Superior Hardware Design

The Hercules Stingray 128/3D combines Alliance Semiconductor's and 3Dfx Interactive's chip technology with Hercules' unique expertise in board design and industry leading software dri-vers. By integrating the 128-bit Alliance ProMotion AT3D 2D/3D graphics and multimedia processor with the 3Dfx Voodoo Rush 3D graphics controller chip set, and 6MB of EDO DRAM as a single slot solution, the Hercules Stingray 128/3D eliminates the need for dual slot solutions to provide the high-end gamer with an exciting visual experience or the graphics professional with workstation quality 3D in applications such as 3D modeling.

The Hercules Stingray 128/3D also continues Hercules' tradition of providing the highest performance from a trend-setting configuration of controller chips and fast, higher quality memory. Hercules' unique high-performance/wide-bandwidth hardware design and advanced Power Drive™ Windows 95 drivers with enhanced Microsoft DirectX support unleash all of the capabilities of a powerful board.

Powerful, Versatile 3D Support for Arcade Quality 3D Games Performance
The Hercules Stingray 128/3D delivers arcade quality 3D gaming performance (high image quality 3D gaming with more than 30 f/s) for the PC platform with fill rates exceeding 40 million pixels per second. Handling the triangle setup in hardware offloads a compute-intensive bottleneck which first generation 3D accelerators left to software. It also helps to optimize Direct3D support resulting in fast frame rates on the PC.

In addition to offering high resolution, high quality texture maps with 30 f/s 3D frame rates, the Hercules Stingray 128/3D also supports an extended set of advanced 3D features and 3D special effects in hardware. These include, advanced texture mapping, point-sampled/bilinear filtering, MIPmap filtering, depth cueing, perspective correction, fogging, alpha blending, Z buffering, flat shading and Gouraud shading.

In order to offer the most powerful, versatile and complete solution, the Hercules Stingray 128/3D supports all major 3D APIs for popular 3D games including, Microsoft Direct3D, 3Dfx Interactive Glide, Argonaut Brender, and Criterion Renderware.

Included with over 250 developers that have joined the 3Dfx Interactive developer program are 3D Realms, Accolade, Activision, Atari Games, id Software, Interplay, Microsoft, Sierra and Virgin. Over 100 game titles are currently under development to run on the Hercules Stingray 128/3D.

Dedicated Display Memory and Texture Map Memory for Industry Leading Performance
2MB of the 6MB on the Hercules Stingray 128/3D are reserved as dedicated texture map memory for the 3D Voodoo Rush chipset. The other 4 MB of fast EDO DRAM are shared as display memory supporting resolutions from 640 x 480 up to 1280 x 1024 in 24-bit true color with resolution dependent refresh rates of up to 200 Hz.

Superb Hardware Accelerated Video Playback Quality
The Hercules Stingray 128/3D also supports an advanced set of video acceleration features in hardware, including YUV/RGB color space conversion, scaling, and a 64 step bilinear filter with full line buffer to provide exceptionally crisp, smoothly filtered, 30 f/s full-screen/full-motion video playback.

The MMX-optimized software MPEG player provided with the Hercules Stingray 128/3D supports both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 playback (software DVD).

Complete Software Driver Support, Comprehensive Utilities, plus 3D Games  The Hercules Stingray 128/3D will ship with an attractive set of popular 3D games.
The Hercules CD supplied with the Hercules Stingray 128/3D contains drivers and utilities for all operating systems including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX. Hercules' integrated suite of utilities called Hercules Touch 95™ provides useful capabilities for desktop management "on-the-fly". The Hercules Entertainment Center is a revolutionary, totally integrated audio/visual multimedia console for sound and video playback control. The Windows 95 Autorun installation automatically installs the Power Drive Windows 95 driver, Hercules Touch 95 desktop
management utilities and Hercules Entertainment Center multimedia utilities, as well as, Microsoft DirectX. The Hercules Stingray 128/3D ships with Hercules' award winning Power Drive Windows 95 driver and accelerated drivers for Windows 3.x, Windows for Workgroups 3.11,