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Apple 8.24 GC = fastest 8bit NUBUS card?
Posted by: ObeyDaleks on 2025-05-16 10:09:07
Correct me if I'm wrong. With most/all other "high-end" cards, QuickDraw acceleration doesn't kick in until 16 or 24 bit color depth. But because of the unique architecture of the Apple 8.24 GC, it provided acceleration regardless of the bit depth. I remember seeing some benchmarks a few years ago (on this site?, can't find it now), that showed the GC outperforming all other cards at 2/4/8-bit depth by a significant margin.

So, if the above is correct, that would mean that for things like most early games that required 16 or 256 colors, a card like the Radius Thunder IV GX will be completely outclassed by the 8.24 GC? I recall that even in 16/24 bit color depth, the card was no slouch. So unless you're doing mostly heavy graphics work on high res displays at thousands/millions of colors, the 8.24 GC might be the best all-arounder. Speaking from the perspective of the Mac II series. Quadra/early PPC might be different story.

Thoughts?
Posted by: Arbee on 2025-05-16 10:31:52
The SuperMac Spectrum PDQ has acceleration in 256 color. The Thunder IV GX I think has acceleration down to 16 color, but it's been a minute since I've fought with the blitter registers on it. (EDIT: not quite. It's accelerated in 8, 16, and 32 bpp, not 1, 2, or 4).

That said, action games are unlikely to be using QuickDraw primitives and would thus perform based purely on framebuffer write throughput, meaning a Quadra 700/800/900 or similar would win.
Posted by: ObeyDaleks on 2025-05-16 11:04:09
The Thunder IV GX I think has acceleration down to 16 color,

Oh, right, bad example.

Quadra 700/800/900 or similar would win.

I was mainly referring to the Mac II series (last paragraph).

I think I found the benchmark thread I was referring to:
Posted by: Coloruser on 2025-05-16 14:26:14
Radius Precision color 8 is an accelerated 8bit card and it is not part of the above mentioned benchmark overview.
Posted by: Arbee on 2025-05-16 18:20:54
For games on the Mac II series, NuBus itself is always going to be the bottleneck. A IIsi with a PDS card would probably have the fastest video, but I don't know if that's been benched.
Posted by: Trash80toHP_Mini on 2025-05-21 15:03:29
Indeed, RCPII/SI may be a good candidate? Dunno about acceleration, but does that even have anything to do with gaming?

From what I've read, acceleration has mostly to do with things like scrolling the desktop in Illustrator et al, basic QuickDraw routines the wouldn't be employed in gaming I'd think? Most gave even that up by using the hand tool, you need to use the tabs for acceleration to do you any good. Few did so.
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