Intel I740
The i740 is Intel's entry into the 3D
accelerator market. Together with Read3D (Lockhead Martin offspring) they've developed an
interesting solution already adopted by upwards 30 IHV:s.
The i740 uses high speed SD or SGRAM
framebuffer memory (up to 8Mb) and AGP memory for textures (The i740 was meant exclusivly
as an AGP graphics solution but Real3D have also developed a PCI version of their
Starfighter board). The i740 can handle textures that are up to 1024 x 1024 pixels
(compared to 256 x 256 on most solutions) and can utilize 16Mb of crisp textures through
AGP without any problems.
While the i740 isn't the top performer it
offers superb image quality and good rendering speed. The creators brags with the fact
that it passes ALL 3D WinBench 98 feature tests (which it actually doesn't). Currently the
i740 only supports Direct3D and has a BETA OpenGL ICD (which uses a heap of memory),
there's no *native* API.
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