Oak Technologies
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Oak Technology was a supplier of semiconductor chips for sound cards, graphics cards and optical storage devices such as CD-ROM, CD-RW and DVD. In 2003, it was acquired by Zoran Corporation.

Oak Technology helped develop the ATAPI standard and provided the oakcdrom.sys CD-ROM driver that was ubiquitous on DOS-based systems in the mid-1990s.

History

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2008)

Oak Technologies was founded in 1987. During the late 1980s through the early 1990s, Oak was a supplier of PC graphics (SVGA) chipsets. Oak enjoyed modest success in the value segment (low-end) of the market, but without an effective Windows accelerator, ultimately failed to remain competitive.

Products

Warp 5 - OTI 64317

Warp 5 Test Board

Close-up of Warp 5 chip

During the late 1990s, Oak was developing their first and only 2D/3D graphics accelerator chip. Warp 5 was to be a tile-based deferred renderer (TBDR), similar to PowerVR's chipsets. In the same vein as the S3 ViRGE chip, the Warp 5 was pin-compatible with a 2D-only predecessor. The chip was never released because ATI acquired the technology. It was Oak's final mainstream graphics chip development effort.

This graphics processor was based on a region concept and had many similarities to Microsoft's Talisman architecture. The chip processed each region at a time and did on chip z-sorting and anti-aliasing. As a result, the chip did 24-bit floating point Z, sub-pixel anti-aliasing, order independent translucency, non-linear fogging and atmospheric effects and MIP-Mapping. Typically, such region based architectures are gated by the number of polygons that can be processed per region, but Oak claimed that there were no such limitations in the WARP 5.

The specifications included:

• 50m pixels/sec (all features turned on)
• EDO and SGRAM Memory Supported - 8MB
• On-chip Texture Cache
• 2D GUI acceleration
• Video Scaling in Y
• VBI support Including Intercast
• 220MHz RAMDAC
• Resolutions to 1600 X 1200
• Direct3D and BRender APIs supported
• OS support Windows 95 and Windows NT
• Packaging - 256 pin BGA
• Pin Compatibility with OAK OTI-74217 EON 2D GUI accelerator

References

• "Inside Look @ Metabyte" by Amer "Mossad" Ajami, October 13, 1998, retrieved December 26, 2005
• "Oak Warp 5 Review" by Rage's Hardware, Date Unknown, retrieved December 26, 2005
• "Video Card Benchmark Page" by Rage's Hardware, Date Unknown, retrieved December 26, 2005

External links

• http://list.driverguide.com/list/company745/ - some drivers for Oak graphics cards