Sheep3D™

Sheep3D™ is the fastest yet consumer-level integrated 2D/3D graphics processor. We've only written some numbers on the back of a napkin and said, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat, if..." but, anyway, it will be available in two configurations, Sheep3D™ 2000XL-GLX and Sheep3D™ 10000SGL-XLLXZ!

The Sheep3D™ 2000XL-GLX delivers 3D-graphics at breakneck speed of 1024 bazillion texels per second. The 10000SGL-XLLXX-version is twice as fast, with its 64-pixel pipeline it can process 2048 bazillion texels per second.

Sheep3D™ builds on embedded ASSRAM technology from Infineon Technologies. The current crop of 3D-graphics chips are struggling with conventional external memory technology which no longer offers sufficient memory bandwidth for 3D-graphics rendering. External ASSRAM access times have declined by only 10% p.a.

Embedding the framebuffer memory on the same silicon chip with the rendering core allows a huge 51200-bit wide memory bus, four hundred times larger than the external 128-bit bus used before! Dude! That rulez! This directly translates to a quantum leap in rendering performance and visual image quality and we can charge more, too! Users want true color rendering, lots of high-quality textures and photorealistic image quality. And all this at thousands of frames per second.

Embedded ASSRAM is the future and Sheep™ with its embedded framebuffer and ultra-mega-super-duper-efficient quad-pixel pipelined rendering core is the first graphics chip architecture to make this leap from old conventional image quality to a whole new photorealistic level. And all on the back of a napkin!

To put it this way, Sheep3D™ 2000XL-GLX is three hundred times faster than any consumer-level 3D-graphics architecture available today. The fastest chips available today can render less than 200 million dual textured pixels per second. With 600 bazillion rendered pixels per second, Sheep3D™ leaves them in the dust. Baaaaaah!

Sheep3D™ 10000SGL-XLLXX is a wooly monster. It's twice as fast as the 2000XL-GLX-version - with a 2048 bazillion texel fillrate it can render 1.2 quintillion pixels per second with dual texturing. It's the ultimate graphics accelerator for the most demanding game player or graphics professional. And it's all on the back of this napkin!

The Sheep3D™ has been designed for screaming performance in games and business applications, with full PC 99, Direct® 7.0, OpenGL® 1.2 and Microsoft® Windows® 2000 support.

Diffuse and specular shading, fogging, anti-aliasing, alpha blending, stencil buffering and Z-buffering can be enabled in all modes without any performance penalty.

Sheep3D™ has been designed to be fully compatible with the PC'99 specification and with DirectX® 7.0 and OpenGL® 1.2 APIs. The architecture supports perspective correct diffuse and specular shading, perspective correct per-pixel fogging, anti-aliasing, stencil operations, Z buffering and all alpha blending modes.

The Sheep3D™ has a full 32-bit true color rendering pipeline, providing maximum accuracy and image quality. True color framebuffer and 32-bit floating point Z buffer add up to the visual rendering quality, eliminating the rendering and video artifacts common in 16-bit rendering architectures.

The integrated 2D-acceleration unit of Sheep3D™ is fully Microsoft Windows compatible, the fills and bit-block transfers operate at the speed of 600 bazillion pixels per second. Next generation Microsoft Windows user interface, GDI+ compatibility is a must for the year 2000 - users will be able to enjoy high-quality anisotropic filtering, tear-free window handling, sRGB color matching and exceptionally flexible window/video overlay and underlay handling.

Four simultaneous textures are supported in a single rendering pass with trilinear mip-mapping. Most architectures support only one or at most two textures in a single pass, forcing game developers to use multiple rendering passes, which increases the geometry processing requirements and greatly decreases rendering quality.

The accumulation buffer support in Sheep3D™ provides for advanced image quality enhancements like full-screen order-independent anti-aliasing, depth-of-field effect, motion blur, soft shadows and soft reflections. herd mentality has improved the performance and image quality of the accumulation buffer to allow users to utilize these features in all applications and games at eye-pleasing refresh rates starting from 70 Hz. Examples of these features can be seen in the accompanying images. We made them all with the Sheep3D... no really!

Sheep3D™ has a tried and tested rendering architecture, no tricks, just pure screaming performance. The architecture has been balanced between speed, features and silicon size to offer a cost-effective single-chip solution for thirsty gamers and power-users.

Both Sheep3D™ 2000XL-GLX and 10000SGL-XLLXX have a full framebuffer and depthbuffer, which is a requirement for compatibility with OpenGL and Direct3D. The framebuffer, depthbuffer and textures can reside in either the embedded ASSRAM, in external video memory or in AGP memory.