![]() ![]() The card Not exactly a card collectors dream about getting with the whole package. But it took fourth attempt to enter the more promising 3D market- the infamous 3DImage 975. Sales of 2D discrete products were still rising rapidly. After acquisition of Omega, Trident could manufacture their own PCMCIA products and become important player in mobile graphics. Thus Trident later referred to Cyber9397 (based on the 975) as their first 3d mobile chip. Did the board manufacturers finally jump after Trident's 3D? I still cannot find any products implementing them despite announced contracts. These added TV-Out, optional 24 bit z-buffer, used cheap EDO memory and had a setup engine processing 500+k triangles per second. But Trident was on a roll and next quarter reveaed yet another 3d enabled cores- ProVidia9695 for PC and power-gated Cyber9395 for notebooks. Which cards used the T3D9692? Any ProVidia 9692 out there? I don't know any. To get closer to software developers Trident established its "Third Dimension" program that provided them with evaluation T3D2000 boards, documentation and tools for porting to the technology. It was a complete solution ready for Direct3D with perspective-correct texture mapping and filtering. That summer Trident, not to miss the ride, prepared $37 T3D9692 chip with universal memory architecture. What happened? Was it broken, did it suck too much, was too expensive at $60 or just nobody cared? Anyway Trident continued improving T3D architecture and reduce costs through higher integration.ฤก996 came and 3d was getting serious. But it seems no board maker picked the chip, despite good relations with several OEMs which could use such product. T3D2000 supported up to 16 MB of Micron's WRAM which could teleport Trident into high end. ![]() Instead of games Trident was aiming at CAD and engineering workstations where texturing was not yet necessary. It was supposed to be performance flagship. The T3D2000 chip integrated Tridents already established true color 2d and video acceleration with 64 bit 3d rasterization and z-buffering. With advent of PC 3d market the company stepped up and designed their first 3d architecture as early as of 1995. Ever since 1992 launch of their ubiquitous TVGA8900 they had a reputation of rather slow but cheap graphics. In the middle of the nineties Trident Microsystems was very well known maker of 2d accelerators. ![]()
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