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From: mmshah@athena.mit.edu (Milan M Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Tseng 4000 / Orchid Pro II - mostly hype?
Message-ID: <1991Apr16.233527.21277@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 16 Apr 91 23:35:27 GMT
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 58

Hello!

I post this in the hope that it will benefit others on the net.

After hearing all the good things about the Orchid Prodesigner II and
the Tseng 4000 chipset based super vga cards, I decided to get one myself.
I was *very* disappointed.

First of all, I have a 20 MHz 386 machine with 64K cache, 8 Megs of RAM. I
have a Paradise 512K card, and my main environment is Windows 3.0 in enhanced
mode and in 800x600x16 resolution. Video drivers used are the ones from cica.
I use it mainly for development work, so I normally have 3-4 dos apps all
running in windows. (Edit, compile, Microsoft's QH ie, quickhelp) etc. My main
aim was to have 4 complete windows on the screen, all just a mouse click away.
My main gripe is that the video update rate of each dos window is abysmal; 
running Checkit in a window gives a video rate of ~980 cps.

After asking on the net, I heard that with Tseng 4000 based card, people were
getting ~3000 cps (doubtless on 25 MHz machines and above). So I ordered an
Orchid Pro II with 1 Meg.

Well, I couldn't get the Orchid Pro II to beat the Paradise, especially while
running dos apps in a window. This was while running the card in 16 bit mode.
Unfortunately, my work demands a debugging monitor, and with the mono card in,
the Pro switched to 8 bit mode. Video rate in a window dropped to about 800 
cps. Surprizingly, the Paradise stays in 16 bit mode even with the mono card 
in. I have no idea why, but I ain't askin.

Moreover, the 800x600 drivers for the Pro II have, in my opinion, a serious
flaw : they use the fonts intended for 8514 (1034x768 mode). I don't like this
because it takes up too much of my screen real estate : all the default window
borders and scroll bars take up more space etc. I tried to modify my system.ini
to get the smaller fonts etc. and succeeded, but it didn't solve the problem of
title bars and scroll bars etc. taking up much more room.

Lastly, I did try their 256 color drivers, and yes, here, the Orchid Pro II
pretty much blew my Paradise away. Note, however, that this is not because the
Orchid Pro becomes faster at the higher color mode, but that my Paradise is
next to unusable at 256 colors. However, because of windows half hearted
support of more than 20 colors, I don't think 256 color is too useful for a 
user like me.

Thus, my conclusion is that at the current state of windows 3.0, processor
cycles are the big bottle neck. The Tseng 4000 chipset might be faster, but its
not enough to make much of a difference.

So, if you, like me, are tempted to dump your current super vga card and
replace it with a tseng 4000 based one, you might want to recheck the bennies.
I am convinced that for windows, a faster mainboard results in a much higher
increase in performance.

I hope this helps someone.

Milan
.