Since I was pressed for time and the review was late, I used a simple but stressful test to determine movie playback performance - a 320x240 Cinepak QuickTime movie stretched to full screen in 1024x768, thousands color mode. The movie was loaded into RAM to prevent the CDROM drive's performance from affecting the scores.

Be aware that Quicktime will not use the hardware scaling/acceleration features of your card if you scale the movie up an exact 2X factor. For exact 2X movie size playback, software scaling only will be used. Also note that the ATI cards only accelerate Quicktime movies that use the CinePak and Indeo codecs. In the past these two codecs have been the most popular.

The results of the frames played and max framerate tests in MacBench 4.0 using the above parameters are shown below:

MacBench tests: 320x240 movie stretched to 1024x768 (full screen)

As shown above, the ATI cards were about 23% faster that the MacTell card on these tests. Also the image quality of the ATI cards looked a little brighter and with less edge pixelation than the Virge card. Considering these factors, I rated movie playback of the cards as follows:

• ATI Xclaim 3D: 8.5
• ATI Xclaim VR: 8.5
• MacTell Vision 3D: 7

The next page has details on the software controls and hardware features.