Irvine, California-based Western Digital Corp has entered the graphics accelerator products market high end with the Barbados 64-bit Peripheral Component Interconnect board. It is a 64-bit VRAM-based Windows accelerator board that supports VESA extended Video Graphics Array modes of operations. It has a palette of 16.8m colours and supports resolutions up to 1,600 by 1,200. The Paradise Barbados board has 2Mb of on-board memory, upgradable to 4Mb and supports a refresh rate of up to 150Hz. The Local Bus version is fully compatible with the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus, Video Graphics Array, Extended Graphics Adaptor, Colour Graphics Adaptor, Hercules Graphics Controller and Monochrome Display Adaptor standards. The board uses advanced architecture like hardware cursor, BitBlit, pattern fills, short stroke vectors and line draws. The Barbados boasts driver support for Windows 3.1, Windows NT, OS/2, AutoCAD, Microstation, Video for Windows, Santa Cruz Unix, Solaris, NeXTstep and other graphical user interface-based applications. The Barbados also comes with easy to use installation programme, along with a comprehensive set of utilities. The utilities include panning and zooming tools, colour correction and a picture-in-picture feature, enabling users to capture all or a portion of the screen within an application and insert it into an active screen of another application. The Paradise Barbados board uses the Vision964 graphics acceleration chip from S3 Inc. The Video RAM-based Vision964 features an internal 64-bit graphics engine and 64-bit video memory interface. The Vision964 supports 32-bit Peripheral Component Interconnect local bus interface with no glue logic and 32-bit VESA, Video Electronics Standards Association, Local Bus interface. Other features the thing offers are the selection of resolution and colour depth, drop down menus to change the size and position of images and hot keys for feature selections.
