English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Real-world difference between bus speeds

jPV · 12 December 2018, 10:31

Wasn't "real life" Zorro II throughput more like 3.5MB/s rather than 5.3MB/s said in that page? At least in practise chunky demos ran more smoothly over AGA than on CV64/3D in Zorro II on my 060 setup.

And the Zorro II bandwidth limitation really shows with games and demos that push raw chunky data on screen and don't use any 2D accelerated functions. For example, playing Napalm in 640x512 mode is quite impossible with Zorro II graphics card, but it flies without any problems over Zorro III or PCI.

Zorro II is somehow acceptable when you use system friendly utilities, and definitely better than AGA for that use, but generally Zorro III or PCI are so much more enjoyable setups.

Sound cards are fine in Zorro II and you get DSP options which is really nice compared to PCI ones.

I guess network cards should be in theory too. Although I don't know if it was Zorro II or just old crappy network card designs, but for me it was like day and night when going from Hydra AmigaNet in Zorro II to Realtek cards in Mediator. Hydra was always a bit unreliable and max transfer speeds were 600kB/s in good weather. 10Mpbs PCI NIC gave steady 1MB/s, and 100Mbps card went over that (but was restricted by CPU then soon). So, in my experience PCI has been much better solution for networking.

12 December 2018, 10:31	#3
jPV Registered User Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: RNO Posts: 1,007	Wasn't "real life" Zorro II throughput more like 3.5MB/s rather than 5.3MB/s said in that page? At least in practise chunky demos ran more smoothly over AGA than on CV64/3D in Zorro II on my 060 setup. And the Zorro II bandwidth limitation really shows with games and demos that push raw chunky data on screen and don't use any 2D accelerated functions. For example, playing Napalm in 640x512 mode is quite impossible with Zorro II graphics card, but it flies without any problems over Zorro III or PCI. Zorro II is somehow acceptable when you use system friendly utilities, and definitely better than AGA for that use, but generally Zorro III or PCI are so much more enjoyable setups. Sound cards are fine in Zorro II and you get DSP options which is really nice compared to PCI ones. I guess network cards should be in theory too. Although I don't know if it was Zorro II or just old crappy network card designs, but for me it was like day and night when going from Hydra AmigaNet in Zorro II to Realtek cards in Mediator. Hydra was always a bit unreliable and max transfer speeds were 600kB/s in good weather. 10Mpbs PCI NIC gave steady 1MB/s, and 100Mbps card went over that (but was restricted by CPU then soon). So, in my experience PCI has been much better solution for networking.