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Today in DCC Workstation
3D
Graphics Cards for DCC
Intro,
Why Accelerate?, What
to Look For, PCI vs. AGP
Entry-Level,
Low-Cost, High-Speed 3D Acceleration: Sub $300 Cards
Mid-Range, High-Speed
3D Acceleration: Sub $1000 Cards
3Dlabs
Oxygen GVX1, 3Dlabs Oxygen RPM,
Intense3D Wildcat 3510, E&S
Lightning 1200, E&S AccelGalaxy,
Appian Jeronimo Pro, Diamond
Fire GL1
High-End,
Maximum 3D Acceleration: Cards Over $1,000
Evans
& Sutherland AccelGalaxy
 The
AccelGALAXY, formerly an AccelGraphics offering and now under the E&S
product line, since E&S acquired AccelGraphics, is based on the Evans&Sutherland
100MHz REALimage 2100 rendering processor chip technology.
Now, with DYNAMICgeometry, E&S' Pentium III-ready driver, the card offers
top performance and high-quality anti-aliasing with a range of professional
applications such as MicroStation, CATIA, Maya, Softimage 3D, and Unigraphics.
One AccelGALAXY board can handle dual screens and support 3D stereo glasses.
The REALimage 2100 graphics subsystem offers a second connector for attaching
two monitors in total to it. Additionally shutter glasses can be connected
directly enabling stereo views for applications supporting it. Therefore
this graphics subsystem is a good choice for all demanding 3D-graphics
applications offering the possibility of connecting a second monitor for
free.
The AccelGALAXY 3D graphics accelerator offers performance of up to 4
million triangles per second and fill-rates up to 90 million textured
pixels per second. It has a fast SETUP engine (up to 4M vertices/second),
a bi-directional virtual DMA engine for better CPU usage, 220MHz RAMDAC
for ergonomic refresh rates and the latest Pentium III SSE OpenGL driver.
OpenGL hardware features include: flat and Gouraud shading; alpha blending
for transparency; high-quality anti-aliasing; fog and depth-cueing; as
well as scissoring and stippling. There is also hardware support for all
OpenGL 1.1 texture modes: point-sampled, bilinear, and trilinear MIP mapping;
YUV texture format for full-speed video into texture memory support.
The 16MB cache DRAM dedicated texture memory provides the texture fill
rate of 90M pixels per second. A total of 31MB of video memory includes
15MB 3DRAM frame buffer memory - allowing 24-bit true color (double buffered),
24-bit Z buffer, 4-bit Windows ID and 4-bit stencil plane or overlay plane
- as well as 16MB CDRAM texture memory. The AccelGalaxy is capable of
24-bit double buffered resolutions of up to 1280 x 1024. The street price
for the E&S AccelGalaxy is currently around $1,000.
Lead
on to the Appian Jeronimo Pro
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