Editing Visualize EG

{{Unreferenced|date=December 2009}}
The '''Visualize EG''' is a [[Hewlett-Packard]] 2D [[graphics card]] used in their Series 700 [[UNIX]] [[workstation]]s.

The Visualize-EG (project name Graffiti) was the basic graphics card in the era of HP's older [[HP 9000|B, C and J class]] workstations (e.g., the B132). In those, EG was the integrated (on the [[motherboard]]) display device, although it was also available in [[GSC bus|GSC]] and later [[Peripheral Component Interconnect|PCI]] card form. EG is a descendant of HP's CRX family of graphics devices.

Despite being entry level, and offering no hardware 3D features, EG had excellent 2D performance. Specifications (without optional memory upgrade) are:

* Resolutions up to 1280&nbsp;×&nbsp;1024 at 75&nbsp;Hz.
* 8 planes providing up to 256 simultaneously displayed colours chosen from a [[24-bit color|true-color]] palette.
* Two 256-entry hardware colour maps.
* [[HP Color recovery]] technology for simulated True Color using only 8&nbsp;planes.

Optional memory can be used to provide one or the other of these benefits:

# Extra resolution – up to 1600&nbsp;×&nbsp;1200 or 1200&nbsp;×&nbsp;1600 @ 75&nbsp;Hz.
# 16 more planes, giving 24 in total: <!--the phrase before this isn't clear-->
16 of these become image planes with the other 8 used as moveable "overlay" planes. Another 2 hardware colormaps become available, providing 2 for the image planes and 2 for the overlay planes.

The EG features an accelerated 2D graphics engine that is capable of:
* [[BitBLT]] featuring boolean and arithmetic raster operations at up to 241 million pixels per second.
* Filling – a very fast (up to 2.3 billion pixels per second) hardware fill allows filling of rectangular areas with solid color or stippled pattern. It is also possible to fill with [[bitmap]] patterns.
* Vectors – the hardware can produce over 7&nbsp;million 10-pixel [[X Window System]] compliant vectors per second.
* Trapezoids – hardware support for trapezoids means filled polygons can be created at a rate of 106 million pixels per second.
* Window clip and offset – time-consuming [[Clipping (computer graphics)|clipping]] and relative co-ordinate translation are provided for in hardware.
* Hardware cursor – a 2-color 64&nbsp;×&nbsp;64 pixel '[[sprite (computer science)|sprite]]' is provided for presenting the cursor.

The programming interface of the EG (and other [[Hewlett-Packard|HP]] graphics devices) has been kept private to HP, although efforts to release them are underway. The documentation needs to be "scrubbed" to check and remove company confidential material.

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[[Category:Graphics cards]]