re orchid p vs fahrenheit mini review in article apr adobe com sherwood adobe com geoffrey sherwood writes in going with the modern trend the orchid p card only supports colors in x mode without a driver of course this breaks any dos program which uses svga modes like most of my cd roms this is not the case the rom on the p supports vesa modes of up to x in colors vesa compliant applications should have no trouble setting these modes but i m forwarding your posting to our software group just in case can t be too careful not that i doubt that your applications are failing to run lots of stuff depends on figuring out which exact svga they re looking at and don t use vesa calls vesa is still pretty new every new chip set confuses them the supported resolutions really annoy me you can do x at hz if you tell the driver you have an nec fg they only have about six monitors listed plus generic and if you choose generic you can t get any high refreshes at all but at x you are limited to hz seems to me that the hardware should be able to support the bandwidth if it can do hz at it sure should be able to do it at higher vertical resolution was the main reason i bought the card over the orchid f vlb i currently have and it will do x x hz as well i think we go to at least hz at x x and maybe more and it s a function of the ramdac speed not the power we need to fix the problems you ve noted they were already on the list if you re really interested though take a look at the text file p res dat which holds the data from which the choices in the p monitor installation program are built working by analogy you can build up a new monitor definition that has the right combinations of refresh rates for your monitors keep a backup copy of the file once you ve built a new version of the p res dat file run the p installation program inst and your new choices should show up this assumes you have the weitek v drivers you can tell the rev number by looking at the modification time of the driver is version microsoft uses this gimmick too the board is faster that the ofvlb for most things according to the hercules speedy program this program tests various operations and reports the results in pixels second i don t have the numbers for the graphite card but they were close to half of the ofvlb ie slower but that was running in a mhz isa so the numbers aren t really comparable the following numbers were all obtained using a mhz air motherboard umc chipset with mb memory i give ranges because the program reports the numbers as it computes them and these tend to jump around a bit the speedy benchmark was put out by hercules and iit who to my knowledge were unencumbered by any motivations except making the hercules graphite iit agx card look really good so i d take the numbers with a ton of salt texas instruments did the same thing with wintach trying to make the look good compared to the as if anyone cared it s safer though not safe to use benchmarks from unbiased sources such as testing labs columnists etc interestingly the solid vectors and shaded polygons show no improvement and hatched polygons ie filled with cross hatching and ternary rops whatever they are graphics operations like xors maybe are a dead loss on the i think you ll a large discrepancy between the results of speedy and the results of anything else in the universe on these things i give two numbers for the fonts because i think they are caching when the fonts are first drawn on the screen they are done fairly slowly the speed of the ofvlb then the speed increases dramatically sounds like programming to a benchmark to me font caching is a perfectly legitimate optimization windows has hooks for it built right into the gdi what s kind of silly is iit s use of a hardwired the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog then sat on a tack string in their driver not only is it useless in real applications it lacks the programming elegance of the bart simpson optimization in which you save the bitmap of the most recently drawn string in off screen memory and just do a screen to screen bitblit if you happen to be given that same string a second time in a row we call it the bart simpson optimization because bart s the only person we can see benefiting from it he could right i will not cheat on benchmarks a hundred times and be done in half the time it would take to actually form each character i make no claims that these numbers mean anything at all its just what i saw when i ran them on my computer i normally don t write disclaimers but this time maybe i d better my testing is totally unconnected with my work i program under unix on decstations is done completely without the knowledge blessing or equipment of my company we don t have any lawyers they re all working for intel there used to be a lawyer in montana who didn t but he died robert robert plamondon robert weitek com pay no attention to the man behind the curtain i the great and glorious oz have spoken scene from a trade show
