Rendition, Inc., was a maker of 3D computer graphics chipsets in the mid to late 1990s. They were known for products such as the Vérité 1000 and Vérité 2x00 and for being one of the first 3D chipset makers to directly work with Quake developer John Carmack to make a hardware-accelerated version of the game (vQuake). Rendition's major competitor at the time was 3Dfx. Their proprietary rendering APIs were Speedy3D (for DOS) and RRedline (for Windows).

3D Chipsets

Vérité V1000

right|thumb|300px|[[Sierra Entertainment|Sierra's Screamin' 3D. V1000-based]]

Released in 1996, Rendition's V1000 chipset was notable for its RISC-based architecture. The V1000 was the first PC graphics card to utilize a programmable core to render 3D graphics. V1000 was both faster and more advanced (in terms of features) than competitors such as the Matrox Millennium, ATI Rage, and S3 ViRGE. Only 3DFX's Voodoo Graphics was faster, but unlike the 3DFX Voodoo, the V1000 included 2D/VGA capability making it the only acceptably fast single-board solution for 3D games.

Vérité supported a local framebuffer of up to 4 MB EDO DRAM, on a 64-bit bus (for a theoretical 400 MB/s bandwidth). Aside from 3D games, Vérité contained an IBM VGA compatible display controller, and served as a traditional 2D/GUI accelerator for the Windows operating system.

Vérité's first claim to fame was being the only accelerator supported by Quake. Board partner Number Nine Visual Technology later canceled their Vérité products. In the book Masters of Doom, Carmack cited bad experiences with programming the Vérité as the reason for id's shift away from proprietary APIs toward the industry-standard OpenGL.

The V1000 was fairly popular when it was launched. At least four companies sold Vérité boards: the Creative Labs 3D Blaster PCI, the Sierra Screamin' 3D, the Canopus Total 3D, and the Intergraph Reactor (later renamed Intense 3D 100).

Vérité V3300 RRedline (unreleased)

The V3300 is Rendition's third generation 3D graphics chipset. It would have been manufactured on a 0.35 μm process at IBM and would have replaced the V2200 as Rendition's high-end chipset in early 1999. This chipset was never released. After several delays, in 1998 Rendition was purchased by Micron Technology and the project was cancelled.

  • Dual Pixel Engine
  • dual-texturing for bilinear and trilinear filtering
  • specular highlighting (per vertex), Anti-aliasing
  • 3 million triangles/second triangle setup engine, 200 million pixels/s trilinear fillrate
  • Dual independent 250 MHz RAMDAC CRT controllers
  • iDCT transformations & motion compensation support (DVD playback acceleration)
  • Compatible with 166 MHz SDRAM/SGRAM
  • 128-bit bus architecture
  • AGP 2X execute mode support

Vérité V4400E (unreleased)

With its acquisition by Micron in 1998, Rendition had hoped to take advantage of Micron's embedded DRAM technology. After the setbacks to the V3300 project, and its eventual cancellation due to delays, Rendition came back with promises for a V4400 chip in 2000. This new chip was purported to have 125 million transistors mostly used by 12 MB of embedded memory, a stunning level of complexity for the day. Although this embedded memory design was later used in Micron's AMD Athlon chipset codenamed "Mamba", the actual graphics chip never surfaced.

Previewed Micron "SuperChip2" motherboard chipset specifications:

  • 180 nm process
  • DDR SDRAM memory interface
  • Rendition V4400 graphics core with 4 MB embedded DRAM. Can use system RAM as well.
  • PCI interface, USB interface, Ultra ATA 66, AC'98 audio controller, IEEE 1394 interface

Games with Rendition support

Rendition built a thorough list of supported games by encouraging developers large and small to make use of their free APIs. Rendition originally provided developers with Speedy3D, an MS-DOS-based API. Later, Rendition released a Windows version, branded RRedline. A free programming API was released to the public and the company hosted a programming competition called "Take it to the RRedline".

Games with native Rendition API support include Descent II, Grand Prix Legends, IndyCar Racing II, the Myth games, Sierra's NASCAR, Quake, Quake II, EF2000 V2.0, and Tomb Raider.

Downfall

Rendition was one step behind other competitors coming to market at a pivotal time in the 3D PC graphics engines battle. The NVIDIA RIVA 128 came to market in late 1997. The V2100 saw first silicon in early 1997, but was late to sample due to a digital cell library bug necessitating a respin.

Rendition used libraries developed by SiArch (licensed through Synopsys at that time) for their digital logic synthesis, which is done by means of sophisticated software auto generating and simulating the actual chip manufacturing process. This software avoids the expensive and labor intensive manufacturing of faulty hardware. Chips are quality tested in simulation before manufacture, or "spiced", because faults are incredibly difficult to detect in microchips with modern trace widths, even with highly accurate instrumentation.

A critical section of circuitry happened to synthesize into a 3 input nor-gate driving a scanned flip-flop. The scan-flop had three passive transmission gate muxes driven by the three n-type transistors in the NOR3, all in series. The result of this was excessive resistance with a weak bus-hold cell, which ate into the allowable noise margin and violated the static discipline in good digital logic design. This combination of faults was not found in the software test environment by SiArch before manufacture.

These faults manifested as an intermittent bug that was seen in the lab on real silicon but not in high level functional or even RTL or gate-level simulations. The root cause was only determined after months of investigation, simulations, and test case development in the lab, which narrowed the problem to a very confined space. At that point, the chip was run live under a scanning electron microscope using the oscilloscope probe mode to find the problem net between the NOR3 gate and the scan-flop. The combination was then spiced and confirmed to be the culprit.

Two full quarters were lost due to this bug. When it was released, V2x00 shipped with fully conformant OpenGL and D3D drivers, but it arrived late to the market.

The company was eventually purchased by Micron, who kept the development team intact as a source of embedded graphics solutions for their own line of motherboards. Rendition's engineers were initially excited by the prospect of utilizing Micron's embedded DRAM technology for a high-end graphics processor, but such a product never surfaced commercially.

Micron resurrected the Rendition brand name as a value line of RAM by Micron Technology's consumer memory division, Crucial Technology. Micron has since re-branded the Rendition line as SpecTek Select, aimed at OEMs and resellers

Competing chipsets

V1000 era

  • 3D Labs Permedia
  • 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics
  • ATI 3D Rage and Rage II
  • Matrox Mystique
  • Number Nine Imagine 128 Series 2
  • NVIDIA NV1
  • NEC-VideoLogic PowerVR Series 1 (PCX1)
  • NEC PC-FXGA
  • S3 ViRGE

V2x00 era

  • 3D Labs Permedia 2
  • 3Dfx Voodoo2 and Voodoo Rush
  • ATI 3D Rage Pro
  • Matrox Mystique 220; Matrox Millennium II and Matrox m3D
  • Number Nine Ticket 2 Ride
  • NVIDIA RIVA 128
  • PowerVR Series 2 (PCX2)
  • S3 ViRGE DX/GX/GX2 and Trio3D
  • SiS 6326

References