Is Genesi's PegasosPPC powerful enough to ensure unspoiled gaming fun? Is the quality of the drivers, which were developed independently from the gfxchip manufacturers good enough and can the actual OpenSource game ports meet the demands of the ambitious gamer?

Thanks to ID Software's OpenSource policy PPCNUX had the opportunity to test three generations of their OpenGL first-person shooter series with three different gfxcards on Pegasos II MPC7447 1GHz G4 PPC systems.

After the Linux based live-CDs of Cube und racing games like Torcs, which offered a nice approach for effortless gaming on Pegasos hardware, but could not entirely satisfy for different reasons, we now take a look at MorphOS based games:

The "Quake" series as a commonly used realworld 3D benchmark has been released under the GNU Public License and may be compiled on any platform now.

Setup

• OS: MorphOS 1.4.5 with 3D support package - available for all Pegasos customers


• Hardware:




• Open Desktop Workstation - 256MB system RAM at DDR266 datarate




• Radeon 9200SE with 200MHz GPU / 166MHz 64Bit DDR RAM clock (128MB)




• Custom Pegasos system - 512MB system RAM at DDR266 datarate




• Voodoo 3 3500TV with 183MHz core / 183MHz 128bit SDR RAM clock (16MB)


• Radeon 9000 Pro All in Wonder with 275MHz core / 270MHz 128Bit DDR RAM clock (64MB)






• Sound: Onboard AC'97 codec - always enabled in our tests


• Games:




1. Quake 1 - GLquake and Blitzquake


2. Quake 2 - unreleased test version, additional demos "massive1" and "crusher", depth 16bpp setting


3. Quake 3 Arena - v1.32, "normal+" settings with "normal" settings, but additionally "Geometric Detail: High"; "max" setting with everything set to best quality

Due to MorphOS only receiving Radeon 9xxx support very recently - and solely for Pegasos II - we included an older star in our tests:

The Voodoo 3 3500TV together with the Radeon 9000 Pro All-in-Wonder as a "highend" choice for MorphOS 3D includes a TV tuner which might be supported in one of the next Visionary revisions.
The Visionary author and member of the core MorphOS team will be happy about every additional motivation through a small paypal donation to paypal@cybergraphx.de ...

The Radeon 9200SE as a very inexpensive entry gfxcard has been tested in a different system for practical reasons. As previous tests have shown, the different RAM configuration only had a neglectable influence on the results, although
Quake 3 on MorphOS has proven to consume 150MB easily.

FPS = frames per second

Auflösung = resolution

Quake 1

After the pioneering Ultima Underworld in 1991, 1996's Quake has been one of the milestones in 3D game history and made the first-person shooter genre immensely popular thanks to support of network and even optimized internet playing later on.

The Radeon 9200SE offers adequate framerates in the common gaming resolutions, while the 9000 Pro is an outperformer in every displayable resolution. The Voodoo 3 gets along fairly well, but framerates degrade much quicker in higher resolutions. Ambitious gamers will probably not take the 1024x768 mode into consideration anymore.

A peculiarity that we discovered in our tests is the unability of the Voodoo to open a proper 1600x1200 resolution in 3D games - an empty grey screen appears. This might be due to some limitations in MorphOS's graphics memory management, since a test with a Windows PC did not exhibit any problems in 1600x1200.

Blitzquake increases the hardware requirements somewhat which results in an up to 1/3 framerate reduction in low resolutions. Aside from that, the situation looks similar to the standard GLQuake results:

The Radeon 9000 Pro cannot be exhausted even at 1600x1200 and still realizes formidable 69.1fps, Radeon 9200SE does fine in 1280x960 with 43.3fps, Voodoo 3 3500TV with 32.3fps in 1024x768 remains at the edge of reasonable gameplay.

Quake 2

The slightly more recent Quake 2 (GPL since 2001) is an interesting case: suddenly the Voodoo 3 takes the lead at 640x480, but starts to struggle earlier than the Radeons in higher resolutions and nearly mirrors the Blitzquake results.

We see the Radeons falling below 100fps in 640x480 for the first time, while the 9000 Pro uniformly comes out very well. The 9200SE cripples the capabilities of its gfxchip by a very slow 64Bit video ram interface with 38.8fps at 1280x1024, which is just less than half of 9000 Pro's framerate thanks to the latter's full 128Bit interface to the gfx memory that is good for achieving about 500% the framerate of Voodoo 3 in this resolution native to 17"-19" TFTs.

The Quake 2 "massive1" demo represents an intense multiplayer recording and is a measure for what you have to expect from busy online matches.

We see a general drop of fps levels although the relations largely stay the same - the Voodoo 3 keeps being our star at 640x480, Radeon 9200SE fine in 1024x768, Radeon 9000 Pro without problems even at 1600x1200.

