Datapath Ltd, the Derby-based designer and supplier of graphics boards and computer systems for computer-aided design and simulation has announced its new Tornado Peripheral Component Interconnect graphics board, which is targeted towards the multimedia and high end users, in particular those that have DX4 and Pentium-based machines. It uses a Weitek Corp P9100 graphics processor and Weitek P9130 video power accelerator, which transfers the image to the screen with real-time scaling, dithering line and pixel averaging, obviating the need for the host to scale the picture. It features 4Mb dual-ported Video RAM and IBM Corp RG525 220MHz RAMDAC video clock. The Tornado offers 16.7m colours at 1,280 by 1,024 pixels. It is due out in the middle of this month at UKP500. The firm has also announced the Eye Media board, which has been designed not to waste valuable processor power. The compressed data is taken from the compressed and stored source, such as the CD-ROM, and instead of being decompressed by the personal computer’s processor, the processor just sends it straight to the Eye board, which decompresses it and sends it on for display on the monitor. It is due for release later on this quarter.
