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Benchmarking the TwinTurbo 128MA (REV 3.7) + using it on other PCI Macs

demik

Well-known member
Hello,

I had this PCI card lying around because I couldn't get IXMicro drivers to work and enable acceleration. Someone suggested to me that this card came from a dead 9500 or 9600, and that I should try Apple drivers.

For reference, we are talking about this card:

800px-Integrated_Micro_Solutions_Twin_Turbo-128MA_%28Rev_3.7%29.png



This card now runs in my 6400/200 with 256k cache without issues, so I can heave something better than the weak onboard Valkyrie. After extracting the required CDEVs from a MacOS installer, a reboot later, QuickDraw acceleration was working fine.

If you want to do the same, you need the "9600 Graphics Accelerator" and "IX3D Graphics Accelerator" just to be sure. Supposedly, they are included within 9.1 but it didn't seem to work for me. I'm running 8.6 with the above CDEVs right now.

There is very noticeable difference in UI responsiveness with acceleration enabled. Scrolling is smoother, general display is way faster, altho I didn't notice much improvement in video/pictures/games.

Time for benchmark !
Please read 6200/200 as 6400/200 because I was drunk. TT128 OFF means without acceleration, TT128 ON means with acceleration.

IXTT128MA.png


Pretty happy so fat ! If you see one of theses around, they will improve graphics performance nicely on any 601/603/604 Mac.

P.S. ROM was dumped, just in case someone need it, send me a message…
 

Powerbase

Well-known member
The Twin Turbos were decent 2d cards, no doubt. I have a full size OEM lying around. It has a little bit of graphical coeruption though.
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Thanks for posting the benchmarks - Twin Turbo 128s are the pinnacle of 2D performance in a Mac, kind of like Matrox cards in PCs. They can handle anything 2D but never were made for any 3D use.
 

demik

Well-known member
Thanks for posting the benchmarks - Twin Turbo 128s are the pinnacle of 2D performance in a Mac, kind of like Matrox cards in PCs. They can handle anything 2D but never were made for any 3D use.

You are welcome. Indeed Radeons are better suited for 3D acceleration.
 

jessenator

Well-known member
demik we chatted on IRC about, so thought I'd post my results :)

This was just a custom test config in MacBench 4 of just Graphics, Low-Res Publishing Graphics, and High-Res Publishing Graphics on my StarMax 5000/275. Since the TwinTurbo crashes one of the two comprehensive tests at the end (DrawText or something there) I opted to omit those. MacBench 3 might work like yours did, though.

hXKoD3n.gif

So in last place we have the TwinTurbo with no drivers installed (also there are results from the TT with the 'wrong' drivers—clone ROM drivers—so it's like there's nothing driving the card…); followed by the on-board Rage II+DVD w/4 MB SGRAM; then the Rage128 with no drivers; then TT with 9600 Acceleration CDEV; and finally Rage128 with the system-7 compatible drivers.

That TwinTurbo really shines in the high-res dept compared to on-board chipset capabilities of the era! Rage128 is more B&W G3 era, so it's more for show-off-iness here :p
 

powermax

Well-known member
@jessenator The TT Macintosh card has the built-in ROM that contains two drivers: a FCode one for running under OpenFirmware as well as a native PPC driver to control the card under Mac OS. I'm not sure if the latter implements 2D acceleration.
AFAIK the card won't work in a Mac without proper drivers. I assume that "no drivers installed" actually means your TT is driven by the built-in drivers resided in the card's ROM.
 

jessenator

Well-known member
If you see one of theses around, they will improve graphics performance nicely on any 601/603/604 Mac.
I decided to test the several cards and configs with a G3 in the L2 slot
pP6EgJY.gif

the "wonky" test was when I had removed the TwinTurbo and the Rage128 just wouldn't respond: reinstall of drivers, CUDA reset, PRAM reset. Finally took a slot swap to get it working again for the G3 tests. RageII is the onboard chipset in my StarMax
 

Powerbase

Well-known member
Im glad the Rage 128 is pretty decent 2d wise too. Ive got two of em laying around from B&W G3s.
 

