Thunder IV GX - What am I missing?

[ObeyDaleks]

Hey y’all. I am having problems getting QuickDraw acceleration to work on a Radius Thunder GX IV. The card works fine, but it appears that the QuickDraw acceleration is always off. I got the QuickColor 3.3 control panel which appears to have an option to enable/disable the acceleration, but it has no effect.

My system specs:
Macintosh II
32mb ram
Daystar PowerCache @50Mhz
System 7.5.5 (I tried 7.1 as well)
Radius Thunder IV GX (firmware 1.2.3)

Any ideas?

 

[olePigeon]

I didn't even know there was a 3.3 version. Interesting. Maybe try a different copy?

Here's RadiusWare 4.0 (QuickColor 3.2.5.) This is a disk image I made from original disks.

 

[ObeyDaleks]

I think I figured it out. It looks like the card simply doesn't accelerate at monochrome color. I was running the basic Speedometer benchmark (which only does a monochrome test), comparing results and seeing no difference. But the 8 bit color test was almost a 4x improvement between toggling the Acceleration on and off in the QuickColor control panel.

 

[olePigeon]

Oh, that's interesting. Nice find.

 

[soundworks]

@olePigeon I just tried to mount the RadiusWare 4.0 image from above but I'm getting an "INVALID CHECKSUM" from disk copy on 7.6.1 on my Quadra... any tips?

 

[slomacuser]

You should use this https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/radiusware-341-sept-1995

 

[ArmorAlley]

In real world applications how do you know whether QuickDraw acceleration is on?
What is faster? MacDraw? CAD applications?
Do windows redraw faster?

@ObeyDaleks Don't be too disappointed with the speed of the Radius Thunder GX IV on a Mac II. This card was designed for high-end Quadras and the three PowerPCs with NuBus slots. You may very well be better off with 2 NuBus cards giving 640x480 on each monitor.

I got a SuperMac Thunder GX/1360 for my IIfx because I wanted to play Civilization at 1600x1200 on it. The card supported 1600x1200 up to 256 colours, I think. It worked but I had to wait about 20 seconds for each screen redraw. It seemed really slow. The game itself wasn't slow but the CPU wasn't used to shoving so many pixels around.

 

[Phipli]

In real world applications how do you know whether QuickDraw acceleration is on?

With a good card it should be obvious. Usually there is an option to make caps lock enable and disable acceleration, toggling it on and off while repeating the same action such as moving a window or windowshade collapse should make it obvious.

What is faster? MacDraw? CAD applications?

Well... Everything. Other than videos and games like doom. The biggest changes should be a) redrawing things made out of lots of primitives such as a drawing in illustrator or MacDraw, and b) scrolling images that are already on-screen, such as a Photoshop image.

Do windows redraw faster?

Yup, even finder windows.

I got a SuperMac Thunder GX/1360 for my IIfx because I wanted to play Civilization at 1600x1200 on it. The card supported 1600x1200 up to 256 colours, I think. It worked but I had to wait about 20 seconds for each screen redraw. It seemed really slow. The game itself wasn't slow but the CPU wasn't used to shoving so many pixels around.

Yeah, that's a lot of pixels and probably not using quickdraw. Games often don't. Do you have a processor upgrade for it? That might go well with the video card for Civilization.

 

[Unknown_K]

The one thing people forget is those high end video cards are optimized for 24 bit video.

https://lowendmac.com/video/thunder2gx.html

"The "Toby" card is Apple's unaccelerated Macintosh II Video Card. The Thunder II GX was tested with acceleration off and on. Performance improved with acceleration enabled at all settings. It is only 3% faster at 1-bit and 4-bit, but 79% faster at 8-bit."

I mean who would pay thousands of dollars back in the day to do Photoshop at 256 colors?

It reminds me of a very expensive Matrox VLB 4MB card that was really meant to do 16M color at high resolution in Windows 3.1 while most accelerators were speedy at only 256 color office apps.

 

[Phipli]

The one thing people forget is those high end video cards are optimized for 24 bit video.

https://lowendmac.com/video/thunder2gx.html

"The "Toby" card is Apple's unaccelerated Macintosh II Video Card. The Thunder II GX was tested with acceleration off and on. Performance improved with acceleration enabled at all settings. It is only 3% faster at 1-bit and 4-bit, but 79% faster at 8-bit."

I mean who would pay thousands of dollars back in the day to do Photoshop at 256 colors?

It reminds me of a very expensive Matrox VLB 4MB card that was really meant to do 16M color at high resolution in Windows 3.1 while most accelerators were speedy at only 256 color office apps.

Most cards from the Nubus era target 8 bit and 24 bit rather than just 24bit. A lot of work was still done at 8bit - not everyone was editing true colour photographs I guess . But you're right about 1 and 4 bit, they didn't tend to be accelerated because they were fast enough already. I think those scores are relitive to another machine (the 605 or something?), which means it is obscuring how fast the 1bit performance is because you can't compare between bit depths.

Those LEM benchmarks are mostly in a IIcx - the IIcx is a bit of a bottleneck for a lot of the cards they're testing. Shame they didn't do a bit more of a spectrum of machines, IIcx, Quadra, PPC or something.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a whole bunch of Supermac Thunder/24 Nubus cards that has 3MB RAM (some with DSP and most with Gworld RAM) and they are fine at 1024x768 24 bit in my IIfx, IIci, Quadra era machines. I don't game on those machines.

The older slower cards go into IIx or IIcx machines just to be different. The real issue is that the very old cards tend to be fixed frequency or specific brand monitor cards and my heavy 19" Sony tubed Mac fixed frequency monitor is like 100Lbs and I don't move it for nothing.