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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: CU_AMiGA on December 05, 2003, 12:49:51 PM
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I currently have a Blizzardvision, which i think is a pretty neat graphics card but was wondering how much better a Voodoo graphics card is. I maybe tempted into getting a mediator. :-)
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Well you have a lot more memory on the voodoo to use, and the Warp3D capabilities is a lot of fun. Its much faster then the B-Vision as well. I'll never go back. I bought 4 off ebay to put away as spares if that tells you anything.
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Acill : and I thought I was crazy to buy a Voodoo3 + 4 + 5 .... :-P
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You are all crazy guys.
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Yeah, tell me about it, the story of my life ... glad I ended up here, at least a place I can call my home :-)
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I definately remember how nice it was going from a BVision to the Voodoo. I've never regretted purchasing either of the Mediators I own.
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My Mediator 4000D is on its way according to Elbox. Reading all these positive comments makes me expect a lot, even from a humble 68040/25 ... ;-)
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cu_amiga: u have a ppc so... voodoo cards will output in 8mb windows.
68k systems can have 32mb, nasty thing..
anyway on ppc you can have 8mb for system and rest for videomem and thats cool enough.
speedwise, your voodoo will be faster.
but the biggest thing you will notice is the API :) , on your mediator with vodoo you will have to use P96 and on the bvision CGX....
i like p96 and its fast and it has stuff like "free rtg MEM viewers etc" :)
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@CU
Voodoo has a faster fill rate than the Permedia2 and supports more blending modes. Both are attached by buses that are vastly slower than each chip can make use of.
The fill rate currently makes slighltly less difference than you might expect under warp3D (at least from the test results I had) for 680x0 code as both chips are held back by how quickly the vertex data is processed by the software and fed to the GPU.
Theoretically, for games that use several textures to render a scene (lightmapping in quake engines for instance), the voodoo should be considerably faster since it supports multitexturing but no existing drivers support this yet (AFAIK). That will no doubt change later.
The blendmode issue is actually more important if you want accurate visual quality. The permedia2 can only do alpha blending whereas the Voodoo supports the full spread of alpha and chromatic blending. This makes a difference in the visual quality of games such as quake2, heretic2 etc and blitzquark, all of which need chromatic blending to do the coloured light passing (itself a texturemap), whereas the p2 can only use monochromatic (quake1 sytle) lighting.
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Well I wouldnt say I am crazy, its just getting harder to find these cards these days. With the AGP2PCI thing its better though. Maybe Elbox will sell them and get some more of the modern AGP cards working with Mediator?
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whats the Pixel64 card like compared to these?
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IIRC the pixel64 used a basic Cirrus Logic chipset and shipped with either 2 or 4Mb of RAM (can't say exactly). In any event, it was 2D only.
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I wanted it so I can use better graphics for mac emulation and have a better resolution workbench screen.
Does this card help with that? Does it not give any help for games such as Napalm and Quake? no better than AGA?
cheers guys
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It will give you better 2D support, no doubt about it. Normal GUI stuff tends to rely on drawing ractangles and stuff that the gfx chip can do by itself using it's blitter.
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You can expect higher resolutions and more colourful displays than AGA. Even a basic 2Mb card should be able to deliver 1024x768 in 16-bits (which needs about 1.5Mb of framebuffer).
RTG games should benefit also, but that would ultimately depend on the bus speed and resolution used. For instance, some doom clones ran faster under AGA than they did on Z-II graphics cards since on these systems writing the chunky pixels was limitied by bus speed (even with AGA C2P) so AGA won out there.
Given the ateo bus is a modified ISA bus, I don't know how fast it is capable of.
The pixel64 offers no 3D acceleration of any kind so it won't accelerate 3D games directly, but the chunky pixels should help (unless the bus is slower than AGA, eg Z-II comparable).
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Hi Mate,
CU Amiga says that it performs better than Z-II and runs at 8Mb/s.
I was wondering about getting a PCI to ISA adapter and sticking a Voodoo onto the ateo busboard using the voodoo. I am guessing that using the PCI drivers for the voodoo on the amiga wont work on the Ateo busboard.
You think there would be any chance this would work?
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mantisspider wrote:
Hi Mate,
CU Amiga says...........
:lol:
Almost got a bit confused there! :-)
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@mantisspider
No such driver exists for a voodoo on the pixel busboard thingy, the only gfx card driver that exists for it is for the Pixel64, I had an ateo setup and man was it slooooooooooow, still good enough for workbench, but that was about it.. also all the people I know who have had or indeed still the ateo bus complain about it being very loose on the accelerator slot, so any slight movement at the who lot refuses to boot, I had the same problem with mine for the short space of time I owned it.
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And how about Voodoo Graphics or Voodoo2? (SLI, yeah baby!) :-) It would be nice, wouldn't it? If Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo3 work nice - why not their predecessors? It seems possible... :-) SLI Voodoo2 would sure be the fastest and and most affordable solution on the market! And ofcourse the most PCI-slot hungry one :-D
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@spavatch:
A simple Radeon7000 or 7500 should be MUCH faster than 2Voodoos2... come on... even a simple Voodoo3 was usually faster...
And keep in mind that using 2 voodoo2 usually required to have 2 voodoo2 of the same manofacturer to make them work...
@mantisspider
I would go for a 2nd hand mediator... with the Ateo you get a ISA SVGA card and that's all. A friend of mine tried to make a NE2000 work without luck and has some stability problems...
A 2nd hand Mediator is more expensive but will give you more options...
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A simple Radeon would be faster (or not) if there were any drivers... It would be much easier to adapt/convert Voodoo3 drivers for use with older models than write new ones for ATI products. Oh, and remember - as Karlos said: both (Radeon and Voodoo) are attached by buses that are vastly slower than each chip can make use of. I doubt if there would be any performance gain.
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Actually I was referring to the Permedia2 and Voodoo, but the same would hold true for any Mediator/Prometheus/GRex attached gfx card.
Local operations on the card will naturally be very quick, and faster cards will always do better. However, when you have to send lots of information to the GPU, eventually you will hit the bus limit and that will level out most cards currently used.