Powerbase

Well-known member
Its too bad you dont have any of Number 9's Imagine 128s or a Proformance 3 laying around. Im pretty sure theyd be faster than a Rage 128 even.
 

Nathan_A

Well-known member
Its too bad you dont have any of Number 9's Imagine 128s or a Proformance 3 laying around. Im pretty sure theyd be faster than a Rage 128 even.
I sadly recently missed out on an eBay auction for a PCI Mac Edition Revolution IV card by Number Nine :-(
 

macuserman

Well-known member
Its too bad you dont have any of Number 9's Imagine 128s or a Proformance 3 laying around. Im pretty sure theyd be faster than a Rage 128 even.
Indeed! I'd love to see a writeup comparing those as well as a voodoo5. If you weren't in France I'd be happy to lend my cards for benchmarking, as I'm to busy to do it myself.
 

jessenator

Well-known member
So the TT is indeed really fast
Especially on a high-res workload—1152x870 was the MacBench 4 'Hi-Res Publishing Graphics' test, which was a series of scripts working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark Xpress.

How Ziff-Davis was able to license those programs for testing would be a tale in itself. Here are two of the script files: Hi-Res A and Hi-Res B (no idea how to read them, outside of just running them in MB4).

I guess I should mention, if I haven't, that my TwinTurbo is an Apple ROM version like yours, demik. There have been a few OEM/clone versions, but higher on the price scale. I don't know what the OEM drivers do, or if they perform better, but they certainly don't work with the Apple ROM cards.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
Just to add, performance varies significantly between driver and OS versions on the TTs and IX3D cards.
 

Powerbase

Well-known member
Just to add, performance varies significantly between driver and OS versions on the TTs and IX3D cards.
I assume the official ix3D cards with the official drivers most likely outperformed Apples ones. Apple was never good at keeping their drivers updated.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
I assume the official ix3D cards with the official drivers most likely outperformed Apples ones. Apple was never good at keeping their drivers updated.
Ixmicro went bust so they didn't keep putting out drivers. There is a community patched version that is meant to work with OS9 but I found unreliable, and a version came from Apple with OS 9.x which is stable.

The ixmicro driver is faster at some tasks and the Apple one at others. The biggest differences were in fonts and 2D image manipulation, I forget which way around. The differences were crazy.

See the two attached scores, one for drawing pictures, the other for rendering fonts. As mentioned, each is from a different driver version. The best of each.

Unlike with the TTs, the ixmicro driver recognises apple ROM ix3d boards.

Edit : benchmarks made on a 9600 with a 400MHz G3. Note on the "Draw Pictures" benchmark you can see the predestrian performance of the other driver further down the list. I did that driver second. I think that means the "Draw Pictures" high scorer is the Apple version.

Edit edit : I'm the person who was talking about the ix3d on IRC and shared the Apple Driver for the TT.
 

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powermax

Well-known member
Side question: what do we know about TT hardware, especially the 2D accelerator IC? Is there any developer documentation (white paper) for the chip?
 

Phipli

Well-known member
Side question: what do we know about TT hardware, especially the 2D accelerator IC? Is there any developer documentation (white paper) for the chip?
Interesting thought. I don't know anything. There are a couple of community forums hanging on to the edge of the internet. One is here : https://www.voy.com/58680/

You need to scroll past the post moderation spam.

The other I think is only on the wayback machine and I forget where.
 

powermax

Well-known member
Linux PPC includes a driver for Twin Turbo cards. Here its source code.
Unfortunately, code quality is poor: for the most part it stuffs magic values into magic registers.
Moreover, it looks like the driver only implements a dumb frame buffer. 2D/3D acceleration isn't even mentioned there.
In other words, it will be nearly impossible to understand how the HW works by looking at this code 😒
 
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