Formac 32 MB ProFormance 3 graphics card arrival, info

29 July 99.

We have covered the new Formac ProFormance 3 graphics card in some detail in previous articles and our Expo reports. Here is further information concerning the arrival of the 32 MB version of that card.

When we contacted Formac about the possible ship date for the 32 MB version of the 128-bit ProFormance 3 graphics card all that they would be willing to say was that the card was "still under development" and should be ready by the end of summer ("hopefully"). The 16 MB card is not RAM upgradeable to 32 MB's. And any of their cards will definitely work faster on the 66Mhz slot on the blue G3's.

We asked them how much faster the 32 MB card would be over the 16 MB card (if there was such speed increase numbers already calculated) -- knowing that some benefit would be achieved -- and this is what they said:

"That depends on the application. Applications like Photoshop or the 3D game Unreal upload quite a bit of data. The 66MHz bus effectively doubles the upload of everything (data and commands, pictures, textures...). Nonetheless the product gain is not two times, but something in between.

Thanks for the hyperlink, I read the articles. However I want to note, that more RAM on the card indeed does not always increase the drawing speed. It is rather the other way around: if the memory fills up, the drawing speed decreases. Usually this happens, if you use large, deep texture information in a 3D context, not because of a high amount of geometry information. Since all command queues including the geometry information reside in main memory, the throughput for CAD is mainly the so-called triangle-rate. This rate is the maximum rate of processed triangles per second and is very fast because of the GLINT core in the Permedia3 ([I] remember seeing more than 7 million triangles per second, for the correct number look at http://www.3dlabs.com).

However, for CAD purposes I understand that the 32MB version will be the version of choice, because at 1280x1024x32 [resolution] 15MB are used for the display, backbuffer and z-buffer (at 32bit). A bit is needed by the 2D acceleration, so a humble 800 KB of texture information is free in the best case."

The price for the available 8 MB card is $189.00 and $259.00 for the 16 MB version. There is no price set for the 32 MB version due later on this summer.

We appreciate the engineer from Formac for sending in this valuable information. If you have any other questions about these exciting graphic cards then go to http://www.formac.com.

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