Get Your Windows Video Up to Speed with These Graphics Accelerators
by: David Gabel, Reviews Editor, Janice J. Chen, Technical Editor, Philip Albinus, Assistant Reviews Editor, and Ian Etra, Lab Assistant
Whenever you use your computer, you interact with the display system--the monitor and the graphics adapter. And without a fast graphics accelerator that can display a rainbow of colors and paint your screen lickety-split, your Windows just won't look so good, no matter how fancy your monitor is.
A faster display adapter, with more colors and more pixels, definitely makes working in Windows more efficient and pleasant. Good, solid video acceleration means that those .AVI files that used to jerk around on your screen will flow smoothly and display quickly and clearly. With multimedia becoming all the rage, that's an important consideration when you're setting up a system.
We looked at 10 video cards that feature graphics acceleration and hardware video acceleration, which is faster than software acceleration. Manufacturers sent us cards with either 2MB or 4MB of video memory. That memory was either pricey but fast VRAM, or more moderately priced--but generally slower--DRAM. One vendor, STB Systems, used the relatively new EDO (Extended Data Out) RAM. With 2MB of display memory, a card can generate a resolution of 1024x768 with 65,536 colors. This should be more than adequate for a Windows system running common business tasks, like spreadsheets with graphics, or presentations. We tested all the cards at this resolution and color depth.
While testing these cards, we discovered some interesting facts.
Some of the cards we reviewed, like the one from Number Nine, are brand new, shipping just in time for us to look at them. Others, like those from Matrox and ATI, have been out for a while and are just about due for an upgrade. In fact, Matrox's new Millennium card, which will feature hardware MPEG playback, wasn't shipping in time to be included here. Nevertheless, these 64-bit video accelerators all performed well, so pull up a chair and take a look at what we found.
When we reviewed the Actix GraphicsEngine Ultra 64 PCI in our video accelerator roundup last year, we had a few problems with the card, particularly with the setup utility. This year's entry from Actix--the Graphics Engine Ultra 64 AV--is the new and improved version of that same card. Based on S3's Vision968 graphics accelerator, the newer card resolves problems found last year and delivers improved performance.
Software installation caused no problems. A simple Windows setup procedure installs all the included software automatically, but it doesn't let you customize the installation. Actix chose a minimalist approach to software, with everything included on one floppy disk. "Everything" means drivers for a variety of applications, including AutoCAD, as well as three utilities: AV Mode Select, AV Refresh Select and AV Centering Utility. The card we reviewed came with an old manual that referred to out-of-date utilities, but the current utilities are so simple that you won't really need a manual. A new manual should be out by the time you read this.
The card supports the bidirectional VESA DDC 1 and 2 Plug-and-Play standards, so if you have a DDC-compliant monitor, driver setup and monitor configuration are even easier.
The AV Mode Select utility lets you set the number of available colors, font size, font caching and refresh rate at each resolution. You can switch resolution and refresh rates quickly, but the program restarts Windows each time you change the settings. If you have any applications open, you'll have to close them all first.
The AV Refresh Select utility, on the other hand, lets you change refresh rates on the fly. It's a DOS utility, but can also run in a Windows DOS session, enabling you to change the refresh rate without having to restart Windows. Initially, the Refresh Select utility wouldn't work for us, but a call to the company quickly brought us up to speed. The utility requires that a mouse driver be loaded in DOS. After loading the Microsoft Mouse Driver version 9.01 in DOS, we were able to use the utility. This glitch was being fixed at press time, the vendor told us.
The card that we tested was configured with 4MB of VRAM and at 75Hz (non-interlaced) was capable of delivering 65,536 colors at 1280x1024 resolution or 16.7 million colors at 1024x768. In our tests, the GraphicsEngine Ultra 64 AV was set at 65,536 colors and 1024x768 resolution with a refresh rate of 75Hz.
Measured with the WINDOWS Magazine Wintune video benchmarks, the GraphicsEngine scored just under the Diamond card. The Actix card scored even better in the scaled video tests, displaying an average of 30 frames per second (fps) without dropping any frames. The GraphicsEngine also scored decently in our Excel, Fractal Painter and PowerPoint tests.
