RTG Disappointment

[fitzsteve]

Forget about screen modes above 320x240 unless you have Warp3D (Voodoo/CyberPPC)

NovaCoder has an 80mhz 060 hence the frame rate in his Video's

As others have said you'd be better off with a Zorro III Graphics Card for your 3D games or better still a Mediator setup but you're never going to set the world alight with your A4000 and these modern games.

Have you thought about a Next Gen Amiga like the AmigaOne/Sam? You'll be able to play these games at PC speeds with an Amiga OS

I really enjoyed reliving these games on my Micro AmigaOne and the best thing was it fit in a MiniITX case

And @Zetro long time no see!

[fitzsteve]

By the way Clickboom's quake runs about 4-7fps on an 060 @50mhz with ZorroIII RTG (such as CV64/3D) in 320x240 just to manage your expectations. You actually get a better speed bost overclocking the 060 to 66mhz if you add some extra cooling it's pretty safe on the CSMkII but just bare in mind the age of the hardware and it's value should it go pop.

Here's a Video of my Old A4000T CsMkII 66mhz + PicassoIV:

[ Show youtube player ]

This is about the best you can expect without PPC or Warp3D

[Daedalus]

Yep, Zorro II is going to be a big bottleneck there alright. 3D acceleration can be used by some games if you have a 3D capable card, e.g. Voodoo 3 + Mediator or CV64-3D. With that sort of setup you'll actually get a reasonably playable game of Quake on an 060 with GlQuake, which takes advantage of the hardware acceleration. My A1200 with a Mediator, Voodoo 3 and Blizzard 1260 running at 66MHz does a reasonable job of it. Doom is quite playable too (though I didn't play much of that). I also played through Descent: Freespace on that setup, it dropped quite low in the FPS department in many places but was generally playable. As others have said though, pull any PC out of a skip and it'll run rings around a £1000 Amiga at these games.

[fitzsteve]

Just a side note the Warp3D driver on the CV64/3D is about a much use a chocolate teapot. The only game which will work with the 4mb VRAM is Decent (the original Decent)

I think I have a Video somewhere of my sorry attempt to run GL Quake on it lol.

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

.....And @Zetro long time no see!

Steve!!!! We love you Steve!!!!


How you been fella!

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

Steve!!!! We love you Steve!!!!


How you been fella!

Ya know, getting by 'one day at a time...'

[SpeedGeek]

Sorry guys, it's no surprise stock AGA is faster than ZorroII RTG on A4000. Super Buster (any Rev.) is a ZorroII Downgrade and not capable of 3.5 MB/sec ZorroII transfer rate. 2.4MB/sec is max. assuming the ZorroII board is a Zero wait state design. Unfortunately, PicassoII is not a Zero wait state design!

If you want fast graphics on A4000 you basically have two options: ZorroIII RTG or AGA with a scan doubler.

[edd_jedi]

Thanks for the replies. Wish I'd written this thread before buying it

I don't really understand how it can speed workbench up but make zero difference compared to AGA in games, but seems to be the general consensus that's the case.

So why do Amiga users harp on about RTG so much if literally the only thing it does is give you a few more colours in Workbench?

[zipper]

More colours (there's quite a big difference between 256 and 16/24bit pictures), bigger screens, faster screen update due to hardware acceleration on 2D gfx. And gaming, too - I was quite happy when playing Warp3D Descent with CV64/3D@ 256x400 screen on my A500T with steroids.

[demolition]

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the Vampire 2 in this thread yet. Its RTG mode is very fast (No ZII bottle neck) and although it doesn't run everything yet, what it does run it does so very fast and compatibility is improving day by day and I would consider it for the A2000 once the V500 is released (it can be installed in an A2000 as well using an adapter board). FPU support is expected to be added in the near future and that should open up support for many additional 3D games.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by edd_jedi

I don't really understand how it can speed workbench up but make zero difference compared to AGA in games, but seems to be the general consensus that's the case.

In the case of the Picasso II, it might be the very reason why Village Tronic released the Picasso II+ and Picasso IV only 3 years later. To be fair, though, the Picasso II was released in 1993, which was only months after the A4000 received an official release (Oct '92). It was probably more a happy side-effect that it worked on the A4000 as it was clearly intended for Z2 machines, which were all non-AGA before the A4000 came out.

So why do Amiga users harp on about RTG so much if literally the only thing it does is give you a few more colours in Workbench?

