Yup, in a nutshell.
it's why i'd love someone to reverse engineer the CPLD chips on a Cvision or G-Rex and do another production run. i seem to recall some benchmark program getting 50MB/s on the ol' cyberstorm3/blizzardPPC bus. so best case scenario, for the mediator, is it's only 3 to 4 times slower than the G-Rex, or B/Cvision cards. and that's before the obvious hardware differences between the permedia chip made in the 90's, and radeon chip made in the 00's.
i could put some legit numbers up there to test this but the thought of faffing about with putting a PPC/bvision machine together again and what boingbag version works with what version of cybercraphix.... eeesh. no thanks.
having 64Meg graphics ram tho, and just not having to worry about how many screens with high bit depths/resolutions... and also not stressing about cooling... almost worth it...
--edit-- some numbers i did for another forum. same OS software, same graphics software
A3k = A3000, Cyberstorm3/060, Cvision64/3D. A500 = A500&Vampire2. A4k = A4000, A3640, Mediator, Radeon9250 - not the best CPU i admit, so will revisit when either a TF4060 or Warp4060 becomes a thing.
operation A3k A500 *A4k*
RectFill 2889 4261 6722
RectFillPattern 2842 6158 5875
WritePixel 147969 301582 57870
WriteChunkyPixels 741 6158 403
WritePixelArray 730 6072 386
WritePixelLine 30072 36449 11630
DrawElipse 9874 24698 4920
DrawCircle 10743 25527 5975
Draw 14644 6768 1328
DrawHor/Ver 24624 16067 9811
ScrollRasterX 162 313 1259
ScrollRasterY 160 389 1330
Text 10351 12596 2849
BltBitMap 8660 8530 6229
BltBitMapRastPort 7058 7135 3368
BitMapScaling 75 548 66
Openwindow 103 172 20
MoveWindow 392* 1135* 43
SizeWindow 117* 261* 11
ConOutput 371 652 104
ScreenToFront 61 61 60