page_title: Number Nine Visual Technology
section_title: Number Nine Video Cards using Number Nine GPUs
hierarchical_section_title: Number Nine Visual Technology / Products / Number Nine Video Cards using Number Nine GPUs
caption_attribution_description: Number Nine Visual Technology Revolution3D (Ticket_to_Ride) PCI 8MB WRAM
context_page_description: Number Nine Visual Technology Corporation was a manufacturer of video graphics chips and cards from 1982 to 1999. Number Nine developed the first 128-bit graphics processor, as well as the first 256-color and 16.8 million color cards.
  The name of the company, as well as many of its products refer to Beatles songs. At system boot up, Number Nine cards' video BIOS splash screens display short phrases from Beatles songs related to the cards' model names. Card model names were usually preceded by a "#9" moniker.
context_section_description: The Imagine series GPUs (also called graphics accelerators) were Number Nine's own in-house designs. The Imagine series went through four generations:
  Imagine 128 (Imagine)
  Imagine 128-II (Imagine2)
  T2R (marked "Ticket to Ride"; sometimes marked "Imagine-3")
  T2R4 (marked "Ticket to Ride IV").
  The Imagine 128 GPU introduced a full 128-bit graphics processor—GPU, internal processor bus, and memory bus were all 128 bits.  However, there was no, or very little, hardware support for 3D graphics operations.
  The Imagine 128-II added Gouraud shading, 32-bit Z-buffering, double display buffering, and a 256-bit video rendering engine.
  The Ticket to Ride (Imagine-3) supported WRAM and both the AGP and PCI buses, had a 3D floating point setup engine, bilinear filtering and perspective correction, Gouraud shading, alpha blending, interpolated fogging, specular lighting, double and triple display buffering, 16-, 24- and 32-bit Z-buffering, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and hardware MIP mapping.
  The Ticket to Ride IV included an integrated 250 MHz RAMDAC, support for up to 32 MiB SDRAM, full scene anti-aliasing, per pixel fog, specular, and alpha effects, 10-level detail per pixel MIP mapping, bilinear and trilinear filtering, 8 bits per texel, 8 KB on-chip texture cache, hardware MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and a full IEEE 754 floating point pipeline 3D rendering setup engine.
  Number Nine graphics accelerators were used on the following Number Nine model video cards:
  These 1990s video cards were Number Nine's flagship cards of their day (the Imagine 128 and 128 Series 2 were very expensive).  None required a heatsink on the GPU.  The original Imagine 128 was introduced in 1994.  The Revolution IV was introduced in 1998.
  In addition to a standard analog VGA connector, the Revolution IV-FP (also called the Revolution IV-1600SW) had an OpenLDI digital interface connector for the  Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) 1600SW digital flat panel monitor.  The Revolution IV-FP was one of only a few standard video adapters with the OpenLDI interface for SGI's 1600SW digital flat panel monitor (some others were 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1-1600SW, I-O DATA GA-NF30/PCI, and Siemens Nixdorf S26361-D964 cards in some Siemens Nixdorf computer). SGI's 1600SW video adapters were proprietary (on-board) to their O2, 320, and 540 graphics workstations.  Formac made a limited number of PCI cards with OpenLDI for Apple Macs.
  The OpenLDI interface is neither physically nor electrically compatible with the modern DVI-D interface.  This was the early days of digital video connections and there were several competing, incompatible standards.  OpenLDI for stand-alone displays disappeared, but several aftermarket manufacturers made adapters to convert OpenLDI to DVI-D so more modern video cards would work with the 1600SW monitor.
  The 1600SW monitor was far ahead of its time and was eagerly sought long after it was out of production.  For this reason, for a time, Revolution IV-FP and Oxygen VX1-1600SW video cards commanded a premium price in the used market, long after they were out of production.
caption: Revolution 3D (Ticket to Ride), PCI bus
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