ATI 3D Xpression
The 3D Xpression was released slightly after the 3DRage, and was the first to sport ATi's new chip, 3D Rage. As I understand it, only the 2 MB version was available at launch, with the 4 MB one arriving a year later.
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Released | October 1996 |
| Bus | PCI | |
| Chipset | ATi 3DRage | |
| Standards | VGA and SVGA | |
| Memory | 2 MB EDO (40ns) or 4 MB EDO | |
| Ports | 15-pin DSUB (RGB analogue) | |
| Part # | 102-38502-02 | |
| FCC ID | ||
| Price | At launch: $172 | |
| See Also |
It retained the Mach64 architecture with integrated DAC and clock synthesizer, and added a 3D engine into the same chip.
Key features:
- 57 MHz core
- 2 MB EDO RAM
As a first-generation 3D chip it proved about as useless as offerings from Matrox and nVidia, with a very low feature set and was not fully DirectX- and Direct3D-compatible. Matrox ran a series of advertisements in October and November of 1996 which provided performance charts which showed their Mystique was much faster and full-featured than the 3D Xpression and the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000XL, and was the same price.
Board Revisions
Competition
The 3D Xpression competed with the S3 ViRGE which was first to the 3D market - the 3D Xpression's 3dRage chip only supported a 32-bit memory path compared to the ViRGE's 64-bit.
3D Xpression also competed with the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 and Matrox Millennium.
In the Media
Setting it Up
There is no hardware configuration required for the 3D Xpression.
Downloads
Operation Manual Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
Original Utility Disk Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
VGA BIOS ROM Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
