[Appian, Colorgrafic, STB]
here are my thoughts about the special multimon graphic adapaters:
Appian
appian says about the J3 that it is based on 'the latest 64-bit accelerators and high performance memory' ???..ok...a closer inspection of the picture of the J3 card (and the short description given) i found out that they are using the cirrus logic laguna chip (CL-GD5462).
so we get the following key features for the J3 (partially based on the info from the cirrus logic)
- integrated 170MHZ RAMDAC (on chip)
- rambus memory architecture (RDRAM)
- up to 4 chips on board (Daughter card)
- multiple boards support not mentioned
comments:
they dont mention support of multiple cards (may be its possible because of PCI 2.1 compliance).
Daughter card approach good, you can start with 2 ports and upgrade to 4 portsby adding a daughter card later.
Rambus RDRAM is really fast (but SGRAM is faster, up to 800MB per second).
maybe the laguna chip is cirrus logics flag ship, it unfortunately has only a 170MHZ Ramdac on-chip...thats only 'middle class' i would say.
appian has a very detailed description of its driver software (called HydraVision) it seems to be quite sophisticated. as far as i can see it is similiar to what you'll get in Win98: different resolution/different refresh rates (important if you have different monitors); window splitting is prevented. however, it is not clear to me if you can drag a window which is maximized to one monitor.
this is prevented in Win98beta3 and its quite annoying for me.
Colorgraphic Evolution Series
the card is based on cirrus logic CL-GD5480
key features are:
- 200 Mhz Ramdac
- SGRAM memory, 4 MB per port
- up to 4 chips on board
- multiple boards for support of up to ??? displays
- Windows 95 & NT 4.0
comments:
fast Ramdac! fast memory!
no daughter card approach..so you have to decide for a 2 port card or a 4 port card. however, you can start with a 2 port card and can add another 2 port card later (which will cost you another pci slot). they dont mention how the displays can be arranged physically (horizontal/vertical/cube) there is hardly any info available about the driver software. so the question here is whether window splitting is suppressed or not
STB MVP Workstation
- S3 Virge/DX
- 170 Mhz Ramdac
- EDO-DRam, up to 4MB per port
- up to 4 chips on one board (Daughter card) = one pci-slot for 4 ports
- multiple boards for support of up to 16 displays
- horizontal, vertical and cubed (physial display arrangement)
- Windows NT 4.0 only
comments:
170MHZ ramdac is not high end..so is S3 Virge/DX
couldnt find any info about performance of EDORAM for video memory.
Daughter card approach is good.
only NT is supported..thats no drawback for me
STB MVP3D
- S3 Virge
- 135 Mhz RAMDAC, integrated
- Dram, up to 4MB per port
- up to 4 chips on one board (Daughter card) = one pci-slot for 4 ports
- multiple boards for support of up to 8 displays (2 PCI slots)
comments:
this card is in the lower performance range
for a comparison i would like to add the data of a real high end graphic card
which allows a multimon setup:
- Matrox Millenium II w MGA-2164W chip
- 250 Mhz ramdac
- WRAm, up to 16 MB
- multimon support with multiple cards for windows NT
comments:
this approach has clearly the drawback, that you need one pci-slot for one port (monitor).
Bottlenecks
for bottlenecks on the graphic card its the best to have a look at
tomshardware.com
here a short summary:
1st bottle neck (CPU to graphic card) is clearly the PCI bus...no need to go into details..a solution is available: AGP.
2nd bottle neck is the shared access of the video memory, both the RamDac and the video processor need to have access..this can be solved by either dual port ram (matrox) or high speed memory (SGRAM & RDRAM). of course, you can increase the bus size of the video memory but we compare only cards with the same size of 64bit.
3rd bottle neck is video output to the monitor which is determined by the bandwdith of the RamDac. the 'limited' bandwidth of the RamDac determines the maximum resolution/refresh rate. if you 'drive' your card to the limits (nearly maximum resolution/refresh rate) the card with the higher bandwidth RamDac usually produces a more sharp picture..no guarantee for this but my experience
summary:
if you dont have enough pci slots available for a multiple graphic card setup you should take the 'colorgraphics evolution series' . it seems to be the most advanced multi monitor card (at least from a harwdare point of view), combining a high bandwdith 200Mhz ramdac with a high speed SGRAM technology. so you should get a clear/sharp picture at a high resolution/refresh rate.
however, i coundnt find much info about the driver software.
so it is not clear to me how you can arrange your monitors and how the driver software affects working ( window splitting, window maximizing, dragging of maximized windows etc.). Appian may have an advantage here, their HydraVision driver technology seems to be better compared to everything else.
all special graphic cards seem to have in common that you dont get the fastest performance which is possible right now. i think there are faster/better graphic cards available (eg Matrox Millennium II).
finally i would like to say, that i dont have tested the above mentioned cards, the info is based only on what i've read.
btw, if you are looking for a high end monitor, how about a
16:10 panoramic 24" 170mhz color monitor: the ELSA ECOMO 24H96.
PS. congrats to ZeusPaul for having ZeusNet up and running...i know its a lot of work |
