Excellent features and performance, but it’s pricey and you need a suitably powerful PC to make the most of it.

2D graphics speed has been a non-issue for some years, and the demand for analog image quality is also waning in the move to digital TFTs, all of which means that Matrox's reputation for analog engineering is now a moot point for most users.

Fastest 2D/3D Graphics Card

There was a time when Pinnacle dominated the PC video-editing market. But, after its initial success with the DV500, the advent of sophisticated realtime editing seemed to leave the company behind. While it was a good product, the company’s Pro-ONE arrived when competitive products from Matrox and Canopus had been available for some time. The Pinnacle Edition PRO 5 is an entirely different matter.

Not content with dominating the semi-professional end of video editing, Matrox has reworked its 'Power of X' technology for a more humble audience.

The graphics market is a cutthroat game, and we have seen many casualties recently. Not all of them have been fatal, like Matrox, which has recently backed out of the consumer race, or Rendition, whic

Blistering speed in 3D and a multitude of multimedia features makes the 3500 an excellent card for video enthusiasts and gamers alike.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

A lot has happened since our last graphics card Labs back in September 1999. Back then the nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra was starting to give 3dfx a hard time, and the Matrox Millennium G400 MAX was showing

To test the TFTs in this month's Labs we relied on a few different methodologies. All TFTs were tested on the same test bench PC consisting of a Gigabyte 8GE667-PRO motherboard and 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 512MB of DDR RAM, running Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

For many years, After Effects (AE) was the only real choice for PC video compositing - everything else was in a different price/hardware league. But in the last couple of years, with the steady improvement of Pinnacle's Commotion and the huge price drop in Discreet's Combustion, AE isn't alone anymore.

TrueSpace has always led the pack in terms of features as far as Windows 3D animation packages under $2,000 are concerned. Recently, however, the market has become rather crowded, with a powerful upgrade to Ray Dream (reviewed issue 9, p100) and the cut-down version of LightWave 3D (Inspire 3D) both challenging it on features and price.

The graphics card is one of the most important performance-generating components in the system, but it can also be one of the most problematic. As is the case with most new hardware, theres a period w

Great real-time performance, particularly with high definition footage. But the EDIUS Pro software still needs a few more features to usurp the competition.

VideoLogic is a name few people would now instantly associate with graphics accelerators. In fact, its parent company, Imagination Technologies, was present at the birth of the PC 3D accelerator field in June 1996 with its PowerVR card.

As futuristic technology concepts go, 3D screens have been right up there with the teleporter as an aspirational idea that could change the way we see the world, yet the idea still resides in the realm of the science fiction.