Revolution IV
The Revolution IV with 16 MB of SDRAM was first announced on 16th June 1998, with the 32 MB variant on 24th August 1998. Both were based upon Number Nine's then-new fourth generation 128-bit graphics chip, Ticket to Ride IV - a single chip 3D/2D/MPEG coprocessor.
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Released | June 1998 |
| Bus | PCI or AGP 1x/2x | |
| Chipset | Number 9 Ticket to Ride IV | |
| Standards | MDA, Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA | |
| Memory | 16 MB or 32 MB SDRAM | |
| Ports | 9-pin DSUB (RGB analogue video out) | |
| Part # | 01-428007-00 | |
| FCC ID | ||
| RAMDAC | IBM RGB524 (250 MHz) | |
| Price | At launch: $169 (16 MB), $219 (32 MB) | |
| See Also | Number Nine Revolution 3D |
It delivered an almost-threefold increase in performance over the prior generation Ticket to Ride processor which powered the Revolution 3D. It supported DirectX 6.0 as well as OpenGL in Windows 95 and NT. The card's 3D capabilities included a 32-bit Z-buffer, triangle setup engine, trilinear MIP mapping, anisotropic filtering and MPEG video texture support.
HawkEye was a display control utility for Windows that was included on the Revolution™ IV CD. With HawkEye, you could change the color and size of your cursor, view two side-by-side applications by enlarging the view of your desktop, calibrate screen tones and colors to more closely match printer output, eliminate screen flicker, and make screen images appear bigger and closer. It worked on Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0.
A special version of the Revolution IV was released for Flat Panels, called Revolution IV-FP.
Board Revisions
No information is known on the various board revisions for the Rev IV. This BIOS is stored in an Atmel AT29LV512 PLCC which has a 64 KB capacity.
Competition
The Revolution IV with its Ticket to Tide IV chipset competed in late 1998/early 1999 with other AGP chipsets including:
- nVidia RiVA TNT - Leadtek WinFast 3D S320, ELSA Victory II, ELSA Erazor II, Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Riva TNT, STB Velocity 4400 and Diamond Viper V550
- S3 Savage3D - Hercules Terminator Beast, Number Nine Savage Reality 357, Guillemot Maxi Gamer Phoenix and STB Nitro 3200
- 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee - Diamond Monster Fusion, Quantum3D Raven and Metabyte Wicked3D Vengeance
- Matrox MGA G200 - Matrox Millennium G200
- Intel i740
It was an interesting time when graphics cards could come from anywhere between 8 MB and 32 MB of SDRAM. Non-interlaced resolutions tended to be up to 1920 x 1200 at 60 to 75 Hz (though the Revolution IV beat them all with its ability to hit 77 Hz at this resolution).
Against this competition, however, the Ticket to Ride IV couldn't quite keep up with the nVidia RiVA TNT or the 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, but proved much better than Savage3D cards. Generally-speaking, its 3D and even 2D performance was middle-of-the-pack, better than the Matrox, Savage and Intel (which ranked bottom). The Banshee of course also supported 3Dfx' own GLIDE 3D API, so if you had a number of games that used this, they were a good choice but were limited in other ways since they never made use of AGP texturing.
In the Media
- Pure 128-Bit Graphics Power
- 16MB of SDRAM for Extreme performance
- World's First 128-bit Memory bus to SDRAM
- Integrated 250 MHz Pallette DAC
- Hot 3D, Awesome 2D Performance
- Full-Screen, 30 Frames/second MPEG-II Playback
- True Color (32-bit) to 1600 x 1200 @ 107Hz
- Extensive 3D Features for Direct3D(tm) and OpenGL(r) APIs
- $169 MSRP
- Ultimate Performance for Professional and Consumer Markets
Number Nine website, July 2017
Setting it Up
Details on how to install and set up the Revolution IV can be found in the Installation and User's Guide in the CD download below.
Downloads
Windows 95/98 Driver
Windows NT 4 Driver
More Pictures
This AGP version of the Rev IV belongs to DOS Days contributor, targeted, who also provided the ISO image of the CD-ROM.
