Hercules Thriller 3D

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The Hercules Thriller 3D for PCI and AGP is Hercules' first board to combine outstanding 3D acceleration, excellent 2D graphics, and superior video quality on a single board. The Hercules Thriller 3D integrates:

  • the leading edge Rendition V2200 True Media Accelerator based on Rendition's high performance RISC technology, which provides blazing fast 2D, 3D, and video performance,
  • a 230 MHz DAC for ``high resolution, ``high color depth and ``high refresh display up to 1600x1200 with 90Hz,
  • 4MB or 8MB of super-fast 125 MHz/8ns SGRAM for almost unlimited bandwidth,
  • a video-in connector for video conferencing (video camera), full motion video recording from any video source, and image grabbing from any video source,
  • superior, flicker free video-out circuitry (S-Video and composite video) for recording to a VCR and for large screen gaming display on a TV set with a better image quality than provided by console game computers,
  • a 150Hz 3D stereo glasses connector,
  • MPEG acceleration (motion compensation) for smooth, high quality filtered MPEG playback.

In order to offer the most powerful, versatile, and complete solution, the Hercules Thriller 3D supports all major operating systems and 3D APIs including Windows 3.11, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, OS/2 Warp, AutoCAD, OpenGL, and DirectX 5, Speedy3D, and RRedline.

The Hercules Thriller 3D is based on Hercules' high-performance/wide-bandwidth hardware design and Hercules' Windows driver technology. By efficiently reducing noise with the most stable proprietary hardware circuitry and the highest quality components, the combination of the powerful Rendition V2200 True Media Accelerator and super-fast 125 MHz 8ns SGRAM runs at the highest speed possible in volume production.

The architecture of the Hercules Thriller 3D promotes an unprecedented level or pipelining and parallelism while performing multiple or different 2D, 3D, and video graphics tasks. Rendition's technology uniquely combines a highly flexible, programmable RISC processor with a five-stage pipeline, a powerful triangle setup engine, and a sophisticated pixel pipeline. While executing key rendering tasks "in parallel" and pixel calculation "single cycle," the Hercules Thriller 3D delivers unmatching performance and rendering speed.

By also handling the complete triangle setup in hardware, a very compute-intensive part of the 3D pipeline, which most popular 3D accelerators including Matrox leave to software, the Hercules Thriller 3D eliminates a decisive bottleneck from the CPU.

Calculating a 14-attribute Direct3D pixel in a "single cycle," the Hercules Thriller 3D accomplishes excellent OpenGL performance and a new level of 3D gaming experience for the PC platform. It also delivers the high speed fill rate necessary for smooth, real time 3D animation. While running at 60 MHz engine clock, the Hercules Thriller 3D outputs up to 60 Million Gouraud-shaded, perspective-corrected, texture-mapped, bilinear-filtered, alpha- blended, fogged, diffuse/specular highlighted, and z-buffered pixels per second.

In addition to offering high resolution, high quality 3D texture maps, the Hercules Thriller 3D also supports an extended set of advanced 3D features and 3D special effects in hardware including sub-pixel/sub-texel accuracy, MIP mapping, trilinear filtering, and texture modulation for smoothly lit gaming scenes. Special 3D effects, such as the water effect in Tomb Raider, can also be programmed in micro code and executed on the Hercules Thriller 3D's RISC engine.

With its 230 MHz DAC, the Hercules Thriller 3D achieves desktop resolutions ranging from 640x480 to 1600x1200 with refresh rates up to 200 Hz.

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  Resolution      Colors    Refresh Rates  Horizontal Frequency
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 1600 x 1200      65,536       60 - 85           78 - 100
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                    256        60 - 85           78 - 100
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 1280 x 1024       16.7M       60 - 90           64 - 100
                --------------------------------------------------
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                  65,536       60 - 90           64 - 100
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                    256       60 - 100           64 - 110
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  1152 x 864       16.7M      60 - 100           57 - 100
                --------------------------------------------------
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                  65,536      60 - 120           57 - 110
                --------------------------------------------------
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                    256       60 - 120           57 - 110
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  1024 x 768       16.7M      60 - 120          35.5 - 100
                --------------------------------------------------
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                  65,536      60 - 120           48 - 100
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                    256       60 - 120           48 - 100
                --------------------------------------------------
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  800 x 600        16.7M      56 - 160          35.5 - 100
                --------------------------------------------------
                --------------------------------------------------
                  65,536      56 - 160          35.5 - 100
                --------------------------------------------------
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                    256       56 - 160          35.5 - 100
                --------------------------------------------------
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  640 x 480        16.7M      60 - 200          31.5 - 110
                --------------------------------------------------
                --------------------------------------------------
                  65,536      60 - 200          31.5 - 110
                --------------------------------------------------
                --------------------------------------------------
                    256       60 - 200          31.5 - 110
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See Also