Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture (TIGA) is a graphics interface standard created by

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

that defined the software interface to graphics processors. Using this standard, any software written for TIGA should work correctly on a TIGA-compliant graphics interface card. The TIGA standard is independent of resolution and color depth which provides a certain degree of

future proof Future-proofing is the process of anticipating the future and developing methods of minimizing the effects of shocks and stresses of future events. Future-proofing is used in industries such as electronics, medical industry, industrial desig ...

ing. This standard was designed for high-end graphics. However, TIGA was not widely adopted. Instead,

VESA VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an American technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve the information, searc ...

and

Super VGA Super VGA (SVGA) is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards that extended IBM's VGA specification. When used as shorthand for a resolution, as VGA and XGA often are, SVGA refers to a resolution of 800×600. History ...

became the ''de facto'' standard for PC graphics devices after the

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can no ...

. Texas Instrument's

TMS34010 The TMS34010, developed by Texas Instruments and released in 1986, was the first programmable graphics processor integrated circuit. While specialized graphics hardware existed earlier, such as blitters, the TMS34010 chip is a microprocessor ...

and TMS34020 Graphics System Processors (GSP) were the original TIGA-compliant graphics processors.

Clone Hardware

The primary manufacturers of mainstream TIGA cards for the PC clone market included

Number Nine Visual Technology Number Nine Visual Technology Corporation was a manufacturer of video graphics chips and cards from 1982 to 1999. Number Nine developed the first 128-bit graphics processor (the Imagine 128), as well as the first 256-color (8-bit) and 16.8 m ...

and

Hercules Hercules (, ) is the Roman equivalent of the Greek divine hero Heracles, son of Jupiter and the mortal Alcmena. In classical mythology, Hercules is famous for his strength and for his numerous far-ranging adventures. The Romans adapted the ...

graphics cards using Texas Instruments' TIGA co-processors were made from about 1986 to 1992, including the ''

Pepper Pepper or peppers may refer to: Food and spice * Piperaceae or the pepper family, a large family of flowering plant ** Black pepper * ''Capsicum'' or pepper, a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family Solanaceae ** Bell pepper ** Chili ...

'' and '' GX'' series.

manufactured cards such as the ''Graphics Station'' and ''Chrome'' lines which were marketed primarily toward users of Microsoft Windows. In the early 1990s, Texas Instruments France (which had marketing control for the TIGA architecture and GSP chipsets in Europe) experimented with manufacturing and selling its own range of consumer oriented video cards based on TIGA and aimed at speeding up the user experience of Windows. These products were named ''TIGA Diamond'' (34020 based) and ''TIGA Star'' (34010 based), and provided a platform for selling TI DRAM and video palette chips as well as the GSP chips themselves.

Impact

Despite the superiority of the technology in comparison to typical SuperVGA cards of the era, the relatively high cost and emerging local bus graphics standards meant that IT distributors and PC manufacturers could not see a niche for these products at consumer level. The (limited) success of the graphics cards paved the way for products based upon various derivatives and clones of IBM's 8514 architecture. Part of the effort to make graphics accelerators useful required TI to convince Microsoft that the internal interfaces to its Windows Operating System had to be adaptable instead of hard-coded. Indeed, all versions of Windows prior to

Windows 3.0 Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. It features a new graphical user interface (GUI) where applications are represented as clickable icons, as opposed to the list of file names seen in its predeces ...

were "

hard-coded Hard coding (also hard-coding or hardcoding) is the software development practice of embedding data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, as opposed to obtaining the data from external sources or generating it at ...

" to specific graphics hardware.

References

External links

*TMS340 Interface User's Guid
spvu015c
*TMS340 FAMILY GRAPHICS LIBRARY USER'S GUID
spvu027
Graphics Architecture Graphics cards {{compu-hardware-stub