in generally. By entering this market we have expanded our product line even further enabling us to hit the major markets in the industry that require multimedia graphics."

In other Siggraph '97 developments, Evans & Sutherland (E&S) and Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) signed an agreement to create a new graphics subsystem based on E&S' Realimage 3-D graphics technology to be ported to DEC's personal workstation family. The subsystem, dubbed the PowerStorm 4D30-T, will be used as DEC's mid-range 3-D graphics offering for its personal workstation's A and I series.

"Digital's work with Realimage on both Pentium and Alpha processors demonstrates the versatility of the technology," said Rick Maule, VP and GM of E&S' Desktop Graphics Division.

Also, E&S demonstrated to Electronic News the initial silicon for its next generation of Realimage 2000 devices. The Realimage 2000 will be compatible with PCI and the Intel accelerated graphics port (AGP) while offering a full graphics feature set as well as OpenGL compatibilities, E&S said. The company plans to offer the Realimage 2000 technology by early 1998.

Attempting to eliminate cost premiums while maintaining performance, 3Dlabs introduced its Glint TX Gold graphics processor enabling what the company said it expected will be graphics boards for PC workstations priced in the sub-$1,000 range. The Glint TX Gold processor offers 16MB of on-board memory while providing more than 800,000 polygons per second and over 60 true-color Winmarks, according to 3Dlabs. The company also garnered the interest of two workstation graphics board makers: Leadtek and STB who have introduced Glint TX Gold-based graphics boards that are available in volume quantities.

"Working with 3Dlabs with the Glint TX Gold further strengthens Leadtek's push into the professional 3-D markets," said K.S. Lu, president of Leadtek. "Leadtek will be cooperating very closely with 3Dlabs and leveraging our low-cost manufacturing capabilities and extensive channels to market to ensure the WinFast 3-D L2500 Gold board achieves maximum market penetration."

In addition, 3Dlabs announced a number of design wins at the conference including contracts with Diamond Multimedia, Gateway 2000, Leadtek, Netpower, and Omnicom.

Diamond Multimedia Systems unveiled an additional 3Dlabs device to its Fire GL 1000 Pro series of graphics accelerator boards priced at approximately $300 each.