From: chuckc@fc.hp.com (Chuck Cairns)
Subject: Re: ATI Ultra Pro vs. #9GXe
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 20:39:40 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Fort Collins Site
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1.6 PL6]

Drew William Hess (dhess@Xenon.Stanford.EDU) wrote:
: I noticed a Number Nine Computer Corp. ad in the October 26 issue of PC Week.
: The ad is for the #9GXe, Number Nine's new accelerated graphics board.
: 
: What really caught my attention was a graph that shows the ATI Graphics
: Ultra Pro clocking in at 25.5M WINMARKs (which is what ATI advertises for it),
: and the #9GXe getting 40.5M WINMARKs!  I find this number amazing.
: Prices start at $495 retail
: 
: Has anyone seen similar claims for other S3 86C928-based boards?  Does anyone
: actually *have* a #9GXe and can back this benchmark up?
: 
: -dwh-
: dhess@cs.stanford.edu
: 
 Hi I've been looking into this lately as well. It seems that this is that
 magic "Comdex time of year". Seems that a veritable flood of new boards 
 are soon to roll out onto the market. It appears that 30 to 40 million
 Winmarks will be pretty standard soon. 

Of note are boards based on the S3 86C805 and S3 86C928 chip. It looks
like #nine's #8GXe in base on the 928. That board uses VRAM (video ram=$) versus
the 805's use of cheaper DRAM.  It'll be interesting to see what the 
performance will be  less expensive cards based on the 805. 

Others are the Western digital WD9031 as used in the Diamond Speedstar 24X.
I'm not familiar with any other new WD  chips. One Concern of mine  is
that the 24X seems only to be able to do ANY HI-COLOR (i.e. >256) at 
60Hz. This is clearly a problem IMHO.  I wonder it that's just a RAMDAC
limitation and not a WD9031 limitation?

Then there is the much acclaimed and maligned Mach 34 in the ATI Ultra +/pro.
Will ATI get it's act together vis a vis drivers and OS/2?
 
  Does anyone know if Diamond or others are using the WD9031 or other WD chips
  to put out a card at 600x800 or 1024x768 by 65K colors at >70 Hz? 

It also Looks like the major card manufacturers and motherboard makers
are also really hopping on the VESA local bus (VL-BUS) standard.  I'm
personally little shaky on this since it's so new.  Anyone know the
difference between a VL-BUS rev .8 and a VL-BUS rev 1.0 ?  I got some
indication from ATI that all motherboards may not play with all VL-BUS
cards.  However, a motherboard maker I talked to had tested four hot new
VL_BUS graphics cards from four different manufacturers and they all
worked well in their (new)  VL-Bus motherboard.

A note here about "why VL-BUS" ... Clearly there seems to be a stampede in that
direction but most benchmarks say accelerated cards do "just fine on ISA
thank you" at least in windows. I can only think of two reasons:
 1) You need to do something like motion video (as I do) which takes a
    raw data rate which can't be pumped over the ISA/AT bus. I talked to the
    software-playback MPEG folks at Xing  and they said that the ISA bus is
    pretty saturated just pumping 8-bit color video at 320x240 so 16 or 
    greater bit-color motion video is not available on ISA. 

 2) You reason that, for best performance, dollar for dollar,  the card's
    1 to 4 megabyte linear address space must be mapped into memory. This 
    means either a limit of 12-15 megabytes ( probably meaning 12) in and
    ISA system or some sophisticated song and dance by the driver 
    writer. Note the problems which ATI has had with drivers and the
    terms "with memory aperture"  and "without memory aperture" in the
    ATI ultra pro postings. With VL-bus or EISA the "aperture" could be
    placed anywhere in the address space thereby avoiding problems.

My advice would be to wait until early 93  for a new graphics card IF you can
do so and let the market get out the new products and stabilize.  Likewise, 
if you are thinking of a new 486 system you may want to wait until the market 
stabilizes on the new VL-bus motherboards.


OS/2, Xfree and Free Un*x fans out there, I would write, call, FAX 
manufacturers to state you displeasure with proprietary practices like the 
Diamond 24X clock-programming issue. 

My $.02
cc
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