18 Graphics Cards Quick On The Draw

Pick from among these 18 graphics cards to intensify your pixel production at high resolutions

Jim Kane and John McDonough

To satisfy users' lust for faster graphics redraws, add-in-card vendors are dealing out 64-bit cards that deliver intense colors at high resolutions. Some of the higher-end Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) graphics cards that we tested for this Lab Report support 16.7 million colors at resolutions up to 1600 by 1200 pixels (at 32 bits). We also tested graphics cards that come with lower resolutions and color depths at bargain-basement prices of under $200.

Just over a year ago, 32-bit graphics adapters were the norm, but now 64-bit boards have dropped in price so that you can afford to double your bus-width throughput with a quick card swap. Two boards that we tested -- Number Nine's Imagine 128 Pro and AsusTek Computer's PCIV192 -- raise the bar even higher with broader bus widths of 128 and 192 bits, respectively.

The 18 cards tested for this Lab Report employ both DRAM and video memory to enhance performance, but Matrox Graphics takes memory a step further by using Window RAM (WRAM) with its MGA Millennium. WRAM, the latest graphics/video memory technology to come into use, is optimized to accelerate Windows drawing operations without the high cost associated with video memory. This helped the MGA Millennium to excel in our 32-bit-color InterMark benchmarks. As in our February 1995 Lab Report, most of the manufacturers of the boards we reviewed employ graphics-accelerator chip sets from S3, and vendors such as ATI Technologies use proprietary Mach 64 chip sets.

The most important criterion we tested is performance. Perfo rmance results are produced via our graphics tests, which use images created from widely used applications, such as CorelDraw, Corel Presents, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word for Windows. We also required each graphics adapter to draw a variety of Windows images, ranging from straight text, to 2-D and 3-D bar charts, to complex full-color drawings.

While speed is the primary factor when purchasing a graphics adapter, it's nice to see that most of the cards come with helpful utilities for installing drivers, changing resolutions on the fly (instead of having to restart Windows), zooming in and panning around areas of a desktop, and creating virtual desktops. Videophiles will also be glad to know that some boards offer enhanced video playback with software MPEG engines or via some form of hardware assistance.

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HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

To find the best graphics adapter for your needs, follow the main headings until you come to the appropriate bus architecture and then look for the subcategory that's most relevant to your work. We grouped the graphics adapters into best-overall (a weighted combination of performance, features, and quality scores), high-resolution, 32-bit-color, and low-cost categories.

Boards rated as excellent came with installation software and clear documentation; a good rating identifies boards that can be installed without checking the documentation; fair-rated boards required a check of the user's manual; and boards that received a poor rating needed to have jumpers or interrupt requests (IRQs) reset.

Prices shown are for the adapters as they were configured for our tests. Typically, the cost varies according to the amount, type, and speed of the installed RAM.

Performance results are given in transactions per second: The higher the score, the more transactions an adapter was able to complete. The tests use a collection of screens from popular Wind ows applications. Except for the motion-video tests, higher numbers indicate better performance.

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Graphics Cards Face-Up

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