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jrobbins70

Posted Sat Aug 14, 2021 11:43 am

I recently lost my Picasso-II card to old age and am considering replacing it with a Phase5 CyberVision 64 or CyberVision 64-3D. I really miss having a high resolution VGA style workbench.

However I'm unclear which is the better card. The specs seem to be the same: Zorro III, 4MB, same modes.

This card will be going into an Amiga 4000/060 with buster 11.

Thank you.

J

User avatar
nonarkitten

Posted Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:09 pm

In 2D performance these are basically the same chip, S3 made the initial ViRGE literally a drop-in replacement so they didn't have to rework the cards themselves.

Of course, for 3D, it's miles ahead of the Trio64. Even modest hardware acceleration can destroy even the beefiest CPU. That being said, there aren't a lot of Amiga 3D apps out there that will use this card. Even games that were accelerated on the PC often aren't on the Amiga due to incomplete ports of SDL and OpenGL. So the utility of the 3D is specious. But if their the same price, why not?

Edit: The S3 ViRGE was one of the first 3D GPU's out there and while it did have blending and filtering, it was still prone to warping from affine interpolation, and performance nosediving with any blending since it had to do multiple-passes. Think PSX at maybe slightly higher resolutions. Affine distortion was fixed even on the PSX by doing software perspective-correct tessellation of the original models, so later games looked okay, but it's heyday might have been a year at best before we had 3Dfx.

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Sat Aug 14, 2021 12:44 pm

Nothing useful to add about the 3D stuff, but I do find my CGX-3D limited by its maximum pixel clock and thus what resolutions at which color depths it can attain. So that would be something to look at.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Aug 14, 2021 2:26 pm

For the price you'd likely have to pay for a 25 year old card, have you pondered the zz9000? It's P96 compatible.

Most of its extra features are really beta at best. But for RTG screen resolutions the results are astonishing. There is one known A4000 bug but it doesn't sound that serious.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sat Aug 14, 2021 4:15 pm

+1 for the ZZ9000. Not only does it also have a scandoubler for the videoslot. It also has basic Networking, although relatively slow. It also has a USB-connector for USB-sticks. The recent beta-firmware provides booting from such a USB drive. No hotplugging, though. There also is a soundboard in development for things such as mp3. The AmigaAmp developer is now on this as well and is considering special support for the ZZ9000.

TL,DR - fantastic card in active development with lots of new features coming.





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