I bought my first graphics card - a Cybervision 64 (pure Z3) - secondhand in the mid-to-late 1990s, and it flew on A4000/060 on WB + with all the utilities. By that time the Ami games market had died commercially after the fall of C= and then Escom, and graphics cards were still exorbitantly expensive. Clearly, if you wanted to play games that used cheap graphics cards, then PCs were the way to go......particularly with Doom and Quake on the scene!

Anyway, the Cybervision 64 was the best 2D graphics card going around at the time (even faster than the Cybervision 64/3D in 2D mode) until the Picasso IV came out. Once you used a graphics card with such a high-end set-up, going back to AGA just blew chunks and it seemed like an absolute waste to have a bottleneck like AGA spoiling the experience of owning an 060 card!

Having bought a graphics card back in the day, that's my answer to your question. Whether it's the reason why others back then did, I dunno!

[Thorham]

3D gaming on the Amiga? Don't bother. 3D games -> peecee.

[SpeedGeek]

Originally Posted by edd_jedi

I don't really understand how it can speed workbench up but make zero difference compared to AGA in games, but seems to be the general consensus that's the case.

You can speed up workbench without RTG. Just install FBLIT and then read the docs. They explain how rendering icons in Fast RAM (with a faster CPU) is faster than the Blitter. The Docs also explain why non-displayable graphics data is normally kept in Chip RAM (So the Blitter can access them).

P.S. RTG also allows graphics rendering in Fast RAM.

[Korodny]

Originally Posted by edd_jedi

I don't really understand how it can speed workbench up but make zero difference compared to AGA in games

As somebody already wrote: Without hardware 3D, your typical 3D game renders the entire frame in software and then transfers said frame to the graphics card -> slow, especially on Z2.

Workbench and GUI driven applications do not render the entire screen all the time, they just update parts of it. That way, they can use the graphics hardware to accelerate stuff - like scrolling a large bitmap, drawing lines and shapes... (provided the driver supports it and the graphics card actually has a blitter or similar hardware, of course).

So why do Amiga users harp on about RTG so much if literally the only thing it does is give you a few more colours in Workbench?

An RTG card makes a world of difference if you actually want to use Workbench. It gives you (way) bigger resolutions and millions of colours. That's not just a lot more comfortable, it also speeds things up a lot (e.g. because icons, logos, photos or graphics on a website do not need to be dithered in realtime anymore) and it enables you to do things that simply weren't really possible before (true color image editing, WYSIWG DTP...).

RTG was useful for gaming in the late nineties: when many people had a souped up Amiga but no PC yet, RTG gave them access to some PC ports. These days, it's mostly useless in that regard - I don't know how many original Amiga games actually benefit from RTG (as opposed to just supporting it - it doesn't really make a difference if I run my 320x200 game on AGA or RTG) - Napalm comes to mind, not much else. On a pre-AGA machine, it does give you access to some titles that would otherwise be out of your reach (OnEscapee, Genetic Species, Bubble Heroes...) though.

[Zetr0]

@OP
I would humbly suggest that you try NEMAC IV - you will see a difference

[Daedalus]

Payback is another game that is massively improved by RTG, but there are few others that aren't ports from the PC.

[grond]

The Z2 limitation is even more severe as RTG programs will usually simply render a frame and then dump it to the gfxcard via the Z2 bus while an program optimised for AGA and 060 will often render a frame, do c2p in fastmem and then copy to chipmem while rendering the next screen or doing something else. Optimally the time required to copy the frame to AGA chipmem is not noticable anymore. I guess the same thing could be done for RTG programs but nobody does this which is probably due to the fact that you need to go through some RTG library layer to do this.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by demolition

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the Vampire 2 in this thread yet.

I'm no longer surprised that someone comes dragging the Vampire into a thread about graphics cards for the A4000. Which the Vampire isn't.

Can one even write a post about a module here without someone mentioning how the Vampire makes the MOD sound better?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by DrBong

To be fair, though, the Picasso II was released in 1993, which was only months after the A4000 received an official release (Oct '92). It was probably more a happy side-effect that it worked on the A4000 as it was clearly intended for Z2 machines, which were all non-AGA before the A4000 came out.

The A3000 came out in 1990.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I'm no longer surprised that someone comes dragging the Vampire into a thread about graphics cards for the A4000. Which the Vampire isn't.

For some reason I had in my head that the OP was talking about an A2000 system and that's why I though it made sense. But now that I think about it, an 060 in an A2000 would be something special.