ATI Technologies HD3800 Series, User Manual

Page: 9 / 101

Chapter 1: Introduction
5
1.2 Performance
The
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series is a graphics accelerator card.
Computer functions like disk access and numerical calculation are not
accelerated by the
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series. It is not unusual to
obtain an overall system speed increase of 2 times for graphics-heavy
applications after installing the
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series. The
speed of pure graphics operations, like dragging objects with a mouse,
scrolling, and resizing, will be remarkably improved.
1.3 Software Compatibility
The key function of the
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series is its VGA
compatibility. Unlike coprocessor-based, or IBM
®
8514A-type display
cards, the
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series is 100% compatible with your
DOS computer. This means that all DOS software will run correctly with
the
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series VGA without modification.
The VGA compatibility includes backward compatibility with the EGA,
CGA and MDA standards. All DOS software will include drivers for at
least one of these display types and will be fully compatible with the
ATI
Radeon™ HD 3800
series. The
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series is also
fully compatible with VESA BIOS extensions for resolutions higher than
640x480.
When the
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series is used in VGA, backward
compatibility, the graphics engine of the
ATI Radeon™ HD 3800
series
card is not used. The speed in these modes will be comparable to the
fastest type of standard VGA card.