Help identify this nubus graphics card?

[Johnnya101]

I can see that it's a Radius 24 bit card, but what is it specifically? Isn't there more of a name to it, like precision color or something? I don't see anything like that on it.

Is this plug and play for all OS versions?

 

[Johnnya101]

I now see something right after I uploaded a photo (of course).

I see PC 24XK on the white square in that socket. PrecisionColor 24XK?

 

[nglevin]

Sounds about right.

The Radius display drivers can be pretty easily found. One of the control panels in that package, QuickColor, is a must for accelerating QuickDraw calls even if you have no use for driving a display with the card itself.

 

[Johnnya101]

Will this work to get an OS installed, and then I can download drivers after? Or do I NEED drivers. Period?

 

[nglevin]

Yeah, the Radius cards work fine without drivers, I remember the Nubus ones being System 6 friendly through Mac OS 9.1 on a Nubus Power Mac.

First hand experience. The half width Nubus slot Precision Color cards were cheap to source and did the job well for compact Mac IIs. For a Quadra they are mostly good at providing QuickDraw acceleration but otherwise not an improvement over the internal graphics hardware.

 

[Johnnya101]

Cool, thanks!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

First hand experience. The half width Nubus slot Precision Color cards were cheap to source and did the job well for compact Mac IIs. For a Quadra they are mostly good at providing QuickDraw acceleration but otherwise not an improvement over the internal graphics hardware.

1152 x 870 @ 24bit is a pretty good upgrade for any compatible machine.

 

[nglevin]

I guess an asterisk is to consider what the card will be used for. This goes on a Nubus graphics card tangent, on the grounds of do you really need this considering recent discussion of what Nubus cards now cost on Fleabay.

For Marathon or Pathways Into Darkness, 1152x870 at 24 bit is not going to feel better than 640x480 at 256 colors or 16 bit color. The overhead of having a 68k derived CPU try to blit a subset of that larger byte buffer before it hits the display is going to slow things down, you're going to want to play at 640x480 at most for real time action games on any 68k machine.

PrecisionColor cards were really made for Photoshop, Canvas, FreeHand 4 and other graphic design apps that could throw more panels on screen when they had the the extra screen real estate. Being budget minded, those tasks can be handled about as well with a cheap PowerPC Mac for less than the cost of an eBay Nubus card.

But if you found this thing free in a Mac II, by all means go for it. Might even be cheaper than trying to source VRAM for internal graphics in some cases.

 

[Johnnya101]

Yup, this IIfx has been sitting in the back of my closet since I got it last year. Full ram (not sure how much, but all the slots were filled and it's after market, not apple. Good chance it has 16mb or more) this card, I think it had another video card (apple) that I put somewhere, two floppy drives, etc. It's loaded.  Just waiting to get the board recapped now. Got it from a church with an old terminal and some other stuff. Not sure where it was used before that.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

This goes on a Nubus graphics card tangent, on the grounds of do you really need this considering recent discussion of what Nubus cards now cost on Fleabay.

Excellent point, hadn't considered what such cards might go for on eBay these days. Of course built in graphics is faster then anything NuBus for anything not needing loads of pixels.

Sounds a perfect fit for a IIfx.