According to some of Rendition's old news stories, they were currently developing a new accelerator before they were taken over by Micron Technology.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990221150025/www.rendition.com/FOW/

Also, according to the following URL (do a find for 'RRedline Accelerator' on the page to find it) it confirms that such a production may have been stopped during the takeover.

http://vr.isdale.com/HighEndAccelerators.htm

I know Renditions completed cards the Verite (also known as V1000), Diamond Stealth S220 (V2100) and Hercules Thriller 3D (V2200) were well known cards, but I cannot find anymore info on this mystery accelerator.

@Paul - I know you have the majority or Rendition's cards mate, but have you heard anything of this accelerator?

Bugger, this meant to go in 'This & That' area.  :)

oh well still is interesting ya Know, never heard of "The Rendition RRedline Accelerator   but an old friend of mine did have a Rendition V2200 once very long ago, it was a Diamond Multimedia Stealth II S220 AGP 4MB :).

The Diamond Stealth is actually the V2100 chipset if I remember correctly.

Only the Hercules brand carries the V2200 chipset.

Assuming that Rendition use the word "Accelerator", I was assuming a 3D only card similar to 3dfx Voodoo or the PowerVR PCX2 chipset.

However, as Rendition knew they were onto a good thing doing the 2D/3D cards, it is most likely that.  :)

do they still exsist the company from Rendition? aka PowerVR?

Rendition was bought out by Micron Technologies.  It is now a division of Micron, but the name Rendition is now all but dead.  :(

PowerVR are still around but abandoned their attempts at PC accelerators soon after the last Kyro 3 model.  There are a lot of loyal PowerVR fans (just like us 3dfx fans) still around waiting to see if the 'Series 5' model will ever come.  I hope ... but I'm not holding my breath.  :(  PowerVR now concentrate on developing Mobile graphics chips for the next generation of mobile phones and hand held consoles.

The era of 1996 - 2000 saw a lot of companies attempt at making their own 3D  proprietary API's to support their 3D accelerators (PowerVR, Rendition, Number Nine and of course 3dfx, RenderWare) with ATI, nVIDIA and Matrox more or less the only ones around at the time
who stuck with using what others had created.

And look who sunk, and who's still around today.  :-/ Madness!

S3 made great things also, Texture Compression and TransForm & Lighting aka T&L also come from S3, the S3 Savage4 was the first to bear S3TC and the S3 Savage2000 was the first to bear S3TL, t&L originated from S3 and not NV , NV kinda stole everybody's designs, it still hurt's my eyes to see them still around, I liked S3, ATi and Matrox more than ever nowadays, they are the Underdogs still do'n thier jig. Oh not to forget S3 MeTaL that API looks frikk'n great with Unreal Tournament 1999, man it's a shame that S3 MeTaL didn't get further. I still Play UT 1999 with my S3 Savage 2000 with the S3 MeTaL API, it looks way better than D3D or OpenGL, 3dfx Glide has it;s speciallity also, but if you like 32Bit Texture compression in UT 1999 S3's MeTaL is the way to go.

I've heard of S3 Metal, but not really investigated much further.

I'm interested.  :)  If you get anymore stuff together on S3's Metal, start a new thread up for it.  :)  It would be interesting to look at.

P.S: Make sure you post it in 'This & That'.  I made a mistake by putting this thread in here, when it should not have been.  ;)

RRedline was basically renditions answer to the other proprietary API's such as GLide and PowerSGL. ;)

So... ::)

Rendition V22xx series = RRedline
Power VR series = PowerSGL
3dfx series = GLiDE

That's the long and short of it! ;D

...oh, and the only card I own is a Hercules V2200! :P

@ Janskjaer Norries mate here we go:

http://www.falconfly-central.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=offtopic;action=display;num=1122721257;start=0#0

That's right.  :)

Also, Paul's V2200 was the only one made by Rendition.  Hercules were the only ones to distribute the card.
Likewise with Diamond and the V2100.

hmm didn't Gigabyte have a Rendition V2100 also?

Not that I am aware of.

I cannot also find any such information on the Rendition archive pages.

But, please, if you find anything, please let us know.  :)

okay I will try and scout this one out, I will let youze know asap ;) I'm on it right now.

Good luck.  :)

Although you may find a limited number of resources to search from as Rendition weren't as popular as 3dfx, so it will be even harder in your quest.

aha, JAZZ Multimedia did have one though, and it's nice and blue also:

Click Thumbnails to enlarge ;)

Card with Box, from TM30
http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/albums/album64/1_G_011.thumb.jpg

Card closeup:
http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/albums/album64/2_G_010.thumb.jpg

Yes, I remember seeing this one.  :)  A nice card, with nice packaging too.

However, it is the Hercules card, just re-branded for a third pary distributor.

well I haven't seen any Gigabyte one, I suppose I was mixed up with the JAZZ Multimedia one :)

It's possible.  ;)

I remember seeing this Jazz V2200 card a few months earlier, and I can't believe I totally forgot all about it.   Maybe because I found out it was a third party distributor through Hercules, which pretty much means, the same card.

Although it is nice to have it in a different retail format.  :)

I had some 'fun' with my old V2200 card... ::)

I had to hack a BIOS update file using a hex editor, as the BIOS on the card got knackered one day! :P

Only reason was that the BIOS fiels were updated from an embedded EXE...and the EXE file needed LOADS of base memory...so it didn't work! >:(

One short hex editing session later...and I reflashed my Hercules card and it was back to normal. 8)

Phew! Close one.  ;)

What exactly were you trying to do with the BIOS?  :)

Also, I snagged this old V1000 yesterday:

http://i21.ebayimg.com/01/i/04/8e/20/67_1_b.JPG

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6788255296

I couldn't reflash the BIOS as it was embedded in an EXE - the EXE needed LOTS of base ram in DOS and would not load... >:(

...so I hacked the BIOS file out of the EXE and used another flash program to reflash the card! ;)

BAM - it worked! ;D

Crikey!  :o

Are Rendition's BIOS file always embedded within .exe's, or was this one just special ?

