Wave Issue 9611 10/25/96 Article 7-01

***DEC's PowerStorm
by David Lohse

The latest additions to DEC's PowerStorm line of accelerators came last
month with the introduction of the 4D40T, 4D50T, and 4D60T. Each of these
products, which are aimed at the Digital Unix and Windows NT workstation
markets, are OpenGL-compliant, and according to DEC are designed for
animation, vis-sim, scientific visualization and 3D GIS applications.

The cards, which are dual-PCI-based and sport SDRAM memory, offer an
impressive feature list including:

Resolution: Up to 1600x1200
Buffering: Multi-buffering with 4 or 8 double-
buffered overlay planes
Z-buffer: 24- or 32-bit
Frame buffer: 128 or 102 bpp
Texture mapping: Up to 32 MB texture memory; bi-linear
and trilinear interpolation; MIP-mapping

The performance, as cited by DEC:

-Up to 2.3 million 3D vectors/sec
-Up to 1 million Gouraud shaded polygons/sec
-Up to 30 million pixels/sec (tri-linear interpolated,
MIP-mapped)

The pricing for the PowerStorm line delegates it to the high end of the
market:

4D40T - $3,995 - 16 MB memory, 1280x1024 resolution, 24-
bit frame and 24-bit Z-buffers
4D50T - $7,995 - 16 MB memory, 1280x1024 resolution, 24-
bit frame and 24-bit Z-buffers
4D60T - $11,995 - 32 MB memory, 1600x1200 resolution, 24-
bit frame and 32-bit Z-buffer

4 MB texture memory module - $595
16 MB texture memory module - $2,495
32 MB texture memory module - $4,995

www.dec.com/info/lists/key-graphics_WN.HTM