MacPicasso MP540/3D Overdrive Review 3D Tests of the 3D Overdrive Card Intro | 2D Performance | 3D Performance | Game Performance | Movie Playback | Features | Summary 3D Performance The 3D Overdrive card provides the 3D horsepower, containing 8 MB of 30ns EDO Dram (the fastest I've seen on any 3Dfx card) normally configured as 4 MB of frame buffer and 4 MB of texture memory (both twice the size of most 3Dfx game cards). Like all 3Dfx cards, it runs at 50mhz but unlike other 3Dfx cards the you can't use the Tweaker to adjust clock speeds or swapbuffer modes. As with most images in this review, clicking on the card photo above will display a larger version of the 3D Overdrive (62K image) with technical details noted.
Besides having twice the framebuffer (allowing higher resolutions) and texture memory (which can boost speed and quality) the 3D Overdrive also has a seamless interface to the 2D video screen and can output into a window inside 3D applications, something the other Mac 3dfx cards cannot do. As stated in the introduction, another bonus of this design is crystal clear 2D video, since no 2D pass-through cable or adapters are needed which cause some loss of signal strength and increase susceptability to interference.
The 3D Overdrive installation includes 3Dfx Rave and 3Dfx Overdrive extensions and Village Tronics own 3Dfx GlideLib (for 3Dfx Glide API Game support). Note that if you have installed Quake or any other 3Dfx games you need to disable their 3Dfx extensions for proper operation. I discovered this during troubleshooting a problem with vertically stretched and horizontally compressed windows in Walker. Disabling the Quake installed 3Dfx extensions solved the problem.
3D Applications:
I tested the card with Infini-D 4.01, Ray Dream Studio 5 and the bundled AMAPI Workshop v3.04 (a subset of AMAPI Studio). Performance was best in AMAPI, which uses a 3DMF viewer window that is fully interactive with a shaded model (even when using the Nexus GA). Infini-D 4.0, with the camera view set to "best interactive" or "HW interactive" rendering engine also allowed shaded objects to be moved in real time (using models from the Ch. 7 tutorial file).Infini-D's camera view was not as fast as AMAPI's 3DMF viewer, primarily due to the fact Infini-D's view was displaying a background and multiple objects.
Infini-D Camera View
AMAPI 3D ViewerWith 8MB of 3Dfx RAM, I expected better than average performance from the card, but in my tests with sample scenes there was literally no difference in perceived performance between the MP540/3D Overdrive and the Nexus GA. In AMAPI, even when the viewer was stretched to full screen both cards allowed fluid rotation and movement of the rendered model. One note about the 3D Overdrive, due to the fact the first generation Voodoo chipset can only handle one draw context, there was no "grow" icon in the lower right corner of the viewer window in AMAPI, while it was present when running the Nexus GA. Not a big deal, but at first I thought the viewer window was not expandable, especially since the size toggle in the window title bar was not functional. Even though the 3D Overdrive did not display a grow box, dragging on the lower right corner stretched the window as usual. Ray Dream Studio 5 was less satisfying, at times generating errors with both the MP540/3DO (memory allocation while moving a object) and the Nexus GA (program error). Both recovered gracefully and the program never crashed. [Note: As I'm writing this I see there is a 5.02 update (4MB!) for Ray Dream Studio available at MetaCreations web site that is said to fix many bugs.]
I'm not alone in being frustrated at the 3D hardware support in Mac applications. Often times it's a combination of too little memory on the video card (3D buffering), a driver/hardware bug, lack of full support for Quickdraw 3D in the application and/or a limitation/bug in Quickdraw 3D itself. If you check reviews of most popular 3D packages you'll see many have a track record of bugs and limited 3D hardware support. This is improving, as is the speed and quality of QuickDraw 3D itself.
So far I've not been impressed by any 3D card I've tested in serious 3D applications, but the 3D Overdrive was at least as good as anything I've personally tested. I'm talking with NewTek now to try and obtain a copy of Lightwave 5.5 for a complete performance review of all the cards I currently have on hand, but so far they seem reluctant to provide a copy. I'll probably have to return the MacPicasso card soon so further testing will not be possible.
Rave Benchmarks:
Village Tronic supplied a Quickdraw 3D RAVE benchmark called RaveBench 1.1.1. I ran tests on both the 3D Overdrive, Nexus GA, and Ultimate Rez using the latest drivers available. The results were surprising, but repeatable. The 2D screen resolution was set to 1024x768, thousands colors and the test window was 640x480 pixels. The Nexus GA was set to best 3D quality in the ATI control panel.
Since RaveBench allows only two scores to be compared and due to the limited support and poor performance of the Ultimate Rez card, only the 3D0 and Nexus GA comparion is shown. The following chart lists the results of the tests in frames per second for each card.
As you can see the Nexus GA was actually faster than the 3D Overdrive at most of the tests and supported all the QD3D features as well. I suspect there may be a performance penalty from the viewport scheme or possibly Village Tronic has not fully optimized the Rave drivers. I expected the 3Dfx card to outperform the Nexus, given the specs on the graphics chips. Since it's a fairly new product, future Rave drivers from Village Tronic may improve performance.
The results of the Ultimate Rez are not shown, as the current driver release (1.1a5) does not support Rave acceleration in thousands color mode. I did run the tests in both software mode at thousands colors and in hardware assisted mode at millions colors. In both cases the Ultimate Rez was 3 to 10 times slower at each test than either card and did not support some features such as transparency.
Walker 1.1 Tests: I ran three scenes in the Walker 3D viewer with the 2D screen set to 1024x768, thousands colors (Walker used a 350x350 default window size). The minimum framerate seen in two 360 degree spins is shown below:
Exhibition Stand:
- 3D Overdrive: 6.00 fps
- Nexus GA: 8.00 fps
Stairs:
- 3D Overdrive: 7.06 fps
- Nexus GA: 9.38 fps
Atrium:
- 3D Overdrive: 9.68 fps
- Nexus GA: 12.73 fps
In summary, 3D performance of the 3D Overdrive was very good, but application support in general is spotty at the current time. One concern I have deals with the way the 3D Overdrive functions - outputting into a viewport. In modelers with multiple windows you seem to only be able to have one viewport that uses the 3D0, whereas more standard cards can accelerate all views/viewports. However the supplied AMAPI Workshop works very well with the card, and may be all that most owners need (and it's free).
On a scale of 1 to 10, I rated 3D speed a 8.
Enough of the heavy stuff, let's move on to more enjoyable things like Movies and Games.
Index of MacPicasso MP540/3DO Review Pages
Intro | 2D Performance | 3D Performance | Game Performance | Movie Playback | Features | Summary - or -
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