Test reports
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Test reports
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After a long wait full of hope for an A4000T PCI board it finally caught fire!
Matay is first to market with a PCI board for ZorroIII. Oh, man! How long have I had to look grudgingly on A1200 users who have PCI boards in their computers - G-Rex from DCE, Mediator from Elbox, and even the Predator, so far stuck in the announcements. None of them work in a ZorroIII port. And suddenly here's a company with the name of Matay, producing a PCI board for all Amigas.
Other enterprises had announced, but not delivered, a PCI board for the A4000T. And when Elbox indicated that they would not support the Warp3D driver from Hyperion, my choice narrowed to the Prometheus from Matay.
I straight away went to KDH Datentechnik and bought a Prometheus board with Voodoo3 from Günter Horbach. At home I had a closer look at the case and I must say that this was the very best looking packaging I ever had seen for an Amiga hardware extension. The cover is colourful and professionally done, it could be put on a computer shop rack without need to hide behind other articles.
After opening the package this first impression was confirmed. Inside I found the Prometheus board with fasteners and necessary screws, a feed cable for the additional power-supply, an extension cord for a graphics board and a colour manual, in English, German and Polish, with detailed advice and pictures describing installation of the board. And right at the bottom of the box was a CD-ROM, containing the driver for the Prometheus board and P96 for the Voodoo3 board, and several demo programs such as Shogo, HereticII and Wipeout2097.
The most difficult thing in the installation was securing the two clamps that hold the Prometheus. But thanks to extensive installation information this was mastered quite quickly.
But be careful!!! Electronic components can be destroyed by static electricity! Touch a grounded point, for instance a radiator or a blank part of the computer housing, with your hand to discharge your static. And only hold the Prometheus by the edges, at places where no components are located to be on the safe side. Of course this equally applies to the handling of the Voodoo3 board.
After both the angular metal supports are fastened with three screws, the Voodoo3 board can be set into any one of the four PCI slots and be fixed with another screw at the support. Now the Prometheus is ready to be put into one of the ZorroIII slots of the tower. But be careful, clearance is tight above. Now just fit the additional power cable and the graphics board extension and the mechanical installation is done.
Installation of the drivers is simple, kids' stuff.
But first the old graphics board driver has to be deleted from the system, in my case CyberGraphX V4, otherwise it can lead to a system crash. Unfortunately the old graphics board has to go as well, because it has a negative influence on the speed of the new Voodoo3.
Having done this, you are nearly done. You just have to start the installation script in the Prometheus directory on the CD and all necessary files are copied to their directories. The board is recognized immediately after a reboot. Quickly install the graphics board driver P96 and you can start enjoying the Voodoo3 board.
It is known that there are problems with the original A4000T, because that system does not recognize a Voodoo3 board. But I have an A4000D converted to an A4000T, I did not have any troubles and the Voodoo3 board has run just fine for several weeks.
If you are lucky and have an A4000T conversion, you better have internet access, for now it is very important to download from the homepage of Matay, www.Matay.pl, the recent driver updates as well as the Warp3D driver and to install them. (If there are problems with the connection, try it between 3 o'clock and 6 o'clock, because then the connection is best).
Be sure to have the latest WarpUp (V5.0) available, and when during installation you are asked for the graphics board, set it to "Other Graphics Board" [or similar]. After the Warp3D driver is installed, you just have to find out the video-memory address with the provided program "PrmScan" and to copy it into the directory PowerPC. This is done like this: start "PrmScan" in the CLI and the following data will be shown:
VENDOR: 3DFX INTERACTIVE INC DEVICE: VOODOO3 ALL VOODOO3 CHIPS, 3000 REVISION: 1. DEVICE CLASS 03,SUBCLASS 00. ADDRESS RANGE: 5E000000 - 5FFFFFFF. ADDRESS RANGE: 5C000000 - 5DFFFFFF. ADDRESS RANGE: 400EFF00 - 400EFFFF. 64KB OF ROM AT 5BFF0000 - 5BFFFFFF.
You now use the second address in the first column, i.e. here 5C000000, to type the command "setenv PowerPC/Gfxaddr $5C000000" and additionally copy this Gfxaddr to the directory "Prefs/ENV-Archive/PowerPC" of the Workbench.
Now you are ready to experience the new Voodoo3 in full power and splendour.
According to manufacturer's specs by Matay the Prometheus manages a data transfer of appr. 120 MB/sec from PCI slot to PCI slot and a transfer of appr. 12 MB/sec from PCI via ZorroIII to CPU. I couldn't check this directly, but these statements seemed to be quite realistic.
But now to the most important aspect of the speed, the 2D/3D tests. For this I used the following configuration: A4000T 604e/233/060/66 with 128 MB Ram, OS3.9 and a Voodoo3 3000 PCI board. For the test I ran "P96-speed", which is on the CD-ROM.
