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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
High-End, Maximum
3D Acceleration: Cards Over $1,000
HP
VISUALIZE-fx2+, -fx4+, and -fx6+, Intense3D
Wildcat 4000, Intense3D Wildcat
4105, Intense3D Wildcat 4110,
3Dlabs Oxygen GVX210, 3Dlabs
Oxygen GMX2000, ELSA GLoria
XXL, Evans & Sutherland Tornado
3000
Evans
& Sutherland Tornado 3000
 The
E&S Tornado 3000 subsystem is Evans & Sutherland's most powerful 3D graphics
board product to date. It provides professional high-end performance,
especially for texturing in visualization/simulation, digital content
creation and CAD applications, and features Evans & Sutherland REALimage
3000, and Mitsubishi 3DRAM technology.
This technology delivers up to 5 million primitives per second, and sustained
pixel fill rates of 100 Megapixels per second for both bi-linear and tri-linear
textured polygons, at maximum 3D screen resolutions, with integrated 2D
and 3D graphics engines.
Each Tornado 3000 comes with a 30 MB 3DRAM frame buffer enabling true
color, high resolution with dual screens. The board also includes 32 MB
of dedicated CDRAM texture memory. Leading-edge functionality includes
support for dual monitors with one card (1280x1024 at true color each
monitor), the ability to view 3D objects in stereo using stereo glasses,
and resolution support of up to 1920x1200 for 16:9 aspect ratio monitors.
The Tornado 3000 is a full length card, which, because of high power consumption,
requires the attachment of an additional small card in a free PCI slot.
The E&S Tornado 3000 is Pentium III ready and incorporates E&S's newest
DYNAMICgeometry software architecture for full exploitation of Intel Pentium
III processors with Streaming SIMD Extensions. Hardware accelerated per-pixel/linear
and exponential fading allows atmospheric effects which enhances realism
with simulation applications for effects such as fog, smoke, and clouds.
Other OpenGL graphics features include: Phong Lighting, Gouraud shading;
alpha blending for transparency; high-quality antialiasing; texture bilinear,
trilinear filtering, perspective correction, and full-speed tri-linear
MIP-mapping; specular lighting of textured surfaces; scissoring; stippling;
subpixel positioning (4-bit fraction); overlay & stencil planes; and per-pixel
depth cueing. Specific support for 3D Studio MAX dual-planes extension
enables use of off-screen memory which allows users to manipulate rapidly
one object in a scene without the need to update the entire scene, dramatically
increasing performance for 3D Studio MAX.
The texture mapping acceleration provided by the up to 64 M bytes of dedicated
texture memory means there is no performance impact for texturing. All
OpenGL v1.2 texture modes are supported, with multiple textures (1 or
2) per polygon and a two-level cache hierarchy for maximum performance.
The card also provides X-Y filtered video scaling; YUV to RGB conversion
on input; on-chip MIP level setup calculation; and indexed texture (4-bit
index).
Besides OpenGL, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and UNIX, the E&S Tornado 3000
also supports DirectX7 on Windows 2000. It has built-in VGA support, 8-bit
double-buffered overlay or alpha, 4-bit stencil planes, 4-bit Window IDs
and an AGP 2X or PCI interface. Other features include: true A/B buffer
switching for Windows or UNIX; Window-ID for RAMDAC color look-up tables;
hardware window clipping; on-chip integrated VGA controller; and a bi-directional
virtual memory DMA engine. The MSRP for the E&S Tornado 3000 is $1649.
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