Oak Warp 5 Final Reality

Here is a video of Final Reality running on the unreleased Warp 5 from Oak Technology.

This particular board is a review sample, made by Metabyte, called the Wicked 3D. Scheduled to ship a few weeks before the first Voodoo 2 card was to be made available on the market, the Wicked3D Warp 5 was officially announced in early December of 1997. Technologically, the Warp 5 was ahead of all chipsets at the time, and would have put Metabyte "on the map". Unfortunately, Oak Technologies, only one day after Metabyte announced the card, divested all interests in their graphics and multimedia division.

The drivers never fully matured, hence there are texture anomalies in a lot of games, this video was shot with the 5177 driver, which even though considered an early Beta, still provides support for Directx 6. Unfortunately, the Oak Warp 5 does not support OpenGL, but games that use OpenGL can be run via an S3 OpenGL to Directx wrapper which fortunately works with the Warp 5.

If anyone has got a later driver revision, please contact me so I can do some proper benchmarks.

The Warp 5 was their first and only 2D/3D graphics accelerator chip. Warp 5 was a tile-based deferred renderer (TBDR), similar to PowerVR's chipsets. In the same vein as the S3 ViRGE chip, the Warp 5 was pin-compatible with a 2D-only predecessor. The chip was never released because ATI acquired the technology. It was Oak's final mainstream graphics chip development effort.

This graphics processor was based on a region concept and had many similarities to Microsoft's Talisman architecture. The chip processed each region at a time and did on chip z-sorting and anti-aliasing (which interestingly, cannot be turned off). As a result, the chip did 24-bit floating point Z, sub-pixel anti-aliasing, order independent translucency, non-linear fogging and atmospheric effects and MIP-Mapping. Typically, such region based architectures are gated by the number of polygons that can be processed per region, but Oak claimed that there were no such limitations in the WARP 5.

The specifications included:

* 50m pixels/sec (all features turned on)
* EDO and SGRAM Memory Supported - 8MB
* On-chip Texture Cache
* 2D GUI acceleration
* Video Scaling in Y
* VBI support Including Intercast
* 220MHz RAMDAC
* Resolutions to 1600 X 1200
* Direct3D and BRender APIs supported
* OS support Windows 95 and Windows NT
* Packaging - 256 pin BGA
* Pin Compatibility with OAK OTI-74217 EON 2D GUI accelerator


Platform :

Intel Pentium MMX 233Mhz
Aopen AX5T Rev1.6 Intel i430TX
64Mb EDO RAM
Metabyte Wicked 3D S/N 209A13
5177 Driver
Sound Blaster Live!
Windows 98 SE
Directx 6.1a

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Oak
• Technology
• Warp
• Final
• Reality

[Timbervanduijvenbode]

Perhaps so, it's difficult to judge perfmance with Beta drivers. Although it's not so much the performance, but the utter brilliance of the image quality, Voodoo, Riva 128 etc. didn't have much on it's high level of AA.

[leileilol]

Somebody get this man a VGA framegrabber!

[xenocore01]

I still love the audio from this demo. Also, gives you a hint for how long Max Payne was in development for.... :-)

[dranoel1963]

whats this oak for?

[cusbrar1]

by region based rendering I believe you mean tiling... which became rather common the dreamcast for one used it and so do later PowerVR graphics chips not sure if Nividia and ATI do but it is probable

[anss321]

Not amazing but it clearly had potential. The big rival would have been the Riva128 and depending on the price could have put up a good fight. Knowing that Nvidia would shortly follow up with the TNT we can only guess if Oak could keep pace.