The included AutoCAD driver automatically invokes the GraphicsEngine Ultra 64 Series high-speed drawing engine, so it's not surprising that the Actix card did well in our AutoCAD tests, coming in third behind the Number Nine and Matrox cards. The driver is compatible with AutoCAD Release 11, 12 and 13. For Release 13, all configuration is automatic.
The GraphicsEngine Ultra 64 AV is a no-nonsense, no-frills video card. Though it doesn't have the bells and whistles of some of the other cards reviewed here, it provides solid performance, especially if you use AutoCAD or do a lot of graphics-intensive computing.
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Actix GraphicsEngine Ultra 64 AV
Price: 4MB, $529; 2MB, $345
In Brief: This new and improved video accelerator is particularly well-suited for AutoCAD users as well as people who use video-intensive business applications.
Actix Systems
800-927-5557, 408-986-1625
The ATI Graphics Pro Turbo was a solid performer but not the most inspiring on most of the tests we ran. While the Wintune benchmark scores placed it close to the bottom of our performance scale, it did come in first in our Painter test.
We got these benchmark results by using a new set of drivers downloaded from ATI's forum on CompuServe. Although they did improve the card's performance significantly, even with the new drivers, we can't say that this was a blazing performer. Driver installation proceeded through a DOS install program, which worked fine; a Windows install would have been nicer. Moreover, when downloading a set of drivers, you also have to download a program called LOAD64.ZIP, which unzips into an .EXE file that does the actual installation. This seemed like an unnecessary complication.
Having said that, though, most of the rest of the card's specifics are very nice. The most outstanding feature was the ATI Desktop utility, which gives you complete access to all of the card's capabilities and features.
You set video resolutions using a nifty slider control that sets both the color depth and video resolution. As you change the pixel resolution, the size of the desktop keeps pace, so that a video resolution setting of 1024x768 will give you a default desktop of the same size. You can also set the virtual desktop, with its own slider control, to a higher value than the pixel resolution for an even closer look. For example, you could create a virtual desktop of 1280x1024 while having pixel resolution of 1024x768. You could use this feature to view a large, complex illustration on the desktop at the workable pixel resolution you need.
We set the desktop, resolution and color depth on our 4MB card to our monitor's limit of 1280x1024 with true-color depth. We had nary a hitch at any of these resolutions, whether we used the WinSwitch applet--which provides on-the-fly switching--or the more conservative approach of opening the ATI Desktop and selecting the desired resolution from the FlexDesk+ applet.
Also included in FlexDesk+ is a DPMS applet for shutting down your monitor after a period of non-use, a color correction applet and a motion video applet. The DPMS applet worked flawlessly, as did the color correction. The motion video applet allows you to set color, tint, brightness and contrast. There were no controls for speed, which is the area in which this card fell short: It averaged 11fps in a 640x480 window, while many of the reviewed cards handled 30fps at that size.
The drivers and the card's utilities were well designed and gave us no trouble. But at $599, it was one of the most costly cards in this review, so we expected more.
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ATI Graphics Pro Turbo
Price: 4MB, $599; 2MB, $399
In Brief: A no-nonsense card, the Graphics Pro Turbo turned in solid performance, controlled by its versatile desktop utilities.
ATI Technologies
905-882-2600 x1, fax 905-882-2620
As its name implies, the Stealth 64 Video VRAM is targeted at users who make extensive use of video in their applications. Building on the success of the original Stealth 64, the card uses the newer S3 Vision968 processor along with a RAMDAC from Texas Instruments to accelerate playback of several compressed video formats, including Video for Windows, Cinepak and Indeo 3.2. It achieved near-flawless playback of .AVI files in scaled and full-screen windows, coming up just shy of the desired 30fps rate on our video benchmark. The card also ships a ready-to-use software MPEG-1 decoder. Although the software wasn't available at press time, a coupon for the software was in the box. An MPEG hardware upgrade will offer even faster performance for a $299 premium.
Installing the Stealth 64 Video VRAM is very straightforward, even for the most inexperienced users. While the install launches from DOS, it automatically loads Windows and installs all the drivers for you. If you can't find settings for your monitor in the extensive list of presets, the utility lets you selectively test refresh rates and save the configuration under whatever name you choose. The utility can store as many custom monitor profiles as you like.
