pf@diab.UUCP (Per Fogelstr|m) (01/15/88)
In article <1823@kontron.UUCP> stephan@kontron.UUCP (Stephan W. Wendl) writes: [ Deleted some text unrelated to this comment.] >That is rather nice. But the price might be quite high and the performance >of a TMS34010 is not that exciting. Yes. Most advertising material is based on single bit pixel perf. >People might have heard about the QPDM Chip from AMD. There are companies >out there that provide excellent graphic controller boards for AT style >computer that use this chip. They are available in resolution from >1280x1024x8 downwards. Pricing is $4000 and downwards. They come with >some drivers for known CAD programs and libraries to write code immediately. Speaking about performance. Heard about the National Semi. DP8500. That is what i call speed. I have a working prototype board, 1k*1k 4bit pixels. It uses an "RGP" ,four "BPU's" and 100ns video rams plus some 40 more chips. (Shift registers,dram control,buffers, host interface etc.) Line drawing rate is at least 5.5Mpix/sec and as most 6.6Mpix/sec. (depending on slope) (Maximum rate achiveble is 10Mpix/sek, but then the memory has to be REALY FAST). BitBlit speed goes between 54 to 65 Mpixels/sec depending on destination combine or not. Fill speed is 155Mpixels/sec. It seems that the DP8500 outperformes the QPDM (wich i belive is the closest competitor) with at least a factor of 2 at line drawing and at least a factor of 3 at BitBlit (using 100ns dram). And adding bit planes doesn't affect speed! I recently read an article in the computer magazine flood about a test of some new PC graphic boards, one with the Texas processor and one with the QPDM. No board was faster than the other, and from the tables one could draw the conclusion that the speed was most dependent on wich type of PC the board was installed in. On the other hand, the board was tested with some CAD programs, wich seldom uses scrolling where copy speed is important. Any one who wants to share experience or have more information about the DP8500 series chips, feel free to contact me. I am not associated with National Semiconductor, and i dont speek as a representative for them. I'm only interested in computer graphics and likes high performence.