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Apple QuickDraw 3D Accelerator Card

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Reply 40 of 63, by stynx

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Here are some benchmarks that i have made.

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Reply 41 of 63, by stynx

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Here is a more complete comparison:

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I have taken about 300 measurements of 8 different cards and 3 different CPUs.
The final result is a combination of the speed compared to the CPU-speed (Software renderer).

The Matrox Millennium II is really fast for a 1996 design. The QD3D Accelerator would have been a really good choice if it had more texture memory. With 512k of onboard memory it is extremely limited despite its good performance. To add insult to injury, it did not support more than a total of 16 textures at any time.

The design is like a single render-pipeline with additional (seldom used) logic for single cycle boolean operation on the vertices. The original idea was that several of these pipeline chips would be combined on a single card and several cards in a system. It would have been extremely fast and easy to upgrade.

An earlier version of the system (most likely the 'White Magic') seems to have archived 880 KPoly/s instead of the 120 KPoly/s the QD3D Accelerator ('Gotham') had. The earlier system did have no texturing logic, though. Texturing seems to have been added pretty short before that card was sold. The filing date of the patent suggests that, at least. I ignored the most prominent feature of the QD3D Accelerator in these tests since i did not have the means to benchmark them. The QD3D card can be much faster, when a lot of triangles are hidden. All synthetic tests work with a 'wall' of triangles instead of a cloud. I will try to modify the main benchmark-program for this test... sometime in the future, maybe 😉

The ATI Rage II is a bit faster than the S3 Virge, even though the synthetic benchmarks suggest otherwise. The final push come from the 'Gerbils' measure. In the end the filtrate is the most limiting factor in this part, as it would in a real-world scenario.

Surprising is the amount of speed-increase the ATI Rage LT Pro has over the Rage II. The Rage LT Pro is pretty much a 1:1 clone of the Rage Pro with added DFP-interface. It therefore is equal to the direct successor of the ATI Rage II. It has often more than double the speed and has a nearly four times higher filtrate with texturing. Both cards support compression which allows more textures to be available. A 4mb Rage II can easily store more than 8Mb of textures.

-Jonas

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Reply 42 of 63, by stynx

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The 3D accelerator cards were developed by the Quickdraw 3D team as part of the Apple Advanced Technology Group (Apple ATG).
Key developers were: Stephanie L. Winner, Michael W. Kelley, Kirk Gould, Brent Pease, Bill Rivard, Alex Yen, Lee Mighdoll

  1. 1988-1990 start of the project
  2. 1992: White Magic prototype
    • 1994: Gotham prototype
    • Spring 1995: Quickdraw 3D Seed Card (pre-release)
    • Late 1995: Quickdraw 3D Accelerator Card (final release)
  3. 1996/97: Prototype for high performance accelerator

White Magic specs:
- Modified scanline renderer
- Gouraud & Phong shading
- constructive solid geometry (in-pipeline vertex processing)
- per vertex transparency
- No texture support
- 2Mb DRAM Object Memory
- multi-chip solution: command-decoder, object processor, rasterizer
- up to 880 KPoly/s (parallel implementation using several chipsets)
- most likely NuBus or PDS
- most likely 20 Mhz Operation

Gotham prototype specs:
- Modified scanline renderer
- 3.3V architecture!
- texture mapping
- trilinear filtered mipmaps
- constructive solid geometry (in-pipeline vertex processing)
- per vertex transparency
- single-chip solution @40MHz
- 120KPoly/s
- PCI bridge chip
- 2Mb SRAM Texture memory
- 12 textures
- 128K SRAM Object cache
- 256x256 Textures only
- 16x1 px partition chunks

QD3D Seed card specs (changes):
- 512K SRAM Texture memory
- 3 textures

QD3D Accelerator card specs (changes):
- updated 343S1167 silicon
- 3 or 12 textures
- 256x256, 128x128 Textures

High performance accelerator specs:
- A-Buffer architecture
- very flexible architecture, adaptable for low- and high-end use cases
- object processor with 2Mb-64Mb Object cache & PCI/AGP DMA
- trilinear filtering
- multipass per pixel compositing
- per pixel transparency
- constructive solid geometry (in-pipeline vertex processing)
- 16 & 32bit texel color depth
- square & non-square texture maps up to 2048 px per side
- 3.2 GB/s on-chip texel-cache bandwidth
- 800 MB/s Memory bandwidth
- 2Mb - 64Mb texture SDRAM
- Pipelined, cached architecture
- 100 MHz single-chip rasterizer
- 2 MPoly/s
- 100 MTex/s
- Hardware accelerated edge antialiasing with 30%-40% performance impact (mask-based)
- 16x32 px partition chunks (tiles)
- up to 4 rasterizer chips per object processor
- PCI or AGP bus interface
- direct Frambuffer interface or PCI DMA transfers

