Product Reviews

The world of graphics cards is currently obsessed with all things 3D, so you could be forgiven for thinking that graphics cards are just for playing games. Connectware's RasterMedia three-in-one multimedia accelerator shows that there are other ways to make graphics cards stand out from the crowd. In addition to 2D Windows and video acceleration, the RasterMedia claims to offer a complete audio solution, with 16-bit audio for WAVs and wavetable for MIDI.

The RasterMedia is based on the Brooktree BtV MediaStream chipset. This handles the GUI acceleration, video and audio. The GUI side is standard, using a 2Mb of VRAM frame buffer, and comes with Direct Draw drivers; PC Pro benchmarks showed it was slower than a Matrox Millennium, but not drastically.

The way in which MediaStream handles graphics and video is far more interesting: before it's sent to the frame buffer, data is placed in discrete packets which are handled independently in memory. With special video mixing hardware, Brooktree avoids many of the memory and bandwidth problems that occur when video is scaled up before being sent to the frame buffer. The card can display two simultaneous video streams in true colour, even if Windows is using an eight-bit colour depth. The system also looks after colour space conversion, and vertical and horizontal interpolation.

Audio is handled by the same chipset, which aims to achieve better lip-synching during video playback. Video playback was seamless and the Mediamatics software MPEG playback was better than from some hardware, with no unsynchronised words.

WaveStream, the wavetable audio software, is included for General MIDI

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purposes. The instrument sounds are held in RAM rather than on dedicated ROMs as on sound cards. WaveStream does a good job of pretending it's a 'real' sound card, both under Windows and DOS, but the driver for the latter has problems with some older games. Also, because WaveStream is software-based, there are potential CPU and RAM-hogging problems. Fortunately, the software provided enables you to monitor CPU usage.

Taking a P133 with 16Mb of RAM as a testbed, the CPU usage was minimal. On the Wave audio side, RasterMedia supports full-duplex 16-bit playback and recording up to 48kHz, with full SB Pro-compatible games support. It has the usual programs for audio CDs, recording and playing back WAVs with the familiar home stereo approach used by all sound card manufacturers.

Software to control the optional TV tuner provides TV or video pictures on screen. It's displayed with the same engine used for AVI playback, so pictures appear in true colour regardless of Windows colour depth. Resize the picture by dragging or using hotkeys and, as with video playback, picture quality is very good.

The tuner is joined internally to the RasterMedia via a feature connector and the blanking plate has a socket for an aerial, in addition to S-Video and composite video inputs. The sound card outputs and VGA connector on the main card and the separate backplate (which must be connected to use a joystick or external MIDI) is an impressive display of functionality, or a baffling array of sockets, depending on your viewpoint.

The RasterMedia card does all it sets out to do well. It's a good Windows accelerator with excellent video playback, a competent sound card and TV tuner. The integration is neat and it's a good solution for Windows multimedia performance. Connectware has tried to keep everything standard. Those who play a lot of games could buy a dedicated sound card, as it won't need software drivers to play DOS games.

Plenty of good graphics cards cost less than £150, such as the VideoLogic GrafixStar 600 (reviewed issue 23, p144) or Matrox Mystique (reviewed issue 24, p170) and a Wavetable sound card can be less than £100. Therefore, £399 for the basic RasterMedia without the TV tuner seems a bit steep.