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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillyG who wrote (37131)	11/6/1998 1:31:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

We originally thought this was going to be Cube then Zoran won it... Real 3D StarFighter.(Evaluation) 12/01/98 PC Magazine Page 273(1) COPYRIGHT 1998 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company Copyright 1998 Information Access Company. All rights reserved. Intel i740; 8MB; 1,600 x 1,200 (75 Hz). PCI, $110 street; AGP, $150. Orlando, FL; 800-393-7730, 407-306-7302; www.real3d.com The Real 3D StarFighter sells for an attractive price, especially since the bundle includes a true hardware DVD decoder card. But its Intel i740 chip just doesn't let it keep pace with the top-tier performers. The AGP and PCI versions of the StarFighter differ in a few important ways. The more expensive AGP model uses SGRAM (not the less-costly and slower SDRAM) and offers TV-out functionality. Each StarFighter ships with an MPEG -2 decoder card (based on the Zoran chip set) for DVD playback and a custom DVD player applet. Before you lift off, though, keep in mind that 3D support is limited to 1,280-by-1,024 with 16-bit color, and the highest refresh rate you'll get is 85 Hz (at up to 1,280-by-1,024 resolution). In our labs, the StarFighter had significant difficulty with the 3D WinMark quality tests: We found many errors during objective quality tests, including incorrect execution of MIP-mapping operations, many fogging operations, and several geometry features, including anti-aliasing. (Also, see the benchmark tests section for information regarding dropped frames.) Subjective game play was more forgiving, and we didn't notice any fatal flaws in scene quality. The cards scored a hair better on our 3-D benchmark tests than other i740 cards, but they were still near the back of the pack. Scores on our 2-D tests were acceptable but again below the average. Although the DVD support is useful, Real 3D has hitched its wagon to the wrong star with the i740.