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Glaze3D


Glaze3D was a family of graphics cards announced by BitBoys Oy on August 2, 1999 that would have produced substantially better performance than other consumer products available at the time. The family, which would have come in the Glaze3D 1200, Glaze3D 2400 and Glaze3D 4800 models, was supposed to offer full support for DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.2, AGP 4×, 4× anisotropic filtering, full-screen anti-aliasing and a host of other technologies not commonly seen at the time. The 1.5 million gateGPU would have been fabricated by Infineon on a 0.2 μm eDRAM process, later to be reduced to 0.17 μm with a minimum of 9 MB of embedded DRAM and 128 to 512 MB of external SDRAM. The maximum supported video resolution was 2048×1536 pixels.

The Glaze3D family of cards were developed in several generations, beginning with the original Glaze3D "400" with multi-channel RDRAM instead of internal eDRAM. This was offered only as IP but with no takers. Bitboys revised the design and decided to have it manufactured themselves, in cooperation with Infineon Technologies, the chip fabrication arm of Siemens. They came up with a new Glaze3D pitched for release in Q1, 2000. The card promised extremely high performance compared to contemporary consumer GPUs. As bug-hunting, validation and manufacturing problems delayed the launch, new features became necessary and a DX7 variant with built-in hardware Transform & Lighting was announced, but never appeared.

The GPU was later redesigned under a new codename, Axe, to take advantage of DirectX 8 and compete with a developing competition. The new version sported such features as an additional 3 MB of eDRAM, proprietary Matrix Antialiasing and a vastly improved fillrate, as well as offering a programmable vertex shader and widened internal memory bus. The new card was to have been released as Avalanche3D by the end of 2001.


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