Picasso96 or Cybergraphx?

[Framiga]

Mauro73 ... try by yourself (i already did) and you will see! ;-)

ah, btw ... i'm speaking about everyday usage NOT benchmark crap!

[billt]

Pick whichever was more designed for your card. If you have a Phase5 card like CV643d, go with CGX. If you have a Picasso4, go with P96. Some of the additional driver support for the "other guys" hardware was mediocre at best. I tried CGX for my Picasso4 and it really wasn't as good as it is for "CGX cards". Less stable and things like that, after trying it out I went back to P96 long ago and have never looked at CGX again.

If I ever plug in my CV643d card then I will, as I don't expect P96 to be as good as CGX on that hardware. (maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I expect) But that card sits in a drawer somewhere. I should probably sort through things, make sure they work, and sell a bunch of my drawer and attic stuff...

[Framiga]

we are speaking about Cybervision64 here (NOT 3D).

And (as already said) CV64 run smoother (menu speed and backdrops redraw) with P96.

[Flashlab]

Mauro73 wrote:

Flashlab wrote:
Pepsi or Coca-Cola?

Pepsi for ever  :-D

Coca-Cola of course!

Anyway you can actually install both systems at the same time with some scripting. Look at this here.

For personal taste: I like P96 better but as said before it also depends on what RTG card you're using.

[stefcep2]

Mauro73 wrote:

keropi wrote:... you might call it a personall taste, but for me cgx4 is way better.

Ok, so it's most of all a personal taste matter, isn't it?

Anyway, I'll try CGX4 too, just to have a better idea of what are the posibilities  :-)

I have the card you have and I've been through this before.  
Its not just personal taste.

The Phase 5 cards ie CV64 and CV64/3d are better supported by the CGX software: its faster to draw, pointer aspect ratio and movement is EXACTLY like a native screen(P96 isn't), click-and-drag icons actually is as smooth as a native screen unlike the flickery redraws you get with P96 , CGX has support for the roxxler chip (which allows really fast 3d rotation, movement and magnification of wireframe objects in Cinema4D windows).  You can also overclock using the tooltypes in the monitor icon to speed the card up even further.


I don't know why but I think there is some anti-CGX bias that seems to crop up when this issue is raised: maybe its the whole "lets support the free/shareware alternative and denigrate anything commercial". Get the latest version of CGX4, its worth the money.

[Ami_GFX]

I have both Picasso 96 and Cybergrafix running my GVP spectrum card in my A2500 on separete partitions. Picasso 96 is faster and more stable. Cybergrafix has more features--like dragable screens. Both work well but I'd say Picasso 96 is slightly better performance wise and never crashes while Cybergrafix occasionally crashes--not enough to bother me very much.

[amigadave]

It looks like more than a couple of the posters in this thread have done some testing with CGX4 and P96 to support their claims of better performance on a particular graphics card or another.

If someone will point me to where I can download some testing software that will give results that prove which graphics software is faster than the other, I will do some testing on different cards that I own and post the results.  If a few others here do the same, we can compile a list of graphics cards and the test results under both CGX4 and P96.

The graphics cards that I own and can test are:

CyberVision 8mb
PicassoIV
PicassoII
GVP Spectrum
RetinaZ3

I recently tried to get CGX4 installed on my A3000T w/RetinaZ3 but could not get a display, so switched to P96 and it worked the first try.

To make the results consistent, I suggest that we all test on OS3.9 and use the same monitor and settings each time.

I know that each of us will be using a different monitor, so perhaps for testing purposes we should just use the low end, generic VGA settings to get a fair comparison across all cards and both graphics software systems.

Is anyone else interested in doing this comparison testing?

