orchid p vs fahrenheit mini review i just purchased a viewsonic and and orchid p in short i am happy with the monitor and unhappy with the card i have spent a lot more time futzing with the card so that is what i am going to write about the monitor is pretty the moires i had under simcity on my magnavox went away it isn t as heavy as i thought it would be lbs i think so much for the monitor on to the bitch session and test results 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 the compudyne whiplash vga orchid fahrenheit and orchid f vlb all share this limitation those are all s cards which means it is an s problem for them the p uses a weitek vga chip which also doesn t support them the hercules graphite card does seem to have these modes but i didn t run the same test cases as i did on the other boards during the brief time i had it it was able to print the splash screen for the grolier s encyclopedia though which the s cards just printed as hash which is why i suspect the svga modes are supported 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 the higher graphics modes all crash hp dashboard i just got off the phone with orchid and with the drivers i don t know what i have he was unable to recreate the problem on the plus side their tech rep was as helpful as he could be and booted up the program on his computer to verify he didn t have the problem he didn t know why they limited the refresh to hz either 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 k means thousand not m means million pixels per second orchid fahrenheit vlb orchid p chip s weitek dib to screen k k k k memory to screen m m m m screen to screen m m m m vector solid m m m vector styled k k k k polygon shaded m m m m polygon hatched m m m m ternary rops m m k k font k k k k m the dib to screen test takes a device independent bitmap of a face and transfers it to the screen i have no idea what is being done internally as far as conversions go the memory to screen takes the same face and copies it to the screen my guess is after it has been rasterized into a bitmap that can just be copied to the video display the screen to screen test copies that face from place to place on the screen awesome 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 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 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 geoff sherwood