The action-packed "crusher" fragfest is one of the most demanding demos ever:

Even the 9000 Pro can only get up to 45.6fps at 640x480, but stays quite unbothered by an increasing resolution with a playable 37.3fps at 1600x1200 compared to 9200SE's poor 20.7fps. Voodoo 3 remains playable well up to 800x600, while 1024x768 is no fun anymore with a measly 23.5fps.

To raise the levels here, one would wish for a faster Pegasos II 7447A or 7448 CPU card.

Quake 3

Barely made compatible with the GPL in August 2005 - already being ported to MorphOS: Quake 3 Arena together with (non-GPL) Unreal Tournament set new standards in visual quality in 1999, with hires textures, curved surfaces and pretty volumetric fog.

Q3A can benefit greatly from GPUs with hardware T&L (Transform and Lighting), texture compression or generally systems with high memory performance. The Pegasos with 64Bit 133MHz memory access through the CPU bus can only accomplish that in a limited way. The TinyGL drivers have the capability to render Quake 3 correctly, but do not offer advanced hardware acceleration. In comparison, the Mac was
able to score by a special program version that included AltiVec and SMP optimizations and also could rely on direct support by the gfxcard manufacturers.

In spite of that, the Pegasos displays a respectable performance and the Radeon 9000 Pro only drops by 2.8fps to 39.2fps when going from 640x480 to 1280x1024. The 9200SE has lost 30% framerate already going to 1024x768 and - again - achieves only half the results of our superior 9000 Pro in 1280x1024.

The cherished but aging Voodoo card is barely up to the task anymore and already drops below 30fps at 800x600.

Since Q3A offers such nice gfx effects, we cannot finish without a test run that enables all quality options. This rules out the Voodoo 3 already, because it only supports 16Bit in 3D modes which are calculated with a higher precision internally, but at the end of the day are still not true 32Bit.

The 9200SE is weakening and shows 27.2fps at 800x600, within range of the 9000 Pro - at 1600x1200! The 9000 Pro as the quickest gfxcard currently supported by MorphOS might still be good for play in 1280x1024 with 33.7fps, an outrageous 150% winning margin compared to the 9200SE.

We noticed a difficult to explain but reproducible anomaly at 1024x768 in 32Bit that already showed up earlier with a Radeon 8500 - at the next higher resolution of 1152x864 the framerates went back
to a more regular and expectable 36.4fps.

Summary

All games ran smoothly and without trouble - except the fatal try to set a 1600x1200 gaming resolution with the Voodoo 3.

The Voodoo 3 3500TV had not been a bad choice for a Pegasos gfxcard due to its integrated TV tuner circumventing Pegasos 1 DMA problems and 3D support that has been in place for 2 years already. In the meantime it has become rather obsolete though and can only offer a satisfying 3D performance up to 800x600.

The 9200SE has a very limited 3D throughput due to its 64Bit ram interface. It is a usable 2D card with DVI interface that is preferable to the VGA output of some cheap Radeons that use a ribbon cable to connect it
to the board and might have a less than stellar display quality...

Video playback is more consistent with Radeon now, where Voodoo 3 exhibited a jerkiness in certain cases - and passive cooling is still a standard feature of most low end Radeons.
The 9200(SE) successor is the Radeon 9250 with 240MHz GPU and 200MHz memory clock. Unfortunately there is no specific "SE" designation anymore marking the use of a much slower 64Bit ram interface. Some cards with 128Bit interface are equipped with 256MB onboard ram - an absurdity in this
class of entry level chips.

The 9000 Pro matches the performance of Pegasos II very well and provides usable results for gamers even in higher resolutions, an advantage of 100% over 9200SE is not uncommon. Furthermore there is the chance for support of the All in Wonder card's TV tuner part.
A drawback is the active heatsink that is glued to the GPU and the sole availability on the second-hand market - around 30EUR in online-auctions.

In closing we can resume, to all intents and purposes games run well on Pegasos and MorphOS.
Further examples worth pointing out are GLHexen2 and Foobillard, a nice billard simulator, as well as Descent Freespace 2 with an upcoming possibility to also play part 1.

A special highlight is Virtual Grand Prix 2, available for free exclusively to MorphOS users (but the author again appreciates a small donation as acknowledgement for further development) and with a strong focus on true-to-reality car simulation.
For beginners there is an optional arcade mode and teams and drivers of the 2004 racing season can be imported for use in VGP2.

While it supports resolutions up to 1920x1440, the Voodoo 3 runs smoothly till 800x600 and the Radeon 9000 Pro can still achieve a convincing racing feeling in 1600x1200 with some adjustments to the detail settings.

This article in German

Italian translation by Cristiano Cherchi

Part II with further tests and comparison to the Radeon 8500LE