»CL8:»SML:--------------------------------------
  »CL9:»BIG:Review - »SML:Blizzard Vision A1200T
            Graphics card
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»CL4:            by Bucko/Depth

»CL0:Amiga graphics cards are one of those
luxury items that many users drool
over in magazines and until recent
years expense was not the only factor
that stopped the average Amigan
ditching his or her AGA displays.
Graphics cards required Zorro Slots,
the reserve of `big box` Amiga owners
and those brave enough to undertake
tower conversions. However thanks to
the innovative Phase 5, you can now
add a 8 meg graphics card to your
A1200, provided of course you are
willing to invest in a tower casing
and a PPC card.

Having to own a PPC card may annoy
many potential customers, who quite
rightly are none to keen to shell out
on a £400 board with so little
software support, especially
considering the new Amiga is less
than 6 months away. However this does
mean that, at least according to
benchmark software, the Blizzard
Vision is by far the fastest graphics
card that exists for the A1200. Zorro
2 busboards are very slow in
comparison and even the Ateo bus
cannot keep up. According to the
venerable Amiga Format the bus speed
on the Blizzard Vision is around that
of Zorro 3 levels. It also has more
»CL0:display memory than any other A1200
card and it features the lovely
Permedia 2 2D/3D chip.

Installing the card is a simple task,
the board simply clips onto the small
socket on your PPC, and is held in
place by a pair of screws. Output is
via a ribbon cable which was left to
dangle out of the back of the tower,
it actually became damaged like this
after extended use and much moving of
the tower, so a bit of DIY to make a
backing plate would be a good idea.  






An important point to note now is
that there is no in-built
scandoubler/mode promoter as with the
Cybervision 64/3D. What this means is
that you are left with two video
outputs, one for the B-Vision and one
for the AGA modes. This is somewhat
of a problem if you`re a scener,
since nearly all scene productions
use AGA or ECS. However there is a
solution in the form of the B-Mon
monitor switch from Eyetech. (see
review elsewhere).







»CL0:Who remembers the buzz they got when
they first added fast memory to their
Amiga? The way suddenly even the hard
drive seemed to load twice as fast
and workbench became more responsive?
Adding a graphics card is like that,
only better. You can now have
workbench in 16 or 24 bit colour with
huge background pictures and it
neither slows to a crawl nor ever
runs out of chip memory. The speed
improvement is huge, image processing
software like Elastic Dreams actually
runs at a sensible speed, MPEG`s play
back perfectly (until you switch the
sound on and the dreaded context
switching problems come into play).
It is a huge productivity boost for
programs like Pagestream or
Wordworth, Web browsers like voyager
absolutely fly and are even faster
than Netscape or IE4, although
unfortunately not as stable, but this
is a fault of the browser software
and not the graphics card.

            »PIC:128x69»








Getting to this utopian state of
Amiga bliss is not all pain sailing,
however. Like so many other Phase 5
peripherals the software installation
and set-up is not as easy and
productive as you might like to
expect. When installing the
Cybergraphics software I was prompted
to choose my graphics card, and
Blizzard Vision was not in the list,
fortunately the Cyber vision PPC
drivers seem to work fine. This
coupled with the fact that you're
likely to spend a few hours at least
tweaking the screen modes within the
`cgxprefs` utility, does suggest that
the software is somewhat rushed. This
also means that while installation of
the hardware is relatively painless,
the software makes the card somewhat
of a no-go area for complete novices,
assuming there are any Amiga novices
left these days.

Once configured however, this card is
likely to be your favourite bit of
Amiga hardware. The full potential of
the card is as yet untapped. The
Permedia 2 is a powerful 3D chip,
overshadowed by the latest Voodoo and
Riva developments but still highly
competent. OpenGL drivers already
exist, but the system is still under
development and hence I could not get
it to work. Time will tell if the
full potential of this card will be
realised. If you own a PPC card then
I really cannot recommend this card
enough, you could get a higher spec
one for the PC for half the money but
so what? Buy this and unleash the
full potential of the Amigas
brilliant OS.

»CL9:Overall »CL7:9»CL8:/10