Trident T2R4  07 Jul 1998

Here's a press release from #9 about the T2R4.

Remember the Ticket To Ride 3D chip from #9?    Of course you don't.  It was one of the most forgettable 3D chips seen.    But I guess #9 had some extra time, so they were working on another chip, the 'T2R4'.  Here's a bit about it, from Tech Zone:

This is the chip I was talking about last week. It is called the Ticket to ride 4, or as we like to call it around here the T2R4 which is a scarier sounding name. The specs look pretty good, but I am really dying to see the performance numbers. Here is a brief of some of the specs and a picture of the chip.

2.0 GB/second onboard frame buffer bandwidth.

• Pipelined memory read and writes.
• Fully combined and integrated 128-bit 3D/Video and 2D Engines.
• Proprietary 128-bit WideBus Architecture.

Advanced 3D Pipeline:

• A built-in 3D rendering engine, tightly coupled to a IEEE 754 floating point 3D rendering setup engine that runs at 430 MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second).
• 3D pixels processed at up to 32-bit color for precision 3D rendering.
• Precision 32- and 16-bit Z-buffering support processes up to 16.7 million Z-steps. This High Precision Z-buffering significantly improves 3D imagine quality. It reduces texture seams and unsightly artifacts that are present in 3D games-oriented chips that offer less precision.
• 10 Levels-of-Detail Per-Pixel Mip Mapping.
• An 8KB on-chip texture cache.
• Palletized textures at 8, 4, 2 and 1 bpt.
• Atmospheric effects for specular lighting, interpolated fogging and alpha blending.
• Support for perspective corrected texture mapping with bi-linear and tri-linear filtering.
• Complete DirectX 5.0 and 6.0 support.
• Optimized Direct3D and OpenGL ICD (Installable Client Driver) support.

And this is my favorite spec:

Full-screen, 30 frames per second, MPEG-II playback

And a PR blurb from Number 9 on the RevolutionIV card, based on the T2R4.

Old Ticket To Ride info:

Trident Microsystems, Inc.today announced that during the last quarter, it has shipped more than one million 3DImage(TM), the world's first AGP, hardware-based, 3D graphics chip. As a matter of record, a single version of the device, the 3DImage 975(TM), passed the one million mark some time in early April. With this announcement, the company clearly dominates the market for entry-level AGP graphics chips.

Wow.  Who'd have guess, based on the performance?

Cards:

Number 9 Revolution 3D

Data: