Dedicated Graphics Chips for Multimedia Processing

While Intel pushes CPUs and simple DSP chips as the solution to this year's PC multimedia needs, readily available dedicated 3-D graphics chips might be just as viable a solution. The new entrants in the mainstream 3-D PC arena all offer combined 2-D, 3-D, and video acceleration.

With the rapid graphics and motion-video technology changes that are now occurring, companies previously oriented toward the low end now have new high-end offerings, and previously high-end vendors are now expanding into the mainstream. For example, Trident Microsystems, traditionally a low-end-solution provider, now offers one of the best PC grap hics accelerators around. Its $37.50 (in quantities of 1000) 3DImage 985DVD 3D+ digital videodisc (DVD) graphics processor uses the fastest 133-MHz version of Intel's AGP bus.

Trident's CADE3D technology, used in the 3DImage 985DVD, achieves a peak 1.2-million-polygon-per-second (60 megapixels per second) 3-D rendering rate while storing the textures in main system memory. This is over twice the speed of 3DLabs' Permedia.

The 985DVD also has an on-chip 3-D geometry setup to off-load a big slice of the 3-D computations from the floating-point-weak Pentium CPU. The built-in, full-motion DVD video support runs at 30 frames per second with Dolby AC-3 surround sound. The chip can work collaboratively with an MMX-enabled Pentium or Pentium Pro to off-load to the CPU up to 50 percent of the DVD playback tasks with MPEG-2 decompression and image-enhancement hardware.

Graphics Chip Race

ATI, Cirrus Logic, Matrox, Rendition, S3, 3 DLabs, and VideoLogic are all in the race to offer a winner in the graphics chip market. Most of them will also begin to support AGP by the middle of this year. For now, standard performance is equal to that of S3's 86C385 ViRGE/GX processor. This chip uses up to 8 MB of synchronous graphics RAM (SGRAM) clocked at up to 100 MHz with standard trilinear filtering, MIP mapping, transparency, and effects. It also provides better motion-video acceleration than previous graphics chips.

Other important entrants in the Windows NT power-desktop 3-D graphics arena include 3DLabs, the current market leader, with its GLiNT 500TX rendering chip and the companion GLiNT Delta geometry processor; Intergraph, with its RealiZM and Intense3D cards; Dynamic Pictures, with its Oxygen family; and Evans & Sutherland, with its REALimage cards, which use Mitsubishi's 3D-RAM technology. The majority of these processors are expected to support the AGP bus on Intel platforms and Alpha's platform for the Windows NT environment by year's end, although some will also support 64-bit extended PCI for systems without AGP.

At the high end of the market, one particularly interesting entrant is Real 3D, a Lockheed Martin company, which has teamed up with Intel to design a new generation of AGP 3-D graphics processors optimized for Pentium Pro systems. The current Real 3D/100 two-chip PCI chip set is aimed at high-end power desktop graphics and achieves up to 750,000 shaded, textured polygons per second by integrating a geometry-transformation engine with a rendering and texture processor.

Another entrant, Intel and its forthcoming chip (code-named Auburn), looms as a strong competitor to other graphics chips. Auburn is evidence that even Intel doesn't believe that CPUs can handle the demands of 3-D video.