Guest Review - MacTell Vision Pro 3D II Lite 4MB Graphics Card

By Michiel Buisman August 5, 1998

(Note: in 1999 Mactell went out of business. The cards were made by Formac for Mactell as far as I know. The original 1998 article follows.) First impression The box. Plain white, with a sticker on the top and on one side checkboxes for the graphics cards, on the other side checkboxes for the PowerJolt cards MacTell makes. I like that: I haven't spent my money on one of those glossy ATI boxes, no, the $259 went into the card. In the box were 6 items: One top piece of foam rubber, one middle piece of foam rubber, one bottom piece of foam rubber, one floppy disk (3.5"), one 71 page manual and the card. The manual covers all cards currently shipping from MacTell, except the Vision 3D Pro II 4MB Lite (let's call it V3P24L, for short). The card itself looks pretty normal, the #9 ticket to ride chip is clearly visable, no heatsink. There are three slotlike slots on the card, one SO size, two larger ones. There is also a connector (on the inside) saying "VGA passthru". Outside: one VGA connector. Surprise! No Mac connector! MacTell does not mention this at their site or in the manual. Fortunately, the PowerTower came with a Sony 17" monitor, so I don't need an adaptor, but it would've been nice to mention the VGA only-ness of the card. I suppose that one of the slotlike slots is actualy for memory expansion, which is very nice for a "lite" card. Apparently, the only "lite" thing about it, is that it does not use the 250Mhz RAMDAC the "heavy" uses, rather it uses the Ticket to ride's built-in 220Mhz RAMDAC. The floppy contains a readme, saying not too much more than: put the card in your Mac, restart, put the floppy in, drag the control panel to your control panels folder and restart, then enjoy. This is exactly what I did. After restarting, I discouvered that the controlpanel had placed an extension in my extensionsfolder. Nice, no slow installer to launch, not nice, yet another extensions nobody told me about. The control panel is the same as the one for the "heavy" card, so I won;t discuss it too much here. It does it job most excellently. One thing I don't like is the tabs: it has two 'stories' of tabs, that switch up and down in a Windows-like manner, but hey: the thing just has too many options! The 2D part I have no Macbench CD, so I can't do the 'official' tests. I do have Norton System info, so I used that, to compare it to the TwinTurbo 8 (TT8) at various resolutions. Lateron, I thought of checking whether an updated driver is available, like you suggested in your review of the "heavy". And yes, there is. On the floppy that shipped with the card was version 5.20b (called 5.2L), while 5.2.2 was available for download. Strangely, they had exactly the same creation dates. Oh well, I don' care. Most pleasingly, the results were even 25% faster than version 5.20b! Very nice. This leads me to think that I can expect performance boosts in the future. The enclosed PICT says it all: 15" in this respect is 832*624, while 17" is 1024*768. Another difference between the TT* and the V3P24L, the latter has higher refresh rates. Whereas the TT8 allows me to go to 75Hz at both rezolutions, the V3P24L goes upto 80Hz, and can do 105Hz at 640*480, almost iMac! TT8 can actually do 100Hz at 1024*768, but my Sony can't. 16b = 16 bit, 32b = banana-mode. Copybits is somewhat faster in the TT8, but the scrolling just blows it away: 6 times faster scrolling! With this card installed, the 225Mhz 604 machine feels quicker, nicer, more responsive. Playing the 1984 commercial is really cool with this card. It's only 320*236, but I can play at full screen (1024*768) and it still looks good (slightly less blocky than double-size whithout acceleration) and never skips a frame. TT8 can not do that. 3D MacTell says that V3P24L accelerates OpenGL, so I downloaded some of the conix (www.conix3d.com) demos. Some work better and way faster than whithout, some are the same, some don't work with the V3P24L. Only the moth demo runs faster. Leaping lizard, Dissolve and Chess look the same, TT8 even does a better job at the shadow under the lizard. Geo-Face,Vulcan_gunner and Gears *don't* work on the V3P24L (white screen), while they do on the TT8. Unfortunatly, the screensize of the GLdemos is either small or full screen. At this point I discover the shortcoming of this card: texturememory. 4MB is not enough. I ran Ravebench, and it showed very good results over MacPicasso 3DO, on the two lowest resolutions. V3P24L won't go higher. For some reason, at 800*600, the transparent reflections test comes to a standstill when tried on the V3P24L. Quake RAVE (1.08.5). 640*400, very startingpoint: 27+ FPS RAVE [NOTE: this was from the simple spin 'timerrefresh' - not the more accuarate TIMEDEMO tests. The Timedemo tests actual gameplay speeds (moving, firing, etc) and the scores would be lower that the simple timerrefresh he used, which does a static (no enemies, etc.) 360 degree spin in place. The author also said that Shadows had to be turned off in Rave Quake.-Mike]. 15.5 FPS standard Quake. At this point I noticed that this card is actually brighter than TT8. I'm not dreaming, I think. So I turned down the brilliance, which was maxed out for the TT8, and it was too much for the V3P24L. This is definately good. (later, when I switched back to TT8, I had to readjust the brilliance, cuz I couldn't see a damn). One point of attention: no shadows. Pity, but it doesn't work. The rest does, though. NanoSaur 1.06 Nice. Transparencies, fast, smoothed, etc. But then came a lot of textures and it got quite confused and coloured me bad, exusez le pun. If the 8MB DRAM upgrade [[DRAM, that's slow, right? like, SGRAM is not a kind of DRAM?]] also comes in a 4MB or even 2MB, these issues would be resolved. The manual mentions nothing and the link on the MacTell site to the PDF V3P2 manual is a 404. Misc The card has one option I didn't look into: Font cache. Since it is only a 4MB card and I'm running it at 1024*768, there's not too much left for the cache. I don't know the benefits of it. I'll see later on, as I will take this card home and install it in my G3 AIO (when it comes). Another interesting (useless?) feature is solid dragging of windows. This is similar to what Respond! does, only much, much faster and smoother. Disadvantage: the window functions as a giant eraser, while Respond! updates it in the background,which slows it down, although the V3P24L hardware solid drag is also faster than Powerwindows at no transparency. In the controlpanel, it managed to identify the TT8, sitting idle (with no drivers). Cool. So how does this card add up? Pros: very, very fast 2D (Movies, scolling of graphics and text), fairly cheap and probably expandable so that the 3D capabilites are more usefull (they are fast enough). Most likely you'll gain extra performance or extra capabilities with newer drivers. Cons: virtually no documentation, VGA port, unpredictable OpenGL acceleration. Related Links: For the latest in video card reviews and articles, check the www.xlr8yourmac.com Video Cards topics page.

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