RTG Disappointment

[edd_jedi]

Quick back story, I have an Amiga 4000D with Cyberstorm II 060. I really want to be able to play FPS and PC adventure games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Full Throttle etc at a decent speed/frame rate, so following advice I have bought a Picasso II RTG card (2mb version.)

I have installed it using the Picasso96 driver, however I have not noticed any improvement in any of the above games. In fact they all run worse than they do under AGA! I have seen videos like this one playing Quake II on AGA:

[ Show youtube player ]

I can't even get the original Doom to run at this frame rate! Quake runs at about 1 frame a second. Am I doing something seriously wrong, or was I wrong that an RTG card would improve graphics performance? It does seem to make Workbench much snappier at higher color depths, so I don't understand why I'm seeing no improvement in games.

[edd_jedi]

Oh, and should have mentioned I am obviously selecting the Picasso screenmodes within the games. At 320x240/8 bit games run about the same as AGA, at 640 x 480 much slower.

[bebek]

There is another bit missing in your configuration that would enable to play all this games with decent frame rate. It is not expensive at all ...

[edd_jedi]

Cybergraphx driver?

[bebek]

no ... PC, any would do

Sorry, stupid joke

[edd_jedi]

Haha, I see

I would agree with you if Youtube wasn't full of videos of A1200s running these games perfectly, I don't understand why my A4000 can't even get close.

[amiman99]

FYI, Picasso II is a Zorro II card, for best performance on A4000 you will need a Zorro III graphics card.

[edd_jedi]

Thanks, I realise the Picasso II is at the lower end of the spectrum and there are better cards. But surely it should be better than stock AGA?

[amiman99]

I'm in the same boat as you, have the same card, same A4000, same results. Slow.
It's fine for hi res WB and WB applications.

[bebek]

Is it worth it? You are in pain now ... even if you manage to run the game best way you can on Amiga this pain will not go away.

Why would you do it to youself ?

[mark_k]

Zorro II bus bandwidth is only ~3.58MB/sec; that's a pretty serious bottleneck for games that refresh the entire screen each frame.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by amiman99

FYI, Picasso II is a Zorro II card, for best performance on A4000 you will need a Zorro III graphics card.

The Picasso II is also an old slow gfx card which may make more difference depending on the game. The ZII bottleneck makes copying big bitmaps slow. A slow gfx card (combo of GPU and gfx memory type and speed) makes updating the screen slow. There are software variables like the RTG software which can make a difference too.

[idrougge]

I'd also be disappointed if I had a Picasso II.

[edd_jedi]

So would a Zorro III card like the Cybervision make a noticeable difference? I'm not optimistic considering the Picasso II has in most cases made performance worse! We're talking about 20 year old games here that ran just fine on a 386 or 486 PC!

[idrougge]

Don't know, really. My A4000 doesn't handle Doom well even with RTG.

[Jope]

Save your money, no Zorro3 RTG board will help you run these games at acceptable speeds.

It's best to use a PC for PC games.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by edd_jedi

So would a Zorro III card like the Cybervision make a noticeable difference? I'm not optimistic considering the Picasso II has in most cases made performance worse! We're talking about 20 year old games here that ran just fine on a 386 or 486 PC!

I believe a Cybervision 64/3D, Cybervision 64, Picasso IV or a Mediator with Voodoo 3+ or Radeon would make a noticeable difference. Some newer and slightly better cards like the GVP Spectrum (ZIII capable but old chipset) may be a little faster but you may not notice a difference.

[Zetr0]

I had doom (600x400) / Quake (600x400) running well on my A4k it had CSMk2 060@50Mhz + 128MB RAM, CyberSCSI and a Cybervision 64 3D Mk2.

It was running CGX4 / Warp3D - this was the best combo I found

To be fair Doom was full speed - Quake struggled in large areas.

[Zetr0]

@OP

I have a Picasso II+ (Thanks to a certain PPC powered old sprite ) and had this combined with my GVP Combo 040@33MHz on my A2000.

I got a very near full speed Doom in 256colour (8bit) (300x200) - higher screen resolutions there were troubles I am afraid to say with lagging screen refresh.
The A2000 system was - CW3.9 BB1&2 with CGX4 Drivers.

Originally I used Picasso drivers for the card but found issues with the GVP 040 - (mainly picture glitches and freezes)

To be fair the Picasso II is a great card for Low entry RTG - for better work and applications - games... not so much - some games sure, but I would humbly recommend a Z3 RTG card like the Cybervision 64 / 3D or BLTZ3 for that matter - sadly I have not used a Picasso IV.

If you can, try a CGX driver for you Picasso II

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Jope

Save your money, no Zorro3 RTG board will help you run these games at acceptable speeds.

It's best to use a PC for PC games.

One cannot escape this truth.

I'd be upset too if after plonking a considerable amount of money on an Amiga it wouldn't run something properly. This is why I never bothered with any of these "upgrades".

Cheaper and easier to build a Pentium rig to run these games. I have a Toshiba Libretto I quite like for this use.

I know this is not the answer you want, but you have to consider it an option too.