The card we tested came with 4MB of VRAM, which allowed it to achieve the impressive resolution of 1600x1200 with 16-bit color and a VESA-compliant 76Hz refresh rate, and virtual desktops as large as 2048x1536. It also helped the card's performance on our benchmarks, which placed it at or near the top in every test.
Diamond's InControl Tools is automatically loaded at Windows startup and provides sophisticated controls that go beyond the typical resolution and color-depth adjustments. The interface includes controls for changing your cursor, icon fonts and font size, a customizable screen saver for VESA DPMS-compliant monitors, and a color calibration utility for on-screen adjustment of brightness, contrast and gamma. The card can also do resolution-switching and hardware zooming on the fly, both of which can be controlled by user-defined hotkeys. It even includes a video performance test, allowing you to toggle hardware acceleration and test the frame rate during playback. And though we had no problems with the card, the utility is able to automatically generate a debugging report that includes all your system information, should you need to contact technical support.
The Stealth 64 Video VRAM boasts a nice bundle of CD-ROM software, which includes the CorelDRAW 4.0 graphics package, Asymetrix 3D F/X for creating three-dimensional animation and effects, and Asymetrix Digital Video Producer for video editing. It also shipped with the latest version of Video for Windows. All in all, the Stealth 64 Video VRAM is a well-planned and powerful package for high performance video.
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Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM
Price: 4MB, $569; 2MB, $399
In Brief: The Stealth 64 Video VRAM is a great performer with a solid set of integrated utilities.
Diamond Multimedia Systems
800-4-MULTIMEDIA, 408-325-7000
The entrant from ELSA, a U.S. subsidiary of the German company, was a breeze to install and use.
The ELSA is based on the S3 Vision968 accelerator chip. It proved to be a competent, but not blazing, performer. In our Wintune video test, it scored an impressive 10.625 million pixels per second, which brought it in fifth of all the entrants in the review.
Installing the card leads you through a myriad of instructions, including an explanation on how the different cards from the company are configured. In our case, the Winner 2000 came with 4MB of video RAM and no DIP switches for configuration. So the hardware installation consisted of removing the computer's cover, plugging in the card and connecting the monitor cable.
Software was another matter. The manual tells you that if you want to install the Windows drivers, you must shell out to DOS (if you're running Windows) and run the setup program in the Windows directory. The instructions are clear and enabled us to install the proper drivers with no major fuss. A Windows-based install program would have been more straightforward. I found that there was one located on the utilities disk when I had to reinstall the drivers after my first test. For some reason, the documentation had apparently not kept pace with upgrades to the software, a not unusual situation. The driver disk did not include one for AutoCAD Release 13, but we downloaded that one from ELSA's forum on CompuServe (it's also available on the company's bulletin board).
The documentation assumes the user is fairly competent technically, much more than most documentation that I have run into in the past. Other manufacturers make installs simpler and more intuitive. Nevertheless, if you are comfortable working in DOS, have had some experience with hardware, and can follow printed directions, then installing this card and its drivers will be no problem.
The WINman utility lets you set screen resolution and color depth, specify your monitor type--including refresh rate and size--and more. WINman loads as you run setup and starts up the first time you enter Windows.
WINman is a simple menu- and dialog-box-based program that guides you through the process of matching your video card with your monitor, and with setting color depth and resolution. We switched the ELSA card to every supported resolution that the monitor could display, and the switching worked flawlessly.
You have to first tell WINman what resolution and color depth you want, at which time the program gives you a dialog to switch on a test pattern at that resolution. Look at the test pattern, and if it looks OK, you can tell WINman to store the settings (it can store a maximum of five) and the program will restart Windows at the new resolution and color depth.
WINman also allows you to set up a virtual window (a 1024x768 window, for example, at a screen resolution of 800x600) and then pan around the screen with the mouse. If you have saved several video modes, or one that uses panning, then starting Windows invokes WINman to set the mode you want.
Other utilities we were able to use include a power manager, which has three states in addition to active, and RUNman, which displays a small toolbar similar to that of Microsoft Office for quick starting of common applications.
Overall, this card offers good performance and an easy installation, although not as easy as some might like. Its $699 price, the highest in this review, might give you pause, however.
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ELSA Winner 2000PRO/X PCI-4
Price: $699
In Brief: A dependable performer that provided reasonable scores on our tests. Its utilities are comprehensive and easy to install.
