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Review: BottomLine's Railgun G3/466/233/1MB ZIF Published: 6/28/99 |
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| Applications/General use comments | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This page lists test results in common Mac applications like Bryce 2, Infini-D 4.01, After Effects 3.1, Premiere 4.2 and also results of the PSBench tests in Photoshop 5. I've included comparisons to other systems for comparison. To see additional scores with dozens of other G3 and 604e upgrades, visit my G3 Apps Tests page. You might have to open your browser width a bit due to the Photoshop 5 results table below. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Infini-D Tests | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I used the same Infini-D 4.0 tutorial file rendering test as I've done in past reviews using the 'Chapter 7 completed' scene. Rendering quality was set to Ray Trace, medium anti-aliasing, shadows on, patch detail low. The table below shows the results of the Railgun review ZIF in Beige and B&W G3s, and in the PowerCenter Pro (mounted in the XLR8 CarrierZIF card). Several other systems/upgrades are also shown for comparison (for more see my G3 Apps Tests page). Infini-D was allocated 40MB of RAM for the tests.
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| Bryce 2 Tests | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I also ran tests in Bryce 2, using the samples scenes in the KAI folder called "Magical Knight I" and "Alexandria II". Bryce 2 was left at the default memory allocation of 16980k, anti-aliasing was on, screen resolution was set to 1024x768, thousands colors.
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| After Effects 3.1 Tests | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The following is a chart showing the time to render a special effects movie (10MB file size) in AE with the CarrierZIF and other systems. Resolution was set to 1024x768, thousands colors as was common on all but the Photoshop 5 tests.
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| Photoshop Tests: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I also ran the PS5Bench (21 filter test) series. Only the total time to complete the tests are shown, but for more details on PSBench and the name of every filter used see my Photoshop 5 Performance page which lists other systems including PCs (Pentium III/Dual Pentium II). PSBench settings are 1024x768, millions colors, VM off, Interpolation set to bicubic (better) and Photoshop should be allocated enough RAM (I use 70MB min., 108MB for this review) to avoid any swap file activity from the 10MB test image filter actions.
Note that disabling "Speculative Processing" (often called Branch Prediction) on pre-G3 Macs actually improves many Photoshop filters performance (I repeated the tests to verify this). Note that Photoshop performance does seem to scale almost linearly with CPU speed (the G3 233/512KB times were almost double those from a 466/1MB). |
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| B&W G3 w/Railgun ZIF 550MHz CPU Speed (Overclocked) 1MB Cache at 250MHz 100MHz Bus 256MB RAM Rage128 rev B OS 8.6 VM OFF |
Beige G3 w/Railgun ZIF 500MHz CPU Speed (Overclocked) 1MB Cache at 250MHz 66MHz Bus 160MB RAM RagePro 6MB OS 8.1 VM OFF |
Beige G3 w/Railgun ZIF 466MHz CPU Speed 1MB Cache at 233MHz 66MHz Bus 160MB RAM RagePro 6MB OS 8.1 VM OFF |
9600/350 w/CarrierZIF 412MHz CPU Speed (Overclocked) 1MB Cache at 206MHz 55MHz Bus 320MB RAM (Interleaved) Spec Proc OFF Thunder3D OS 8.1 VM OFF |
Apple G3/233 (Apple ZIF) 233MHz CPU Speed 512K Cache at 117MHz 66MHz Bus 160MB RAM RagePro 6MB OS 8.1 VM OFF |
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Note: a Pentium III 500Mhz (500/250/100) Windows 98 system with 256MB SDRAM took 165.7 seconds to complete this test. Adobe's Pentium III Photoshop update was applied prior to the test.
| Game Performance Tests: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Games are one area where performance seems to show little gain after you reach a 300Mhz G3 CPU speed with the Beige G3's onboard ATI RagePro graphics chip. The RagePro video chip is obviously a bottleneck as far as fill rate. The results below with a faster Rage128 graphics card clearly shows the benefit of a faster graphics chip. Software mode games (2d) might benefit more from faster CPUs since they're not as demanding, but if you're looking for a 400Mhz G3 card upgrade, you're not likely to be running the often ugly and slow software modes of games like Quake and Unreal. The first gamers purchase should be a 3Dfx Voodoo card (see my video cards page for reviews) or perhaps a Rage128 (when they are released), then plenty of RAM (Unreal and Quake 3 both need 90MB+ now). After about 300Mhz, with the stock Beige G3 onboard video chip, throwing more CPU speed into your machine will shown little gain. If you're well equipped with RAM (128MB or more) and have a G3 CPU already, a faster video card is a far better investment for improved game performance and visuals as well.
As shown in the above table of results (and based on reader comments), the beta OpenGL drivers cost the B&W G3 a few FPS in Rave Quake compared to the previous Rage128 1.0 driver update. I've not had time to try the final 1.0 OpenGL beta or the just released Unreal 2.24 beta. Quake 3 - Q3Test 1.05 Performance Thankfully OpenGL does show some headroom with the Rage128 in the Blue and White G3. Performance did scale up a bit with the Railgun running at 500MHz vs the 400MHz CPU. Note that the Rage128 in 32-bit mode outperformed the 3Dfx banshee card (IXMicro Game Rocket) running in the 66MHz slot of the B&W G3/400. The sky textures did look better on the 3Dfx card, even in 32-Bit mode the sky looked dithered badly on the Rage128. Other parts of the game looked great and it was noticeably faster than the 3Dfx card. Settings were FullScreen, Lightmap lighting, texture detail high, Geometric detail high, texture detail 2nd notch down from max, texture filter set to bilinear. The Rage128 was set to 32-bit color (game and desktop), 3Dfx Banshee (IXMicro Game Rocket) ran 16-bit color (game and desktop) since it does not support 32-bit mode games.
Some say the Timedemo is 'broken' - but I'm not saying the fps are 100% accurate literally, but that the scores are useful for comparisons and simply watching the two run you can clearly see the Rage128 is significantly faster than the 3Dfx card - noticably so. (In fact, Thresh himself uses Q3test timedemo as a video card benchmark and says 'the timedemo function is a repeatable process which gives consistent scores' in Q3test.) I was using a new 3dfx Opengl extension but framerates were the same as the previous MesaQuake b11 with the GameRocket running MesaQuake instead. I've added this info to my Quake 3 page was well for future reference.
For more B&W G3 game performance scores (including comparisons to |
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Since applications performance was excellent, I rated this category a 9. |
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| The next page describes the software cache control supplied with the card. Or you may use the links below to jump to a specific page. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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