Interesting information:
The QD3D accelerator card (Gotham) can be adapted for 2Mb of texture SRAM. The drivers are "hard-wired" for 512K, though and no change is recognizable in software. The 343S1167 chip can be run at 54 MHz from the stock 40 MHz by replacing the Oscillator (3.3V). The 128K SRAM cache has to be swapped with 12ns parts for >50 MHz. Heat becomes a problem over 50 MHz and a passive cooler is needed. The texture color depth is 16bit with a 5-6-5 RGB configuration. The 343S1167 chip could manage 6-6-6 (18bit) texture color depth but only 16bit are physically connected to the memory.
Very early QD3D release cards are from around 35th week 1995 which may hint as august 1995 as the beginn of production for the final revision.

Sources:
Paper: "Hardware Accelerated Rendering Of Antialiasing Using A Modified A-buffer Algorithm" 1997
Paper: "Hardware Accelerated Rendering of CSG and Transparency" 1994
Paper: "A scalable hardware render accelerator using a modified scanline algorithm" 1992
Patents: US5307449, US5345541, US5517603, US5583974, US5592601, US5606650, US5701405, US5706415, US5920687,
WO1995029464A1, US5517603, US5561752, US5777621, US5808627, US5986667, US5706415

Reply 43 of 63, by stynx

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stynx wrote on 2022-03-20, 12:34:

White Magic

Correction: White Magic is most likely the name of the whole project and Gotham the Codename of the final QD3D-accelerator card.
"White Magic Board" was used for the pre-release QD3D-accelerator (seed-card) in July 1995 with the release of Quickdraw 3D.
A seed-card can be seen on the packaging of the QD3D accelerator card... hidden in plain sight!

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Reply 44 of 63, by stynx

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I just tested "Virtual Wings" and the Version 1.0.2 is compatible with the QuickDraw 3D accelerator. It runs pretty smoothly and has textures (that seem to be working).

Tested games with 100% support so far:
- Virtual Wings
- Havoc

Games that work with texture errors:
- Nanosaur
- Weekend Warrior

Games that don't work:
- Tomb Raider (1 &2) -> not recognized
- Quake 1 - RAVE patch -> Error 10 Freeze
- VR Soccer -> not recognized
- Mech Warrior 2 -> not recognized
- Nascar Racing -> not recognized
- Quake II -> Open GL/not supported
- IndyCar racing -> not recognized
- HotCarts -> not recognized
- Descent 1 & 2 -> not recognized
- Unreal -> not recognized

Reply 45 of 63, by stynx

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I have found some more info on 1995 developer CDs. The original Beta of Quickdraw 3D was June 1995 and version 1.0b1c5 (Apr. 14, 1995).

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The final release Version was 1.0.3 and was available in October 1995 together with the 3D accelerator card.
The Beta did not have the accelerator interface or the accelerator drivers.

Developer Names found in the files for Escher Project:
Grant Anderson (Software Configuration Management)
Eiichiro Mikami (developed the first Viewer Lib -> later "Interactive Renderer")

----
Gerbils 4/95 build (0.5)
Brian Greenstone (texture from the 0.5 Gerbils build)

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Reply 46 of 63, by stynx

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A bit of background regarding the time that Quickdraw 3D was developed:

1994/ 1995:
Apple was beginning to feel the 'burn' as the Macintosh platform was massively loosing marketshare. New PCI based PPC Macintosh were scheduled and Apple had just allowed clones to be manufactured. The Newton was beginning to age as was Quicktime and Apple was lacking a clear vision. The famous 'Knowledge Navigator' Video was already 6-7 years old and there was still no technology like that around. Apple scrambled in all directions to get hold of some 'future-tech' to get ahead of the industry, throwing things on the wall to look what would stick. The Apple/Bandai Pippin had just been announced to be on sale in late 1995 (which was later pushed to early 1996).

Apple had a lot of eggs in the basket but no clear vision on how to bring it all together. Many different Projects with clear technological overlap were managed separately. In this chaos was the next-gen OS "Copland" which should have made a big leap forward for Apple.

Based on the Data that I have collected, I can say that the Quickdraw 3D accelerator was rushed to market. It lacked several important features that made it a bad fit for games and software. The Quickdraw 3D environment was seemingly rushed as well and had fundamental and structural changes in just one year (Q4/95 - Q4/96) . OQD3D was slow to be adopted and the rush seem to have been unnecessary given the state of the industry.

