9FX Motion 771
The Motion 771 was part of Number Nine's "9FX" series in 1995, which also comprised Vision 330 and Motion 531 cards. The Motion 771 was the flagship offering of the three, as noted by the advert which called it "The ultimate 64-bit VRAM accelerator for power graphics & video".
|
Released | 1995 |
| Bus | VESA Local Bus or PCI | |
| Chipset | S3 Vision968 | |
| Standards | MDA, Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA | |
| Memory | 4 MB VRAM | |
| Ports | 9-pin DSUB (RGB analogue video out) | |
| Part # | ||
| FCC ID | ||
| RAMDAC | IBM RGB524 (220 MHz) | |
| Price | At launch: $499 (street price) | |
| See Also | Number Nine Vision 330, Number Nine Motion 531 |
Based on S3's Vision968 chipset, it could output resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 in 64K colours at 75 Hz refresh rate.
Numerous other cards that year were also based on this same S3 chipset, including the Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM, ELSA Winner 2000 Pro/X, Genoa VideoBlitz III AV, Hercules Graphite Terminator Pro, and STB Velocity 64V. All these also came with 4 MB of VRAM and many implemented the same IBM 220 MHz RAMDAC, though the Diamond and ELSA cards instead chose the equivalent TI PTVP3026 RAMDAC, which also ran at 220 MHz.
Board Revisions
Known BIOS versions for the Motion 771 include: 2.05.09
Competition
In the Media
Like Number Nine's Imagine128 offerings (also reviewed here), the Motion771 comes with the outstanding HawkEye for Windows utilities set. If you're looking for a true-color-capable card with decent performance at true-color resolutions and above-average 16-bit Windows and 8-bit AutoCAD speeds, the Motion771 is an excellent choice.
Four megabytes of VRAM, a 220-MHz IBM RGB524 RAMDAC, and the S3 Vision968 graphics controller add up to a strong hardware pedigree. The S3 Vision968 controller delivers a solid set of features and performance enhancements, including the usual BitBlt, line-draw, and pattern-fill functions. New to the S3 Vision968 is hardware video acceleration, and that is what puts the motion into the name of this card. The S3 Vision 968 hardware offers x-axis video scaling; the y-axis is implemented in the Motion771's DCI driver set. Though we didn't formally test video playback, we noticed that when we stretched Video for Windows clips on our test-bed, the resulting interpolated image was far finer and less pixelated than images on cards without video acceleration.
On our Graphics WinMark 95 tests, the Motion771 fell close to the bottom in 1,024-by-768 true color. A switch to 16-bit color at a resolution of 1,600-by-1,200 pixels brought the Motion771 to the top third of the line up. Interestingly, on our Raster Rotate test, the Motion771 turned in an excellent performance - coming in fourth overall. On the AutoCAD 3-D Pan test, the card pulled into an impressive third place,, while on both the Windows-based Vector File Open and the AutoCAD Redraw All tests, the Motion771 dropped back into the mid-range."
PC Magazine, 27th June 1995
Setting it Up
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! |
|
