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| Architosh Staff ([email protected]) |
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Special Expo Report: Part - 2: New Mac Graphic Acceleration!
We spent some time talking to engineers and representatives at Formac's exhibit booth (one of the nicest booths in terms of integrating with their marketing materials. One of the items we were hoping to learn more about was their new ProFormance 3 128-bit graphics card, built with technology from 3DLabs, and the value and purpose of adding additional graphics cards to your machine.
Formac ProFormance 3 Graphics Card The information on this new pro-level graphics card piggy-backs our addendum report on the "ultimate PC for CAD - Part 2". One of the things that came up from the first article was reader feedback concerning the usefulness of adding additional graphics cards to your system. The question is, "does that do anything for performance and what is the usefulness of an additional card?" According to a Formac engineer adding an additional card does nothing for performance unless the memories on each card can be utilized systematically. For example, in high-end rendering cards costing upwards of $1000.00 large amounts of memory can be utilized to support both z-buffering and frame-buffering simultaneously, each buffer type with its own memory. Formac's new ProFormance 3 card does not have this capability; regardless Formac claims it is the fastest card available in the Macintosh market -- faster than the ATI 128 Nexus card with 32 MB of memory. Additional graphics cards are used to support additional monitors, simultaneously. The discussion of memory is another point of clarification. Many believe that the more graphics RAM you have on your graphics card the faster your graphics performance. Not necessarily true. Graphic cards within certain model lines contain the exact same graphics chip sets (engine) and therefore render at the same speed. Where performance is affected by how much RAM you have is if your 2D or 3D file, running in your accelerated application, is greater in size than your graphic card's RAM. In that case your system RAM is accessed to grab data which cannot completely sit in the graphic card's RAM because it exceeds the RAM size. As this Formac engineer explained, for optimal performance you want the graphic card's RAM to contain the entire file rendering data. So if you work with files in the range of 8-16 MB of RAM and rarely exceed that than getting a graphics card with 32 MB of RAM doesn't gain you any significance performance increases over a 16 MB version of the same card. ATI's own website mentions that having more RAM on your graphics card not only produces greater color depth on your monitor at larger display resolutions but improves performance with texture-intensive games and graphics hungary applications. Such descriptions can be misleading. As this Formac explained, one of the biggest slow-downs in processing graphics is when the graphic card must access the main RAM to obtain requested data. This happens when the card's RAM is exceeded by the file size being rendered. The Formac ProFormance 3 card comes in 8, 16 and 32 MB RAM versions. So How Fast is the Formac Pro Card? According to their marketing materials, the 16 MB version is up to twice as fast as the ATI 128-bit graphics card built-in to every new Power Macintosh blue G3 tower. For those looking over the ATI website or product literature, the ATI 128 RAGE graphics card most like the chipset shipping in the new blue Power Mac G3's is the ATI RAGE Orion card. Specific results for comparison are listed below (source material by Formac):
The results are reportedly from the June issue of MacUp.
3DLabs Technology and the Glint Technology Core According to the engineer we spoke to the 3DLabs technology used in the Formac ProFormance 3 card is based on the Permedia 3 chipset from 3DLabs, which itself -- we are told -- consist of a Glint core. The Glint chipset is 3DLab's renowned ultrafast graphics engine used in their fastest graphics cards for high-end NT and UNIX graphics machines. The 3DLabs website describes the Permedia 3 chipset as an advanced 128-bit graphics card for demanding business and web users. 3DLabs produces much faster cards with RAM well over 32 mega bytes. Permedia 3 has performance gains of 114 percent over the ATI RAGE 128 GL chipset for Wintel hardware. Specific Permedia 3 results for 3D Studio Max (trilinear filtering) using BenchMark 1+, Windows NT, OpenGL, 1280x1024, show it out performing the ATI RAGE 128 GL chip at 168 percent faster. Glint technology produces ultrafast OpenGL rendering and would be the graphic card of choice to add to the ultimate Macintosh CAD "dream machine" (to compete with PC Magazine's version of the ultimate CAD "dream machine"). Unfortunately, as this Formac engineer said, the Macintosh market for such machines just isn't large enough to warrant producing a Mac version of these cards. For more information about super-fast graphics cards for "dream machine" CAD and engineering workstations and what you can get in the Macintosh market click here.
Expo Report Series:
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