Choosing a display card for OS/2 and Linux by Rhodes Hileman This is a somewhat off-center report of the state of PC graphics cards. Even though this shopper has been involved with image processing systems for fifteen years, I have not studied the SVGA market for a decade. I'm primarily an OS/2 user, followed by DRDOS, Linux, and WinNT. I've used Tseng Labs ET4000 graphics chips for the last decade, so I'm now dragging myself into the nineties, staring at the current market for 2D and 3D graphics processors, a blinking Rip Van Winkle. Clearly, I'm a late adopter. I'm looking for a graphics chip set I can live with. The specs - Here's the requirements I'm working with: $300 or less for the card. This turns out to be the easy part. 1280 x1024 x 256 at 70Hz refresh. No problem here. It must be good for CAD work. I don't care about game performance, but solids modelling, rendering, and fast vector drawing is required. It must work in four operating systems: OS/2, Linux, DOS, Windows NT 4. This trims the list considerably. I prefer to buy it from a solid company that will be around for a while. This is turns out to be tricky. I care about high performance in 2D first, and 3D after that. I'd like my choice to be among the top half dozen performers. I'd like to see modest power consumption, considering the performance; no floor heaters please. I want to see good reviews from CAD users. It would be nice if the driver takes advantage of my AMD K6-2 "3Dnow!" CPU chip. Checking the research - According to the 11/19/98 Mercury Research report: Strong 3D chips - Strong 2D chips - (In Futuremark sequence) (In Winmark sequence) S3 Savage 3D 3DFX Banshee 3DFX Banshee Nvidia Riva TNT Nvidia Riva TNT Matrox G200 Matrox G200 S3 Savage 3D Nvidia Riva 128 Number Nine T2R IV Intel i740 3Dlabs PERMEDIA II From the May and August 1998 Mercury Research reports: 3D chips - 2D chips - 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee Matrox G200 S3 Savage 3D 3Dlabs PERMEDIA II 3Dfx Voodoo 2 Number Nine T2R IV Matrox G200 S3 Savage 3D Intel's i740 Nvidia Riva 128ZX Mercury publishes a caveat at the beginning of their reports, stating that the numbers and rankings reflect the use of a "Windows Hardware Quality Environment" and the use of certain benchmark tests which have their own biases. The above rankings reflect this also, since their data is our source here. Beware. Tom's hardware site sees the Nvidia Riva TNT as the strongest 3D chip for games, and shows results on games which differ from Mercury. See http://www.tomshardware.com/releases/99q1/990105/ for their comprehensive review of Riva TNT cards. Tom also asserts that all current graphics chips give equivalent performance in 2D, having reached some theoretical maximum. What about the drivers? Generally, OS/2 drivers have not caught up with the state-of-the-art chips. A close inspection of the lists at the OS/2 Device Driver Pak Online site shows that most of the drivers are for chips that were hot in 1997 or earlier. Of the chips which scored well in 1998 there are OS/2 drivers for the following: Matrox G200 Intel i740 3Dlabs PERMEDIA II Linux drivers for the current hot chips are more extensive. That's a virtue of open-source software. (cf. Red Herring, Feb 99, P 48) S3 Savage 3D Nvidia Riva TNT Matrox G200 Nvidia Riva 128 Number Nine T2R IV 3Dlabs PERMEDIA II Windows NT 4.0 drivers seem to be supplied for cards carrying all the chips in the two driver lists above. This is certainly true for the OS/2 list and is probably true for the Linux list. Of course, NT drivers are available for many other cards which are excluded here for lack of Linux and OS/2 drivers. Intersecting the two lists reduces options to two: Matrox G200 3Dlabs PERMEDIA II Note that these are the top two chips on the mid-1998 2D list above. Both of these chips made respectable showings in all tests. Of the two, the Matrox has the edge in performance in the 1998 Mercury Research tests. The companies - As of Q2 1998, the two largest market shares belonged to ATI and S3, at just under one quarter each. Behind them, each with about 6% market share, were Intel, SIS, and Cirrus. Then at 5% each, Nvidia, 3Dfx, Matrox, NeoMagic, and Trident. How long have these chip and card makers been in business? company in biz since Matrox 1976 STB 1981 Hercules 1982 Number Nine 1982 Elsa 1983 Cirrus 1984 ATI 1985 Trident 1987 S3 1989 Neomagic 1993 Nvidia 1993 3Dlabs 1994 Intel is a special case. Although it was founded before any of these companies, and invented the whole microprocessor game (remember, the 8080 came out in 1974), it did not get into the graphics chip market until recently. I believe the current i740 is their first entry. The industry environment - The pace of power doubling for graphics chips is now almost twice the rate of Moore's law for CPUs, that is, about ten months instead of eighteen months. Making life even more rough, the recent entry of 3D into the algorithm design puzzle has raised development times substantially. In 1989, design time for a graphics card was about four months, and a company could expect to sell it for two years. By 1995, the design time had risen and the product sales window had shortened, so they were equal at about seven months. This was the last year that a display card company could get by with one design team. Today, it takes eighteen months to design a graphics card that will sell for about three months. At a six to one ratio, video companies must keep six design teams working in parallel to maintain cash flow. This puts a big advantage in the hands of larger companies with substantial capital. Graphics chips are now at about 8 million transistors and are moving from 0.35 to 0.25 micron processes. News and rumors - S3, the previous market leader, lost a number of design wins in 1998 due to a slow introduction of their current 3D chip. ATI just squeaked by them, in market share, as a result. ATI's current top-of-the-line chip, the "Rage Pro Turbo," is reported to be running hot and is being redesigned for cooler performance. Its performance numbers in tests were at the lower end of the chips in this report. Nvidia's Riva TNT is also reported to be toasty enough to require a chip fan. 3Dfx just swallowed card maker STB, giving them design control of a line of cards for their chips. Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. ate Orchid/Micronics. Orchid cards continue to be supported as well as Micronics boards. In 1995, Diamond also ate Supra (modems) and SPEA (graphics). The 3D assets of Tseng were bought by ATI. The remains of Tseng were bought by Cellpathways.com. Cirrus Logic has dropped out of this market to focus on other products. Several other companies are or will be following suit. Intel recently purchased Chips & Technologies for $420 million, and invested $24 million in Evans & Sutherland, which suggests it is getting serious about graphics. Since they have more capital than anyone else, they may be in the best position to take this market. In January's Red Herring, Gerry Liu of Trident sums it up, "Intel will push the high-end players into a very high niche and the mainstream players into the low end. It will then sit in the middle like a tornado." Conclusions - It is not reasonable to expect much stability from any of today's players in this market. Whatever I buy today will not be around for long, and even the chip maker may be gone soon. The price/performance for mid-range graphics cards reflects the tremendous pace of advances. In 1988, an Orchid Prodesigner II, running on the 16MHz ISA bus, supplied with an ET4000AX chip and 1MB of memory, yielded 1024x768x256 at 60Hz refresh, and acceptable 2D drawing speed. It cost about $250. For that price today, I can buy two Elsa Gloria Synergy cards, running on the AGP bus at 66 or 133 Mhz, supplied with the PERMEDIA II chip and 8MB SGRAM, yielding screens of up to 1920x1200x256 at 73Hz. And, if the specs on the web sites are to be believed - I haven't tried this yet - I can use them both at once, one AGP and one PCI, or two PCI, in the same system with dual screen drivers, giving me 3840x1200 dots! The Matrox Millenium G200 is my first choice and fills all the requirements and preferences specified. Elsa's Gloria Synergy, based on the PERMEDIA II chip, comes in a close second. Both are available in AGP or PCI bus forms. Both cost under $150, loaded with 8MB. The Elsa and Matrox are said to work together in a two screen setup. I have ordered one of each, so I will soon find out. * If you're a big spender and you're about to pick up a 21" monitor, ask about the Matrox "SE" version of the Millennium, which will give you even more dots. It is only sold with the monitor. Sidebar: Sources used - Third party testing and opinions: http://www.mercuryresearch.com http://www.tomshardware.com http://www.tomshardware.com/releases/99q1/990105 http://www.hardwarecentral.com/reviews/vcards/beast http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue62/shoot.html I should particularly acknowledge Andrew Madden for his excellent article in the January Red Herring, cited above. OS/2 and Linux device driver lists: http://service.software.ibm.com/os2ddpak/html/displaya http://www.xfree86.org/cardlist.html Online sales sites: http://www.killerapp.com http://www.indelible-blue.com Manufacturers of chips and cards: http://www.atitech.com http://www.diamondmm.com http://www.elsa.com http://developer.intel.com/design/graphics/drivers/index.htm http://www.matrox.com http://www.neomagic.com http://www.nine.com http://www.nvidia.com http://www.orchid.com http://www.s3.com http://www.stb.com http://www.tridentmicro.com http://www.tseng.com/sftlst2.htm Short bio: Rhodes Hileman manages engineering development, documentation, and manufacturing for hi-tech startups. He was on the founding teams of Genigraphics GP Systems, Array Technologies, and Gigaoperations Corp., all involved with creating faster image processing systems. He now lives in Seattle. Web site - http://www.smsys.com/ Addenda: June 1999 - nVidia has released an OS/2 driver for all their chips. See http://www.nvidia.com/Marketing/Products/Pages.nsf/pages/os2drivers/ to get it. ...or - http://www.nvidia.com/Products.nsf/htmlmedia/software_drivers.html July 99 - S3 has promised an OS/2 driver for the Savage 4. See http://www.s3.com/savage4/savage4ds.pdf July 99 - I did buy both the Matrox Millennium and the Elsa Gloria Synergy cards. The Elsa card arrived over a month before the Matrox. So it got installed first (Feb 99), and has been running flawlessly ever since. The installation routines for the Elsa card are the slickest I have ever witnessed on both OS/2 and NT4 platforms. "Witnessed" is the right term. After entering some data about your monitor and resolution preferences, you don't do anything, you just watch. On the NT4 machine it tells you not to touch your mouse, and then a flurry of setup screens fly by, then it's done. Many utilities are available in the Elsa icon in the tray next to the clock. * The documentation on the two cards now leads me to believe that dual screen drivers work only with two cards of the same make. I have not tested this, and I would be happy to hear otherwise. My ideal configuration would be to run the Elsa or the Matrox in the AGP slot with a second screen running on my Genoa Phantom PCI card for my older applications with ET4000 drivers.