Forum2News_Exporter@mts.rpi.edu (Barry Bailey) (12/19/90)
With all this talk about video resolutions, speed, colors, etc. maybe someone could help me decide what features to look for in a computer supporting high-end video equipment. For the sake of arguement I will presume that it is preferred to have the fastest affordable clock and most advanced CPU (25Mhz '386, 33Mhz '386, 50Mhz '486, etc.). After that, is it worth the expense to invest in either an EISA or MCA bus system (a la bus mastering); invest in some sort of CPU cache?; invest in some sort of advanced harddisk and controller (e.g SCSI, ESDI, etc.; to keep out of the way of the CPU/video processes)? I have read about SUN workstation graphics accelerators, not knowing really what they do -- are their similar for Windows? If eventually I want to work with 24bit color displays what are the highest available resolutions (e.g. 1024x768, 1240x1024, etc.)? At this level of technology, what hardware/software would speed up video displays most? barry USERE9W9@RPITSMTS ps maybe answers to these and similar questions could be added to the FAQ file?
jimf@idayton.field.intel.com (Jim Fister) (12/30/90)
> With all this talk about video resolutions, speed, colors, etc. maybe > someone could help me decide what features to look for in a computer > supporting high-end video equipment. > > After that, is it worth the expense to invest in either an EISA or > MCA bus system (a la bus mastering); invest in some sort of CPU > cache?; invest in some sort of advanced harddisk and controller (e.g > SCSI, ESDI, etc.; to keep out of the way of the CPU/video processes)? > In most of the cases that I've seen, there are two good ways to speed up any windowing system. Or any system, for that matter. The first is to get a fast disk drive. The fastest EISA of MCA or ISA controller in the world is pretty useless if you're running with a 28ms drive. As long as I'm inserting personal opinion, IDE seems the way to go. Most of the reliable vendors have 18ms or 19ms drives with the cache activated. A good drive card running with a fast drive will help with disk swapping, access, and data transfer. The other good idea, esp. for windowing, is to get a fast video card. Did you say something about graphics accellerators? > I have read about SUN workstation graphics accelerators, not knowing > really what they do -- are their similar for Windows? Some. I know Microfield Graphics (somewhere in Oregon) has a bit-slice graphics board with Windows and UNIX drivers. I've seen it run X; it sings. There's a couple others out there, but I can't remember them. > If eventually I want to work with 24bit color displays what are the > highest available resolutions (e.g. 1024x768, 1240x1024, etc.)? At > this level of technology, what hardware/software would speed up video > displays most? > Uh...anyone else? Greetings from the Rocking Metropolis. JimF
gwe@cbnews.att.com (George W. Erhart) (12/30/90)
I have a friend that is "playing" with a live video board ... that is, a board from Matrox that can digitize video in real-time and display on any VGA card that has the VGA feature connector. The real question of bus speed tends to be an issue if the source for the video display is from a disk (CD ROM or other). In these cases, the data transfer rate for the back plane must be high enough to avoid the nasty flicker. For example, I have a disk drive containing a sequence of digitized video images that form an animated sequence. I wish to display them on a 1 megapixel display with 8 bit planes (256 colors). To display a single image (frame) will require transfering 1 megabyte of data from the disk to the display. The standard video refresh rate is 30 frames per second. Thus, the transfer rate from disk to display will need to be 30 Megabytes per second. The ISA bus is not capable of this speed. Both MCA and EISA are capable of this rate. However, realize 2 things, at 1 megabyte per frame, 30 megabytes per second, you will need a lot of disk space AND finding a disk drive that will be able to get 30 megabytes per second off the disk will be expensive. (The newest ESDI drives are ~15 megaBITS per second.) Now project this to a 24 bit color system ... 3 megabytes per frame!!! A lot of work is being done in the area of image compression. Several new chips are on the market that will compress/uncompress in real-time with minimal loss of image quality. These chips can significantly cut the amount of data that must be stored. If you are simply interested in watching the Finacial News Network in a window on your VGA display ... you can do this now with off the shelf hardware/software with the ISA bus, using the VGA feature connector. Hope this helps. (Disclaimer: I am not promoting Matrox products. It just happens to be the hardware I am most familar with.) -- George Erhart AT&T Bell Laboratories att!archie!gwe