Flash951 wrote:I agree, F030 seems like a powerful computer with lots of useful features for the price. But if you only "count" number of features you get, the the Amiga 1200 also has it features, like custom co-processors like Alice and Lisa (copper, blitter), denise, paula, that takes the CPU load off, that's why demos like Nexus 7 and others looks so good, hardware sprites and scrolling in hires. It can display 262 144 colors (18-bit) in HAM-8. The graphics has 32 bit DMA to chip RAM, and would not "slow" the CPU bandwith down like on the F030. The core of the Amiga OS in a 512 Kb ROM (Kickstart 3.0 or 3.1), fully multitasking system.
If we were to compare the features you mention in this particular context, we'd easily conclude that those nifty features of the Amiga chipset becomes fairly useless when it comes to *3D*. Contrary to what you state, AGA DMA does affect the CPU bandwidth, and the blitter is still 16-bit. While the Falcon may have half the CPU bus width of the 1200, the Falcon bus frequency is twice that of the 1200, which means bus width doesn't really matter unless we take fastram into the equation - which we don't. HAM is honestly crap for anything but still images (unlike the hicolor mode in the falcon), sprites are useless in the context of 3D, scrolling of individual bitplanes/playfields is also not very useful for 3D, copper is nice but again I can't see a good use for it when it comes to 3D, and I doubt you could do 3D with the paula.
Most of the users on this forum have a fair amount of knowledge of what an Amiga actually is. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy both these machines, and they both have their pros and cons depending on the usage scenario, and this thread deals with one specific scenarion - namely "3D - F030 vs Amiga 1200". Ironically, if you *do* put an accellerator/fastram board on these machines, their differences quickly becomes irrelevant, since they actually share the same bottle necks - with the Falcon having the edge over the 1200 due to faster STRAM bandwidth.