Perhaps in all of the commotion about how fast the new machines are, some of us are overlooking a really exciting thing about these amazing new boxes. There is on board video designed in a manner similar to the IIci in that it uses some of your onboard DRAM to drive it. It does not have the same effect that using the IIci’s on board video did because of the much faster machine speed and the wider data bus. On board video of all of the PowerMacintosh support 16 bit color on a 14 inch monitor right “out of the box”. When I worked on a 6100 with a NEC 4FG plugged in at 640x480 resolution it would scroll a little faster than the 840av with the same set up.
 
The 7100 and 8100 come with a second monitor port on a video card installed in the PowerPC 601 PDS slot on the motherboard. Both the 7100 and 8100 VRAM cards provide standard 15-pin monitor connections. In this case the hardware designers must have talked to the users and got it right. If you use the 601 PDS slot it does not block a nuBus slot!
With the addition of inexpensive VRAM Simms to this video card:
The Power Macintosh 7100 supports up to 24bit color up to a 16 inch display and 16 bit color up to a 21 inch display.
The Power Macintosh 8100 supports up to 24bit color up to a 21 inch display (1,152 by 870 pixels).
If you are in the market for a new machine, this reduces the cost by not requiring the use of a separate video display card. The performance of the VRAM video is much faster than any previous Macs, but it's still not as fast as QuickDraw accelerators.
