MGA Millennium: A visual treat that plays 3D too

MGA Millennium: A visual treat that plays 3D too

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): No matter how gorgeous your display monitor may
be, you wouldn't be able to enjoy its fullest beauty unless you
also have a very good graphics board on your computer to go with
it. A graphics board -- also called a graphics card -- is a
device that prepares digital video signals, produced by the
computer, for the display and sends them to the attached monitor.
It sits in a slot on your motherboard, and it connects to your
monitor via a video cable. Some motherboard models may have this
graphics card already embedded in them.

Today, we normally talk about a SuperVGA card instead of just
the plain-vanilla VGA that IBM introduced more than 10 years ago.
SuperVGA means, among other things, higher resolution levels (800
by 600 and up) with more colors and higher refresh rates
capabilities.

I have frequently emphasized in this column the need to have a
high refresh rate, so, suffice to say that the higher the rate is
the more stable the display will be because the less the flicker
you will have.

Most of today's graphics boards come with their own graphics
processor chip. Some familiar names in graphics processors are
Tseng Lab., Trident, Cirrus Logic, S3, and Diamond. These
processors are employed in the graphics cards to free the CPU
from the display-related tasks, thereby improving the performance
of your system as a whole.

The cards also perform various functions that aim at
accelerating the display. Thus, the name graphics card is usually
interchangeable with Windows accelerator card.

When scouring the market for a graphics board with the best
value, remember the following few parameters that you have to
examine: First, the card should have at least 1 MB of RAM on
board. This will give you a 256 color depth at 1024 by 768
resolution, which is definitely adequate for most computer jobs.

Second, the refresh rate should be in excess of 70 Hz.

Third, you should find a PCI version if your computer has PCI
slots on it. Nowadays, you wouldn't easily find a new graphics
card that is not PCI. But if they do offer you one anyway you
should be wary because chances are that it is an old card.

Fourth, it should also have a feature connector in case you
decide to add an MPEG playback card later on.

Some more expensive cards use Video RAM chips, or VRAM, and
some other slightly less expensive ones use EDO RAM for fast
performance. Just a few of them use a special type of RAM called
Windows RAM. The one I will review shortly uses this type of
memory.

On the higher end, you have the choice among graphics cards
from Diamond, Number Nine, ATI, STB, and many others. Courtesy of
PT Siemens Nixdorf Indonesia, I was able to test drive MGA
Millennium, one of these expensive cards, on my newly upgraded
AMD 5x86 machine that runs Windows 95.

Siemens Nixdorf uses this card, that is made by Matrox
Graphics, on some of their high-end PCs. In fact, if you happened
to read my review of Siemens Nixdorf's Pentium Pro system, you'd
recall that powerful workstation also had a MGA Millennium on it.

Features

MGA Millennium has been around for almost a year now. It has
won quite a few awards and is still receiving some. The card that
I tested came with 2 MB of WRAM. If you have the need, the budget
or simply the impulse to have the utmost, you can upgrade it and
add another 6 MB of WRAM to it.

With a whopping 8 MB of WRAM on board, you can actually do a
lot of things, including real-time 3D animation at a resolution
of 1600 by 1280 resolution and 16 bit color depth. It also came
with a Windows 95 driver and PowerDesk utility.

The bundled CD ROM contains a potentially addictive -- and
therefore potentially devastating -- game, NASCAR Racing from
Papyrus. I ventured to play it for a little while, and it
reminded me of my old-time favorite game Test Drive from
Accolade. Honestly speaking, I still cringe each time I think of
how many hours I had wasted on the five sports cars that are
featured in Test Drive, and it helped me avoid loading this one
afterwards.

On the more serious side, the CD-ROM also contains a useful
software. Included is Asymetrix's 3D F/X, a 3D animation creator
and image rendering from a company that has a strong reputation
in the animation and authoring world. Keep in mind that this
graphics card also caters to the needs of those who work with 3D
programs, i.e., the need for a 3D accelerator. That's also the
reason why 8 MB of RAM may be required.

As you would expect from a high-end graphics accelerator card,
Millennium also comes with a color calibrating utility. Finally,
if you like playing MPEG files, you'll be able to do it with the
help of the included SoftPEG Media Player. Take a look at the
accompanying picture, and you'll find a karaoke window at bottom
center.

The software-based MPEG player will hardly give you the
pleasure of watching live video or singing karaoke, as the frame
rate is pretty low and resolution is very poor. You will still
need RealMagic Pro if you want to see quality MPEG playback (I
will review this MPEG hardware some time soon).

Practical

Like most other SuperVGA cards on the market today, Millennium
allows us to have a desktop larger than what we can see on the
monitor. Take a look at the Display Properties window in the
picture, and you'll have an idea of what it means: You can have a
working area that is larger than what your monitor can display.

For instance, you can have a 1600 by 1200 desktop area but
your monitor only displays a 1200 by 1024 area at any given time.
You can pan around the desktop area with the monitor functioning
as your looking glass.

To make it easier to navigate inside the desktop, Matrox
supplies us with a Quick Access utility. It allows us to change
current resolution to any of the four preset modes, zoom in and
out, lock the pan viewer, or center the currently active
application. I like the zoom-in and out feature very much,
especially when working with graphics. Changing the display mode
will still involve rebooting the computer, unfortunately,
although the next generation of Windows will enable us to do it
on the fly.

With 2 MB of RAM, I was able to get a resolution as high as
1600 by 1200 with 256 colors. This level of color depth is
adequate for most of the jobs that I do. I could have had an even
higher color depth, i.e., 32 bit, but the maximum resolution
would drop to 800 by 600.

MGA Millennium can also be used side-by-side with another VGA
card or another Millennium, so you can have two high-quality
displays simultaneously. That's a feature that professional
presenters would definitely love.

Final word

It's hard to find fault with a graphics card of this caliber,
especially when it is used to display the pretty face of Windows
95. The card is fast and easy to install. Moreover, it offers all
the necessary features and then some. Unfortunately, it's not
cheap.

Fortunately, the price of Taiwan-made SuperVGA cards, which
belong to the more affordable but still reliable category, have
dropped significantly. In fact, quite recently I was offered one
with 1 MB of EDO RAM for less than Rp 100,000 (US$43). With such
a down-to-earth price, there's no longer a reason for you to keep
crimping on the graphics card, because it won't add much to the
price of your new Pentium anyway.

However, if you have the money to spend, MGA Millennium is
definitely on the list of alternatives that you should look at.