Hercules Graphite Pro and Graphite VL Pro
Hercules' second set of cards in their Graphite series was the Graphite Pro and Graphite VL Pro which arrived in late 1993, supporting a maximum resolution of 1280 x 1024.
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Released | 1993 |
| Bus | ISA 16-bit or VESA Local Bus | |
| Chipset | IIT AGX015 | |
| Standards | VGA | |
| Memory | 1 MB or 2 MB VRAM | |
| RAMDAC | Brooktree 481/485 | |
| Ports | 15-pin DSUB (analogue RGB video out) | |
| Part # | HG310S (1 MB ISA), HG420S (2 MB ISA) HG610S (1 MB VLB), HG720S (2 MB VLB) |
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| FCC IDs | EW65T5HERCULESHLC | |
| Price | At launch: $549 (either version) | |
| See Also | Graphite, Dynamite |
The Graphite Pro was a 16-bit ISA card, and Graphite VL Pro was a VESA Local Bus card.
Using the AGX015 graphics chipset from IIT, it was an improvement over the earlier Graphite which used the AGX014. The AGX015 was designed to operate at resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 in 16.7 million colours and had built-in hardware support for certain GUI functions such as BitBlt, line draws, complex polygon fills, circles, ellipses, and surface mapping and shading.
The Graphite Pro series came with either 1 or 2 MB of video memory (lower than the chipset could use) that clocked at 70ns with a memory clock running at 65 MHz. Non-interlaced, its highest resolution of 1280 x 1024 could show 256 colours. Reducing the resolution to 1024 x 768 allowed for 64K colours, and at 800 x 600, 16.7 million colours.
Other cards that used the same IIT chipset include the Boca Research Vortek VRAM Accelerator, Orchid Celcius/VLB, Spider Graphics Black Widow VLB, and VidTech GraphMax LB.
Benchmark tests at the time showed the Graphite VL Pro to be a mid-range performer.
Board Revisions
Competition
At the time, the IIT AGX015 chipset competed with ATI's Mach32, Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428, Weitek P9000, Tseng Labs' ET4000/W32i, and S3's 86C928 chipsets. Cards that were benchmarked alongside the Graphite Pro series include Matrox MGA Ultima, Genoa WindowsVGA 24 Turbo, ATi Graphics Ultra Pro VLB, Diamond Stealth Pro VLB and Diamond Viper VLB, and Cardinal's VideoSpectrum VL and WarpSpeed cards.
The Tseng and Cirrus Logic chips were very much the budget offerig, S3's 928 was middle-of-the-pack, and Matrox' MGA 64-BLT was the premium choice.
In the Media
In this round, Hercules supplied new drivers without the false optimization. The Graphite card scored a pedestrian Winmark score of 8.7 megapixels per second. However, the Graphite card eeked out the top speed of 8 minutes 26 seconds in the applications tests, nosing out the ATI Ultra Pro (when enabled to complete the tests) by 3 seconds. This card turned out the highest scores in the CorelDRAW section of the applications test, 26 seconds ahead of the #9GXE, which was last in this segment. The Graphite card ranked second of third in all the other sections of the applications test.
At a price of $399 with 1MB of VRAM memory, the Hercules Graphite gives solid performance for a reasonable price."
PC Magazine, April 1993
Setting it Up
No information is available on setting up the Graphite Pro series of cards.
Downloads
Operation Manual Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
Original Utility Disk Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
VGA BIOS ROM Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
VGA BIOS ROM Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
VGA BIOS ROM Get in touch if you can provide this missing item! |
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