I have a strange Dome Imaging medical card based on Number Nine Imagine 128 GPU. There are some rumors on the web that this GPU has 3D acceleration capabilities and is one of the first 3D acceleration cards ever (1994). But what sort of 3D support does it actually have?
This is the first chip of Imagine series, afaik no 3d whatsoever.
Series 2 not much better:
Even promoted z-buffering is missing, maybe in opengl...
For some reason the card with Imagine 128 GPU has been mentioned on tga3dx.com, this site was also called "The Golden Era of 3D Acceleration". Unfortunately, I've started collecting cards too late 😀 the site has been closed already, so I don't know, if there was any information about 3d-acceleration of Imagine 128 GPU on the site
Its 2D speed was impressive. A friend of mine had a laptop back in 1996/97 that had this chip for graphics and was the fastest 2D acceleration I've ever seen.
Here is the archived tga3dx.com "1994" (first year) page:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101007092802/htt … x.com/1994.html
[name removed by moderator] (the author) has written on the bottom of the article:
"No info found on what exact 3D capabilities the card has, sources needed. Most likely the card was only capable of drawing basic 3D primitives."
Thanks for answers! May be there was only demo software, that uses Imagine 128 capabilities for drawing basic 3D primitives, or some sort of CAD software. There is an answer in the FAQ (#9 archived site) about DirectX support.
Question 3: Does the Imagine 128 support Direct X?
The Imagine 128 supports the Direct Draw portion of Direct X 1.0. This card does NOT have the hardware needed to support Direct X 2.0
