An illustrated Guide to the Video Cards
The Matrox company is also Canadian, and originated from ATI. They also make excellent cards with their own accelerator chips. They only make a few models. Regardless of which Matrox card you buy, it is an excellent product. Matrox comes with good drivers. Obviously to be recommended.
Tseng has made graphic chips for many years. In the good old DOS days, an ET 4000 card was one of the best on the market. It was equipped with Tseng's ET 4000 chip, which was excellent for DOS usage. Since came the somewhat overlooked ET4000/W32 chip. I had good experiences with that on some low cost ViewTop cards. Tseng's latest chip is ET 6000, which is mostly sold as a discount card. Not recommended.
S3 is a big name in graphic chips. They do not manufacture their own cards, but their chips are used in numerous cards. companies like IBM, Diamond, Number Nine, and ViewTop/Britek use S3’s different accelerator chips with widely varying results. A small S3 Trio 64 chip is mounted in IBM’s PC 300, which on paper is not very powerful. Yet, it produces an incredible fine image. Thus, the quality depends just as much on other video card design features as on the accelerator chip. Can you then recommend S3 based cards at all? Yes, if they are made by a respectable manufacturer, who includes a quality driver. And that has to be tried out in practice.
3D graphics 3D images, where you can move around in space, is a technology, which is expanding to the PC world. Ordinary PC’s to day are so powerful, that they can actually work with 3D environments. Ordinarily, our screen images (such as in Windows 95) are two dimensional. But we know 3D effects file:///E|/education/Click & Learn/module7b.htm (9 of 15) [4/15/1999 6:30:43 AM]