Is 030 overated, and 040 underrated?

[crazyc]

Surely whdload now resolves most compatibility issues for 060s?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Doom is an Amiga benchmark?

Yes, it is. Doom was the game that the Amiga was measured up to in the mid 90's, and failed. But in the late 90's the price of accelerator cards like the Blizzard 1230-IV tumbled, and then the A1200 could have run Doom reasonably well - if only an Amiga optimized version had been produced.

But why Doom, when it wasn't an Amiga game? It's a good example of a popular real-world program that is very CPU intensive and can be 'fairly' compared across different platforms. Other commonly used synthetic CPU benchmarks such as Dhrystone and Sieve of Eratosthenes are sensitive to micro code optimizations and so may not reflect real-world performance. Also their results are harder to relate to - everybody understands what 15 frames per second means, but 19246 Dhrystones?

[d4rk3lf]

Well, speaking of non-pc doom ports...
How does Alien Breed 3D 2 works on 030/50?
Can you go full screen + full details, and to be (fairly) smooth?
What about Breathless?

[Lisko]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Well, speaking of non-pc doom ports...
How does Alien Breed 3D 2 works on 030/50?
Can you go full screen + full details, and to be (fairly) smooth?
What about Breathless?

On my blizzard iv 1230 32MB, ab 3d 2 could be playable with full details but definitely not full screen.

[daxb]

On 040/40 with "fast" chipram access and Kalms C2P around 10 FPS max. for Alien Breed 3D 2. Breathless is slower.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Well, speaking of non-pc doom ports...
How does Alien Breed 3D 2 works on 030/50?
Can you go full screen + full details, and to be (fairly) smooth?
What about Breathless?

Even 060 is "too slow" to play TKG at full screen 1:1 ;-)
Except for maybe towerized 1200 with overclocked 060 and RTG patch (+voodoo) Vampire was probably first hardware to play the game at a smooth framerate (and when I say hardware I mean, not software emulation".
If memory serves me correctly, the framerate is not constant throughout the game, so you could have places where you could play full screen 1:1 but then you had other places where you need at least 2:1 or 1:2 to maintain playability on 060.
Didn't have a 040 at the time, but I played it at some point later on a 040 and first impression was, "damn, is it this slow on 040?" 030 users can likely forget about full screen and maybe scale down to something more like AB3D1 screen size but with better resolution. (tried a quick search to find a youtube video of gameplay on actual 030 but didn't find one)

[Lord Aga]

I would be surprised if a 030 could pull off a decent full screen 2x2 gameplay. AB3D II is really demanding.

[NovaCoder]

030's are cool, simple as that (quite literally actually).

It's like an 020 will bells on LoL

Loved my Blizzard 030 which ran just about everything well apart from the 060 demos and my own ports. My ACA030 @ 56Mhz was also very impressive.

I've always thought the 040 was a dud, the 060 on the other hand was a big step up.

[Havie]

My first accelerator was as Blizzard 1220 (28mhz 020) which was great but when I upgraded, I couldn't afford and 060 so went for an 040/40 - loved it! Played Doom really well, Gloom 1:1 and others. I thought it was really powerful so missed the 030 completely at the time (mind you, I had towerised my 1200 at this point).

Do have an 030 in my 1200 at present and it's great but I definitely notice the difference from my old 040. Nice accelerator though but not the dream 060. Alas I feel I will never own an 060 but have a V1200 in the post as we speak so this is the next best thing currently

[nikosidis]

I totally love my Blizzard IV 030 with FPU.
The system is very fast, responsive to use.
On top of that very compatible.

[NorthWay]

I'd pick an 040 anytime. Never had an 030 for that matter. The MMU tech is so much more sane on the 040.

[defor]

I owned Blizzard1230/III for two years and I wanted to upgrade. Naturally I wanted B1260 but I couldn't afford it (1996 or 1997). So I purchased Blizzard1240 (040/40) with a tower so I could rebuild my A1200 because of the fan which 040 needed, and still it was cheaper than B1260. Additionally, I could have CDROM neatly placed in the tower. 040 was fine. Reasonably faster than 030/50, builtin MMU and FPU was a nice bonus. 4kB i+d cache + write-back caching + instruction pipelining helped a lot. I was using it for programming in SAS\C and assembler and loved it. Nowadays I wouldn't pick 040 again. I rather prefer having A1200 in the original case, instead of tower. It means 030 or 060. Unfortunately we all know how expensive 060 (+accelerator card) is However, realistically 060 is needed for watching scene-demos only (and for playing a few 3D games which run much better on any cheap potato PC). Hard to justify such a high investment

[alexh]

I've not had had an 030 for a long time, not since my A3000@25.

