First post, by Stiletto
- Rank
- l33t++
"Lord Nightmare" brought my attention to this 3D accelerator card for the mid-late 90's Mac:
http://www.forcedperfect.net/hardware/cards/a … uickdraw3dcard/
http://appletechlab.jp/blog-entry-926.html
Supposedly shipped November 1995.
also known as "White Magic" Board.
This could use some additional research.
We don't know what the 3D "core" is inside the custom Texas Instruments ASICs, whether it's off the shelf, custom for Apple, or licensed 3dlabs or S3 or Rendition Verite or 3dfx Voodoo or some other mid/late 90s dead end 3d accellerator?
Whatever it is, it did bilinear interpolation and fog/alpha and some sort of non-nearest filtering.
It's not a stock PC accelerator since those were all native PCI - this seems to use a PCI bridge chip.
At one point Texas Instruments manufactured 3dlabs Permedia chips on behalf of 3dlabs. Alliance Semiconductor RAM could imply Alliance AT3D, but Alliance was making RAM for all sorts of vendors...
Or like I said it could be based off no existing technology and custom designed for Apple.
Most parts seem to be manufactured 1994.
Well, at this point I'm just spitballing ideas. 😀
[EDIT] More discussion:
https://www.macgurus.com/forums/showthread.ph … ccelerator-Card
At the moment current thought is that they're full-custom chips for Apple.
[EDIT]Interesting feature:
- A single card accelerates 3D rendering to all frame buffers in the system.
- Hardware rendering performance can be doubled simply by installing a second card.
"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen
Stiletto