S3 Trio

The S3 Trio range were popular graphics chipsets for personal computers. Known for their more than adequate 2D acceleration for the day, the Trio was S3's first fully integrated graphics accelerator. The graphics core, RAMDAC and clock generator were built into the Trio chip, negating the earlier need for separate chips to perform these functions. This allowed boards to become much simpler, and thus cheaper, than older graphics accelerators. The 64-bit versions were particularly prevalent in PCs of the mid to late 1990s.

Variants

The Trio64 and 64V+ were essentially fully integrated solutions based upon the earlier Vision 864 and 868 accelerators. Like the 868, the 64V+ has a video acceleration engine that can perform YUV to RGB color space conversion and scaling. The scaling was rudimentary, however, and was limited to horizontal linear filtering. Unlike the Vision964/968, the Trios did not support VRAM, being limited to FPM DRAM and EDO DRAM only. The 2D graphics core was later used in the ViRGE.

The Trio32 was a budget version of the Trio64. It uses a narrower 32-bit DRAM interface (vs. 64-bit).

The Trio64V2 improved on the 64V+ by including vertical bilinear filtering. The 2D graphics core was later used in the ViRGE/DX and ViRGE/GX. Like the corresponding ViRGE chips, the 64V2 also came in /DX and /GX variants, with the latter supporting more modern SDRAM or SGRAM. The final version, called the Trio3D, was in fact the successor to the ViRGE/GX2.

Integration

Trio chipsets offered strong yields, competitive pricing, and excellent performance. They were integrated into motherboard chipsets, and are featured in PC emulators such as DOSBox and Microsoft Virtual PC as a standard piece of reference hardware. Due to their popularity, a large amount of software was designed to be compatible with S3's graphics products.

External links

* [http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/VPC/VPC3_vs_VPC4.html Virtual PC 4.0 Test Results, S3 Trio emulated graphics chipset]