Apple QuickDraw 3D Accelerator Card

The Apple QuickDraw 3D Accelerator Card is a PCI hardware-based accelerator for software using Apple's QuickDraw 3D graphics language. The card contains two custom chips - possibly two graphics chips or one graphics chip and a PCI interface, 128KB of SRAM cache and 512KB of SRAM memory for storing textures. In addition to the speed benefits, installing this card into an available PCI slot of a Power Macintosh computer adds many graphics features to QuickDraw 3D applications such as detailed fog and transparencies.

Unlike most graphics cards, the Apple QuickDraw 3D Accelerator does not function as a video card, it works by accelerating any video display attached to the system as long as it is set to 16 or 24-bit colour - including the onboard video use on most Power Macs of the time. A limitation of this design is the added traffic over the PCI bus that must travel back and forth from the video card and the accelerator. The manual is unclear on whether or not the card is capable of accelerating more than one display in a multiple monitor setup. Another feature of the card is the ability to double your graphics performance by installing a second card.

Like many other proprietary Apple technologies QuickDraw 3D is now almost totally forgotten and has been replaced by OpenGL in all versions of Mac OS X after gaining very little ground in gaming, animation and other areas where 3D graphics are needed.

The card is relatively sparse with only two custom ASICs, SRAM memory and a few other minor components. This photo will be replaced with a nicer one once I get a replacement camera for my dead digital SLR.	One of the two ASICs on the board that handle graphics and the PCI interface.
The nice and colourful box which actually has a lot of information about the card on it including performance charts, hardware specifications and capabilities.	The back of the box showing a 3D rendering of the card and some examples of its use.
Here you can see what the card is really capable of. The right of the photo shows the very fun game HAVOC running using only software rendering on a Power Macintosh 7500. The left side shows the same scene with hardware acceleration enabled. Notice how all the textures are smoother and the fading of the mountain into the sky is much smoother.	The very green CD-ROM that's included in the box. This disc includes all the QuickDraw 3D drivers needed, 3D samples and other goodies.

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