DOS Days

Revolution 3D

The Revolution 3D was the flagship product from Number Nine, winning many industry awards including being the "Editor's Choice Award Winner" by both PC Magazine and Byte Magazine. It was by far their most successful card in the company's 16-year history at launch.

	Released	June 1997 (PCI version), August 1997 (AGP version)
	Bus	PCI, AGP
	Chipset	Number 9 T2R (Ticket to Ride) L2A0907
	Standards	MDA, Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA
	Memory	4 MB or 8 MB WRAM, and later, 4 MB or 8 MB SGRAM
	Ports	9-pin DSUB (RGB analogue video out)
	Part #	01-328002-004
	FCC ID
	RAMDAC	IBM RGB524 (220 MHz)
	Price	At launch:
	See Also	Number Nine Revolution IV

It originally came in either 4 MB or 8 MB WRAM versions, and was based on Number Nine's third-generation "Ticket to Ride" graphics accelerator chip featuring an uncompromised combination of 3D, Windows and MPEG performance capabilities. Supporting both Direct3D™ and OpenGL® 3D acceleration with a dedicated 128-bit 3D engine and a 650-MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second) 3D setup engine.

In November 1997, Number Nine announced a new version of the Revolution 3D with either 4 MB or 8 MB of SGRAM. Both these new versions would be available with PCI and AGP buses, and were targeted at users who did not need extreme high resolution true color requirements. "Memory is one of the most expensive components of a graphics accelerator," said Andrew Najda, chairman and founder of Number Nine Visual Technology. "SGRAM is not only an ideal memory for today's fast graphics accelerators, it's now considered a commodity component. With fast, lower cost memory, Number Nine's 128-bit "Ticket To Ride" processor and Microsoft Certified WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Laboratories) stable drivers, the SGRAM version of the Revolution 3D will be able to hit new markets which have been out of the reach with previous generations of Number Nine technology due to their higher price points.". The SGRAM versions would be available in the first quarter of 1998, and both were estimated to cost below $200 at the time of the announcement.

At the same time (Nov 1997), Number Nine announced they were reducing the ESP (Estimated Street Price) cost of the existing Revolution 3D to $249 for the 4 MB WRAM version and $299 for the 8 MB WRAM version.

Both the 4 MB and 8 MB WRAM versions supported optional memory upgrade daughterboards that added 4 MB or 8 MB additional memory, for a total capacity of 16 MB.

Revolution 3D SGRAM graphics accelerator features:

World's fastest 2D GUI (graphical user interface) drawing engine.
A built-in 3D Floating Point Setup Engine which is tightly coupled to a 128-bit 3D Drawing Engine for superior 3D performance
An 8KB on-chip texture cache for faster texture rendering.
Atmospheric effects for Specular Lighting, Interpolated Fogging and Alpha Blending improve 3D image quality.
128-bit Video Engine allows smooth, full-screen, full-motion MPEG playback at up to 1152 x 870 at 16.8 million colors - without dropping video frames.
A Front-end Color Space Converter de-compresses and converts MPEG color data from YUV to RGB which allows MPEG video clips to be scaled to full-screen resolutions - even when in true color display modes.
Video scaling is processed as a texture by the 3D engine, scaled and color interpolated for full-motion playback without the blockiness normally associated with scaled video.
A professional quality, externally mounted, 220 MHz. IBM DAC (digital to analog converter) provides a brighter, cleaner, crisper video signal to the monitor for a rock-solid image which is considered superior to products that incorporate integrated DAC within the processor.
Designed to accelerate Windows® 95 with Direct3D™, Windows NT 3.51 and Windows NT® 4.0 with OpenGL™ 3D support.

The pic at the top shows the 4 MB PCI version. Factory 8 MB cards have the other 4 MB on the rear of the card.
The pics below show the 8 MB AGP variant (has the optional 4 MB WRAM memory upgrade installed from factory).

In 16.7 million colours on an 8 MB card, it could display 1600 x 1200 at 60 Hz refresh rate or 1280 x 1024 in 75 Hz.

Board Revisions

The only BIOS version known is 3.03.03, dated 9th July 1997.

