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What's the difference between the various Radius 24 cards?
- Thread starter olePigeon
- Start date
No it's not mine, it's just a picture, but the specs from sonnets site say the whole thing is only 4MB so those are probably 4x1MB chips.
Thank you. That lead me to an image of the MacPicasso 540, which was a PCI card, and looking at it suggests that the MacPicasso 340, perhaps, has a PCI video chip on board and the big Xilinx FPGA is there to convert NuBus to PCI. The 540 looks just like the 340, but with a PCI edge connector and a complete lack of the FPGA.
Suggests there's some flavor of standard video chip under the green heat sink. Hopefully standard, easy to find...
Suggests there's some flavor of standard video chip under the green heat sink. Hopefully standard, easy to find...
Woah!!!! I NEED one of these babies! 
Sonata Pro 24 does 720p in 24bit and 1080p in 16bit! That is one hella NuBus card right there. Strange that it doesn't do 1152x870, but 1152x1740 and 1712xx2432 are some kinda crazy Portrait resolutions! If it did 1920x1200 I'd DESPERATELY NEED one!
Interesting that these cards no longer have need of the DSP arrays on pre-PPC NuBus VidCards like the Thunders and SuperMacs.
Sonata Pro 24 does 720p in 24bit and 1080p in 16bit! That is one hella NuBus card right there. Strange that it doesn't do 1152x870, but 1152x1740 and 1712xx2432 are some kinda crazy Portrait resolutions! If it did 1920x1200 I'd DESPERATELY NEED one!
Interesting that these cards no longer have need of the DSP arrays on pre-PPC NuBus VidCards like the Thunders and SuperMacs.
The 320 with heatsink off (noit my picture) looks like a very common Cirrus Logic 54xx chip.
Just like you say, the MP540 is the same thing as the MP340 just without the FPGA to translate the bus interface from PCI to Nubus.
They bot use the same Cirrus Logic chipset.
The information about cards are from Macworld February 1993 and
Macworld April 1994
Also DSP boards tests
Macworld April 1994
Also DSP boards tests
@slomacuser Man thanks for the time machine this stuff is golden, I'd love to pour over the old macworld magazines.
I need to test my Thunder/24 against my PicklesXA.
Also, it's an incredible shame that the PicklesXA thread was lost to the outage. In that thread we:
Also, it's an incredible shame that the PicklesXA thread was lost to the outage. In that thread we:
- Identified the rare card.
- Tracked down its hardware designer in Japan.
- Brought him into the forum.
- Had him clarify the various differences between different BUG Pickles cards he designed.
- Worked with him to eventually locate the otherwise lost to time software & drivers.
So with that FPGA/PROM we might develop a generic PCI<->NuBus translation setup for any PCI card that has drivers usable by 68K or NuBus PPC?
I get emailed everytime someone replies to a thread I am following or posting about. Any chance someone has the thread responses in their email?I need to test my Thunder/24 against my PicklesXA.
Also, it's an incredible shame that the PicklesXA thread was lost to the outage. In that thread we:
Now that's all lost, including the designer's account, etc.
- Identified the rare card.
- Tracked down its hardware designer in Japan.
- Brought him into the forum.
- Had him clarify the various differences between different BUG Pickles cards he designed.
- Worked with him to eventually locate the otherwise lost to time software & drivers.
Unfortunately, no. This thread was started during the window of time that was lost entirely, so it's gone. I will try to see if archive.org managed to capture any of it.
I'll see if I can get some time this weekend to re-run benchmarks in my 7100/80 this weekend for:
- On-board DRAM video
- PDS VRAM HPV card
- PDS A/V card
- Nubus BUG PicklesXA
- Nubus Supermac Thunder/24 w/ DSP upgrade
The trouble is that the full suite of benchmarks that exercise raw graphics functions, basic QuickDraw functions, and application oriented QuickDraw functions take *forever* to run, and due to discrepancies in available bit depths and resolutions everything needs to be run multiple times to capture the disjunctive comparable sets of results. Made worse still by the fact that back then it was very common for hardware to be optimized for specific use cases. Like a card could be great at 24-bit, but absolutely horrible at 8-bit just due to how the drivers and or hardware have been optimized.
Does anyone have any recommendations on what to limit things too? I was basically thinking 8-bit and 24-bit (where possible) at 640x480 and 1024x768 (where possible)?
PM'ing them.
Well I can predict the results;
- On-board DRAM video - 100%
- PDS VRAM HPV card - 140%
- PDS A/V card - 70%
- Nubus BUG PicklesXA - 35%
- Nubus Supermac Thunder/24 w/ DSP upgrade - 30%
Unfortunately we won't be able to recover the old thread. The particular way the previous software failed was complete and catastrophic enough that in general it's best to presume we are unable to recover any text at all. This was the fault of the forum software itself. Not the underlying hardware or server infrastructure software.
w/re those benchmarks: I predict that the PDS A/V card comes ahead of the onboard video, although perhaps not quite as much as the HPV card. The onboard video in x100 Macs isn't particularly fast compared to anything else at the time.
The reason Quadra video was so fast compared to NuBus graphics at the time (1992) was because it was on the '040 processor bus, but it did also have its own dedicated VRAM. The x100 video has that advantage but the onboard VRAM slots it down, plus NuBus video had gotten faster in terms of acceleration and having more VRAM. The PDS video card had both, I believe it had some hardware acceleration as well, so it'll be close to the top of those benches.
Entertainingly, the Mac 6200 outperforms the Mac 6100's built-in graphics on tests it can complete, because the 6200 has graphics with acceleration and its own VRAM on the '040 bus.
w/re those benchmarks: I predict that the PDS A/V card comes ahead of the onboard video, although perhaps not quite as much as the HPV card. The onboard video in x100 Macs isn't particularly fast compared to anything else at the time.
The reason Quadra video was so fast compared to NuBus graphics at the time (1992) was because it was on the '040 processor bus, but it did also have its own dedicated VRAM. The x100 video has that advantage but the onboard VRAM slots it down, plus NuBus video had gotten faster in terms of acceleration and having more VRAM. The PDS video card had both, I believe it had some hardware acceleration as well, so it'll be close to the top of those benches.
Entertainingly, the Mac 6200 outperforms the Mac 6100's built-in graphics on tests it can complete, because the 6200 has graphics with acceleration and its own VRAM on the '040 bus.
