Taz-3D

Silicon Reality Taz-3D 07 Jul 1998

See Silicon Reality TAZ-3D for more info.

From 3Dxtc: Silicon Reality's first chip, the TAZ-3D has architectural roots stretching back as far as 1982. This, in a good sense, these guys know exactly what they're doing and have blessed the chip with some interesting more or less new features never seen before. Examples of these are single pass trilinear mip-mapping, giving excellent texture map quality, 9-bit digital to analog signal converter giving supreme gamma correction and 32 bit rendering pipeline. The chip also features three fog tables giving a possibility of many different fog types.
To this point it's all good, but nothing really special. The inevitable question of speed arises... In this section the TAZ-3D offers comparable specs to the PVRSG and MGA G200, 1.7 million polygons per second isn't anything revolutionary but should be able to kick at least some Voodoo2 ass. Pricewise the chip has got real potential. Costing merely 15$ per chip (in large quantities of purchase, but anyway..) cards powered by it can be expected to cost around 100$.

Evans and Southerland bought Silicon Reality in Jun98.

Here is what SRI has to say about their new baby:

Offer a high quality 32-bit true color 3-D output and display

Offer super high resolution (1600x1200) at true color (32-bits/pixel)

Combine 3-D, 2-D and VGA with dedicated texture memory interface

Offer complete polygon and texture parameter setup with rasterization

Offer single-pass, perspective-correct, tri-linear MIP mapping with automatic level of detail

Incorporate perspective-correct, per pixel fog with three fog tables

The TAZ-3D Core pipeline is designed to calculate pixels with full 32-bit accuracy.

The 9-bit digital to analog converters and optional gamma correction provide the most accurate color display available from a single chip controller at high resolution.

Single chip to combine 3-D, 2-D and VGA with dedicated texture memory interface and polygon setup.

Single chip to offer complete polygon and texture parameter setup with rasterization Polygon setup ("setup") is done after the geometry transformation operation is accomplished by the host CPU and is the process that prepares polygon data for the rasterization operation.

The TAZ-3D Core technology provides very complete and efficient parameter format conversion and delta calculation including texture parameters. It accepts both floating and fixed point parameters and accepts Direct3-D formats without modification by the driver software.

Single chip to offer single-pass perspective correct, tri-linear mip-mapping with automatic level of detail.

Tri-linear mip-mapping requires the selection of two mip-mapped levels for calculating the pixel value from the texture map. Four texels from each level are used to compute two weighted averages then a linear interpolation is made between the two averaged pixels from each level. The selection of the mip-map levels (or levels of detail) are selected by the hardware automatically in the TAZ-3D Core.

The TAZ-3D Core provides high quality perspective correct fog that is computed for each pixel in hardware. This computation is independent of and operates at full rate in parallel with other pixel computations. The three fog tables allow a variety of fog types, such as linear, exponential, exponential squared, or even non-monotonic.

3D Features
3D Geometry Setup Features Integrated high performance polygon setup engine providing 1.7 million polygons/second Accepts both floating point and fixed point inputs 3D in windows of any size or in full screen Optimized for OpenGL and Direct3D 3D Texture Mapping Features Dedicated 32-bit texture memory up to 4MB (in addition to dedicated frame buffer memory up to 8MB) Single pass, tri-linear, mip-mapping with automatic LOD Perspective correct, tri-linear and bilinear filtered textures Nearest neighbor RGBA and YUV texture formats 1,2,4&8-bit palletized textures with dedicated LUT Texture caching Continuous scaling of any size or shape		3D Rendering Features and Special Effects Flat and Gouraud and specular shading and lighting 100 million pixels/second with texture, trilinear, perspective-correction, Z and anti-aliasing 32-bit true color with 8-bit retained alpha 32-bit Z-buffer with 8-bit stencil buffer Single pass, per pixel, perspective-correct fog Anti-aliasing with sub-pixel accuracy Single pass, per pixel transparency High quality, independent alpha blending Alpha testing Full source and destination blending Per pixel overlays Double and triple buffering Triangles and triangle strips Scissor clipping window Fast clear 3D in windows of any size or in full screen

Memory Features

Supports up to 12MB SGRAM or EDO

Dedicated texture memory up to 4MB, in 1,2,3,4 MB steps

Dedicated frame buffer memory up to 8MB, in 2,4,8 MB steps

Memory clock speeds up to 100MHz

Single cycle EDO DRAM

SGRAM with block write and write-per-bit

2D Graphics Features

High speed Bit Block performance with support for 256 ROPS

Fully featured 2D rasterizer with full primitive support

Monochrome and color expansion and color keying

Window clipping

Hardware clipping

Font caching

High speed rectangle and pattern fill

Line drawing

Per pixel overlay for 3D and video

Video Features MPEG 1&2 compatible video playback YUV 4:2:2 and supports 4:2:0 and 4:4:4 Multiple occluded playback windows Independent XY bilinear filtered scaling Horizontal and vertical linear scaling			Color and chroma keying RGB to YUV Color space conversion VMI 1.4 and VESA 2.0 compliant Video input from MPEG, NTSC, PAL with standard external decoders NTSC/PAL TV output with standard external encoder
Additional Features Integrated 230 MHz, triple 8-bit DAC Integrated pixel clock and memory clock Up to 100 MHz memory clock 256x24 color LUT Up to 1600x1200 resolution Ergonomic refresh rates 8,16,24,32-bits per pixel 64x64x2- color hardware cursor (2x clock support for high refresh, high resolution 8-bit modes) Per window double buffering Host Bus Interface AGP 1.0 @ 66MHz with DMA bus mastering PCI 2.1 @66MHz with DMA bus mastering				Package and Voltage 272 Plastic BGA 3.3v with 5v tolerant I/O High Performance Drivers and Software Windows 95 - Display Driver, Direct Draw, Direct3D, OpenGL ICD Windows NT - Display Driver, Direct Draw, (Direct3D NT4.0), OpenGL ICD Video BIOS - VGA, DDC2, VBE2, DPMS