Rasterops Prism GT Nubus card

External Since: Dec 16, 2007 Posts: 6

Looking for information on the Rasterops Prism GT graphics card for old
Nubus based Macs. Have been all over Google and have been unable to
find anything but the 3.3 drivers from the Mac Driver museum.

Basically, I picked up one of these cards for my old Quantum 700. It
gives me the option of now selecting thousands of colors in my Monitors
control panel, gives me some higher resolutions at 24-bit (millions of
colors) depth, allegedly gives me Quickdraw acceleration, and a few
other arcane features that I really have no use for. ie. 2, 4, and 8
times zoom. Yawn!

What I want to know, is what applications will actually benefit from the
acceleration offered by this card. Nothing appears to be really be any
faster than the stock Quadra video hardware. I suppose millions of
colors at higher resolution is better than a kick in the nuts, but I'm
really wanting to see some acceleration. Do applications have to be
specifically written to take advantage of the acceleration offered by
this card? And, if so, which applications will take advantage of it?

Specifics:

Quadra 700 /w 20 MB RAM, System 7.5.5, Quicktime 2.5, Version 3.3 of the
Rasterops drivers.

External Since: Dec 17, 2007 Posts: 1

"De Served" <deserved RemoveThis @cogeco.ca> wrote in message
news:H4f9j.30063$9F1.26025@read1.cgocable.net...
> Looking for information on the Rasterops Prism GT graphics card for old
> Nubus based Macs. Have been all over Google and have been unable to
> find anything but the 3.3 drivers from the Mac Driver museum.
>
> Basically, I picked up one of these cards for my old Quantum 700. It
> gives me the option of now selecting thousands of colors in my Monitors
> control panel, gives me some higher resolutions at 24-bit (millions of
> colors) depth, allegedly gives me Quickdraw acceleration, and a few
> other arcane features that I really have no use for. ie. 2, 4, and 8
> times zoom. Yawn!
>
> What I want to know, is what applications will actually benefit from the
> acceleration offered by this card. Nothing appears to be really be any
> faster than the stock Quadra video hardware. I suppose millions of
> colors at higher resolution is better than a kick in the nuts, but I'm
> really wanting to see some acceleration. Do applications have to be
> specifically written to take advantage of the acceleration offered by
> this card? And, if so, which applications will take advantage of it?
>
> Specifics:
>
> Quadra 700 /w 20 MB RAM, System 7.5.5, Quicktime 2.5, Version 3.3 of the
> Rasterops drivers.

The Quadra 700, 800, 900, 950, etc have their video directly connected to
the CPU + RAM bus so they can do 40MB/sec while Nubus is regulated to
10MB/sec (I think 20MB/sec in the 840av). So you are not going to get a
Nubus video card that can beat built in video on the Quadras unless the card
has some feature not present in the built in video (DSP chips, truecolor on
large screens, video capture, anything that needs more then 2MB of RAM,
hardware zoom, etc).

The card you have is a very nice card, what is the problem with the original
700 that made you want to get a newer video card?