Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture

Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture (TIGA) was a graphics interface standard created by Texas Instruments that defined the software interface to graphics processors. Using this standard, any software written for TIGA should work correctly on a TIGA-compliant graphics interface card.

The TIGA standard is independent of resolution and colour depth which provides a certain degree of future proofing. This standard was designed for high-end graphics.

However, TIGA was not widely adopted. Instead, VESA and Super VGA became the "de facto" standard for PC graphics devices after the VGA.

Texas Instrument's TI 34010 and TI 34020 Graphics System Processors (GSP) were the only TIGA-compliant graphics processors.Fact|date=February 2008

The primary manufacturers of mainstream TIGA cards for the PC clone market included Number Nine Visual Technology and Hercules. Number Nine's PPC_060 was a well-known card which found acceptance in the CAD market. Hercules manufactured cards such as the Graphics Station and Chrome lines which were marketed primarily towards users of Microsoft Windows. In the early 1990's, Texas Instruments France (which had marketing control for the TIGA architecture and GSP chipsets in Europe) experimented with manufacturing and selling its own range of consumer oriented video cards based on TIGA and aimed at speeding up the user experience of MS Windows. These products were named TIGA Diamond (34020 based) and TIGA Star (34010 based), and provided a platform for selling TI DRAM and video palette chips as well as the GSP chips themselves.

Despite the superiority of the technology in comparison to typical SuperVGA cards of the era, the relatively high cost and emerging local bus graphics standards meant that IT distributors and PC manufacturers could not see a niche for these products at consumer level.

External links

* TMS340 Interface User's Guide [http://focus.ti.com/lit/ug/spvu015c/spvu015c.pdf spvu015c]
* TMS340 FAMILY GRAPHICS LIBRARY USER'S GUIDE [http://focus.ti.com/lit/ug/spvu027/spvu027.pdf spvu027]