For those interested in joining the PPC world...

[Bamiga2002]

I thought i saw this few years ago, so here might be an explanation for G-Rex being inferior to Mediator and not so fast as you thought it would be Keropi:

http://www.elbox.com/news_00_09_21.html

[Mad-Matt]

heh, most of that is elbox marketing crap.

mediator sucks badly for gfx. It may have more developed drivers, but the ppc card dierect bus offeres so much more speed then can be gotten over the zorro-II bus the med uses.

I have voodoo 3 and 5 connected to mediator and its no where near as fast as even the bvision. with 040 running the show a soundcard,network card is slower on med then even a pcmcia network card and paula. The mediator is not by anymeans fast and relighs on cpu power to push data around with the limited bandwidth available on the zorro-ii bus.

If i could get a grex real cheap, id be there in a flash, but atm id rarther use paula,pcmcia and bvision for best speed and usability (voodoo3 offeres no 15bit modes making amigaamp w3d plugins useless and nightlong amongst other things, and voodoo5 cant work in bigendian modes - cant play wo2097).

[Bamiga2002]

Originally Posted by Mad-Matt

I have voodoo 3 and 5 connected to mediator and its no where near as fast as even the bvision. with 040 running the show a soundcard,network card is slower on med then even a pcmcia network card and paula. The mediator is not by anymeans fast and relighs on cpu power to push data around with the limited bandwidth available on the zorro-ii bus.

You gotta be kidding, surely Mediator + Voodoo 3 or 5 is faster than BVision. I've read several test results about this. You must have something wrong with your setup, settings or old drivers etc.

[AMIGAZ]

Totally agree.
Remember there was a discussion about this at Amiga.org and there's a website with benchmatks concerning this but can't find it at the moment so I can post the link (arghh)

[Mad-Matt]

Originally Posted by Bamiga2002

You gotta be kidding, surely Mediator + Voodoo 3 or 5 is faster than BVision. I've read several test results about this. You must have something wrong with your setup, settings or old drivers etc.

what makes it so wrong ? the bvision has access to a much faster bus then the mediator can provide. the 040 just cant push the data fast enough and p96 is frankly crap compared to cgx (infact p96 relies on its cgxv3 emulation to get anything done).

Im using the latest drivers from elbox for the MMCD, and Medconfig is used to config. ppc is heavely bottlenecked by the mediator, which makes w3d games slower too. In my opinion the med is only worth concidering if you have an 060 based accelerator to push the data around at a decent speed. Its simply no fun on 040/25, the Bvision/Pcmcia and paula is a more responsive/faster system in this case . (Although pcmcia network does cause my system to freeze alot even with cc fix )

[Bamiga2002]

Yes, maybe your results may be disappointing with a 040. The test results i read were tested with a blizzard ppc 060, which i also have. So mediator speed is dependable on the 68k processor, hmm.....