Microsoft would have a usable Direct 3D Version at the end of '96 (D3D 3.0) which would only find universal adoption with Version 5.0 a year later. Fast 3D accelerators (ATI, Nvidia, 3Dfx) would be widely available in early-mid 1997. Quickdraw 3D was over engineered compared to D3D and OpenGL. Most developers only used its RAVE-Interface. QD3D was scheduled to have many extremely modern features like programmable (pixel+vertex) shaders with version 2.0 in 1997 ! When Apple bought Next to speed up development of Copland, Steve Jobs more or less took over the company. The really bad situation for Apple was that in 1997 the money was already burnt through and drastic cuts had to be made. Newton, Apple Network Server, Apple Printers, Scanners, ... everything not really part of the Apple-'core' was killed off. Most software projects were ended and the developers either fired or reintegrated into new projects around the future Mac OSX. I have no numbers but I remember that Apple might have fired up to 40% of all developers back then...

Apple simply did not have the resources left to develop their own 3D API when the real 3D-boom begann in 1997.

-Jonas

Reply 47 of 63, by RaVeN-05

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Some questions:
Does RAVE works on, Does GLIDE works on, Does OPENGL works on?
68k mac? [][][]
or
PowerPC? [][][]
or
Intel? [][][]

https://www.youtube.com/user/whitemagicraven
https://go.twitch.tv/whitemagicraventv

Reply 48 of 63, by Babasha

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RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-05-23, 15:41:

Some questions:
Does RAVE works on, Does GLIDE works on, Does OPENGL works on?

68k mac? [no][no][no]
or
PowerPC? [yes][yes][yes]
or
Intel? [no][no][yes] + METAL[yes]

Need help? Begin with photo and model of your hardware 😉

Reply 49 of 63, by stynx

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I found another game that works (without any performance or visual improvements): Virtual Chess.
The game-count for the Quickdraw 3D Accelerator is now 3
😉
Virtual Chess has a 3D Chessboard view. When the QD3D-card is activated, the 3D-view is slightly different (some render-errors occur) to the Software renderer (Quickdraw 3D).
The game does not use textures, just phong-shading or flat-shading. The 3D-board cannot be manipulated smoothly but in steps. This makes the whole 3D-experience somewhat lacking.

-Jonas

Reply 50 of 63, by RaVeN-05

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Babasha wrote on 2022-05-23, 17:02:
68k mac? [no][no][no] or PowerPC? [yes][yes][yes] or Intel? [no][no][yes] + METAL[yes] […]
Show full quote
RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-05-23, 15:41:

Some questions:
Does RAVE works on, Does GLIDE works on, Does OPENGL works on?

68k mac? [no][no][no]
or
PowerPC? [yes][yes][yes]
or
Intel? [no][no][yes] + METAL[yes]

Checked quake it comes with RAVE and 3DFX neither is PowerPC, they reaquire Classic Environment (and it not supported on Intel) Classic Environment is 68k

So 68k should support RAVE and GLIDE

https://www.youtube.com/user/whitemagicraven
https://go.twitch.tv/whitemagicraventv

Reply 51 of 63, by Babasha

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RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-05-25, 13:26:
Babasha wrote on 2022-05-23, 17:02:
68k mac? [no][no][no] or PowerPC? [yes][yes][yes] or Intel? [no][no][yes] + METAL[yes] […]
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RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-05-23, 15:41:

Some questions:
Does RAVE works on, Does GLIDE works on, Does OPENGL works on?

68k mac? [no][no][no]
or
PowerPC? [yes][yes][yes]
or
Intel? [no][no][yes] + METAL[yes]

Checked quake it comes with RAVE and 3DFX neither is PowerPC, they reaquire Classic Environment (and it not supported on Intel) Classic Environment is 68k

So 68k should support RAVE and GLIDE

Classic environment is PPC. There no Rave/Glide support in 68K 😀
68K based in Motorola 680x0 cpu’s
PowerPC is next generation cpu’s by Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance
or you can change the reality and show us Quake running on 68K Mac, Quadra 840AV is fastest in line. 😉

Need help? Begin with photo and model of your hardware 😉

Reply 52 of 63, by RaVeN-05

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a very confusing here.
all the exe's on mac is starting from "joy!peffpwpc" internaly it can be 68k or PPC or universally both (fat).

ok i not familiar with mac's, just curious about it.

