Rendition, Inc.

» see rendition.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Rendition was founded in 1993 in Mountain View and spent five years being the second-best answer to a question that was only asked for about three years. Its product was the Vérité, a 3D graphics chip built around a programmable RISC core rather than fixed-function logic, which made it the first PC graphics part that could be told how to render instead of only being told what.

The V1000 arrived in 1996 with up to 4 MB of EDO DRAM on a 64-bit bus, and it could also do ordinary 2D, which the competition could not. 3dfx's Voodoo Graphics was faster at 3D and did nothing else: it needed a separate 2D card in the machine with a cable looping between them. For one Christmas the Vérité was the only board you could buy that was good at games and also drew your desktop. Creative Labs sold it as the 3D Blaster PCI, Sierra as the Screamin' 3D, Canopus as the Total 3D, and Intergraph as the Reactor.

Then the market moved twice in eighteen months and Rendition was late for both. The V2100 and V2200 were good parts, roughly twice the fill rate of the first generation and faster than Voodoo Graphics, but they shipped after Nvidia's RIVA 128 and alongside Voodoo2, which made them a reasonable buy rather than the obvious one. Micron Technology signed an agreement to acquire the company on 22 June 1998 and completed the stock-for-stock merger on 11 September, paying in roughly 3.7 million of its own shares. Rendition stopped being a company that day and became a graphics group inside a memory manufacturer.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the card Quake came to ~

vQuake was the thing. Rendition worked directly with John Carmack on a hardware-accelerated build of Quake, and when it shipped in time for Christmas 1996 it was the first time most people had seen a game they already owned look fundamentally better because of a card. Sixteen-bit color instead of eight, and bilinear filtering where there had been visible blocks of texture. Tomb Raider did the same job for the same chip a few weeks later.

It did not make Rendition the standard, and the reason is in the tooling. The company gave developers its own APIs free, Speedy3D under DOS and RRedline under Windows, and even ran a programming contest called Take it to the RRedline. Carmack's later account, in Masters of Doom, is that programming the Vérité went badly enough to convince him to stop writing against proprietary interfaces at all and move id to OpenGL. So the card that got the first port helped push the whole industry toward a standard API it had no part in.

~ one logic gate, two quarters ~

The engineering failure that killed the second generation is unusually well documented, and it is tiny. In a critical piece of the V2100, the synthesis tools produced a three-input NOR gate driving a scanned flip-flop whose three transmission-gate multiplexers sat in series. The resistance that combination presented, against a weak bus-hold cell, left nothing of the noise margin. Real silicon misbehaved intermittently in the lab while every simulation said the design was fine.

Finding it took months and ended with the chip running live under a scanning electron microscope in probe mode, hunting for the one net between that gate and that flip-flop. Two full quarters went into it. When the V2x00 finally shipped it had fully conformant OpenGL and Direct3D drivers and arrived into a market that had moved on. A company can die of a gate.

~ the boards that never shipped ~

Rendition and Hercules had a project called Thriller Conspiracy that put a Fujitsu FXG-1 geometry processor next to a V2200, which would have put hardware transform and lighting on a consumer card well before the GeForce 256. It was rumored for summer 1998 at $149 and never came out. The V3300, which IBM was to fabricate at 0.35 micron for early 1999, was canceled after the Micron purchase. A V4400 with twelve megabytes of embedded memory was promised for 2000 and never surfaced, though the embedded memory work did end up in a Micron chipset for the Athlon.

One board that did ship deserves a line: the Jazz Multimedia Outlaw 3D, which carried both an AGP and a PCI edge connector on the same card. You flipped the whole thing over, bracket included, depending on which slot you had.

~ the name on the memory ~

Micron kept the engineers and buried the brand, then dug the brand back up for something else entirely: Rendition became a line of cheap memory modules sold through Crucial, and was later renamed again to SpecTek Select. Type rendition.com into a browser today and it sends you to spectekselect.com, which sells RAM to resellers. The domain of a 3D graphics company now resolves, twenty-eight years later, inside the memory company that bought it.

By 1998 I had been online for a few months on a dial-up modem in Turkey, and the 3D card you heard about in that market was Voodoo. I never saw a Vérité board on a shelf. Years later, when I was listing my hardware in a forum signature on frmtr like everybody else, the Vérité had already been dead long enough that nobody would have known what it was.

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