Subject: REVIEW: CyberVision64 64-bit graphics card
From: [email-masked] (Rene Laederach)
Date: 23 Jun 1995 15:14:45 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	CyberVision64 64 bit graphic card

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  This review was updated on July 12, 1995.
	Search for the text "[UPDATE:" to find updated information.
	-Dan]

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	It's the new graphic card from phase5 Digital Products which is said
to be very fast. I will tell you if it is.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		phase5 Digital Products
	Address:	Homburger Landstrasse 412
			60433 Frankfurt/Main
			GERMANY

	Telephone:	+49-(0)69-5488130
	FAX:		+49-(0)69-5481845

	They speak English, but they prefer German. I have not tested their
French knowledge.

	I bought this piece at:

		PROMIGOS Bern
		Herrengasse 6
		3000 Bern
		SWITZERLAND

		Telephone: +41-(0)31-3123775

	Adrian Etter speaks German, French and English.

LIST PRICE

	The list price is 898 DEM. I paid 898 CHF. This is for the 4 MB
version that I highly recommend. The 2 MB version costs 698 DEM and
respectively 698 CHF at Promigos.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		A Zorro III Amiga is required. This card has no Zorro II
		mode. That is, you need an Amiga 3000, 3000T, 4000 or 4000T.

		phase5 says that 2 MB RAM are enough, but remember that more
		is better. They recommend 4 MB, and I do recommend at least 8
		MB if you want to do some serious multitasking.

		A buster rev 11 is "recommended" for optimum performance.

	SOFTWARE
	
		I suspect you need at least AmigaDOS 2.04 to run the
		Cybergraphics system. I only tested it with AmigaDOS 3.1.  I
		also suspect you need at least AmigaDOS 3.0 to get advantage
		of 256 colors.

COPY PROTECTION

	Terrible. :)  You can't put your card into a photocopier and make a
copy - actually, it some sort of a hardware dongle. I haven't managed to
copy it.  :)

	The Cybergraphics disk is not protected.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	Amiga 3000/25, 0 MB Fast RAM onboard, 2 MB Chip RAM.
	Motherboard rev 9.3, Buster rev. 11, DMAC rev 02, Ramsey rev 04.
	CyberStorm 040 40 MHz with 16 MB FAST RAM on RAM module of
	 Cyberstorm accelerator.
	1 internal 1660K floppy.
	Quantum Empire 1080 MB hard drive.
	Archive Viper 525 MB tape drive.
	Toshiba XM-3601 CD-ROM drive.
	No-name monitor 17".
	AmigaDOS 3.1, Kickstart 40.68 and WB 40.42.
	Cybervision 64 with 4 MB RAM.
	All the above is in a tower casing from CompZ.

	All SCSI devices are attached to the A3000's internal SCSI.

INSTALLATION

	Installation of the card is a breeze. I had to remove the tape drive
in the lowermost 5.25" slot to be able to insert the Cybervision64 card into
the ZorroIII slot. Then I had to connect the pass-through cable and to
connect my monitor to the Cybervision64 card.

    The software installation was very easy too, and in less than 10 minutes,
I was running my Amiga on Cybergraphics.

WHY THE HECK ANOTHER GRAPHICS CARD?

	Well, when I installed my Cyberstorm 040 last Friday, I noticed to
my outmost disdain that my Retina Z3 wouldn't work. Of course, my dealer
knew the solution: Buy a Cybervision64.

	Until I had installed my Cyberstorm accelerator, I was very happy
with my RetinaZ3, but when I decided to go for speed, my RetinaZ3 refused.
Not willing to buy a crappy EGS card (Piccolo SD64, EGS Spectrum) and then
to pay another 50 DEM to register Cybergraphics, I decided to go for the
latest hardware on the Amiga and went to my dealer and asked him if I could
get the card and pay him the first half today and the other at the end of
the month. He agreed and gave me the card while I have him 500 CHF for the
time being, intending to pay him in full when my employer decides to
transfer me my salary.

THE QUANTUM LEAP

	No, not the hard disk. But I used lousy graphic systems like EGS
(some software simply decides not to run on EGS and it eats some memory and
does not work for the software you need it). Definitely not the thing I can
use. That's also the reason I never bought EGS for my RetinaZ3 (another
reason was that it never supported the blitter mode of the RetinaZ3).

