ARK Tiger 3D          07 Jul 1998

Here is 3Dxtc's summary: ARK (Advanced Rendering Kernel) is a relatively unknown company founded in 1993  who have been delivering both relatively high-end and low-end 2D/3D chips for quite a while now but have now decided to give the hardcore gaming class 3D industry a try. The ARK Tiger 3D offers a performance similar to the PVRSG's and seems to have all the right features incorporated, although no fancy newbies like Anisotropic filtering or trilinear mip-mapping have been mentioned in the 3D spec. sheet. The 32bit rendering and 24bit Z-buffer promise great colors and the image quality of a decent 2:nd generation 3D chip. So at the price of around 100 bucks I don't see why this chip should/would fail.

Here's the company blurb:

2D/3D Single chip solution

The device integrates a texture memory that is separate and distinct from the typical frame buffer:

Tiger 3D incurs no performance penalty when doing complex texture manipulations since the display buffer is isolated from all texture traffic. A maximum 4MB of this texture memory.

-Reduces the amount of "texture thrashing" that typically occurs during the rendering process.

-Enables both double and triple buffering without affecting the number of textures that can be stored in local memory.

• 64Bit Framebuffer, up to 8MB
• 32-bit true color
• 24-bit Z-buffer
• 8-bit stencil buffer
• Capable of displaying a fully shaded, trilinear filtered, texture mapped, perspective corrected and Z buffered texel in a single clock cycle
• 250MHz RAMDAC
• 1.7 million-polygon/sec
• Vertex cache
• AGP/PCI 2.1
• Over 110mpix/sec
• Direct3D and OpenGL API’s
• Advanced 3D features:
• Flat, Gouraud and specular shading and lighting.
• Single pass bilinear and trilinear filtering.
• Alpha blending.
• Edge anti-aliasing.