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The Sun Elite3D m6 is a high-end 3D graphics accelerator designed for Sun Ultra workstations using the 64-bit UPA (Ultra Port Architecture) graphics interconnect. It represents a significant architectural advancement over Creator3D by adding dedicated floating-point geometry processing and higher-performance pixel engines while retaining full binary compatibility with Creator3D software.

Elite3D m6 implements a deep framebuffer consisting of dual 24-bit color buffers, an 8-bit overlay plane, and a 28-bit Z-buffer. Rendering performance is enabled by a highly parallel pipeline built around multiple Advanced Frame Buffer (AFB) ASICs: AFB Command, 6x AFB Float geometry processors, and 2 AFB Draw pixel processors. The AFB Draw ASICs are paired with 15MB of 3DRAM, reducing pixel read-modify-write latency from ~160 ns to ~10 ns. The AFB Float Geometry processors are each paired with 128K(144KBx36) of 143MHz SRAM for a total of 768KB.

The card supports hardware-accelerated OpenGL rendering, including Gouraud shading, alpha blending, stencil buffering, antialiased lines and points, accelerated lighting, and compressed geometry decompression. Stereo rendering is supported in double-buffered mode, with a dedicated stereo output connector.

Elite3D m6 connects directly to system memory via the UPA bus, allowing texture data to reside in main RAM and eliminating the need for large local texture storage. Video output is driven by a Brooktree BT498 RAMDAC, supporting high-resolution displays up to 1920×1200 at 70 Hz in single-buffered mode. The card was positioned as Sun’s flagship workstation graphics solution in the late 1990s, offering several-fold geometry performance improvements over Creator3D for MCAD, visualization, and scientific workloads.

https://www.dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_syshbk_V4.1/Devices/Graphics/GRAPH_AFB.html