	With Cybergfx, everything changed. For the first time in my miserable
life, I was able to open a 16-bit Intuition screens, although Intuition is
not yet aware of the real screen depth. Only programs that are written for
Cybergraphics will take advantage of deeper screens. Cyberview, Cyberwindow,
the saver module for PhotoGenics and AdPro and later on (when do I get the
full version? :( ) PhotoGenics 1.2 will support Cybergfx. I'm already
looking for Version 1.2 of PhotoGenics.

THE INCLUDED SOFTWARE

	As everyone who once had or still has a graphic card will know for
sure, is that the software included with the graphic card is almost more
important than the graphic card itself and the hardware performance. That's
why the IMHO crappy Piccolo and GVP EGS Spectrum were so preferred over
Retinas. With Cybergraphics, this era is stone-age now. For the
above-mentioned cards (and some more) and the CyberVision64, a Cybergfx
monitor file exists.  I made the RetinaZ3 work on my Retina before I bought
my Cyberstorm accelerator, but the Cyberstorm accelerator cut short the idea
of registering cybergfx.  And them, why send some money to Frank Mariak
(author of Cybergfx) when he already gets paid by phase5?

	The software includes the Cybergfx software with all libraries and
the CyberVision monitorfile. As add-on, CyberView (a graphics viewer),
Cyberwindow (displays graphics on a intuition screen with at least 16 bits
depth in a window), CVMode (a program which lets you design own monitor
definitions so you can use a 82 or even 86 KHz monitor on the
CyberVision64), NewMode (a screen promoter program which is IMHO very
usable, but you could just use any promoter program on Aminet which suits
your preferences) as well as drivers for PhotoGenics, ADPro, Maxon Cinema4D,
ImageFX PhotoGenics (only saver), PhotoWorx display driver and Real3D. This
is by no means complete, but the cybergfx authors count on the shareware and
freeware authors as well as commercial developers to write additional
software. There is already a software for the VLab digitizer board and
PhotoGenics 1.2 which runs completely (no wimpy PhotoGenics saver) on
Cybergfx. If anybody knows of other software, it would be very kind to tell
me (email addresses below) if other software is coming or has already been
released.

	[UPDATE:  Kermit Woodall of Nova Design states that "ImageFX 2.1 is
	one of the programs that does run on the CyberVision 64 in high
	color modes."  - Dan]

EVERYDAY USAGE

	The card performs better than any AGA AMIGA - see my AIBB at the end
of the review section. It feels like an AGA machine if it comes to behaviour
- I have not yet found any productivity software which did not run on
Cybergfx except if it was written for an non-Cybergraphics graphic card like
the Retina or any EGS program.

	The promoter is a nice piece which not only gives you the choice to
choose the screen mode you want to promote a program to, but you can also
select the 16 bit and 24 bit modes if you do not want to filter them out.
NewMode also allows you to filter the EHB and HAM modes if you wish so. I
did not. Of course, you can save which screens NewMode should promote and
which not. A good candidate not to promote is the Trapdoor screen because it
does neither need terrific speed nor many colors.

	I'm impressed with the speed. That beast is really faster in almost
all disciplines than the Retina Z3. At the end, there will be the uuencoded
AIBB module for those people, who absolutely must compare their system to
mine. But my score is hard to beat. :)

	My Amiga's UI has become very snappy - at least now PC folks can go
home if they see how fast my system is compared even to a Pentium. I know it
because my father has one 15 meters away and I had to use it many times -
and the user interface is slower despite the Diamond Stealth64 graphics
card. But this is also because of my cyberstorm accelerator that the system
feels so snappy.

	One of the programs that does not work directly on a cybergfx screen
is AIBB. The workaround is not to promote the screen and then to select the
screen mode in which comparisons are made in AIBB - the tests are then done
on the cybergfx screen.

	Also, NewMode is IMHO one of the best promoters around - I never
loved the EGS and the Picasso promoters much, but NewMode is freely
distributable and can be used with them if you like. IMHO the best solution.