ELSA
800-272-ELSA, 408-565-9669
The Focus 2theMAX OptiView stood out as the lowest-priced card in this review, but this price point isn't achieved without sacrifices. The card uses DRAM rather than VRAM, and doesn't offer more advanced features such as a virtual desktop or hardware zooming. With a maximum of 2MB of memory, the card is only capable of displaying 16-bit color at 1024x768, but it does maintain a comfortable refresh rate of 75Hz at 1280x1024 resolution.
The OptiView was the only card we saw that used the Alliance ProMotion-6410 chip. The processor seemed to handle certain tasks better than others. In our AutoCAD, Painter and PowerPoint benchmarks, it tested well against cards with more common chip sets. But on our Excel and low-level graphics benchmarks, the performance was significantly worse, indicating that the card is less adept at some everyday tasks such as extensive scrolling. While the card came bundled with Video for Windows, the video acceleration offered by the ProMotion was comparable to the previous generation of graphics coprocessors. The card was able to play an .AVI file at its recorded size of 320x240, but when we tried to scale the playback window, the OptiView began dropping two out of every three frames.
Installing the OptiView was simple enough with the setup program automatically copying and setting up the Windows drivers. If your monitor isn't listed among the preset configurations, you'll want to have its manual handy, since there is no utility for testing refresh rates. The OptiView's control panel covers all the basics, but offers little in the way of extras. You can change screen resolution, color depth and refresh rates through convenient drop-down lists, but you'll need to restart Windows after every change. You can also check the ROM and driver versions, and tweak the card's memory address.
Focus plans to offer MPEG decoding with later versions of the OptiView, but at the time we tested the card, the software was not available.
The OptiView is a fine entry-level card that provides performance comparable to that of some of its more expensive counterparts. It's a viable option for 64-bit graphics acceleration, but less desirable for anyone doing a lot of work with video.
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Focus 2theMAX OptiView
Price: $229
In Brief: The OptiView provides competitive performance in certain areas at a very competitive price.
Focus Information Systems
800-925-2378, 510-657-2845
What a difference a year makes. For the last WINDOWS Magazine video accelerator review, Genoa Systems submitted a video card that maxed out at 2MB of memory. This time around, the company submitted the Genoa VideoBlitz III AV, a 4MB video card with improved software.
The Genoa VideoBlitz III AV is a PCI-based video card based on the S3 Vision968 accelerator chip and the IBM 64-bit RAM DAC. With this impressive pedigree come impressive results--the VideoBlitz placed third in our performance tests. During the three "laps" of the PowerPoint, AutoCAD and Painter tests, the VideoBlitz III AV improved each time. During the AutoCAD portion of the testing, the second and third passes were substantially faster than the first pass. Installing the software for the VideoBlitz III AV was a bit troublesome. The software and the manual instruct you to choose a "Partial Install" while within DOS. For those of us who have cut our teeth on Windows and usually choose the "Complete Install" option when loading software, this may be confusing. But once we did choose the partial installation option, the drivers and video software loaded without a problem.
The VideoBlitz ships with ProPilot, a utility from Genoa Systems for controlling your video performance. The ProPilot utility does not load automatically like Number Nine's HawkEye utility, but once you activate it, you can reduce it to an icon.
ProPilot does not have all the bells and whistles found in HawkEye and is nowhere near as elegant, but ProPilot lets you change image resolution and color depths with a few mouse clicks. ProPilot lets you assign hotkeys for different resolutions and color depths. The VideoBlitz III AV must restart Windows when changing resolution and color depth. Switching resolutions is done within ProPilot with a series of assigned Alt and Function keys. You can save four display modes for the quick activation of various resolutions.
We had one pet peeve about ProPilot--when we tried to exit any Windows application with a fast Alt+F+X (File/Exit), the system temporarily locked up as ProPilot launched the ProPilot Switcher, its application launching tool. ProPilot Switcher's hotkey assignment is Alt+X. To avoid the confusion when making a quick keyboard exit, you can change the hotkey for ProPilot Switcher to Alt+W or some other assignment.
