CompuServe Messages

James: Sigh. I should have kept my mouth shut. OK – let me start with this. Since you are a dealer, you have an obligation to understand the technology which you are selling. I don't want to lecture you, but you'd better do your homework if you want to play with the big boys. And that means understanding technology – not just learning buzzwords. You can certainly get some of the information here, but not all of it. If you come here unprepared, it is doubtful that any of the dealers who have invested significant effort in their knowledge will be willing to help you. End of ranting and raving. Now, on to explaining about graphics performance. Programs such as AmiPro must transfer large numbers of random pixels from system memory to the graphics card. They take no advantage of any processing power on the graphics board. The only thing that counts with AniPro is how fast the computer can get pixels onto the graphics board. This is limited by both memory bandwidth, and I/O bandwidth (for the board registers.) If you're editing large 24 bit images under Windows, one of the choke points will be how fast the image can be moved from system memory to the graphics card. A fast local bus graphics will do fine on that count. But, once the image is on the graphics board, an ET-4000 doesn't have any brains to do much manipulation. The process of repositioning menus and clipping windows will be greatly speeded up by a board which can do bit block transfers (BITBLTs) by itself. The moral of the story? The MGA is a great card, which easily justifies its price. You even get to make a reasonable profit selling it. But for programs such as AniPro, it may be no better than a fast local bus VGA card. (And even this has a caveat. You have to look at the wait states of the memory interface and registers to be sure of the board's performance. The MGA has an optional (I believe) linear frame buffer address space. If an optimized AniPro driver were written for the MGA, it would not have any bank switching latency. Unfortunately, I don't know if such a driver has been written for the MGA) Evan P.S. – let me add that there is a question about the MGA being a 64-bit card. You have to ask what parts of the MGA architecture are actually 64-bit. And this is a looooonnnngggg discussion.