Glaze3D

Vaporware family of graphics cards
Glaze3D was a family of graphics cards announced by BitBoys Oy on August 2, 1999, that would have produced substantially better performance than other consumer products available at the time. The family, which would have come in the Glaze3D 1200, Glaze3D 2400 and Glaze3D 4800 models, was supposed to offer full support for DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.2, AGP 4×, 4× anisotropic filtering, full screen anti aliasing and a host of other technologies not commonly seen at the time. The 1.5 million gate and 128 to 512 MB of external SDRAM. The maximum supported video resolution was 2048×1536 pixels.

The Glaze3D family of cards were developed in several generations, beginning with the original Glaze3D "400" with multi channel RDRAM instead of internal eDRAM. This was offered only as IP but with no takers. Bitboys revised the design and decided to have it manufactured themselves, in cooperation with Infineon Technologies, the chip fabrication arm of Siemens. They came up with a new Glaze3D pitched for release in Q1, 2000. The card promised extremely high performance compared to contemporary consumer GPUs. As bug hunting, validation and manufacturing problems delayed the launch, new features became necessary and a DX7 variant with built in hardware Transform & Lighting was announced, but never appeared. The GPU was later redesigned under a new codename, Axe, to take advantage of DirectX 8 and compete with a developing competition. The new version sported such features as an additional 3 MB of eDRAM, proprietary Matrix Antialiasing and a vastly improved fillrate, as well as offering a programmable vertex shader and widened internal memory bus. The new card was to have been released as Avalanche3D by the end of 2001. The third development, codenamed Hammer, started development as Axe lost viability toward the end of 2001. This new card was to be a high end DirectX 9 part, offering new features such as occlusion culling, improved rendering performance and various other innovations. This version, like the ones before it, never shipped commercially. Bitboys turned to mobile graphics and developed an accelerator licensed and probably used by at least one flat panel display manufacture, although it was intended and designed primarily for higher end handhelds. Later on ATI bought Bitboys for an extra research and development unit, so as of 2008 Bitboys was owned by AMD. In 2009, Bitboys was transferred to Qualcomm.