Mountain View, Calif.–A pair of moves by multimedia semiconductor vendors has nudged the market closer to the goal of 3-D on desktop PC platforms as multimedia designer VSIS, newly spun-off from Mitsubishi Electronics America, unveiled its 3DPro technology for 3-D graphics on the PC, while AccelGraphics separately introduced its AccelPRO TX graphics board.

Jointly developed by Mitsubishi and Evans & Sutherland Computer, the 3DPro project brings to term a 1995 partnership inked to deliver workstation-quality graphics capability to the consumer PC market.

In addition to its sub-micron process technology, Mitsubishi contributed its 3D-RAM as a frame buffer and Cached DRAM as local texture memory, while Evans & Sutherland offered its 2-D/3-D REALimage graphics engine and Velocity software. VSIS, which was granted independence from Mitsubishi last month (EN, July 22), tied the technologies together with its marketing and systems-level experience, according to the company.

The 3DPro is claimed to assume three duties in the 3-D graphics pipeline–geometry, rendering and rasterization–to deliver up to two million polygons/second and 60 million pixels/second at 66MHz. Designed for Pentium or Pentium Pro-based PCs, the architecture is scalable, according to VSIS, and provides base level performance comparable to a UNIX workstation.

The 3DPro provides full Open GL hardware acceleration and supports 1,280×1,024 resolution with true, double-buffered RGB color and a 24-bit z-buffer with 8-bit overlay/Window ID. Running at 30 frames/second, the device is said to support high-end graphics features such as Gouraud shading, fog, transparency, anti-aliasing, perspective-correct bilinear and trilinear mip mapping, overlay planes, alpha-blending, depth cuing, lights, stenciling, scissoring and window clipping.

Featuring varied software support, the 3DPro is PCI bus-compliant and will offer future support for the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and Digital Equipment’s Alpha microprocessor, according to VSIS. 3DPro samples will be available this fall with volume production expected for spring 1997. Pricing has not been determined but will be comparable to existing 3-D graphics devices for the consumer PC, VSIS said.

With workstation-quality claims of its own, AccelGraphics inaugurated the latest addition to its line of 3-D accelerators, adding enhanced 2-D/3-D graphics features.

The device is available now in two version: the $2,295 AccelPRO TX 1500 board with 4MB of video RAM (VRAM) and 8MB of DRAM; and the $2,795 AccelPRO TX 2500 with an additional 4MB of VRAM.