Rendition

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Diamond Stealth II S220

Rendition was a graphics chip manufacturer that produced cards for PCs from 1996 through 1999.

Vérité

V1000

V1000 was one of the earliest chips with VGA, GUI, DirectDraw, 3D and video functions all integrated into one ASIC. It still used an external RAMDAC, which was common at the time. The GUI acceleration is adequate but not exceptional. DirectDraw and VESA VBE 2.0 functions are fast. All V1000 cards are equipped with 4MB of EDO DRAM running synchronously with the graphics chip.

The chip is based upon a customized MIPS RISC CPU technology with microcode programmability. This processor accelerates 3D, GUI and DOS VESA modes. The programmable flexibility allowed the chip to be tweaked for various use cases, algorithms to be further optimized, and was said to allow additional functionality to be implemented. The 3D feature set of V1000 is similar to that of Voodoo Graphics, but performance is perhaps around 50% of Voodoo level. V1000 is by far best utilized with Rendition's APIs, Speedy3D (DOS) and RRedline (Win9x). Direct3D is less optimal for it though Direct3D 5 games like Jedi Knight are quite playable. The chip is not really adequately capable of OpenGL although there is an ICD available.

Legacy VGA modes operate on a slower part of the chip and are unbearably slow. For example Doom, which uses VGA Mode X, will run at around 10 fps on a Pentium III. There is a DOS utility program to remap some VGA modes to VESA modes, but Mode X can not be improved in this manner.

There are two V1000 chips, V1000E and V1000L. V1000L operates on 3.3v instead of 5v and so uses less power and may be slightly higher clocked. V1000E boards should be used with the available BIOS update TSR for improved performance.

V2000

V3300

V4400