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/ … sh_line#PowerPC

from this one i think:
Rosetta is compatibility layer that allow PowerPC apps run on intel CPU but not 68k? since it gives error that Classic environment is not supported (a way i think its 68k)

Classic Environment is compatibility layer on PowerPC based Mac OSX, i never seen my self one, and i think its able to run 68k apps here.

and when i try to run Quake it gives me that error Classic Environment is unsupported

While Hexen II and Heretic II is working well and they marked as PPC

well i just very confused here and can't distinguish these terms.

https://www.youtube.com/user/whitemagicraven
https://go.twitch.tv/whitemagicraventv

Reply 53 of 63, by Babasha

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RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-05-25, 19:00:
a very confusing here. all the exe's on mac is starting from "joy!peffpwpc" internaly it can be 68k or PPC or universally both ( […]
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a very confusing here.
all the exe's on mac is starting from "joy!peffpwpc" internaly it can be 68k or PPC or universally both (fat).

ok i not familiar with mac's, just curious about it.

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/ … sh_line#PowerPC

from this one i think:
Rosetta is compatibility layer that allow PowerPC apps run on intel CPU but not 68k? since it gives error that Classic environment is not supported (a way i think its 68k)

Classic Environment is compatibility layer on PowerPC based Mac OSX, i never seen my self one, and i think its able to run 68k apps here.

and when i try to run Quake it gives me that error Classic Environment is unsupported

While Hexen II and Heretic II is working well and they marked as PPC

well i just very confused here and can't distinguish these terms.

Classic environment is compatibilty layer for running Classic MacOS ver. 6 - 9.2.2 software in MacOS X.

MacOS 6 - 8.1 (are 68k only or 68k/PPC, they dont have Rave/Glide support).

MacOS 8.5 - 9.2.2 are PPC-only (they have Rave/Glide support but in native mode only, not in Classic environment under MacOS X).

Need help? Begin with photo and model of your hardware 😉

Reply 54 of 63, by RaVeN-05

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So
Classic environment is allow 68k and PPC software to work on Mac OS X (PPC based)? With out RAVE, GLIDE, OPENGL
Rosetta allows Mac OS X PPC based software to run on Mac OS X Intel CPU?

The Mac OS 9 running on PPC executes 68k apps directly?

much newer MAC's ARM based is not support OpenGL, and only support Metal API?

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https://go.twitch.tv/whitemagicraventv

Reply 55 of 63, by Jo22

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RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-05-25, 19:30:
So Classic environment is allow 68k and PPC software to work on Mac OS X (PPC based)? With out RAVE, GLIDE, OPENGL Rosetta allo […]
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So
Classic environment is allow 68k and PPC software to work on Mac OS X (PPC based)? With out RAVE, GLIDE, OPENGL
Rosetta allows Mac OS X PPC based software to run on Mac OS X Intel CPU?

The Mac OS 9 running on PPC executes 68k apps directly?

much newer MAC's ARM based is not support OpenGL, and only support Metal API?

Long story short, Classic Environment simply is a virtual machine software for Mac OS X.
It runs on Mac OS X 10 to 10.4.11 (Tiger).
But only on Power Macs.

When you run Classic, it will boot a copy of Mac OS 9.x.
- In the Mac OS X control panel, it's even possible to make it appear in a window.

That copy is located in a folder named 'System' on the same HDD partition as Mac OS X.

With the help of that Mac OS 9.x, running inside Classic Environment,
it is possible to run Macintosh applications with Motorola 68000 code or Power PC code.

That is possible, because Mac OS 9.x itself still has a built-in emulator for Motorola 68000.
That emulator was installed long ago for two reasons.

a) For backwards compatibility with old software
b) because Mac OS (aka System) itself had parts that were still using Motorola 68000 code.
The Mac's Toolbox software, for example, I believe.
So by including an 68000 emulator, best compatibility was provided.

That being said, I don't know if Motorola 68000 applications could be written to use QuickDraw 3D or RAVE if run on Mac OS 9.x.
Maybe some 68000 compatible libraries are missing, not sure.

There is another problem, I think:
Classic Environment uses Mac OS X to communicate with the outside world.
So 3D applications do run, but perhaps can't use hardware acceleration.

Edit: Rosetta is an emulator for Intel Macs.
It does emulate Power PC code on Intel versions of Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6.

It works with both Cocoa and Carbon applications.
Cocoa is the native API of Mac OS X, Carbon was an API that was part of both Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X.

Carbon was a sub-set of the old Mac OS API.
Something that could be used safely on both platforms.

Think of it as something like Win32s on Windows 3.1, if you like.

