Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!romp!auschs!d75!woan
From: woan@nowhere (Ronald S Woan)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Graphics cards, 768x1024x256
Summary: not necessarily the card
Message-ID: <3523@d75.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 91 18:08:42 GMT
References: <1991Feb17.161516.9589@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@d75.UUCP
Reply-To: woan@peyote.cactus.org
Organization: Austin School of Hardknocks
Lines: 29

In article <1991Feb17.161516.9589@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) writes:
>A friend got, a couple of days ago, a new 33 MHz 486 PC with an Orchid
>Prodesigner Plus card with a meg of memory. He set it up to run Windows in the
>768x1024x256 color mode. It is amazingly fast. Far faster than my 20 MHz
>386 machine running a Video 7 card at 600x800x16 colors. Screen redraws
>when returning from a full-screen DOS session are almost instantaneous.
>
>Have other people tried a similar setup? At least for what I tried, with
>this setup I could only call Windows "blazingly fast".
>
>Is this card the way to go?

It is not a bad card, but you must understand that these Super VGA
cards are just dumb frame buffers, so the observed performance, is
largely due to a faster CPU/bus driving the card and perhaps a better
written Windows driver. For really good performance at such high
resolutions, you should be looking at those with hardware assist (i.e.
TI340?0 graphics coprocessors); they have come down in price and are
certainly close to the Orchid's price level. Then again, any ET4000
based card will probably perform similarly to the Orchid board and
they start at around $220 for a board with 1 MB (Swan and PC Brand).



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