HPV vs. NuBus video?

[eraser]

Sorry if this has already been covered, but ...

Which is faster? The High Performance Video PDS card or a NuBus video card? If NuBus is faster, what level of QuickDraw acceleration will overtake the HPV card? I realize that the HPV card is just a super-fast frame-buffer with dedicated VRAM but I wasn't sure if the much-faster PDS access vs. the slower NuBus transfer speed would win in the end.

Thoughts? Benchmarks?

Thanks!

 

[ClassicHasClass]

HPV is not particularly "HP" but it's still going to be faster than motherboard video. However, fast NuBus cards can beat it. I believe my 8*24*GC with the ATI Acceleration extension was faster than the HPV. See also: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=16107

 

[trag]

It depends on what type of operations you are doing. A Thunder IV GX can beat the HPV at some business type applications where the quickdraw acceleration gets invoked. However, the HPV can throw frames up on the screen way faster than the NuBus card can. It's probably more correct to say that the computer can throw new frames on the HPV card way faster than it can put them on the NuBus card.

I wish PowerWatch was still up. That was the forum/website for Power Computing users and that's where Kaye and I posted the results of our tests of various NuBus cards vs. HPV card. It ended up there, because ultimately, we were tricking out the fastest of the NuBus Macs, the Power Computing Power 120. I guess the Apple 9150 tied it for speed and had one more NuBus slot, but back then, you could get a Power 120 for under $1000 while the 9150 was still multiple thousands.

I think the site archives ultimately got mirrored somewhere. If that's still up our discussion would be in the Power 80/100/120 discussion area.

At the end of the day, if you're playing Marathon, you want the HPV card. If you're using Photoshop and MS Office, there's a decent chance you want a Thunder IV GX or Thunder 24/GT.

We did a lot of benchmarking with MacBench 5.0 from Ziff Davis, but again, those old results were up on PowerWatch.com which ultimately went away. Jeff Keller still runs a pretty good camera review site, from what I understand.

 

[Bunsen]

kan.org/6100 is a good place to look.

trag: do you still have the URL for the results page you mention? It could be up on archive.org (assuming you haven't already tried that)

 

[eraser]

What type of VRAM do the HPV cards accept? Any Apple 68-pin 80 ns VRAM? (Like the type that was used in the LC class Macs?)

 

[trag]

Bunsen, the home page was www.powerwatch.com, but the discussion was in the forums and I don't know what the URL to the forums was. It's possible that the whole site was archived, in which case an archive of PowerWatch should link to the archives of the forums. The discussion was in the Power 80/100/120 forums. I don't know where, in the years of discussion the results would be, but they would be by me as either trag or jeff walther and Kaye or Kaye Yum.

Eraser, I think that's correct, but there were two types, because there were two HPV cards. Kan's web page has a good discussion. I'm too lazy to type it all out again here:

http://www.kan.org/6100/hpv.html

Oh, except I can fill in the section on the Power Computing HPV cards. They were just like the PM8100 HPV card, having the 2/4MB capacity, and they fit in Apple machines with no issues. The only difference is that the PCC HPV card has both a Mac (DB15) and a VGA (HD15) connector on the back. Only one connector can be used at a time and the active connector is controlled by a tiny switch on the PCC HPV card.

 

[Bunsen]

Thanks trag. What sort of date range should I be looking at?

 

[trag]

I would guess between '97 and '99 more or less, I think.