RobRich
03-31-2000, 10:24 PM
STMicro, an older company that many have heard of, is finally getting back into the dektop graphics market. STM has always have a commitment for high quality, low priced parts. This comes as a complete shock to me, as none could have prodicted that they would try to return to the desktop world. The new chipsets will be available next month, and hopefully the actual cards will appear shortly after. The preproduction test modeld are already performing better than current nVidia GF256 baased cards.
The new chipset seems to be an evolution of the Neon250 chipset that VideoLogic released awhile back. That's the same chipset that powers the Playstation, and a few Neon250 video cards (if you can actually find one). While the 250 was rather rare in the desktop market, it did have the performance to compete. The upper fillrate was over 500 MegaTexel per second at a standard complexity depth. In most games, it could keep an averaged performance curve that would compare with the GF256, G400 Max, and Viper2. It uses a tile based rendering engine, so it only renders what you can actually see on the screne. It also doesn't require a real z-buffer, so it has less memory overhead than traditional architecture cards.
If STM can provide an updated form of the Neon250, then they should have a very successful chipset. Considering that the orginal chip had a low clockspeed of around 125mhz, if STM could up that to 175+, then they would have a card to compete with 3dfx v5 5500, and possbily low end nVidia GF256-II cards. The major option not listed at this time is hardware T&L, but I might wave that for a good fill rate. Many things I use are D3D 5x and 6x based, so hardware T&L is not used (doesn't appear until DX7). Also, most OpenGL games I use commonly play use lightmaps for rendering, so I would only be able to benifit from the hardware transistion option., something that a good cpu can handle nearly as well.
Here's the orginal article:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000330S0026
The new chipset seems to be an evolution of the Neon250 chipset that VideoLogic released awhile back. That's the same chipset that powers the Playstation, and a few Neon250 video cards (if you can actually find one). While the 250 was rather rare in the desktop market, it did have the performance to compete. The upper fillrate was over 500 MegaTexel per second at a standard complexity depth. In most games, it could keep an averaged performance curve that would compare with the GF256, G400 Max, and Viper2. It uses a tile based rendering engine, so it only renders what you can actually see on the screne. It also doesn't require a real z-buffer, so it has less memory overhead than traditional architecture cards.
If STM can provide an updated form of the Neon250, then they should have a very successful chipset. Considering that the orginal chip had a low clockspeed of around 125mhz, if STM could up that to 175+, then they would have a card to compete with 3dfx v5 5500, and possbily low end nVidia GF256-II cards. The major option not listed at this time is hardware T&L, but I might wave that for a good fill rate. Many things I use are D3D 5x and 6x based, so hardware T&L is not used (doesn't appear until DX7). Also, most OpenGL games I use commonly play use lightmaps for rendering, so I would only be able to benifit from the hardware transistion option., something that a good cpu can handle nearly as well.
Here's the orginal article:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000330S0026