Every budding filmmakers knows that real movie magic happens in the editing room. Bundled with the Marvel is Avid Cinema, an entry-level video editing program that lets you splice together clips, insert titles and basic transition effects like wipes, and even add a separatge soundtrack. Ambitious videographers will need something more, no doubt, but the average home camcorder freak will appreciate the point, click and drag interface of Avid. Within twenty minutes on a bleary-eyed Sunday morning I spliced several video streams, punctuated each with a cute transition effect and introduced the collection with a crawling video screen superimposed on the video stream. Hey, it ain't art, but it's at least as good as the $7.99 video "collector's editions" of old TV reruns I see clogging up the aisles at Wal-Mart.
Since Avid lets you transfer your creation through the Marvel's video out jack and save it to videotape, it is quite feasible that an ambitious video hobbyist, who also had acres of free hard drive space, could edit and polish up her own home video collection.
Video out chores are handled by Matrox's unique DualHead feature, which allows the card to power two monitors simultaneously. Unlike the standard G400 products, which have two VGA ports onboard, the second PC or TV monitor is jacks into the Marvel's Connector Box. TV output was excellent in our test of desktop and gaming screens at the allowable range of 640x480 to 1024x768. Text was as crisp as the antediluvian screen, with its bloated TV grade dot pitch allowed. And unlike other TV out images I've seen, this one produced the full range of color depth and even shadow detail in the Quake2 test we ran.
Whether to a TV or PC monitor, the dual head feature offers tremendous flexibility. Developers keep claiming some game titles that support two monitor displays will be coming any day now. Even though I wasn't expecting much from the dual head output, I have to admit that learned to love it after about…oh, fifteen seconds. You can clone your desktop to run simultaneously on the second monitor or send over a zoomed view. For any kind of video design work, this is indispensable. DVDs can play full screen on monitor two while in a window on monitor one. I am especially fond of using the second screen as an extension of the desktop. Move the mouse to the edge of one screen and it just shows up on the other, where you can keep two programs running at full screen. Yep, I love this. Now, if my wife can just get used to having to retrieve her monitor from my office every night, things will work out just fine.
The Marvel uses the standard .25 micron G400 graphics chip clocked at 125MHz. A 128-bit memory bus runs to 16MB of SGRAM clocked at 166MHz giving a 250 megapixel peak fill-rate. A 300MHz RAMDAC gives extremely crisp and clear images as well as the ability to draw 2D screen resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 in 16.8 million colors at 85Hz as well as 3D screen resolutions up to 1600x1200 in 16.8 million colors. We were unable to get the Marvel to work in 3D at 1600x1200 in 32bit color. We believe this limitation is due to the Marvel's 16MB of RAM.
Hardware DVD acceleration and bump mapping as well as AGP 2X and 4X are all supported. A second CRTC combined with the special Marvel connector and Marvel connector box gives the Marvel its famous Dual-Head feature where, in addition to drawing the image to your main screen, it can draw a mirrored or different image to a TV monitor. All in all, the Marvel's features really knock down the competition.
So how fast is it? What about TurboGL? Read on…