FGL Graphics To Launch Fire GL4 Professional Graphics Accelerator

FGL Graphics announced that it is expanding its product family with the launch of the Fire GL4, slated for delivery in mid-May. FGL Graphics collaborated with Hewlett Packard, which has provided additional technological enhancements for the Fire GL4, and helped with targeting this card as an OEM solution for PCs or Workstations. The new Fire GL4 is a high performance 3D and 2D accelerator targeted at mid-range to high-end workstation systems incorporating Intel Pentium III/IV or AMD Athlon class CPU performance. Based on the Fire GL3, the Fire GL4 is expected to be 25 percent faster at the same price as the Fire GL3. In addition, the Fire GL4 will utilize the same drivers as the Fire GL3, thus taking advantage of all prior driver performance tuning. The Fire GL4 is based upon the RC1000/GT1000 chipset from the IBM visual products division. It utilizes a 128MB frame buffer with 256-bit wide double data rate (DDR) SDRAM memory. The RC1000 integrates all of the functionality of a VGA controller, including a 2D/3D raster engine with pipeline setup processor, plus a 300 MHz RAMDAC, in a single package. Video stream support is provided with a color space conversation and bilinear scaling unit. GT1000 incorporates a complete transform and lighting engine with texture coordinates and fog calculations performing at a 35GFLOPS rate. The chip implements the full OpenGL pipeline and most of the Direct3D geometry pipeline in the hardware. The board supports the industry standard AGP 4X port with sideband addressing and provides a bandwidth in excess of one GByte/s for host-related transfers. The Fire GL4 is available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Linux and is priced at $1,995.