[Ami_GFX]

Actually, my tests are pretty subjective--mostly impression and observation. Like there's a few seconds of delay loading TV Paint under Cybergrafix while it's almost instantaneous under Picasso 96--this is on my A2500 which is loaded with memory but has a slow 25mhz 030 processor. And while you can drag screens under Cybergrafix, this is not really that useful because the mouse pointer dissapears on any but the first screen so you can't really switch between applications with this feature. So subjective opinion is that while Cybergrafix is more feature packed and ambitious code wise, it has some buggy corners and Picasso 96 seems to be more lean and mean--more tightly coded, faster and no noticible bugs.

[Mauro73]

Flashlab wrote:
For personal taste: I like P96 better but as said before it also depends on what RTG card you're using.

I'm using a Phase 5 CyberVision 64  :-)

Mauro

[Crumb]

@Mauro73

There's no much difference between them. You can have installed both P96 and CGX4 in the same partition, IIRC you must use P96 picture.datatype and you can store your P96 and CGX monitors in storage/monitors and switch them when you need, make a reset and voilá. A friend of mine created a small script that interchanged the monitor files so he could do it in a moment.

I used P96 for years with a CV64 and it works very nice, I like the way you configure the screenmodes, but it's a matter of taste.

With CGX4 you can use some kind of fake-draggable screens (like OS4 or MOS-Dragon ones) and some RTG demos like the ones from Mankind work better with CGX (p96 shows wrong colours)

[zipper]

There's no much difference between them. You can have installed both P96 and CGX4 in the same partition, IIRC you must use P96 picture.datatype and you can store your P96 and CGX monitors in storage/monitors and switch them when you need, make a reset and voilá. A friend of mine created a small script that interchanged the monitor files so he could do it in a moment.

I have them on the same partition. You have to change the screenmode.prefs, too. Or when rebooting you get a native screenmode first.

[Damion]

@amigadave

If you're going to run some tests, the "standard" benchmark is probably P96Speed, SysSpeed has some gfx benchmarks also.



 

[stefcep2]

amigadave wrote:
It looks like more than a couple of the posters in this thread have done some testing with CGX4 and P96 to support their claims of better performance on a particular graphics card or another.

If someone will point me to where I can download some testing software that will give results that prove which graphics software is faster than the other, I will do some testing on different cards that I own and post the results.  If a few others here do the same, we can compile a list of graphics cards and the test results under both CGX4 and P96.

The graphics cards that I own and can test are:

CyberVision 8mb
PicassoIV
PicassoII
GVP Spectrum
RetinaZ3

I recently tried to get CGX4 installed on my A3000T w/RetinaZ3 but could not get a display, so switched to P96 and it worked the first try.

To make the results consistent, I suggest that we all test on OS3.9 and use the same monitor and settings each time.

I know that each of us will be using a different monitor, so perhaps for testing purposes we should just use the low end, generic VGA settings to get a fair comparison across all cards and both graphics software systems.

Is anyone else interested in doing this comparison testing?

If you are going to benchmark then you really need the latest version of each software, but CGX 4 is commercial and you have to use the latest version that you download but need the original CD.  

It seems that CGX is better in terms of speed and stability when using Phase5 hardware and perhaps not when using other hardware, according to the posts here anyway.  Back in the day I did benchmark my CV64 on a A4000 68060 against a Picasso IV under p96 published by somebody else with A4000 68060 and I found my set-up won (from memory) about 75% of the tests.

The thing that you can't benchmark is the subjective feel, and this is influenced by things such as how good the sprite pointer emulation is, how icon/window dragging is.  And having used P96 on both a real Amiga with CV64 and under Winuae (which convincingly emulates the not-quite-right pointer movement, icon dragging flicker under P96 of a real amiga running P96) I can say that CGX4 feels better on my machine.

[Mauro73]

...and anyone can explain why P96 eats so much memory?

With cgx my ram (both fast and chip) is the same amount as before the installation.

With P96 I've got less chip ram and almost half the fast ram.

I'm sure that I've done something wrong during the installation, maybe clicked ok when the software asked me if copy something into the ram at the startup... I don't know.

as usual, thank you very much in advance

Mauro