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Upgrading my stock Apple G3/233 with a Radeon 7000 gave BrickDraw3D an 85%
speed improvement. In pure OpenGL mode the improvement is 60% over the
existing OpenGL advantage. The 2002 ATI Retail Card Update worked on G3/233
with 9.1 but BrickDraw3D didn't gain from it (ATI says the upgrade is not
for 9.1 anyway.)
Benchmark Results (lower numbers are better)
Apple Interactive Renderer
262 ms G3/233, OS 9.1 - no hardware acceleration
141 ms G3/233 Radeon 7000 upgrade, accelerated
90 ms G4/500, OS 9.2/OS X - no hardware acceleration
Apple OpenGL
137 ms G3/233
85 ms G3/233 Radeon 7000 upgrade
55 ms G4/500
Note: For some reason, BrickDraw3D lost double buffering under OpenGL+Radeon
7000. Probably a bug in my code.
The Radeon 7000 is the lowest-end card from ATI and the only remaining PCI
choice (no AGP) for Apple Beige G3 made in 1997-98. It still sells for
retail $120 although the PC version is in clearance at $40. People say the
Radeon 7000 here is CPU-bound.
Since I plan to keep using my '97 Mac as a baseline machine for a while,
this is a good investment. It was even less money to upgrade the drive from
4 to 40GB (zowie!)
-Erik
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