Visualize EG
The Visualize EG is a Hewlett-Packard 2D graphics card used in their Series 700 UNIX workstations.
The Visualize-EG was the basic graphics card in the era of HP's older B, C and J class workstations. In those, EG was the integrated display device, although it was also available in GSC and later PCI card form. EG is a descendant of HP's CRX family of graphics devices.
Despite being entry level, and offering no hardware 3D features, EG had excellent 2D performance. Specifications are:
- Resolutions up to 1280 × 1024 at 75 Hz.
- 8 planes providing up to 256 simultaneously displayed colours chosen from a true-color palette.
- Two 256-entry hardware colour maps.
- HP Color recovery technology for simulated True Color using only 8 planes.
- Extra resolution – up to 1600 × 1200 or 1200 × 1600 @ 75 Hz.
- 16 more planes, giving 24 in total:
The EG features an accelerated 2D graphics engine that is capable of:
- BitBLT featuring boolean and arithmetic raster operations at up to 241 million pixels per second.
- Filling – a very fast hardware fill allows filling of rectangular areas with solid color or stippled pattern. It is also possible to fill with bitmap patterns.
- Vectors – the hardware can produce over 7 million 10-pixel X Window System compliant vectors per second.
- Trapezoids – hardware support for trapezoids means filled polygons can be created at a rate of 106 million pixels per second.
- Window clip and offset – time-consuming clipping and relative co-ordinate translation are provided for in hardware.
- Hardware cursor – a 2-color 64 × 64 pixel 'sprite' is provided for presenting the cursor.