Well, it's almost as fast as fullscreen AB3D2 on my machine ;)

[matthey]

I think a modified Blizzard/Bvision will out class a Cyberstorm/cybervision in GFX ONLY according to the benchmark I have seen posted on other website. Cyberstorm has CPU power over Blizzard, but according to benchmark figures Blizzard has a faster PCI bus.

This is reflected here that I never needed to use a screemode below 800x600 & a small number of PPC games showed no difference with 1024x768 but you need a very high PCI bus speed to play at those screenmode.

The only reason PCI bus speed is important is because there is not enough texture memory on the Permedia 2 as Karlos pointed out. As the resolution increases, more and more textures have to be retransferred over the gfx bus. A fast 68060 with a slow gfx bus Mediator and Voodoo 3+ with plenty of texture memory can compete with a faster PPC with faster gfx bus and Permedia 2 with low texture memory for some 3D. It's a matter of how much work doesn't have to be redone. My 68060@75MHz with Voodoo 4 640x480x16 is more playable with GLQuake than Karlos's demo. Don't be surprised if that same rev6 68060@100MHz with Voodoo3+ in a Natami with non-handicapped PCI gfx bus outperforms Classic PowerPC boards for 3D requiring a lot of texture memory.

Edit: Karlos beat me to it. Texture memory rules, at least when there isn't enough .

[matthey]

@Karlos
It seams that the Amiga PCI buses were setup to do the bare minimum to work rather than being compliant. I had similar problems trying to get swizzling (endian translation) of 3D registers to work on the Avenger/Napalm with the Mediator. Either I'm reading the docs incorrectly or the Mediator PCI bus mapping is "funny". That's pretty simple compared to getting DMA working . At least these old cards are easier to program and better documented than the new ones. Have you seen the ATI docs? Ugh. I did have a look at the Permedia 2 docs. It's pretty clean. Too bad ease of use is not a consideration for GPUs (or CPUs). It's possible for programmers to get more out of what is simpler and easier to use.

[matthey]

Both my cards Blizzard/Bvision has massive advantage over any other classic card,this is why Bvision driver software settings  which does not work on all users set-up works here, because some problems here have being fixed.

Does overclocking help 3D performance that much? I overclocked a Voodoo 3 by quite a bit and it helped 2D performance but I couldn't see any change in 3D performance. It probably helped some but very little.

Is the Permedia 3 pin compatible and register compatible to the Permedia 2? How much gfx memory does it allow? There was someone who upgraded a Cybervision 64/3D Virge to a Virge DX. Supposedly the DX was used on some later Cybervision 64/3Ds anyway. Upgrading the amount of gfx memory would be the best hack but also the most difficult.

[matthey]

I did try it in the past, but didn't manage to get the mapping correct. The Permedia would read some address range unrelated to the one I was trying to give it and would lock up very quickly in a manner that's nigh on impossible to debug. You just have no way of seeing what location it sees.

Did you Byte Swap (BE->LE) the data used for the DMA buffer? Does writing to the raw GPU FIFO work instead of writing the 3D registers? The raw FIFO data format should be more similar to the data used in the DMA buffer is why I ask. It's too bad they don't allow expanding the FIFO buffer like the Avenger/Napalm. Just writing to the Avenger/Napalm registers provides pretty good performance and is very easy to use (minus the fact that the byte swapped BE->LE 3D register space doesn't seem to exist).

They aren't so bad, but they are quite big I've had to refer to them a number of times trying to bring the R100/R200 drivers up to date.

Yea, there is way to many variations of the ATI boards with minor differences. It seems to me like the docs were written by the designers who didn't want to write the docs and assume everyone already knows as much as they do. The GPU is quite a bit different than the older ones. I did find the GPU instruction set very interesting but it's not easy to use. It's more like a SIMD/DSP processor with minimal conditional/branch support which makes sense for what it is I guess. There are more friendly and flexible ways to avoid branch hazards.

The permedia documentation is OK, but misses out various things. For instance, the address calculations used by patched (and subpatched) buffers are just not anywhere in the programmer manuals.

That's always the case. The Avenger/Napalm docs are probably the best for any half way modern GFX board and there is still places that need more clarification.

[matthey]

@Karlos
Maybe the DMA is disabled but still appears to work. The PCI CFGCommand register (offset 0x04 from configuration base) has several configuration bits that might make a difference to DMA. It's readable as well as writable so you could read it, change 1 bit and write it. Turning on bits 0 to 2 might make a difference to DMA? This is supposed to be setup correctly by the gfx card boot ROM but that doesn't happen on an Amiga. Initialization is up to the 2D driver writer. I'm still not sure that DMA is going to be the Holy Grail of 3D performance. It sounds like you are already getting more out of the card than higher spec x86 . Take a look at the Quake III Arena hardware and test results here:

http://www.ultimatehardware.net/006.htm

Surely they would have DMA enabled for their driver but with that lack of performance?

Also, I flashed my Cyberstorm MK3 and now I have PCI configuration info in my "ESC" settings. It supposedly fixes some PCI bugs too. I think delshay suggested flashing your BPPC if I read his English correctly :-/.

@delshay
No, I don't have any docs on the Permedia 3. You can see the test results above for how it compares to the Permedia 2. It still didn't perform well. It might be more worthwhile to reverse engineer a G-Rex PCI if you have enough electrical experience. Then you could use something a bit more modern with more gfx memory.

I'm not a big fan of overclocking I/O buses like PCI, Zorro or SCSI. It can cause timing errors when not in spec of the standard any more. I have done conservative overclocking of the CPU, GPU, and memory buses where I observed a large enough benefit and where there was better than average cooling. I overclocked my CSMK3 to 75MHz (rev 6 68060) and the memory with it but left the SCSI bus and motherboard speed alone by using a different oscillator. It's very stable and fast.

@Iggy
I overclocked the Voodoo 3 GPU with memory (SGRAM) and possibly other gfx card chips (gives a higher RAMDAC) by about 25%, but that shouldn't affect the PCI speed. The 2D performance improved modestly while any difference in my 3D tests would not have been statistically significant. I do not overclock my Voodoo 4 at all. I have read that it is not tolerant of overclocking (risk of burning out GPU) and there is not much benefit. The Voodoo 3 with SGRAM is a little faster than the Voodoo 4 at most lower resolution (bandwidth) operations by the way. The Voodoo 3 with SGRAM is probably faster with memory or gfx bus or both.