Quote:
Originally Posted by IanP
The Zorro II bus is too slow I think. Using a CPU across the Zorro II bus to manipulate the data in an FPGA graphics card based on the Vampire/Apollo architecture would be a big performance hit. A Full HD 16 bit frame is about 4MB so you wont get many frames per second from it with heavily animated images.
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Even though Zorro II is limited regarding memory & bandwith, there have numerous graphic cards with 4MB that work admirably well on such systems. Just to name a few: CyberVision 64/3D, Picasso IV and Merlin.
The practical advantage of using Zorro II as a bus interface is that you can serve A2000, A3000 and A4000 users (plus its model variants) with a single design. You can even enable a Zorro III mode for enhanced bandwith on systems that have such capability, as it has been done before on numerous ocasions.