CG30 semi-intelligent frame buffer (photo credit Stephen
Dowdy)
The ROP chips are along the bottom with the datapath above. We included a second keyboard/mouse port on this board and could support multiple users on one machine. We also included a Brooktree RAMDAC with a built-in hardware cursor which was used by X11 but not any of Sun's software. The Western Research Lab at DEC had published an article claiming that raster-op functions were all the acceleration a 2D graphics board really needed and in a way they were right. This board was plenty fast for its day (although I remember early experiments with real-time video and it sucked at that).