OpenGL Turbobooster - Diamond's FireGL2

FireGL2's RC1000 Rasterizer Chip

FireGL2 is equipped with two graphic chips. The larger of the two coolers covers the RC1000 rasterizer, which is clocked at 120 MHz.

The chip's die is covered with some kind of copper heat spreader. The remarkable thing about RC1000 is its diagonal mounting to the board.

The RT1000 offers the following features:

• 2D/3D Raster Engine with Texture Unit clocked at 120 MHz
• Video Overlay Unit
• 2 DMA / BLT Units
• Polygon Setup Processor
• 300 MHz Ramdac (30 bit Palette DAC)
• 4 tables for Color Lookup and Gamma Correction
• 256-bit wide memory interface for DDR memory

Compared to Quadro2 Pro, the theoretical fill rates of the RC1000 are not impressive. The chip manages a meager 410 Mpix/sec. The texture fill rate is even lower, hovering around 200 Mtex/sec. In comparison, Quadro2 Pro with 1000 MPixel/sec and 2000 MTexel/sec is a true Goliath. We'll discuss the (minor) importance of fill rates in professional OpenGL applications later in this report.