TT VME Graphics - Revisited

[Atarian Computing]

Copied from my blog:TT VME Graphics - Revisited

Just recently I posted the article TT VME Bus Fix - Does it really make it faster? where I compared performance before and after Atari's VME Bus Fix which all REV.H motherboards and up seem to have. As kind of expected, the gains were not significant. I mean we would have noticed this years ago. What is unexpected, however, is the sudden performance boost (on average) than just a few days ago. So what has changed? Am I missing something? If so, let me know.

Before I show the results, here's what has changed (I'll list everything even if it is seemingly unrelated):

• Motherboard recapped
  Rest of the rework done (My TT Gets Some Love)
  New storage (TT Cable Management and Cooling - Extreme Edition)
  New HDDriver version 10.12
  Lightning USB installed and drivers loaded
  New GAL and hardware mod to Nova as per Lightning installation.
  Fresh NVDI 5.03 installation with Nova option. (SYS files disabled as before).
  New English version of menu.prg

Not changed:

• NVDI version
  Gembench version
  Nova drivers apart from menu.prg
  Test OS TOS 3.06 Thunder&Lightning edition

Here is a comparison in 1280x1024x256 against exact same reference. The difference is staggering but not all are gains if you look closely.

TT Before & After 1280x1024x256.jpg (547.72 KiB) Viewed 480 times

And here is 1024x768x65536. Same story. Hard to believe that 16bit color at this resolution is almost as fast as TT-High.

TT Before & After 1024x768x65536.jpg (506.17 KiB) Viewed 480 times

So how much faster is Mach64 to the ET4000? I happen to have both. The reference is before all fixes so keep that in mind. Also that test was done without NVDI so to be fair I tested without it now as well. Resolution is at 1024x768x256. Pretty crazy.

Mach64 vs ET4000.JPG (3.45 MiB) Viewed 480 times

[exxos]

Looking at your first two screenshots, it looks like the blitter is running a few percent faster ? Which will up the scores on a lot of things...

[Atarian Computing]

Looking at your first two screenshots, it looks like the blitter is running a few percent faster ? Which will up the scores on a lot of things...

It's actually the other way. I guess I should have named the files "After & Before". So despite the blitter actually being slower, my rig is significantly faster than before.

[exxos]

It's actually the other way. I guess I should have named the files "After & Before". So despite the blitter actually being slower, my rig is significantly faster than before.

Odd... maybe its the caches screwing things up ?

[Petari]

Is there blitter in any TT ?

[exxos]

Is there blitter in any TT ?

ah, says NP in tests so no it seems

[Cyprian]

there is no the BLiTTER in the TT