I have mainly used the Commodore A3640@25MHz (first in the A3000 and then A4000) which did the job, bit slow when you start using 1280x720 RTG and lots of colours.

People say they give off a lot of heat, you can get the L88M mask version and that is practically cold even at 40MHz and 5V.

With the release of the 060 adapter for 040 cards I imagine lots have been turned into 060's?

[fxgogo]

I am actually starting to feel that my 030 in my 1200 is just wasted. For my productivity and creative apps, I can run orders of magnitude faster on my emulated Amigas. So apart from the odd game and demos, I don't see the point of running the 030.

[mikele]

I have an impression that back in the 80s people looked up to 030 as the next big thing, since the 020 boards were usually limited to 14 MHz clock (until 92 or 93). If you do not intend to to install BSD/Linux, play Doom and other old FPS games (they all seem "meh" to me) or render objects in Light Wave probably you won't take advantage of this CPU.

The good compromise between FAST RAM and 030 seems to be a faster 020 card like ACA 1221, which gives you a speed of Amiga 3000/25 and some useful features for the fraction of 030 card's price. The system runs fast and you have a good software compatibility. I do need anything faster to be honest.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

the Blizzard is fast enough for most of the stuff I do and gets the most use. They will pry my it from my cold dead hands!

Indeed. 1230-IV is great

[grelbfarlk]

Don't forget that the 040 FPU destroys the 030 68882 FPU in most situations.
Comparing an 030@50MHz vs an Apollo 25MHz 040 in AIBB in FP mode:

 name						Savage	FMath	FMatrix	BeachBall Flops	TranTest FTrace	CplxTest

Blizzard 1230 III (030/50, 882/50, 3.0 in RAM) 	197.32	27.48	6.08	36.97	  66.64	92.63	119.57	7.32

Apollo 1240 (040/25, 3.0, OxyPatcher)	 	118.03	125.23	12.60	106.40	  195.45 109.10	109.01	14.55

Blizzard PPC (040/25, 3.0 in RAM, 70ns) 	118.33	125.26	11.61	80.87	  195.52 100.09	109.34	14.57

[eXeler0]

A 50MHz 030 is great for most people, but then there is obviously a clear line where the 030 simply doesn't cut it, so it really depends on which category you belong to.
Even if we ignore Doom/Quake.. If you work with any sort of image processing program such as AdPro, Photogenics, Image FX.-- And of course 3d rendering, you will not love your 030 anymore ;-) A 040 would be better at all those things...
My love for the BLizzard 1230 ended when I started rendering heavy scenes on Amiga. 060 was only sane option so I got one as soon as it was released in Germany (yes I mail-ordered it from Germany to Sweden, man it was a hassle back then, but worth it). But of course, suddenly a lot of games would Guru on it so then I missed the 030 a little.. ;-) (Never had the 040 back in the day btw, but I had a buddy with an A4000/040 in 1993 already)
But now, the solution is simple, I have A1200 with 060, A1200 with 030, A500 with default everything, A500+ with faster 68000.. CD32 with 030, CD32 vanilla with FMV, and so on, you get the idea ;-)
Veeery convenient, it only fills up half a room, but now I can run everything :-)
Its a good thing my wife doesn't know what FPGA is ;-)

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

Don't forget that the 040 FPU destroys the 030 68882 FPU in most situations.

It's easy to be faster when you remove half of the stuff...

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

My love for the BLizzard 1230 ended when I started rendering heavy scenes on Amiga. 060 was only sane option so I got one as soon as it was released in Germany (yes I mail-ordered it from Germany to Sweden, man it was a hassle back then, but worth it). But of course, suddenly a lot of games would Guru on it so then I missed the 030 a little.. ;-) (Never had the 040 back in the day btw, but I had a buddy with an A4000/040 in 1993 already)

It would be very interesting if someone could make a Lightwave benchmark, and compare the speed of rendering (the same scene) on 030 vs 040 vs 060.
Personally, for 3D scenes, I think it's more of a RAM issue, then processor speed. I was very impressed with result my Aca 500 plus (68000 on 14 Mhz) processor did in only 7 minutes, in Real 3D, with default scene (table with teapot), where I just removed bump from teapot (it was ugly, anyway, and only slowing the rendering), and it calculated raytrace reflections and all shadows, so I got very nice 3D render in only 7 minutes.

Even now, and especially back in the day, people were not really capable of optimizing 3D scenes, and they were placing raytrace reflections pretty much anywhere (even in non reflective materials like ground and dirt), and they had enormous render times, for no real reason.

People do that even today.
Because, how can you explain, enormous crying of people that they don't have enough processing power to render something (i see comments on youtube, all the time), and Jurassic Park (1994) was rendered on machines slower then processor on low end mobile phone today, and these renders looks absolutely amazing, even today.