10 Facts About Microsoft Talisman

Microsoft Talisman was a complete suite of software and hardware that attempted to solve the tiled rendering problem.

Microsoft Talisman calculated that each tile could be re-used for about four frames on average, thereby reducing load on the CPU by about four times.

Microsoft Talisman had no analog of a framebuffer, rendering chunks on demand directly to the screen as the monitor's scan line progressed down the screen.

When Microsoft Talisman was first made widely public at the 1996 SIGGRAPH meeting, they promised a dramatic reduction in the cost of implementing a graphics subsystem.

That is, Microsoft Talisman was hoped to be a part of a larger media chip, as opposed to an entire 3D system that would stand alone in a system.

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At the time, Microsoft Talisman was working with several vendors in order to develop a reference implementation known as Escalante.

Additionally, the Microsoft Talisman concept required tight integration between the display system and the software using it.

However, for any game that had already been written, or those that didn't want to be tied to Microsoft Talisman, this made the D3D system slower and considerably less interesting.

Nevertheless, several of the ideas pioneered in the Microsoft Talisman system have since become common in most accelerators.

Only the one key idea of Microsoft Talisman, asking for updates to geometry only "when needed", has not been attempted since.