Like the other video cards in this review, the VideoBlitz III AV and ProPilot let you set a virtual window if you need to maneuver throughout a magnified portion of your workspace. With a hotkey combination, ProPilot lets you zoom in and out of your workspace like a fighter pilot.
As a video card, the VideoBlitz III AV was a trouper. It performed at 30fps on our video test in a 640x480 window without dropping any frames.
With a list price of $629, the Genoa VideoBlitz III AV is the second most expensive card in this review after the $699 ELSA card. This may be too pricey for some Windows users looking for video performance and value. But if money is no object, the VideoBlitz III AV offers impressive video acceleration and well designed software.
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Genoa VideoBlitz III AV
Price: 4MB, $629; 2MB, $429
In Brief: The VideoBlitz III AV is a good solid 4MB video accelerator card with above-average Windows utilities.
Genoa Systems Corp.
800-93-GENOA, fax 408-434-0997
With a name like Jakarta, you know Jazz Multimedia's video card is going to take you to new places--the question is, how quickly? Although the Jakarta has a lot more functionality than many of the other cards, its performance on our benchmark applications left something to be desired.
Based on the Tseng Labs W32p graphics chip, Jakarta's strength lies in displaying full-motion video. This comes as no surprise, since the Jakarta provides hardware-assisted video acceleration with Tseng's Viper video-image processor. The card we tested was configured with 2MB of DRAM and is capable of displaying 16.7 million colors at a resolution of 800x600, or 256 colors at 1280x1024. At all these settings, it was able to operate at a 75Hz refresh rate.
The Jakarta was designed with multimedia in mind: It combines MPEG video playback with MPEG audio decoding. An audio-out port on the card connects to your existing SoundBlaster-compatible sound card. If you don't have a sound card, you can still connect your own self-powered speakers to the port for playback of MPEG audio.
To get the most out of the Jakarta card, you'll have to spring for the optional Projector daughter card ($118, street) and the Port of Entry, a separate ISA card ($148, street). The Projector provides S-Video and composite video output, and an audio output, so you can send presentations to a TV or VCR. The Port of Entry provides inputs for these signals, so you can use your PC monitor to display TV inputs.
The Windows drivers and utilities installed quickly and easily, and the Windows setup program also copied all DOS drivers and utilities onto your hard disk. There is an AutoCAD driver for DOS, but not for Windows. The Jazz Multimedia Video Suite contains all the software you'll need to take advantage of the Jakarta, the Port of Entry and the Projector, including controls for TV, videotape, digital video and gaming systems. Also included with the Jakarta is AnyView Professional from Binar Graphics, a set of utilities that lets you change resolution, color depth, power management settings, as well as performance optimization settings on the fly. Though not as slick as other utilities that provide virtual desktops and on-the-fly zoom controls, AnyView Professional does operate smoothly and effectively.
Despite the plethora of features this card offers, the Jakarta was only able to deliver 7.13 million pixels per second on the Wintune graphics benchmark, placing it below most of the other cards in the review. When tested with business applications, the Jakarta was a medium performer and the slowest in our PowerPoint presentation test. Jakarta performed well when displaying scaled video. In our test, the Jakarta was able to display 30 frames per second and did not drop any frames.
For people who are willing to sacrifice performance to get more features, the Jakarta is the card with the works--for less than $300 more, you can get TV, video and gaming system support. If performance is your main consideration, though, you don't want to go to Jakarta.
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Jazz Jakarta
Price: $399 (street)
In Brief: This card was designed with multimedia in mind and has features galore. Two add-on cards take the Jakarta where no video card has gone before.
Jazz Multimedia
408-727-8900; fax 408-727-9092
The MGA Impression Plus card is one of the cards in this review that uses a proprietary graphics processor, eschewing the more common route of employing a third-party processor. That choice is a good one for Matrox, because it yielded a card that has very good performance, coupled with 3-D capabilities in hardware. Incorporating 3-D into the chip itself makes 3-D work much faster than if it were implemented in software. In fact, this is the only card we reviewed that has this feature. But since 3-D was not one of our review criteria, we did not test 3-D speed; the demo program that comes in the PowerDesk utility showed off some of the 3-D capabilities very nicely.
