🚀 go-pugleaf

Just got off the phone with a Radius technician Here's the poop:

1) Their XGA-2 card uses IBM's P2 chipset and will use OS/2's XGA
drivers. No waiting for proprietary drivers (unlike with a certain other
company :-)). (The ATI will work with OS/2's default 8514 drivers, but
proprietary drivers could take better advantage of ATI's hardware, and
could also provide coprocessor support at resolutions lower than
8514.)

2) There is no EISA Radius card because IBM wouldn't give them a license
to produce one, preferring to keep the 32-bit bus market to themselves.
But the Radius will work properly, busmastering and all, in an EISA
machine, albeit with only 16 bit data transfers. For coprocessed
instructions, where not much data moves across the bus, this shouldn't
make much of a difference, but some operations aren't covered by
coprocessed instructions.

3) The Radius lists for just under $500 because IBM charges plenty for
the chipset. Radius insists that this is a low-profit item for them, and
that any soaking is courtesy of IBM.

4) The card is available direct from Radius (1-800-5-RADIUS) or through
regular distributors. Radius will charge you list price; they said that
if I told my dealer to contact his usual distributors, or to call Radius
for the names of distributors, I'd save a bit.

5) They sold out their first two production runs and are in the third.

6) They have no benchmarks comparing their card to the ATI EISA Graphics
Ultra Pro. Radius guesses that the ATI would nose out the Radius card in
an OS/2 EISA system, but only barely.

This user is leaning strongly toward Radius, primarily for the
convenience of driver support. While 8514 and XGA-2 are both IBM
standards, IBM seems more interested in providing quick driver support
for XGA-2. But I still wish there was an EISA version.

Comments and corrections welcome.

--David
--
Professor David J. Birnbaum         djbpitt+@pitt.edu [Internet]
The Royal York Apartments, #802     djbpitt@pittvms   [Bitnet]
3955 Bigelow Boulevard              voice: 1-412-687-4653
Pittsburgh, PA  15213  USA          fax:   1-412-624-9714