Did you hex edit the .exe?

wrote on 01.08.05 at 12:09:06:

Phew! Close one.  ;) What exactly were you trying to do with the BIOS?  :) Also, I snagged this old V1000 yesterday: http://i21.ebayimg.com/01/i/04/8e/20/67_1_b.JPG http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6788255296

oei that's an oldie! don't see them that much around these days :) nice catch Jan :)

And it works like a dream too!  :)

I'm using it on my Windows 98 SE partition, playing Rendition's VeriteQuake!  ;D

Rendition configured the card to play GLQuake.  All you have to do is replace the opengl32.dll in GLQuake's directory with the veritegl.dll that comes with the V1000's drivers.  :)

Looks just as good as it does on the 3Dfx voodoo1 chipset, but it doesn't run even half as fast!  :(  That was the true power (and popularity) of the voodoo1 chipsets.  ;)

Still, I'm hoping to get some screenshots of it.  I just need to find a screen grabber that captures the rredline API.

Well it seems HyperSnap DX 5 will do the job perfectly well.  ;D

The first image was shot using 'print screen' and MS Paint.  The others though HyperSnap.  Note the mouse pointer.  This only appears when using HyperSnap to capture GLQuake shots using the Rendition V1000.
Some of the pictures are quite dark so you may need to turn the brightness up on your screens.   :)

Not the last screenshot, and how the Rendition V1000 chips also supports motion blur in GLQuake+.

The framerate using GLQuake's default res (640x480) was terrible!  :( (around 4fps!)  It played much better using 320x240.

I recently purchased Turok - Dinosaur Hunter, and in the manual it recommends using 320x240 for Rendition V1000 chips also.

http://www.jstorey.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/veriteQuake/QUAKE_01.jpg
http://www.jstorey.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/veriteQuake/QUAKE_03.jpg
http://www.jstorey.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/veriteQuake/QUAKE_04.jpg
http://www.jstorey.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/veriteQuake/QUAKE_05.jpg
http://www.jstorey.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/veriteQuake/QUAKE_06.jpg

I had to HEX edit the BIOS image (BIN file) out of the EXE in which it had been embedded by the Hercules engineers... ::) :P

The thing is that most of the V2200 cards - including the one from DiamondMM had only 4MB RAM...whereas the Hercules one that I own has 8MB. ;)

But the EXE updater from Hercules was SH!TE...it just refused to load! >:(

To I hacked the BIOS out of the EXE and used the DiamondMM flash program to reflash the card...wheee! It worked! ;D 8)

This is the only snag with the Rendition boards.  The small amount of memory on them.

It was silly if the Diamond S220 had only 4Mb RAM, as the Creative Blaster PCI V1000 has 4Mb RAM too.

This is the only thing letting the cards down.  The quality is brilliant, but the speed can be poor sometimes.

If the cards had been built with more memory allocation (say 16Mb on the Hercules Thriller 3D) it would have been a serious contender against even our 3dfx Banshee.

With further investigation and in relation to the first post within this topic, regarding the mystery Rendition accelerator that was under development (a new fact every week about the upcoming card, see here:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990221150025/www.rendition.com/FOW/), I have found out a little more about this card.  :)

According to http://www.bjorn3d.com, the card was to be called the Rendition Verite v4400.

Here is a quote from http://www.bjorn3d.com/sitehistory.php:


Quote:

1998 also was the year for the FOWs. I think every serious Rendition owner knows what I am talking about. To create hype for the upcoming release of the new V4400 chipset Rendition created the Fact Of the Week. Every week a new fact about the V4400 was released. I actually have the FOW files on my computer somewhere but heres a summary: Week 1: Dual Pipelines Week 2: Two Heads Are Better Than One Week 3: 2x64 > 128 Week 4: Bargain Matinee Week 5: The More The Merrier Week 6: Go Deep Week 7: Getting Bigger, Getting Better You can read it all at http://web.archive.org/web/19990508121220/www.rendition.com/FOW/ In the end Rendition was bought up by Micron and the V4400 delayed/scrapped.

Seeing as Björns site was largely based around the Rendition community, I would take his statement of the v4400 to be 'delayed/scrapped' to be true.  :'(

Amongst many other spots of evidence that concur with this, I can only assume the v4400 never made it.  :(

I wonder if there was a prototype made of that V4400, maybe there might be about 10 floating around :)

It could be possible, if the 3dfx V5 6k was anything to go by.

I think Rendition were in a similar scenario with realsing the V4400 as 3dfx were with the V5 6k, but then came the end for both.  :(

According to :

http://www.my-esm.com/story/OEG19990407S0013


Quote:

On the other hand, the proposed features go far beyond other competitive efforts, Klein said. Crammed into a single chip, Micron will combine Rendition's V4400 graphics core; a 32-bit, 66 MHz PCI interface; a USB host controller; a ATA-66 storage interface, an AC'98 digital audio controller, plus a IEEE 1394 interface. Most importantly, the chip will embed at least 4 megabytes of DRAM, the first core logic chip to do so.

Sounds like the technology may have found it's way into one of Micron's motherboards.  :-/

He would be pretty sweet to find a V4400 pre-production card...if they exist? ???

I wonder which Micron chipset it was that the V4400 core ended up in? ???