VT8501 Apollo MVP4

Revision 1.3 February 1, 2000

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System Overview

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System Capabilities

The Apollo MVP4 Graphics Controller’s main system features include:

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High Performance single cycle GUI

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Highly Integrated RAMDAC™ and Triple Clock Synthesizer

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Full Feature High Performance 3D Graphics Engine

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High speed internal AGP Bus Mastering data bus supporting DVD video playback & 3D

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Hardware implementation of motion compensation

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Dual Video Windows for Videoconferencing

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TrueVideo

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Processor

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DirectDraw

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Versatile Motion Video Capture/Overlay/Playback Support

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Flexible Frame Buffer Memory Interface

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Advanced Power Management Features

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CRT Power Management (VESA™ DPMS)

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PC99 Hardware Support

High Performance 64-bit 2D GUI

The 64-bit graphics engine of the Apollo MVP4 Graphics Controller significantly improves graphics performance through

specialized hardware that accelerates the most frequently used GUI operations and matches the high-speed requirements of CPUs.

Functions directly supported in hardware include: BitBLTs, image and text transfer, line draw, short stroke vector draw, rectangle

fills, and clipping. The graphics engine supports 256 Raster Operations (ROPs) for up to 32-bit packed pixel graphic modes. The

ROP3 Processor in the Apollo MVP4 Graphics Controller is able to perform Boolean functions which allow many additional

operations, including transparency, pattern masking, color expansion alignment, and pattern enhancement.

Additionally, the

graphics engine features linear display memory addressing (up to 4GB memory space), accelerated color expansion modes for

graphics text procession, and memory-mapped I/O registers on the graphics engine for faster access time.

Graphic functions are optimized by a 64-bit internal data bus and a four-color hardware cursor/pop-up icon, operating up to a

128x128x2 pixel image, which offloads the CPU. The hardware cursor mechanism can also be used to display patterns stored in

the system memory. This pop-up icon is very useful to display user friendly information instantly through simple hot key

operations. This advanced function combination allows significant performance increases over standard Super VGA designs and

provides outstanding graphics acceleration on GUIs, such as Microsoft

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Windows 95

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.

Highly Integrated RAMDAC

The highly integrated design of the Apollo MVP4 Graphics Controller offers a “no TTL” solution for cost-effective, high-

performance PC multimedia subsystem designs. The 64-bit memory data bus supporting SDRAM and SGRAM memory provides

faster data transfer rates for improved system throughput. The Apollo MVP4 Graphics Controller has a built-in, high speed

RAMDAC

synthesizer, providing the read/write timing control for the Frame Buffer Memory and the refresh of the TV/CRT display.

The integrated frequency synthesizer provides a 125MHz memory clock for high speed DRAM access and a 230MHz video clock

which supports various refresh rates up to 85Hz at 1280x1024.

Full Feature High Performance 3D Engine

The Apollo MVP4 Graphics Controller is equipped with an advanced Graphics Drawing, Single Cycle 3D Graphics Engine that

performs premium 3D functions at a high level of more than 1M triangles per second. The 3D engine supports Microsoft

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Direct3D. The 3D Engine is set up to off-load the CPU from major 3D tasks including slope calculation, sub-pixel positioning,

and Tri-striping. By balancing the 3D pipeline and reducing parameter passing, the Apollo MVP4 Graphics Controller provides

very high levels of performance. The 3D engine is integrated with a triangle set-up engine that sets up triangles according to

vertex input data and accomplishes various functions for 3D rendering. Gouraud shading provides smooth shading for colors

across surfaces, perspective correction texture mapping to correct texture data based on the perspective, bi-linear texture filtering

for interpolating, alpha blending to compensate colors for the opacity of two colors blended, Z-buffering (16-bit/24-bit), video

texturing to overlay 2D video play-back onto 3D images, fogging to simulate weather effects, palletized texture mapping (1-, 4-,

or 8-bit) for memory and bandwidth reduction, and anti-aliasing to reduce or eliminate jaggies resulted from alias rendering. The

3D engine also works with the APM system, conserving power while 3D operations are suspended.