	The picture viewers that come with the cybervision (and you can
download updates from the Aminet) are very nice if it comes to compatibility
- but they don't have a very smart user interface - one point where
RetinaDisplay is much better - you can drop picture files on the
RetinaDisplay and it displays them.  Also, RetinaDisplay's JPEG routine is
much faster when I compare it to CyberView. The very same picture took only
1.5 times longer to decode on an A3000/25 than on my cyberstorm equipped
A3000 now. This is not very good as my Amiga with 040/40 MHz is six times
faster than the A3000/25 when it comes to CPU speed. On the other hand,
they're very handy if you want to do a slide show with them.

EXPANDABILITY

	The Cybervision64 card can be expanded with a video add-on module and
some other type of module, maybe a digitizer or a connection to the planned
2GO! board which includes a DSP and some other goodies to raise the speed
when rendering pictures with programs that support the 2GO! board.

DOCUMENTATION

	The docs that comes with the cybervision are not that good. Although
reviews in the German Amiga magazine state that there is an online
documentation, I could find none on my disk. But it seems this is pretty
identical with the AmigaGuide documentation from the cybergfx40_47.lha
archive.

	The printed manual which shows you how to install the card into your
Amiga and is very good - there are no badly dithered pictures like in the
cyberstorm manual, but clear drawings.

AIBB MODULE

	Here is a uuencoded AIBB module for the Cyberstorm.  To decode it,
use the "uudecode" command available on Aminet in util/arc.

size 1760

BUSTEST RESULTS

BusSpeedTest 0.07 (mlelstv) Buffer:    16384 Bytes
==================================================
loop overhead:      3.4ns
register move:     24.4ns
memtype   op      cycle      bandwidth
fast      readw    48.6ns   41.2MByte/s
fast      readl    78.6ns   50.9MByte/s
fast      readm    84.0ns   47.6MByte/s
fast      writew   68.6ns   29.2MByte/s
fast      writel  145.9ns   27.4MByte/s
fast      writem  137.4ns   29.1MByte/s
chip      readw   972.3ns    2.1MByte/s
chip      readl   973.0ns    4.1MByte/s
chip      readm   973.1ns    4.1MByte/s
chip      writew  747.9ns    2.7MByte/s
chip      writel  747.0ns    5.4MByte/s
chip      writem  741.6ns    5.4MByte/s
rom       readw   165.3ns   12.1MByte/s
rom       readl   319.0ns   12.5MByte/s
rom       readm   323.0ns   12.4MByte/s
$40000000 readw   690.1ns    2.9MByte/s
$40000000 readl   690.1ns    5.8MByte/s
$40000000 readm   693.7ns    5.8MByte/s
$40000000 writew  538.2ns    3.7MByte/s
$40000000 writel  538.7ns    7.4MByte/s
$40000000 writem  538.2ns    7.4MByte/s

This piece is definitely faster than Zorro II. :)

LIKES

	Speed. Compatibility. Expandability. Pass-through port for the Amiga
video signal.

DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS

	I don't like that card is not as expandable as the Merlin board - a
digitizer and a genlock module would be cool. Maybe they will make a
Cybervideo64 card, a successor to the aging IV-24 and OpalVision?

	Also, the thing with the online documentation is one thing phase5
will have to remedy.

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	I've used the Retina BLT Z3 before. It does not have a pass-through
port for the Amiga video signal and you can only add a video module. The
speed is mostly inferior, and the blitter mode (which is mostly slower than
the Cybervision) is not extremely compatible with the existing Amiga
software.

BUGS

	I have found none to date.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	I have not contacted phase5 for the Cybervision64.

WARRANTY

	phase5 gives a warranty of 12 months against manufacturing defects.

CONCLUSIONS

	The product is very good and I'm satisfied. If there were not the
missing online-documentation, I would rate this card with 5 out of five. With
the missing on-line documentation, I can only give a 4.8, which means almost
totally Doggy (1 is "no meat" and 5 is "Totally Doggy!").

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	This review is (c) by Rene Laederach and freely distributable as
long as you don't use it commercially, that is, print it in a commercial
magazine. If you want to print it in whole or in parts, just ask for my
written permission.

You can reach me at:

[email-masked]
C-B.maus (Mausnet)
2:301/723.4@fidonet
39:110/312@amiganet
44:8010/312@aminet (Swiss Aminet only)

---

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