It depends on what type of operations you are doing. A Thunder IV GX can beat the HPV at some business type applications where the quickdraw acceleration gets invoked. However, the HPV can throw frames up on the screen way faster than the NuBus card can. It's probably more correct to say that the computer can throw new frames on the HPV card way faster than it can put them on the NuBus card.

I wish PowerWatch was still up. That was the forum/website for Power Computing users and that's where Kaye and I posted the results of our tests of various NuBus cards vs. HPV card. It ended up there, because ultimately, we were tricking out the fastest of the NuBus Macs, the Power Computing Power 120. I guess the Apple 9150 tied it for speed and had one more NuBus slot, but back then, you could get a Power 120 for under $1000 while the 9150 was still multiple thousands.

I think the site archives ultimately got mirrored somewhere. If that's still up our discussion would be in the Power 80/100/120 discussion area.

At the end of the day, if you're playing Marathon, you want the HPV card. If you're using Photoshop and MS Office, there's a decent chance you want a Thunder IV GX or Thunder 24/GT.

We did a lot of benchmarking with MacBench 5.0 from Ziff Davis, but again, those old results were up on PowerWatch.com which ultimately went away. Jeff Keller still runs a pretty good camera review site, from what I understand.