The Graphics board for the Blizzard 603e (+).
Most PC users know about the Permedia 2 chip - it's one of the most up-to-date 3D graphics processors. The Permedia 2 is also the heart of the BlizzardVisionPPC card, and its 2D performance is quite impressive. It can display 1280 by 1024 pixels in true color with an 85 Hz refresh rate; 1600 by 1200 pixels in true color at a refresh rate of 60 Hz (85 Hz in high color) and is equppied with 8 MB of display memory. Its 3D features include z-buffering, fogging, blending, anti-aliasing, gouraud shading and 80 million 3D pixels per second. At the moment, there is no Amiga software around that makes full use of the Permedia2. This has changed with the release of Warp3D V2.
After all the talk about what the board could do in theory, let us have a look at the pure benchmarks. phase5 claimed the direct-cpu bus on the PPC boards were very fast. Here are some Bus speed results made with BusSpeedTest 0.19.
| Operation -> |
readw |
readl |
readm |
writew |
writel |
writem |
| Picasso IV ZorroII->PCIBus ??MHz |
1.5 |
1.6 |
1.6 |
2.4 |
2.4 |
2.4 |
| CyberVision64/3D ZorroIII->PCIBus 25MHz |
1.7 |
3.4 |
3.4 |
3.8 |
7.5 |
7.6 |
| Picasso IV ZorroIII->PCIBus ??MHz |
1.8 |
3.5 |
3.5 |
5 |
9.9 |
9.9 |
| CyberVision64 ZorroIII->VLBus 50MHz |
2.1 |
4.3 |
4.3 |
7 |
13.9 |
13.9 |
| BlizzardVision B603e local bus |
4.7 |
9.4 |
9.4 |
7.9 |
15.8 |
15.8 |
| CyberVisionPPC CStorm local bus->PCIBus 25MHz |
2.4 |
4.8 |
4.8 |
8.6 |
17.3 |
17.2 |
|
BusSpeedTest 0.19 was used and the numbers are all number(bandwidth) * 10^6 byte/s. |
||||||
It should be noted that although the bus speed results are nowhere near the high speeds some people expected this is still a very fast card, even in high and true colour modes. It is certainly the fastest card on the A1200.
Even if you own a Zorro-II busboard and graphics accelerator, it might be worth considering upgrading to this card because of the large performance advantages of the faster memory bus, more memory and the more advanced chipset.
Prices for the BlizzardVisionPPC start from around DM: 400 UK£: 150 US$: ???.
PowerPC is a trademark of Motorola Inc. PowerUP is a trademark of phase5 digital products. Amiga is a trademark of Amiga Inc. All other trademark and brand names are property of their owners.