High-end Graphics Card

This high-end AGP card is powered by the ATI Radeon 8500LE graphics-processing unit. With 64 MB of onboard DDR RAM, this card boasts of a 9.6 GB/sec memory interface. This puts it in league with Nvidia GeForce 3 series of cards as far as recourses are concerned.

The available interfaces are a VGA for the monitor, DVI for a flat-panel display and a S-Video connector for VCRs and TVs. It gives a maximum resolution of 2048x1536 pixels at a color depth of 32-bit. It also supports DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 for realistic complex lighting effects. Full screen anti-aliasing gives smoother looking graphics. The card comes with drivers for Win 98 SE/Me/2000 /XP.

Preliminary test on the card were done on a PII 450 processor machine with 64 MB SD-RAM. Quake III Arena tests at a resolution of 640x480, 16-bit color depth gave a result of 46.2 fps. At 32-bit color depth and same resolution, the frame rates were 46.6 fps. Increasing the resolution to 800x600 and color depth to 32-bit, did not budge the card and we still got almost the same frame rates (47.2 fps). This essentially denotes that this is indeed a good

performer. Price: $300 abroad (rupee pricing awaited)

Ashish Sharma in Mumbai