TheS3 Trio range were popularvideo cards for personal computers and were S3's first fully integrated graphics accelerators. As the name implies, three previously separate components were now included in the sameASIC: the graphics core,RAMDAC andclock generator. The increased integration allowed a graphics card to be simpler than before and thus cheaper to produce.
The Trio64 and 64V+, first appeared in 1995, are essentially fully integrated solutions based upon the earlier Vision 864 and 868 accelerator chipsets. Like the 868, the 64V+ has a video acceleration engine that can performYUV toRGBcolor space conversion and horizontallinear filteredscaling. Unlike the Vision964/968, the Trio chips do not supportVRAM, and are limited toFPM DRAM andEDO DRAM only. The 2D graphics hardware was later used in theViRGE.
The Trio32 is a low-cost version of the Trio64 with a narrower 32-bit DRAM interface (vs. 64-bit).
The Trio64V2 improved on the 64V+ by including verticalbilinear filtering. The 2D graphics core was later used in the ViRGE/DX and ViRGE/GX. Like the corresponding ViRGE chips, the 64V2 also came in /DX and /GX variants, with the latter supporting more modernSDRAM orSGRAM. The final version, called the Trio3D, was effectively the 128-bit successor to the ViRGE/GX2.
The various Trio chips were used on many motherboards. Because of the popularity of the series and the resulting compatibility advantages, they are used in various PC emulation and virtualization packages such asDOSBox,Microsoft Virtual PC,PCem and86Box.