|
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 Lightning 1200
 The
E&S Lightning 1200 is the entry-level
product in Evans & Sutherland's lineup of 3D graphics accelerators. Based
on the REALimage 1200 chipset, E&S Lightning 1200 is designed for professional
users of CAD, modeling, DCC, and visualization/simulation applications.
As with all REALimage-based products, texturing performance and antialiasing
quality are excellent.
The E&S Lightning 1200 is Pentium III ready, has integrated 2D and 3D
graphics engines, and incorporates E&S's newest software architecture,
DYNAMICgeometry.
At a list price of $699, the E&S Lightning 1200 graphics subsystem is
the company's first low-cost, full-featured REALimage-based graphics board.
The chipset retains all key REALimage graphics features and functions,
such as full-speed anti-aliasing and transparency, texturing, stencils,
overlays, and full-screen 1280 x 1024 resolution. The card has built-in
VGA support, stereo & dual-monitor support, an available AGP 2x interface,
8-bit double-buffered overlay or alpha, 4-bit stencil planes and 4-bit
window Ids. It has X-Y filtered video scaling and YUV to RGB conversion
on input.
The Lightning 1200's performance does not degrade when all graphics features
are active simultaneously. It delivers up to 4M triangles per second and
90M pixels per second of fill rate and 70M pixels of textured fill rate.
Some of these graphics features available simultaneously include: Gouraud
shading; alpha blending for transparency; high-quality anti-aliasing;
bilinear, trilinear filtering, perspective correction, and MIP-mapping
for textures; per-pixel depth cueing; transparency, fog, overlays, and
stencils. Other professional 3D rendering features include phong lighting,
specular lighting of textured surfaces, scissoring, stippling, and subpixel
positioning.
The E&S Lightning 1200 supports the full OpenGL v1.2 feature set, Microsoft
Windows NT 4.0, and DX 6 on Windows 2000. The card contains 15MB 3DRAM
(frame & local buffer), and 16MB CDRAM (texture). It is compatible with
Pentium, Pentium-Pro, Pentium II, and Alpha processors and comes as AGP
2X or PCI (32-bit @ 33 or 66 MHz). The card can support screen resolutions
up to 1920 x 1200 x 24-bit double buffered.
Lead
on to the E&S AccelGalaxy
|
|
