Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
New graphics cards that deliver Windows acceleration and improved full-motion video playback are starting to hit the market for less than $500. Some of them are available for as little as $249. The cost savings are achieved by integrating or sharing graphics, video, and memory subsystems, thus reducing component duplication.
VideoLogic (Cambridge, MA, (617) 494-0530) has two cards that provide multimedia and Windows acceleration. They are 928Movie, available in ISA and VL-Bus versions ($349 for a card with 1 MB of video memory), and PCIMovie, for PCI-bus (Peripheral Component Interconnect) systems ($499 for a card with 2 MB of video memory). PCIMovie provides Windows graphics acceleration and assists video playback by supporting full-screen playback
(at up to 1280- by 1024-pixel resolution) with up to 30-frames-per-second playback on a PCI-based PC.
PCIMovie's on-the-fly hardware dithering helps get rid of ugly banding that can occur during video playback.
The new Graphics Expression card from ATI Technologies (Thornhill, Ontario, Canada, (905) 882-2600) offers affordable 64-bit graphics and video playback acceleration in a DRAM-based card that sells for just $249 in PCI, VL-Bus, and even ISA versions. ATI officials say the low cost is due in part to the mach64CX processor that handles graphics and video acceleration, obviating the need for a second chip set. Other savings were achieved by the use of DRAM instead of more expensive video memory. The card assists video playback by delivering about 15-fps playback at 640- by 480-pixel resolution in the PCI and VL-Bus versions.
Matrox Graphics' (Dorval, Quebec, Canada, (514) 685-7230) MGA Impression Plus ($449) comes ready to support the soon-to-be-released Video-Logic's PowerPlay64 pro
cessor with VMC, or VESA Media Channel ($149). ThePowerPlay64 upgrade snaps into a socket on the MGA Impression Plus.
Diamond (Sunnyvale, CA, (408) 736-2000), which expected to ship its Viper Pro Video ($479 for VL-Bus or PCI version with 2 MB of video memory) at the end of August, designed the card so that the video chip shares the video memory with the graphics accelerator.
Craig Rush, who is the product manager for Diamond's Viper Pro line of cards, says that as video acceleration becomes more common, ``The quality of multimedia titles will improve because multimedia developers will have more incentive to make higher-quality recordings.''
Illustration: VideoLogic's PCIMovie graphics accelerator card can work with other cards, such as the MPEG video decoder card ($349), to bring high-quality playback of MPEG movies to the PC.
Low-Cost Video Acceleration Arrives