Installing this card is accomplished with a Windows-Setup-based installation, which proceeds as you would expect. You answer questions as they appear about where the install files are, where to put them, and the monitor you have. Our Sony Multiscan 20se wasn't on the list, so we told the program that we had a generic monitor. You have to select the type that most closely matches your monitor from a large list of different resolutions and refresh rates. As long as you know your monitor's specifications, this is no problem at all. This is one of the easiest installs in this review.
But after we installed the Matrox card's drivers, we thought we had a real problem. The icons on the Program Manager screen were overwritten with vertical color bars that were offbeat, to say the least. A call to Matrox revealed that the company could see no problems with the exact version of the drivers we had.
Through further investigation, we were able to determine that the problem was in the BIOS setup of the Dell Optiplex computer we were using. A portion of main memory from 512KB to 640KB was unavailable for the driver's use. When we reset the exclude line to none, the Matrox card worked just fine. We subsequently ran all the cards using this BIOS setting.
The MGA's performance was good, but not spectacular. It placed sixth overall in this field of 10 graphics accelerator cards, just behind the Diamond entry, a perennial speedster. We ran the card with all the drivers installed that came with it, including drivers for AutoCAD and the DCI drivers. All are on the included disks, each of which has its own setup program. One disk has the basic drivers and the PowerDesk utility, while the other has supplemental drivers for 3-D, video and other nice-to-have extras.
Once the drivers and the included utilities were installed, and the memory exclusion problem eliminated, we found the Matrox card to be a pleasure to use. The PowerDesk utility includes applets for controlling the screen resolution and color depth (you can define four display modes for quick switching), and the switch from one mode to another was an eyeblink operation. Additional applets in the MGA PowerDesk group include the 3-D viewer that allowed us to watch 3-D animation. You pan over the desktop, when the virtual desktop is larger than the real one, by simply moving the mouse to the edge of the screen and holding it there. The panning operation was smooth and intuitive.
You set DPMS capabilities through the Desktop in Control Panel, just as you would any other screen saver. Many graphics cards use a separate applet, but the approach Matrox employs seems simpler and cleaner. You can select 3-D objects for the screen saver, or leave them as 2-D objects.
The Matrox card is a solid performer. It offers some very nice utilities and some capabilities that we did not test, and it is really simple to set up and run. It also included a CD-ROM with 3-D games and demos that incorporate various 3-D algorithms. Were it less expensive, it would be unbeatable.
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Matrox MGA Impression Plus
Price: 4MB, $599; 2MB, $349; Memory Module, $249
In Brief: Matrox's card features 3-D in hardware, good performance and solid-as-a-rock drivers and utilities.
Matrox Graphics
800-361-1408, 514-685-2630
The Number Nine 9FX Motion771 has everything you want from a video card and more. A 64-bit video accelerator with 2MB of memory, a price point under $330 and impressive software utilities put the others in this review to shame. While other cards in the video roundup came installed with 4MB of video memory, the 2MB Number Nine 9FX Motion771 easily outpaced the competition.
The 9FX Motion771 installed simply and the software was loaded under Windows. When choosing your monitor, Number Nine has a long list of 152 monitors to choose from, perhaps the most complete list in this review.
We had problems with the video drivers supplied by Number Nine. The first set of drivers that Number Nine submitted offered strong GUI acceleration. But during the scaled video portion of the testing, the 9FX Motion771 dropped more than two-thirds of the total frames in the test, averaging 9.3fps in a test with a perfect score of 30fps.
Number Nine sent new drivers (version 1.15) and after installation the video results immediately improved to 30fps with smooth, impressive results. However, the new drivers repeatedly caused General Protection Faults within Wintune, the WINDOWS Magazine benchmark test.
Despite the initial video driver hurdles, the 9FX Motion771 offered impressive results and respectable video performance. Its Excel and AutoCAD scores improved with each pass during testing. Overall, the 9FX Motion771 ranked first in our testing. The 9FX Motion771 ships with additional drivers for AutoCAD versions 10 through 13, 3D Studio versions 2.0 through 4.0, and MicroStation 4.0 and 5.0. With these special drivers, the 9X Motion771 plowed through our AutoCAD test, leaving the competition in the dust. With the 9FX Motion771, you might think that you've upgraded your microprocessor.