That's why Carbon apps can run on Rosetta, too! That's a special case.

A Carbon application could run directly on a Power PC Mac with Mac OS 8/9 and on Mac OS X 10.5 on an Intel Mac through the help of Rosetta.

Edit: Little edit.
Edit: Just noticed that I forgot the FAT binaries etc. Thankfully, Weldum covered them in the following post. 🙂👍

Last edited by Jo22 on 2022-05-25, 22:01. Edited 2 times in total.

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Reply 56 of 63, by weldum

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RaVeN-05 wrote on 2022-05-25, 19:30:
So Classic environment is allow 68k and PPC software to work on Mac OS X (PPC based)? With out RAVE, GLIDE, OPENGL Rosetta allo […]
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So
Classic environment is allow 68k and PPC software to work on Mac OS X (PPC based)? With out RAVE, GLIDE, OPENGL
Rosetta allows Mac OS X PPC based software to run on Mac OS X Intel CPU?

The Mac OS 9 running on PPC executes 68k apps directly?

much newer MAC's ARM based is not support OpenGL, and only support Metal API?

more or less like that
-OS9 runs PPC "native" apps, FAT binaries (PPC+68k) and 68k apps via 68040 emulation inside the os
-Classic environment is a compatibility layer that enables OSX up to 10.4 Tiger PPC to run a copy of OS9 as a program and inside of it, the desired software application. it has it's flaws, like some compatibility issues with 3d apps and games due to how they managed QD3D/RAVE compatibility and the screen buffering (it acts like a virtual machine more or less)
-Rosetta is a compatibility layer that enables OSX 10.4.4 up to 10.6.8 for x86 to run older, -PPC and OSX only- software (but no classic environment)
-Rosetta 2 is designed to run x86-64 sofware for OSX on the new ARM processors, OpenGL support is achieved via a wrapper to Metal API that translates OpenGL calls (up to version 4.1) to Metal API calls as Apple deprecated support for OpenGL

PS: I just noticed that Jo22 already answered most of your question way better than me.

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 57 of 63, by Vasco

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Hey stynx,

could you please also post RaveBench 1.11 or 1.1.1 (exact version number uncertain) here.
According to some old forum entry it was part of the CD-ROM that came with VillageTronic's 3D Overdrive accelerator addon board.

Thx,
Vasco

Reality continues to ruin my life.

Reply 58 of 63, by stynx

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Vasco wrote on 2022-06-05, 07:15:
Hey stynx, […]
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Hey stynx,

could you please also post RaveBench 1.11 or 1.1.1 (exact version number uncertain) here.
According to some old forum entry it was part of the CD-ROM that came with VillageTronic's 3D Overdrive accelerator addon board.

Thx,
Vasco

Sorry, overlooked your comment

Version 1.12 is here:
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/44351-ravebench

-Jonas

Reply 59 of 63, by stynx

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I have finally found the 1992 paper for the Prototype of the QD3D accelerator:
There is even a shot of the silicon of two chips in the PDF:

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The Chips ran @ 40MHz (like Gotham)
No textures
32bit Z-Index (like Gotham)
40bit internal RGB-a values (36bit in Gotham)
220 KPoly/s (4 pipelines = 880Kploy/s)
40 MPix/s (Gotha had 20MPix theoretical, 13MPix/s and 10MTex/s real)
68040-PDS interface, Quadra Computer (can only do 5 K - 10 KPoly/s setup)
720 MiB/s internal Ram-speed

The 68040 CPU of the Quadra was too slow for realtime T&L of complex scenes. They might have prepared pre-processed display-lists for the system. In the paper they mention that the 3D-pipeline was under clocked to 1 Mhz to test the CPU-bottleneck and they could extrapolate from that to the theoretical performance @40 MHz with a more powerful CPU. The two chips shown in the PDF are not the two chips of the (Gotham) QD3D accelerator. The (Gotham) QD3D accelerator has a more or less single-chip design with a separate PCI-interface chip that may do a bit of command-processing itself.

The main chip on the (Gotham) QD3D accelerator may have a PPC-PDS interface and might have originally been developed for the Powermac 7100 or 8100. Delays of QuickDraw 3D and the switch to PCI from NuBus may have delayed the accelerator even further. I suspect that Apple was originally intending to have the QD3D accelerator to be sold alongside the introduction of the PCI-Powermacs. Maybe they even intended to have the accelerator inside the Pippin since it could be directly added to the system bus? The timeframe would fit as would the capability of the 603 PPC in the console. The 3D capabilities would have been above the PlayStation?

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