The Spectrum/24 PDQ is a good card and was the fastest board upon its release. Initially, I think it was the only board with 24-bit graphics acceleration on 21" at 1152x870. So, it had an initial stand-alone advantage for Mac desktop graphics/design/publishing which drove sales of the boards and large-screen monitors. Comparatively, I think Apple's 8•24 GC could only do 8-bit at 1152x870 -- a competitive selling point that stole sales from Apple.
The original PDQ had some support complaints because of the Quark XPress bug (that should be fixed in your v1.27 ROM). It was present in the v1.0 and v1.11 (?) ROMs. And, within a year or so after its release, it was replaced by Gen 3 boards with custom/revised silicon, as above, that were much faster -- new PDQ, PDQ+, Thunder, etc. But, there was eventually a rev to v1.27 for the original PDQ that fixed various issues.
The only minor down-side to the board was the black screen lag during bit depth changes. This delay occurred because the acceleration is xilinx-based and the board has to reload acceleration configurations (for example, when switching from 8-bit to 24-bit mode). I have mentioned this issue in other threads and the use of hand-routed xilinx parts was a major, high-speed achievement at the time. But, the black screen thing is a very minor issue, and is actually a non-issue relative to the improved graphics acceleration and 21" support the board provided vs. the 1st-gen Spectrum/24 Series III (that had a daughterboard -- even more real estate and required slot width). PDQ doesn't support 16-bit mode, but accelerated 24-bit was good enough.
In terms of form-factor, it was a longer (driven by multiple xilinx parts)/heavier board and the zip RAM would eventually be replaced by surface mount memory (and a smaller custom silicon form-factor). Much later, it became a double-sided 1/2 slot card -- in the post-merger Radius days, I think.
Also, I think the original Spectrum/8 and Spectrum/24 PDQ were the first boards that included SuperMac's VDI code (or Video Driver Interface), which provided configurable support for SuperVideo 3.0 and "switch-on-the-fly." SotF allowed the board to change video configurations without rebooting. It also had some bugs that were fixed or updated (configs) by the v1.27 ROM. But, those features were never really leveraged on the original Spectrum/24 PDQ, since SuperVideo 3.0 came much later. Again, I think the original PDQs shipped with SuperVideo 2.06 or 2.07, as above, and then SuperMac resolved some issues by SuperVideo version 2.49+.
The original PDQ should also work with A/UX 2.0 and higher, since A/UX fixes from Spectrum/24 Series III were rolled forward into the PDQ ROM.
I'll look for the release notes.
