How does the new Formac ProFormance 3 compare to the Orion RAGE 128 and 3Dfx Voodoo3?

It's significant to note that both the Orion and ProFormance are capable of running in 32 bit mode in UNREAL without any significant speed penalty. Voodoo2 & 3 are limited to 16 bit. Ironically, the Voodoo boards make the game look better in 16 bit than the NON-Voodoo cards do in 32 bit.

 

 

Conclusion: Wow! I was amazed at the 2D speed of the ProFormance, especially in a "bus-speed-challenged" Power Mac 7500. The 3D speed was impressive, too. I can't wait to see what it does with OpenGL, once they release those drivers.

If those prove stable, it could replace the ATI RAGE 128 as the "best all around" graphics board. Here's a thought: How about a ProFormance 3 coupled with a Voodoo2 board since they can share the same monitor?

 

• The test computer was a Power Mac 7500 with an Interex XLR8 CarrierZIF running a 400MHz G3 ZIF.
• Adobe Photoshop scrolling test was run using 4.0.1 DEMO (120MB App size), a 30MB test document, and a stop watch. Results were rounded to the nearest half second. The scroll test was done at 400% zoom; scroll arrow held down while scrolling from top to bottom
• For the WordPerfect 3.5.3 scrolling test, I created a 120 page document containing the sentence "The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dogs" repeated over and over in paragraphs of 8 sentences each in 14 point Times font. Using a stopwatch, I timed how long it took to scroll from the beginning to the end of the document while holding the mouse button down with cursor over the scrolling arrow. (Font smoothing was turned off. If it's on, it will take you 50% longer to scroll through a document!)
• MacBench 5.0 Publishing Graphics test was done with the display set to 1152 x 870 x millions. The MacBench 5.0 is one of the few benchmark applications that closely simulates "real world" usage. You need the CD-ROM to run the Graphics tests. It only costs $5 to order.
• I particularly enjoy using Unreal 3D to test since it exercises all subsystems of the Macintosh. The test used was the Castle Flyby that comes up at startup. I set the Fullscreen Viewport to 800 x 600 by editing the "unreal.ini" document. Note the Voodoo boards don't support 32 bit. Ironically, the Voodoo 16 bit screen quality blows away the others in 32 bit mode. To get the average and minimum frames per second with version 2.x.x of Unreal, you press "~" and enter "TIMEDEMO 1." Then press "~" to open up the full screen again. It begins the fly sequence at the castle entrance. (Get the latest latest UNREAL Beta from Westlake's Site.)
• "Quake," is not as interesting and taxing to the Macs as it used to be. Quake 2 would be better if I had OpenGL drivers for the Proformance 2. The "frames per second" ratings were obtained by starting up the game, pressing the "~" key, then entering "TIMEDEMO DEMO1" followed by RETURN and another "~" once the demo started. The average frame rate is displayed at the bottom of the screen at the end of the demo. Game Resolution was set to 800 x 600. Other options were set to Flames ON, Filtering ON, Shadows ON, Skip Lines OFF, Double Pixels OFF.
• Quake 2 was run in 800 x 600 mode. For Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 to work in OpenGL mode, it requires a special version of the "ref_gl.lib" from Mesa3DGraphics in the Quake 2 folder. It also requires a document called "Mesa3DGraphicsLibQuake2" (version 3.1b8 or later) to be placed in the Quake 2 folder.

  A big THANK YOU to...

  ...Formac for the use of the ProFormance 3

  ...ATI Technology for the use of the Orion RAGE 128

  ...3Dfx for use of the Voodoo3 card $85.

  ...Interex for the use of the CarrierZIF G3/400.