Actix Systems Inc has released results of its in-house personal computer labs benchmark tests comparing its Quantum VGA Windows accelerator board with other VGA display adaptors based on Tseng Labs Inc’s ET4000: the Santa Clara-based company says the results demonstrate that Actix’s board is four to five times faster than other boards currently on the market, and it attributes the speed to its proprietary board design based on the 86C911 graphical user interface accelerator chip manufactured by S3 Inc; the 86C911 is a single-chip graphical user interface accelerator that performs the graphics operations in hardware including BitBlt, rastor operations, image transfers, line drawing and clipping, colour expansion and hardware cursor; in systems with SVGA display controllers, the graphics operations must be performed in software by the processor, but by implementing these operations in hardware, the S3 86C911 off-loads the CPU and input-output bus, providing an improved response time; the VGA board is a two-thirds sized AT bus display adaptor with feature connector, and the product works with Windows 3.0, AutoCAD 10, 11, and 386 Microstation, CADKEY, CADvance, VersaCAD, GEM/Ventura Publisher, 1-2-3 2.0, MS Word, and WordPerfect 5.0; a Quantum board with 512Kb of memory and 1,024 by 768 resolution costs $400, a board with 1Mb of memory and and 1,024 by 768 resolution or 16 colours and 1,280 by 1,024 resolution comes in at $500.
