Cybervision vs Voodoo

[desantii]

What is better on a PPC system? A Cybervision card conencted to the PPC or a Voodoo via mediator? Any thoughts
 
thanks

[HammerD]

What is better on a PPC system? A Cybervision card conencted to the PPC or a Voodoo via mediator? Any thoughts
 
thanks

for Pure 2D i'd go for the CyberVision PPC.

If you want 3D as well I would go for the Voodoo.  It's not bad at 2D either

[desantii]

Actually my mistake, meant a BVison not Cybervision

[amigadave]

Actually my mistake, meant a BVison not Cybervision

Should be the same answer.  IIRC, they both connect via the same interface to the accelerator card and have the same graphics chip and memory on board, unless there is less on the BlizzardVision than there is on the CyberVision.  Both of my CyberVisions have 8mb of VRAM, but there might have been a 4mb VRAM version.

[zipper]

In 3D games a Voodoo is roughly twice as fast as a C/BVision PPC.

[Iggy]

In 3D games a Voodoo is roughly twice as fast as a C/BVision PPC.

2D operations are also probably faster. Even compared to a more modern card like a Radeon the Voodoo3 has a fairly powerful 2D engine.

[zipper]

Yes, 16bit and especially 24bit screens are really fast compared to older cards.

[Karlos]

Horses for courses. For 3D gaming, the Voodoo is the clear winner. It is both faster and supports more features than the Permedia2.

For 2D, things are a bit more levelled out since the RTG layer tends to use HW acceleration for the most basic operations.

The BVision will win hands down over a mediator1200 attached graphics card for any task where transferring data over the bus is the limiting factor, at least in OS3.x at any rate.

[Iggy]

Horses for courses. For 3D gaming, the Voodoo is the clear winner. It is both faster and supports more features than the Permedia2.

For 2D, things are a bit more levelled out since the RTG layer tends to use HW acceleration for the most basic operations.

The BVision will win hands down over a mediator1200 attached graphics card for any task where transferring data over the bus is the limiting factor, at least in OS3.x at any rate.

That last point has had me puzzled for a couple days Karlos. Yes the Bvision would have a clear advantage in transfer rate over anything tied to an expansion bus.
But I'm still not sure that that alone would be enough to give it an edge in 2D operations.
Are there any benchmarks that could be run to compare both alternatives?

And for 3d operations, I think I'd prefer a Radeon 8500 or 9000 (over a Voodoo3), but the Voodoo3 is probably the better supported card.

[zipper]

Coarse figures AFAIR BVision about 14 MB/s, CVisionPPC 18 MB/s, PicassoIV on ZorroIII 10 MB/s, CV64 faster than PicassoIV.

[Karlos]

That last point has had me puzzled for a couple days Karlos. Yes the Bvision would have a clear advantage in transfer rate over anything tied to an expansion bus.
But I'm still not sure that that alone would be enough to give it an edge in 2D operations.

That depends on what those 2D operations are. If they involve anything software-rendered, such as video or old 3D games or indeed anything that requires the CPU to calculate pixels and then render them to a BitMap, provided the calculation step is not already the slow part and the bus is utilized properly, the BVision will win.

It even wins in some 3D cases. When I first started (back in OS3.x 68K/WarpOS days) on the Permedia2 driver and streamlined the vertex array handling, for large lists of untextured polygons, the bus speed became a dominant factor and on my 25MHz 040+BVision crucified my 28MHz 040+Voodoo3000 in synthetic tests for W3D_DrawArray()

I might still have the benchmark data somewhere.

[zipper]

Driver support has some effect, as my Voodoo 3000 ran rings round Voodoo 4500 on some 2D tests in my Prometheus. The driver was written for Voodoo3 and just happened to work with Voodoo4 and Voodoo5.

[Karlos]

Coarse figures AFAIR BVision about 14 MB/s, CVisionPPC 18 MB/s, PicassoIV on ZorroIII 10 MB/s, CV64 faster than PicassoIV.

And about 8MB/s for my Mediator1200 + Voodoo3000...