The 2D Test:
CVPPC : VOODOO3 :PICASSO IV: AGA :
: : : :
RECTFILL : 7784 : 25803 : 5890 : 60 :
RECTFILLPATTERN : 5139 : 20627 : 5573 : 22 :
WRITEPIXEL : 251055 : 149014 : 122399 : 35787 :
WRITECHUNKYPIXEL : 1078 : 694 : 637 : 30 :
WRITEPIXELARRAY8 : 1049 : 690 : 630 : 204 :
WRITEPIXELLINE8 : 26076 : 25504 : 22078 : 12520 :
DRAWELLIPSE : 16361 : 10194 : 10610 : 290 :
DRAWCIRCLE : 17816 : 12283 : 11167 : 313 :
DRAW : 15145 : 25772 : 3887 : 151 :
DRAW HOR/VER : 18308 : 28964 : 23515 : 207 :
SCROLLRASTER X : 382 : 2865 : 394 : 7 :
SCROLLRASTER Y : 623 : 2945 : 384 : 7 :
PUTTEXT : 5607 : 11791 : 9161 : 635 :
BLITBITMAP : 5091 : 19092 : 9275 : 206 :
BLITBITMAPRASTERPORT: 4108 : 14163 : 7607 : 203 :
BITMAPSCALE : 192 : 81 : 85 : 57 :
OPENWINDOW : 53 : 192 : 104 : 9 :
MOVEWINDOW : 577 : 1211 : 579 : 18 :
SIZEWINDOW : 117 : 269 : 187 : 11 :
CON-OUTPUT : 417 : 1709 : 501 : 88 :
SCREENTOFRONT : 50 : 93 : 101 : 50 :
All those tests were performed at a resolution of 640x480x8 and you can see that the Voodoo3 partly is 3 to 4 times faster than the CVPPC and up to 7 times faster than the PICASSO IV, not to mention AGA.
Sometimes the CVPPC is the winner, but you have to realize that the CVPPC can use the direct connection port on the CyberStormPPC, whereas the Voodoo3 only uses the slower ZorroIII port.
And these little victories disappear in the 3D test!
The 3D Test:
The 3D test was performed with the "Timerefresh" command during the game HereticII at the beginning of the first level. The numbers given are the frames per second (FPS).
HereticII: 640*480*16 : 800*600*16 : 1024*768*16 :
: : : :
Voodoo3 : 28 : 22 : 14 :
CVPPC : 16 : 11 : 2 :
That's that! This should make it clear who the boss is here! The CVPPC at a resolution of 800*600 is only half as fast as the Voodoo3 and at 1024*768 only as fast as a snail.
But this is not all that the Voodoo3 offers. Anyone who has played HereticII with a CVPPC will not recognise it with the Voodoo3, because lots of additional effects can be seen and the light effects are pure madness! Really!
Another improvement is that the picture is displayed by the Voodoo3 quite a bit sharper and clearer than with the CVPPC. And as well the vertical video frequency of the Voodoo3 can't be beat. At a resolution of 640*480*24 a frequency of 160 Hz can be achieved, the same applies at 800*600*24, and even at 1600*1200*24 100 Hz can be displayed, of course only, if your monitor can keep up! In addition to that it is possible to display graphics modi in 32 bit (meaning 4,295 milliards [US: billions] of colours!). Not that I know where this many colours are needed, but the game QuakeIII uses this modus.
My mantra is: Permedia2 no chance! See a Voodoo3 board in action just once, and you will pass up the chance to try the competition. The performance in nearly every respect is many times higher than the current leader CVPPC, especially in 3D. There are nearly no negative features and my board has run in my computer for weeks without a single crash. OK, there are one or more bugs in the Warp3D driver, but they will, according to a statement by Hyperion, be eliminated as far as possible with version 4.2 and the speed again will be increased (can't believe that!!).
On the question of drivers from Matay, it is too early to expect a long list. Presently there are only the drivers for the Voodoo3 2000/3000 and the Warp3D driver from Hyperion. Word has it that before long a 2D driver for the Voodoo4 4500 and drivers for the NE200 network board will be available, and this will only be the beginning.
But don't rush out and buy a Voodoo5 5500 right now, because Hans-Joerg Frieden of Hyperion told me that there may not be any Warp3D drivers for this board! The reason: 3Dfx has been bought out by Nvidia and they are not releasing the spec of the VSA-100 graphics chip. What a shame!
Rumors persist of plans for a G3 CPU board, but this also is a fond hope for the future.
Right now, the picture is brillant, the performance is super, and the drivers work crash-proof! So, what can keep you away from this hardware?
Of course ................the price!
Well, 598 DM (at Vesalia 559 DM) [306 and 286 EURO] and more than 200 DM [102 EURO] for the Voodoo3 is a healthy wad of money, and not every user carries that sort of stash in the pocket. But quality has its price and Matay has made the effort to deliver a product that will satisfy any customer. If you've got the money and want to lift the performance of your Amiga to new dimensions, you should absolutely buy this PCI board and a Voodoo3.
I just hope that Matay sell enough of these PCI boards to be enable them to provide the Amiga with even more new hardware in the future.
Joachim Schmid <Achim-im-Netz@t-online.de>
