This is the most important performance area for most of people to make 2D graphics. It affects the speed of drawing objects and the overall performance. When Windows performance is high , CPU is freed from doing graphical tasks and has time to do other things.
Since more and more Windows games are taking advantage of DirectX which is the technology designed by Microsoft, Windows performance is increasingly important to game players. The advantage of DirectX is that it can make all the DOS games compatible with all the sound cards, graphics cards and so on and bring the games to be played under Windows 95 platform. Also it can increase the graphics performance and sound performance. So Windows perfromance is very important nowadays.
3D acceleration
Video acceleration
Second, the brightness of the images can be affected by the graphics card. If
the voltage of the signal received from graphics card to monitor is 0.7, the
brightness is in average. However, some graphics card produce signal far lower
than 0.7V, the brightness is too low and can not be recovered by just switching
the brightness control of the monitor.
Third, the color produced by graphics card is also very important. Some graphics
cards produce color which does not match with the real color. Then the color
displayed on the screen is not the same as the color printed on the paper. It
affects the professional designers so much.
Forth, the vertical frequency of the signal should be over 75Hz under the
resolution, 1024*768 24bit color. It is because the frequency can affect
the speed of displaying graphics on the screen. Sometimes quality of images
is also affected.
From the results, Matrox MGA Millennium and Diamond Stealth 3D 3000XL are the
best choices. They have good performance and their prices are only around
HK$2000.
More details about the two graphics card, please go to
Nowadays, many 3D graphics is produced and many people are going to design
3D graphics. So 3D acceleration becomes a standard feature of graphics card.
For some designers, 3D acceleration gives higher performance in 3D CAD design.
In addition, it also accelerates 3D games which support 3D accelerator and
Direct 3D which is one of the members of DirectX. 3D acceleration refers to
both the frame rate and image quality that a graphics card can produce.
This includes the high frame rate and image quality a graphics card can
produce when playing back digital motion video such as AVI, MPEG and DAT
files. It is important because many people always use computer to view video.
Quality of Graphics
It is very important to determine whether a graphics card can produce high
quality of graphics. First, we should consider the analog data
transfered from graphics card to monitor. Although many people don't realize
this importance, the analog data is the information of images and this can
affect the quality of graphics. If we extend the length of the monitor cable
twice the original length, we will see some blur of the images. It is obviously
seen when the words is black and the background is white. This means that you
will see some black dots near the edges of the letters and they are unclear.
If the problem is not due to the graphics card such as monitor cable, it can
solve without replacing the graphics card.
Benchmark of Graphics card
The following chart is showing the benchmark of some popular graphics card
under the tests of Business Graphics WiMark 97 and High-End Graphics WinMark 97.
It is only a reference for people to choose a good graphics card.
Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd.
Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc.