Having just gone through the process of upgrading my video card, I
thought I'd post some comparitive benchmarks for my old ATI card and
the two new ones I have used.
All benchmarks on Pentium 133, Triton II 430HX chipset with 24mb EDO.
ATI MATROX VIDEOLOGIC
CBENCH VGA 143 177 177
CBENCH SVGA 41 52 56
GP2 VIDEO 157(!) 487 497
QUAKE 640x480 ----- 12.5fps 12.6fps
'MONACO OCCUPANCY' 170% 164% 164%
NASCAR 'ALL ON SVGA' 13fps 25fps*** 16fps
*** This is the specially optimised NASCAR Racing which looks utterly
stunning with all detail and all cars in SVGA at 25fps at all tracks
except Bristol where we have to slum it at 18-19fps full detail!
There appears to be nothing between the Matrox and the ET6000 cards as
far as dos performance goes in VGA (I thought I had forgot to swap the
cards while testing them!), in SVGA the ET6000 is marginally faster.
The ET6000 cards are ALL cheaper than the Matrox (in the UK at least),
Grafixstar600 is approx 163ukp, Lightspeed 128 is 146ukp (but try
finding one:-( whilst the Hercules Dynamite 128 (are you listening,
John?) is an unnacceptable 195ukp.
Windoze performance appears similar although the Matrox drivers seem
slightly more reliable than the Videologic.
Videologic have a UK tech support line, the Others AFAIK don't.
John Wallace has been singing the praises of the ET6000 for some time
now and I think the as far as price vs performance goes, you cannot go
far wrong with this chipset.
I have resisted giving you any fps figures for GP2 as what is a
comfortable frame rate seems to be a very personal thang.
Hope this helps....
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....We are dreamers, shapers, singers and makers.
We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner.
Holographic demons and invocations of equations.
These are the tools we employ....
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Matrox just came out with Version 3.11 of their video drivers. It
supports DirectX 2.0's Direct3D. It's available at www.matrox.com\mgaweb
