We tested 10 two-page, true-color display adapters for Macintosh-based graphics illustration and desktop publishing. All these NuBus boards were easy to use and produced clear, stable pictures. We used a Mac Quadra 840AV for testing, which is a typical target platform for these cards, because its maximum 2 MB of VRAM leaves it 1 MB shy of what's needed for dual-page, true-color displays.
Our best-overall rankings identified the speed leaders, without concern for price. Our low-cost rankings were limited to boards priced below $1800. Not surprisingly, these boards offer slower response times than the higher-priced boards, but they sell for about $700 less.
Our tests showed only modest performance diffe
rences among the boards ranked as best overall. If you don't need the absolute best performance, the lower-cost SuperMac Spectrum/24 PDQ Plus may offer better value than the Radius PrecisionColor Pro.
The top two product families, the accelerators from Radius and SuperMac Technology, provide an interesting contrast in design philosophies (the SuperMac/E-Machines Ultura LX is a SuperMac design, so these comments apply to it as well). The Radius adapters excel at moving photographic images to the display from memory. The SuperMac adapters, on the other hand, are outstanding at executing streams of graphics primitives, such as lines, polygons, and text. SuperMac claims to accelerate 80 percent of all QuickDraw operations, a claim that was borne out in our test results: With the exception of Radius's PrecisionColor Pro in the best-overall category, SuperMac boards consistently posted the fastest overall speeds among the ranked boards.
However, since just about every program does a combination of ima
ge transfers and graphics primitives, it would be fair to say that the two designs offer roughly equivalent overall performance. Users primarily interested in running Adobe Photoshop or other image-editing software will prefer a Radius adapter; the top-ranked PrecisionColor Pro moves pixels to the screen at an impressive 5.4 million pixels per second, compared to under 3 million pixels per second for all the SuperMac adapters.
The SuperMac cards offer hardware panning, which allows you to pan across a large desktop more quickly than you could by using the normal interface. This feature would be most useful for people who use CAD programs. Large virtual desktops force you to drop down to 8 bits of color, which limits the usefulness of this capability for graphics and publishing work. The SuperMac Spectrum/24 Series IV is ranked in the best-overall and low-cost categories, but be cautious about comparing its score directly to those of the other boards. Its top resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels, and it was
tested at this resolution.
The SuperMac Thunder series of boards allow you to add memory for on-board GWorlds (i.e., images that exist in memory but are not displayed on-screen). This may offer an additional acceleration for applications that are written to take advantage of GWorlds, but you have to weigh the advantage of putting the memory on your display adapter rather than putting it in your system. Additional memory on the display adapter means the acceleration hardware can update off-screen images and, more important, the off-screen image can be copied to the screen without having to squeeze through the NuBus.
The two offerings from Radius don't offer hardware panning, but they allow you to change the resolution of the screen without restarting your Macintosh. This might be useful if you use a 17-inch monitor, as you might want to temporarily view the entire page (at 1152 by 870 pixels) and then revert back to the normal-size image (832 by 624 pixels) to continue your design work. This fea
ture is of no apparent use on a 21-inch monitor, however.
The RasterOps PaintBoard Turbo XL significantly lagged behind the pack in performance. It would be an especially poor choice for image-editing applications such as Photoshop; its time of 1.5 million pixels per second is less than a third of the speed of the more expensive Radius PrecisonColor Pro. However, its text-display speed is better than that of the Radius boards and within 5 percent of the speed of the SuperMac boards.
All the NuBus boards slow down dramatically when displaying 16-bit images (when using 24-bit-color mode). The Radius PrecisionColor adapters move 16-bit images to the display at one-tenth the speed of 24-bit images. The SuperMac boards move 16-bit images at about one-fifth the speed of 32-bit images. The lesson here is to be sure to switch to the color mode that matches the image that you are editing or viewing.
The performance penalty for displaying 1-, 2-, 4-, and 8-bit images is far less severe. One-bit ima
ges display at half the speed of 32-bit images on the Radius adapters and only 15 percent slower on the SuperMac adapters. The significance of this is that you can work with these lower-color images (monochrome is particularly common for desktop publishing) without resetting the colors on your monitor.
When comparing the results of the Macintosh display systems, it becomes clear that Apple is under serious attack by the Windows products for high-end graphics applications. VL-Bus adapters such as the SuperMac Spectrum/24 VL for Windows and the Media Vision Pro Graphics 1280 offer equal or better performance than our top-rated Macintosh display adapters at a fraction of the cost.
Because the tests were not identical (we used popular Mac programs to create tests for the Mac and popular Windows programs to create tests for the PC), we cannot make an overall comparison between the graphics performance of the Mac and that of the PC. But on one comparable test, the time required to copy a 32-bit image
from system memory to display memory (a common operation in Adobe Photoshop), the VL-Bus adapters show a decided price/performance advantage. For example, the top-ranked PrecisionColor Pro for NuBus clocks in at 5.4 million pixels per second. The SuperMac Spectrum/24 VL for Windows produces an equally impressive 5.3 million pixels per second, but at less than half the cost.
Need the best 24-bit Mac card?
