re hercules graphite tomh metrics com tom haapanen writes has anyone used a hercules graphite adapter it looks good on paper and steve gibson gave it a very good review in infoworld i d love to get a real world impression though how is the speed drivers support ntaib silver ucs indiana edu iskandar taib writes the pc world reviewers found out that the herc people had hard coded winbench text into the driver clever no in any case the winbench results are pretty much inflated two things that annoyed me about the pc magazine review their benchmarking technique is seriously flawed as was clearly shown by the graphite and gxe s cheating can t they just admit that their benchmark is to easy to optimize for and or cheat on wintach is much harder to beat the big cheat that hercules iit used was overlappipping bitblit and polyline optimization and hercules sent them a new driver which didn t do this but produced almost identical scores yet the only thing pc magazine says is that scores are not legitimate couldn t they at least make some comment about its real world performance i m not so much going by winbench for performance but rather by steve gibson s results which are more real world based like using micrografx draw to benchmark if you believe gibson that is he writes despite these documented cheats i have to say that in real world applications the hercules graphite adapter actually draws faster than any other display adapter in the industry even though it s just a modest isa bus card it outperformed every local bus adapter i have including the stealth vlb the fahrenheit va vlb the ati vlb mach and even the weitek p based diamond viper vlb this kind of praise is enough for me to be interested in it bogus winbench or not when and if you get one send me mail i might buy that ati gu off you i already returned the ati gu my dealer had sold eight of them and seven were returned to him i m now temporarily back to running an original ati gu until i get my graphite and yes the gu is faster in my mb system than the gu especially in bitmap handling that s where you use bitblits hercules has a promotion available for vars and software developers you can buy one graphite or graphite vlb for off list to try it out at just for graphite or for the vlb version i decided it was worth trying i m supposed to get the vlb board within two weeks i ll post my impressions when i get it tom haapanen tomh metrics com software metrics inc waterloo ont stick your index fingers into both corners of your mouth now pull up that s how the corrado makes you feel car january
