 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Actix Graphics Engine 32 George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
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If your Windows applications seem to run rather slowly you can do a number of things that, singly or in any combination, will increase speed and improve sharpness of image.
1. Zero cost solutions are:
This review is about an AT bus Graphic Accelerator card, the Actix Graphics Engine
32plus, based on the S3 86C801 processor. The retail price is about $450 but financial members may purchase it for $388. The Actix card is 100 percent register compatible with IBM's VGA and it supports many different resolutions. Some of the more common resolutions supported are 640 x 480 with 16.7 million colours, 800 x 600 with 64 thousand colours, and up to 1280 x 1024 resolution with 256
colours - if your monitor has that capability. The better the horizontal frequency of a monitor, the higher the resolution you can have. However, if you go higher than a monitor can cope with the picture will not be in sync and be impossible to read. All you can do in such a situation is reboot or close Windows with Alt F4. Now, how to alter the Windows driver when you cannot see your Windows? That is not mentioned in the manual. It must be done from Dos by editing
SYSTEM.INI and performing the necessary alterations - with due care and lots of knowledge. An alternative is to copy the original
.INI file that you should have saved under a different name - if only the documentation had told you about that at the outset.
Reprinted from the April 1993 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
2. Non zero cost solutions are:
Why is Windows slower than ms and why the need for accelerator cards? Well, in
DOS when you scroll down less than 2 kB of data is transferred to the screen. Under Windows with an 800 x 600 resolution 480,000 pixels need to be moved by the
CPU to the screen - accelerator cards help with that workload.
With the monitors available to me for testing I was able to verify the 16.7 million and 64 thousand colours claims when customising desktop colours. However, the 16.7 million colours option sacrifices resolution and, because of that, my preference is higher resolution. For practical purposes there is not much difference in being able to select one colour from 16.7 million or from 64 thousand, and most applications show only 16 or 256 colours anyway.
On the cover of the box, the advertisement claims the 32-bit Actix card will run up to thirty times faster than a normal
VGA card. That may be true in some unusual cases, but my tests showed a 2 - 3 times improvement.
The testing was done using the Winbench 3.1 benchmark tests, giving a Graphics Winmark result. Under
DOS I found 0 - 2 times improvement in speed using Landmark tests, depending on the card/computer combination.
By just replacing a cheap VGA card with the Actix card, and before loading any software drivers, the speed improvement under
DOS was almost 100 percent. The DIR command, on a RAM drive, listed the several hundred files in about half time compared to a cheap
VGA card, verifying the benchmark test.
Replacing a TVGA 8902 card with the Actix card produced no measurable improvement from DOS.
In Windows the Actix card gave about a three-fold increase in speed compared to a cheap
VGA card on 33 MHz 486. Replacing the TVGA 8902 card on a 25 MHz 386 computer with the Actix resulted in approximately 25 percent improvement in the Graphics Winmark figure.
Installation
The Actix hardware performed well. On my home computer, with windows installed in
C:\WINDOWS (the most common situation) the installation went without any problems but a little knowledge is still required to load the Actix drivers. The Windows image produced was rock steady and crisp.
Documentation
By far the biggest problem with the Actix product is the documentation, or lack of it, and poor software. My Windows software was in
D:\WIN31, on a network drive. The Actix could not cope with anything other than
\WINDOWS for a directory name. Having renamed my directory and tried again, it still failed. All the manual says is ".. follow the instructions to complete the driver process". Unfortunately Windows did not display the instructions about loading drivers. It failed to create a particular
file during installation.
With manual effort, renaming files and manually editing the SYSTEM.INI file, I finally managed to install Actix on the
LAN. On both computers, DOS WordPerfect drivers installed correctly.
Actix copies over 1.5 MB of driver files, but there is no instruction as to which ones are used. Not all will work with the average monitor, so a fair bit of disk space is taken up with the unnecessary drivers. It would be helpful if the documentation included information to enable users to delete the unwanted ones.
Alternative Strategies
By comparison with an Accelerator card, a 25 MHz 386DX chip was replaced with a 486DLC chip during the evaluation period. The 486DLC chip gave a 56 percent improvement in the Norton Sl rating, while the Landmark rating showed an improvement of 112 percent. For the type of work that I do the average improvement came to nearly 50 percent.
Some typical examples are: tune to generate a table of contents in a 110 page WordPerfect document reduced by 60 percent, and even disk intensive programs improved noticeably. A database program that reads and writes to several files, as well doing lots of calculations, improved by over 30 percent (1 always use a delayed write cache for all applications). A graphics accelerator would not have any effect on the above figures.
Video response was improved with the 486DLC chip due to the increased processing power of the CPO. A DIR command took 25 percent less time while the Winbench figure improved by 35 percent with the
TVGA card, giving a better figure than the Actix card with the 386 chip.
I was not able to compare a cheap VGA card and the CPU upgrade, but my feeling is that for pure graphics performance the Actix card will probably give a better result than a
CPU upgrade. In my case, with both the Actix card and new CPU, the Winbench figure improved by over 75 percent. The retail price of the 486DLC chip is $350 but financial members can purchase it from Computer Rebuilds for $300.
Conclusion
As far as hardware goes the Actix card is among the best, according to other reviews of competing accelerator cards. The January 1993 edition of
Byte stated it to be the best of the bunch. I believe that for the serious Windows or
CAD user, this card would be a good buy if you need an accelerator card. However, before purchasing one several factors must be taken into account:
