Dlabs Inc. announced that it will demonstrate a new twin GLINT 500TX reference board design at Fall COMDEX '96 (booth H203 and suite H2 at the Las Vegas Hilton) that provides 3D performance of up to 1 million Gouraud shaded, Z buffered, 32 bit color, 25 pixel polygons-per-second, and 25 million texture-mapped, perspective-corrected pixels-per-second.

The twin GLINT 500TX reference design is available immediately to GLINT Early Access Partners for incorporation into their product lines. 3Dlabs' Early Access Programs enable 3Dlabs and selected hardware partners to cooperate in the development of 3D hardware boards and systems through early access to new silicon, driver software and board designs, as well as technical and commercial support provided to vendors by 3Dlabs.

GLINT Reference Designs

The new reference design incorporates two GLINT 500TX graphics processors and one GLINT Delta geometry processor, 16Mbytes of localbuffer memory per GLINT 500TX, 8Mbytes of video memory and a VGA boot device on a single-slot PCI board.

3Dlabs' reference boards enable hardware vendors to quickly refine and market their designs for high-performance, full-function PCI accelerators. 3Dlabs' Hardware Reference Kits provide a complete design and manufacturing framework for Early Access Partners. Design documentation includes a reference board, chip programming and register documentation, board schematics, netlists, pinouts, diagnostic tools and PAL sources. Manufacturing documentation includes bill of materials data, build lists, assembly plots and ORCAD and GERBER design databases.

GLINT 500TX and GLINT Delta - Providing Professional 3D Graphics

GLINT is a market-leading family of productivity-class 3D processor chips, and integrates high-performance, professional graphics sub-systems onto silicon devices that radically lower the cost of OpenGL(R)-based 3D acceleration. The GLINT 500TX (the second generation of GLINT silicon) supports high-resolution displays and deep 32 bit color and Z buffers, and accelerates 100% of OpenGL rendering operations in silicon - including advanced texture-mapping, anti-aliasing and alpha-blending. The GLINT 500TX provides scaleable acceleration, utilizing its built-in scanline interleaving functionality, enabling utilization of one to eight GLINT 500TX devices in parallel.

The GLINT chip family ships with an OpenGL Installable Client Driver, providing highly-optimized performance and full OpenGL compliance, integrated seamlessly with Microsoft(R) Windows(R). OpenGL is fully-supported and endorsed by Microsoft as the high-end 3D API for CAD, imaging and multimedia authoring. The GLINT 500TX can be gluelessly used in conjuction with the GLINT Delta geometry pipeline processor chip.

The GLINT 500TX is software-compatible with the GLINT 300SX (the first generation GLINT silicon) and Permedia families, and 3Dlabs' extensive range of software drivers is already available for GLINT 500TX-based boards. These drivers include: Windows NT, Windows 95, OpenGL on Windows NT, OpenGL on Windows 95, Heidi from Autodesk, Direct3D from Microsoft and QuickDraw 3D and QuickDraw 3D RAVE from Apple. The drivers for Windows NT and OpenGL are available on Intel, Alpha(R) and PowerPC(R) processors. All 3Dlabs' drivers automatically detect and take full advantage of GLINT 300SX, GLINT 500TX and the GLINT Delta.

3Dlabs' silicon provides integrated 2D/3D acceleration, enabling the use of 2D and 3D acceleration simultaneously within a single window. Neither a companion 2D accelerator board or a 2D coprocessor on-board is required for 2D acceleration.

Applications supported by the GLINT 500TX include Pro/ENGINEER from Parametric Technology, WorldToolKit from Sense8, SolidWorks 96 from SolidWorks, MicroStation by Bentley Systems, I-DEAS from SDRC, Softimage 3D from Microsoft, 3D Studio MAX from Kinetix, Lightwave from Newtek, Lightscape Visualization System from Lightscape Inc., AVS/Express from Advanced Visual Systems, Open Inventor from Template, OpenGVS from Gemini and GameGen II from Multigen, Inc.

GLINT 500TX is compatible with the Apple(R) Power Macintosh(R), with full byte-swapping implemented in silicon. The GLINT 500TX's texture-mapping performance is well-suited to the many multimedia authoring titles on the Macintosh, including products from Electric Image, Fractal Design, Macromedia, NewTek, Strata and Vertigo. GLINT 500TX includes 100% silicon acceleration for QuickDraw 3D - including advanced lighting modes not found in OpenGL.

 

Return to today's headlines

Copyright 1997 - 2008
GVP.DSJ Inc Web Development & GetMeOnTop SEO & Search Optimization NYC