apollo vs blizzard vs gvp

[Piru]

GVP is not using regular SIMMs for memory, so the modules cost their weight in gold (or so).

If only you will never upgrade the memory (believe me you will want to upgrade some day), consider GVP.

[Piru]

...But it should be pointed out that by doing so Apollo break some of the timing specs. Thus, Apollo is much more prone to have timing related issues. Also I am not that sure about the "a lot faster" bit. Faster perhaps, but not that much IMO.

Also Apollo has no real SCSI, which Blizzards do have (SCSI Kit).

Apollo can't take as much memory as Blizzards.

Blizzards can be disabled from keyboard and you can use the regular 68EC020 CPU if you need to (some really picky games/demos perhaps?). Apollo can't be disabled.

Blizzards are commonly considered much more robust and better designed.

I'm not saying Apollos are useless, I'm sure they are good cards in their own way. They sure are cheaper than Blizzard, that's a big plus.

[Piru]

That sounds weird, but I have to admit I only have experience of BPPC 060.

The Blizzard 1230 MK-III I had before was fast in IDE transfer at least.

[Piru]

Blizzard 1260 compared to an Apollo 1260.

Really? BPPC 060 wasn't that slow IMO, at least when I compared SysSpeed modules... Can't remember exactly but if it was slower, it was only couple of percent. It might also depend on the memory speed settings of the BPPC.

But it has been couple of years I last used the BPPC, so I might remember it being faster than it reallty was ;-)

[Piru]

The reason I mentioned the games below is because they all use 3D engines and as far as I can work out, the FPU helps with the floating point calculations associated with 3D.

I'm not aware of specific commands to call the FPU into operation (the MMU yes but I don't know about the FPU). Alien Breed 3D2: The Killing Grounds must use the FPU if Quake does (Quake on '030 would be pretty ridiculous though!) and so may Genetic Species.

Actually older texture mapped 3d engines don't use FPU. The actual  3d calculations themselves are fixed point integer arithmetics, aswell as the texture mapping. The reason quake uses it is the perspective correction.

Out of these 3, only Quake uses FPU.

[Piru]

@Hyperspeed

Since AB3D2:TKG is dead slow on '030 (like Quake), uses polygon weapons, light sourcing and a 3D editor how come it doesn't use the FPU at all when it was programmed with these boards in mind?

Because FPU is even slower than using fixedpoint math.

AB3D2:TKG is rather poorly coded aswell. It could have been much faster.
TKGTurboPatch.lha
AB3DII source code

...and what was that game that used a voxel engine...

Voxel engines don't use FPU.