Recent content by noglin

Oh that would be very interesting to see! The 6300/120 has the Valkyrie chip like the 5200/6200/5300, and it would be very interesting to see how much more FPS you would get with 120 mhz. The 5300 result (12.1 fps) showed that the 5200 (and likely 6200) is actually cpu bound (7.9 fps), which...

It has actually been quite a bit of research just to compare the 603 versus CPU:s from its timeline: 1994-1995 (and possibly 1993-1996) Starting from 6502 to Core 2 Duo would either not go very deep, or be quite an undertaking. Probably best to start another thread for some other "era" of...

It was a huge improvement over the 601 in terms of cost and energy efficiency. But in raw power per mhz it seems to do a bit worse than the 601. Example: 603 is 1.6M transistors, the 601 is 2.6M, Pentium is 3.3M, and the cost to produce scales roughly with that. The 603 can run in the 5200...

Many chips 1994/1995 had 8kb split. I don't think that was the issue. Both first two versions of the Pentium chip had split 8kb/8kb. If I had the choice for my programs, I would prefer 8kb split over 16kb unified. Unfortunately some article on low-end mac has convinced many that the 603 itself...

It is exactly the same chip! Although in comparison to the 68040, the 68040 would also stall? The 68k code *could* have been an explanation, I checked by entering MacsBug while it was running on Mac OS 7.5.1, and NQDMapRegion was active each time I entered and was in PPC code. So the...

True, although this is only when there are cache misses both in L1 *and* L2. So it will not be constantly bottlenecked by the memory bus, only occasionally (although when it does happen, it will be expensive!). The problem comes with cache inhibited data (like storing pixels to vram, or IO...

OK this was interesting... Quadra 630 beats my 5200 on speedometer 8 bit graphics! I ran the test several times, the 8-bit graphics is actually quite a bit faster in Mac OS 7.5.1. versus Mac OS 8.5.1 (but 16-bit is the same). https://lowendmac.com/benchmarks/q630.shtml Machine 8-bit graphics...

Sorry about the PSU fan, but good you found out before it was too late! Thanks for doing that, I added the numbers into the spreadsheet. It is actually *very* interesting to me that you can get such high fps with the video-chip as-is. I had a quick look in the developer notes of the...

Disabling the card, wouldn't that be exactly like running without it?

Very nice! Good to see that the civic video chip can push up to 39.8 fps, which is likely the bottleneck with the G3 in it. I hope we can get a 6100/66 to compare with and see how much that accelerator card is helping out on that same video chip.

That's interesting! OK I will need to fire up my Pentium 100 and do some comparisons eventually. I have only used it to watch some demos, and my memory of my friends 486/Pentiums might have been too colored by how the games performed, although I recall thinking Windows felt quite snappy...

Cool! Thanks for doing that :) I thought it would do better than linear as it is the 603e so should be able to pair instructions better.

It should be amazingly powerful compared to a Performa 400. The question is, how was it measuring up against its competition, which by 1995 was Pentium/top 486. L2 cache miss is roughly 32 cpu cycles for RAM. And valkyrie write buffer is seemingly available again after 8 cpu cycles. It is...

This is true, but exactly what is causing the quite substantial slow down I'm not 100% sure yet. Here is what I do know: the 603 LSU stalls on cache miss, meaning no more loads or stores can happen until the cache miss has been fully resolved. The 603 can still do FPU and ILU instructions, but...

Thank you for doing it, looking forward to see the results! :)