It's the little things that count and Number Nine knows it. The 9FX Motion771 ships with HawkEye, a software utility that controls the image resolution and color depth. HawkEye offers Monitor Adjustment, for changing display and refresh rates on the fly; and Status, for quickly viewing memory configuration, color resolution and more information at a glance. The Zoom feature assigns a right mouse button and keypad hotkey to magnify special sections of your screen area. If you work with large spreadsheets, this is the answer to your prayers. HawkEye also offers virtual desktops and Chameleon Cursor for personalizing and taking full advantage of your desktop. While every card in this review shipped with a software utility for changing the resolution, the HawkEye utility impressed us with its elegance, ease of use and power.
Number Nine wants to groom lifetime customers with its buy-back hardware upgrade program which gives users discounts on hardware upgrades. The 9FX Motion771 ships with a thin, adequate manual for installing your card and software through the HawkEye utility. With a low price point, excellent software, and outstanding video and GUI acceleration, the 9FX Motion771 could send the other video cards running scared.
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Number Nine 9FX Motion771
Price: 4MB, $499 (street); 2MB, $329 (street)
In Brief: This video card is a true performer with some of the fastest results in this review. With excellent utilities, a hardware buy-back option and a low price, the 9FX Motion771 is one you should consider.
Number Nine Visual Technology
800-GET-NINE, 617-674-0009
The Velocity 64V from STB Systems puts the "video" in video acceleration cards. Based on the S3 Vision968 graphics accelerator, the Velocity 64V performed well in the WINDOWS Magazine tests, but performed even better in the video test. The Velocity 64V had a comparably crisp image with few "jaggies" or jagged lines, and the card did not drop a single frame at the full 640x450 window size.
Installing the Velocity 64V and its software was a breeze. The manual instructs you to install from DOS, but it installed fine from the Windows command line. You control image resolutions within the STB Vision Control Panel. Besides changing resolutions and color depths, the STB Control Panel lets you save different resolution and color depth settings, and assign a name or title to that particular setting. STB Vision lets you save up to 10 combinations of resolution and color depth settings. This is an ideal solution in case two or more people share the same workstation yet do not share the same resolution-setting preference; changing is a point-and-click affair.
The software installs a program group with 17 icons in Program Manager. Of the 17 icons, 10 create virtual desktops of different resolution within the original resolution that you have chosen. For example, for this review we worked with a resolution of 1024x768 with 65,536 colors. After clicking on the 640x480 icon, STB creates a 640x480 "zoom" of your 1024x768 workspace. You can navigate throughout its virtual desktop with your mouse.
These icons could confuse new Windows users (and a few experienced ones) since the icons marked 640x480 and 800x600 look as if they could change the overall resolution of the screen, rather than starting a virtual screen session.
All in all, the virtual desktop, zooming and resolution-changing features work fine but do not have the spit and polish of the HawkEye utility that ships with Number Nine video cards. If a program group with 17 icons sounds unruly, we suggest that you delete the extraneous icons and keep the icon for the STB Vision portion of the utility. With this single icon and utility, you can perform the same functions as the remaining icons. The 17 icons could have been incorporated into a single application that could run minimized throughout the Windows session.
The STB Velocity 64V ships with a noteworthy utility called the STB Vision Zoom, which turns your cursor into a magnifying lens. As you move your cursor over your desktop, the Vision Zoom displays the magnified image in a small screen. This is an impressive inspection tool for working within spreadsheets and graphic images. The Velocity 64V ships with two sleek manuals--one for the card itself and the other for using the STB Vision Control Panel.
The STB Velocity 64V ranked fourth in the performance roundup. Its AutoCAD, Painter and Excel performance results improved with each additional "lap." The Velocity 64V zoomed through the video portion of our Wintune test. It played the standard 30 frames per second without dropping a single frame when the image field was increased to 640x480. The Velocity 64V's video performance is impressive.
Shipping with a lifetime warranty and toll-free technical support, the STB Velocity 64V is a smart choice, if you need top-notch video performance. With better, more intuitive software for controlling resolution and the virtual desktop, the STB Systems could have an all-around winner with the Velocity 64V .
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STB Velocity 64V
Price: 4MB, $499; 2MB, $299
In Brief: The STB Velocity 64V offers above-average GUI and video accelerator performance and ships with well designed Windows utilities.
STB Systems
800-234-4334, 214-234-8750pleasing to the eye.