Competition

The Revolution 3D with its Ticket to Ride chipset arrived in the 3rd quarter of 1997, about the same time as DirectX 5 was released, and a year before DirectX 6. In reviews at the time, its 2D performance was simply earthshattering, but its 3D performance was considered poor. A few months after the Rev3D arrived, nVidia launched their RIVA 128 which was used on the Diamond Viper 330 and ELSA Victory Erazor. While the Rev3D could use up to 8 MB of video memory, the RIVA 128 was limited to 4, which limited its 3D resolution to 960 x 712 compared to the Rev3D's 1152 x 864. In 2D the RIVA 128's more limited memory didn't matter as much, with 2D resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 in Hi-Color mode. A 230 MHz RAMDAC was very typical of cards released in 1997.

Another competitor on the scene in 1997 was 3D Labs Permedia 2, which was used on the Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro.

The table below shows a comparison of the 3D features of the Revolution 3D against some of its competition in 1997:

	NumberNine Ticket2Ride	3dfx Voodoo	3DLabs Permedia 2	nVidia RIVA 128	ATI Rage Pro
Fog Vertex	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fog Table	-	Yes	-	-	-
Specular Highlights	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Color Key Transparency	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Alpha Transparency	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Linear Filtering	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Linear MipMapping	Yes (poor implementation)	Yes	Yes (not perfect)	Yes (not too bad)	Yes (quite good)
Dithering	Yes (not perfect)	Yes	Yes (not perfect)	Yes	Yes
Perspective Correction	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fog Vertex and Color Key	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fog Vertex and Alpha Transparency	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

So in 1997, the card to have for 3D gaming was most certainly the nVidia RIVA 128 (or one of its later variants like the faster 128ZX). No DirectX 6 (arrived Sep 1998) drivers were ever released for the Ticket2Ride chipset.

In the Media

Setting it Up

Performance

I tested an 8 MB WRAM AGP version of the Revolution 3D on a machine with the following specifications: Windows 98 SE, AMD K6/2-500 (1999), Gigabyte GA-5AX motherboard (1998), 64 MB SDRAM (1998), and a Sound Blaster 16 CT2940 with Yamaha YMF262 (1995), using driver version Hawkeye v4.10.9382 and DirectX version: 9.0c. There is no option to disable v-sync in the drivers, but the Hawkeye display control utility does allow two settings that can improve performance: text font caching and device bitmap caching, both of which were enabled. All tests ran successfully, however in 3DMark 99 the backgrounds failed to render correctly (just black), as did some objects.

Here's a summary of the benchmark test results:

	640 x 480 x 16	800 x 600 x 16	1024 x 768 x 16
3DMark 99	471 3DMarks, 6006 CPU 3DMarks	364 3DMarks, 6006 CPU 3DMarks	190 3DMarks, 6006 CPU 3DMarks
3DMark 2000	344 3DMarks	235 3DMarks	158 3DMarks
FinalReality	2.87 RealityMarks

3DMark 99 Max - 640 x 480, 16-bit colour, triple buffering (video)

3DMark 99 Max - 800 x 600, 16-bit colour, triple buffering (video)

3DMark 99 Max - 1024 x 768, 16-bit colour, double buffering (video)

3DMark 2000 - 640 x 480, 16-bit colour, triple buffering (video)

3DMark 2000, 800 x 600, 16-bit colour, triple buffering (video)

3DMark 2000, 1024 x 768, 16-bit colour, double buffering (video)

Final Reality (video)

Because this card pre-dates DirectX 6.0, a lot of rendering techniques that were commonly used from 1998 and beyond do not work. 3DMark 99 and 2000 ran very slowly with some non-rendering of surfaces in abundance. Final Reality ran a little faster but also suffered black surfaces. My research concluded that Number Nine did not release any DirectX 6-compatible drivers for the Ticket to Ride (T2R) chipset.

And for some games released after this card:

Half Life (1998) - failed to render correctly using DirectX (lots of black surfaces), and OpenGL is not supported using the MiniGL driver. Falling back on the software renderer resulted in an average of 7-9 frames per second at 1024 x 768.
Colin McRae Rally (1998) - doesn't directly support the Revolution 3D (it does support other NumberNine cards based on S3 chipsets like the Vision 330, Motion 331/531/771, and Reality 332/334/772).
Thief: The Dark Project (1998) - failed to run (general exception error).