Also known as AFB, for Advanced Frame Buffer, the Elite3D was a graphics card produced by Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s and early 2000s for use in their UltraSPARC workstations. It attached to the UPA bus, and was a faster version of the Creator3D in most respects. It was approximately equivalent to SGI's Solid IMPACT card, though the m6 had as much geometry performance as the Maximum IMPACT. Unlike the Max IMPACT, though, the Elite3D had no dedicated TRAM, nor any texture mapping acceleration.

AFB cards had 15MB of 3DRAM as a framebuffer. In order to support double buffering in all video modes, they were limited to a maximum resolution of 1280x1024, but supported both 8-bit and 24-bit visuals, and also hardware overlay planes. Two main versions existed, the m3 and m6. The Elite3D m3 had one hardware geometry engine, while the m6 had two. There were two series produced, but the only difference between them was that the second-series Elite3D had a faster geometry engine. They could also use any unallocated framebuffer RAM as a texture cache, but did not have dedicated texture memory. The AFB had hardware acceleration for transform and lighting, plus Gouraud shading and Phong shading, but not texture mapping.

The Elite3D m3 made its debut in the Sun Ultra 30, in the vertical UPA form factor. The m6 appeared shortly thereafter. A horizontal version of the Elite3D m6 was produced as an upgrade for the Enterprise 450 and the Ultra 2, as well. It's not officially supported in the Ultra 1, but apparently does work. The vertical versions were sold with the Ultra 10, 30, 60 and 80, but also work in the Blade 1000 and Blade 2000.

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