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.