This is my repository of various (usually failed) graphics endeavors that have tried (and failed) to change the graphics industry.
Fahrenheit was an effort designed primarily by Microsoft and SGI to create a unified high-level API for PC 3D graphics to unify Direct3D and OpenGL. It was pretty much responsible to killing SGI as a company after they put pretty much all their effort into Fahrenheit and Microsoft put all theirs into DirectX 7.
Talisman was a Microsoft project first introduced in 1996 to build a new 3D graphics architecture based on quickly compositing 2D “sub-images” onto the screen, an adaptation of tiled rendering. This was an attempt to address the problem of 3D graphics requiring lots of (at the time very expensive) memory. The introduction of commodity 3D graphics accelerators at about the same time quickly made it evident that a radical restructuring of how graphics API’s interact with the OS wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. No Talisman-based systems were ever released commercially, and the project was quietly allowed to die after 18 months.