BEST OVERALL
Radius PrecisionColor Pro
The Radius PrecisionColor Pro was the fastest Macintosh-based board overall, beating out the SuperMac Thunder cards by a narrow margin. The PrecisionColor Pro shows its biggest speed advantage when copying photographic images to the screen: At 5.4 million pixels per second, it was 80 percent faster than the Thunder II, the significantly more expensive card that won out in our rankings for high-speed imaging. For text speed, however, the PrecisionColor Pro was 33 percent slower than the Thunder II. The PrecisionColor Pro has the abili
ty to change resolutions without requiring you to reboot the machine. The 3 MB of VRAM in our test configuration is also the maximum amount of memory that is supported by the PrecisionColor Pro.
OVERALL TEXT IMAGING BIT-MAP PRICE
SPEED SPEED SPEED SPEED AS
(SECONDS) (SECONDS) (SECONDS) (SECONDS) TESTED
BEST Radius
PrecisionColor Pro 1.349 0.243 1.881 0.186 $2499
RUNNER-UP SuperMac Thunder/24 1.421 0.193 1.967 0.367 $2599
RUNNER-UP SuperMac/E-Machines
Ultura LX 1.430 0.207 1.980 0.367 $1299
RUNNER-UP Radius
PrecisionColor 24X 1.473 0.445 2.028 0.207 $2499
RUNNER-UP SuperMac
Spectrum/24 PDQ Plus 1.464 0.224 1.993 0.423 $1499
RAM AS EASE ACCELERATOR
TESTED OF USE CONTROLLER
BEST Radius PrecisionColor Pro 3 MB **** Radius Custom
RUNNER-UP SuperMac Thunder/24 3 MB **** Proprietary
RUNNER-UP SuperMac/E-Machines Ultura LX 3 MB **** Proprietary
RUNNER-UP Radius PrecisionColor 24X 3 MB **** Radius Custom
RUNNER-UP SuperMac Spectrum/24 PDQ Plus 3 MB **** Proprietary
KEY
Ease of Use:
Excellent ****
Good ***
Fair **
Poor *
Are you cost-conscious?
LOW COST
SuperMac Spectrum/24 PDQ Plus
The overall speed of the Spectrum/24 PDQ Plus beats the Raster Ops PaintBoard Turbo XL by a narrow margin. The Spectrum/24 performed especially well in tests that measured imaging and bit-map speed. The Spectrum/24's price beats that of the Raster Ops PaintBoard Turbo XL by more than $200. The performance and retail price of both cards are roughly comparable. The Spectrum/24 can provide hardware panning at les
s-than-24-bit color. Although the less expensive Spectrum/24 Series IV looks impressive, be aware that its maximum resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels. If you can work within this limit, the Series IV can be a good, low-cost choice, especially if fast bit-map speed is important to you.
OVERALL TEXT IMAGING BIT-MAP PRICE
SPEED SPEED SPEED SPEED AS
(SECONDS) (SECONDS) (SECONDS) (SECONDS) TESTED
BEST SuperMac
Spectrum/24 PDQ Plus 1.464 0.224 1.993 0.423 $1499
RUNNER-UP Raster Ops
PaintBoard Turbo XL 1.858 0.225 2.534 0.666 $1749
RUNNER-UP SuperMac
Spectrum/24 Series IV 1.450 0.313 2.057 0.298 $949
RAM AS EASE ACCELERATOR
TESTED OF USE CONTROLLER
BEST SuperMac Spectrum/24 PDQ Plus
3 MB **** Proprietary
RUNNER-UP Raster Ops PaintBoard Turbo XL 3 MB **** Proprietary
RUNNER-UP SuperMac Spectrum/24 Series IV 3 MB **** Proprietary
KEY
Ease of Use:
Excellent ****
Good ***
Fair **
Poor *
When speed matters
HIGH-SPEED IMAGING
SuperMac Thunder II
Most of the Macintoshes to appear since the Mac II are starved for NuBus slots. The Thunder II includes a dual DSP accelerator while still occupying a single NuBus slot. Even on the top-of-the-line Quadra 840AV, the board's DSP acceleration gave us a 50 percent speedup while displaying JPEG-compressed images. The DSP acceleration also speeds up image filtering in Adobe Photoshop. The Thunder II provides performance that's equivalent to that of the Radius PrecisionColor Pro and faster than that of any of the other cards we tested.
OVERALL TEXT IMAGING BIT-MAP PRICE
SPEED
SPEED SPEED SPEED AS
(SECONDS) (SECONDS) (SECONDS) (SECONDS) TESTED
BEST SuperMac
Thunder II 1.400 0.182 1.953 0.334 $3999
RUNNER-UP SuperMac
Thunder II Light 1.444 0.198 1.964 0.424 $2999
RUNNER-UP SuperMac
ThunderStorm Pro 1.422 0.194 1.968 0.366 $3199
RAM AS EASE ACCELERATOR
TESTED OF USE CONTROLLER
BEST SuperMac Thunder II 6 MB *** Proprietary
RUNNER-UP SuperMac Thunder II Light 3 MB *** Proprietary
RUNNER-UP SuperMac ThunderStorm Pro 3 MB *** Proprietary
KEY
Ease of Use:
Excellent ****
Good ***
Fair **
Poor *
The Best Graphics Accelerators For Macintosh Nubus Systems
