Famous Graphics Chips: Microsoft’s Talisman — the most influential chip that never was

In 1996 as the 3D graphics chip market was in its ascendency, with new companies declaring devices every month, Microsoft shocked the industry by introducing a radically different approach — tiling. The conventional architecture for a graphics chip had been (and still is) what’s known as an immediate mode pipeline. The tiling approach composites 2D sub-images to the screen.  Microsoft presented its new 3D graphics and multimedia hardware architecture, code-named Talisman, at SIGGRAPH in 1996. Microsoft said at the time, “[it] exploits both spatial and temporal coherence to reduce the cost of high-quality animation.” The goals of this new technology