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Question for PAR owners...
« on: March 29, 2003, 10:16:45 AM »
I have an Amiga 4000/040 with a DPS PAR, mainly used for 3D computergraphics.
It's still in use but slowly becomming a bottleneck.
 Rendertimes used to be minutes so the 15 or so seconds the PAR needed importing a single frame didn't slow down things much,
now that rendertimes have come down to seconds it's really a wait for the PAR to finish importing all the frames.
I was wondering if having a faster CPU, say a 060 would speed up things at all or if the limited import speed is completely due to the PAR hardware.
Tas.
 

Offline JetRacer

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Re: Question for PAR owners...
« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2003, 12:24:38 PM »
I think I speak for the majority:

???
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Offline JetRacer

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Re: Question for PAR owners...
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2003, 12:41:49 PM »
Let me give you a generic answer:

If it as much as touches the HDD during the relevant time period, then yes. In that case you should also change file system to f.ex. Smart File System (SFS), if you're still using FFS that is.

But then again, a 68060 accelerator is very expensive. Not to say outrageusly expensive, considering actual performance. I would give you bad advice if I didn't tell you to have a look at the x86 option first.
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Offline Dan

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Re: Question for PAR owners...
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2003, 12:50:05 AM »
The PAR is an DSP board with an IDE interface according to a magazine i just reread.
Then the bottleneck is the IDEinterface on the PARboard
What kind off image format does the PAR use  and what filesystem???
If it´s propetary then you´re stuck.
Otherwise it could be possible to first connect the harddrive to an accelerated IDE interface like the PowerFlyer and render to that and the connect it to the PAR for playback but I´m not sure just guessing.
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Offline Ilwrath

Re: Question for PAR owners...
« Reply #4 on: March 31, 2003, 04:08:58 AM »
@tasmanian-
Oh boy... It's been a LONG time since I used an Amiga PAR...  (probably 10 years?)  But as I understand it (granted, this is old knowledge, and may be flawed...)  

NO.  Amiga processor will have little (if any) impact on PAR performance.  The DPS PAR board is pretty much self-contained.  It really doesn't rely on the Amiga to help it out any, processor-wise.  

Now, what it does count on the Amiga for is communication, though.  If by 'importing' you are meaning using the PAR to grab a frame generated from an external source, the Amiga processor will make no difference.  Now, if by 'importing' you mean loading a raw image datafile into the PAR filesystem, though, the Amiga processor MAY help this somewhat, but don't expect miracles.  It shouldn't be taking the Amiga anywhere near 15 seconds to send image data to the card... So I would take that to mean that the PAR card must have to process that image frame before saving it into it's internal animation format.   This is probably where the delay is.  Though I don't remember this action taking nearly 15 seconds per frame.  (To load 60 pre-rendered frames into an anim would take 15 minutes to import??  That doesn't sound right to me!)  

Am I missing something here?
 

Offline JetRacer

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Re: Question for PAR owners...
« Reply #5 on: March 31, 2003, 09:52:12 AM »
Ok, knowing that the PAR is a DSP board with IDE interface I can give you a better answer.

A faster CPU increases the transfer rates of the A1200 IDE indirectly. If my memory serves me right, transfer rates to HDD beyond 1MB/sec is not possible using a vanilla machine. The real question is if the IDE interface of the PAR is as fast as the one in the A1200 (probably).

If you're converting loads of files in a single run using the DSP, then changing to a faster filesystem (like SFS) and adding buffers with (C:AddBuffers) will probably have a huge impact.
The filehandling of SFS is so fast that it outperforms RAM: by factor two on average (excluding bulk transfer rates).

Note: addbuffers adds blocksize times specified buffers. Blocksize is often 512 bytes. You want the total number of buffers to be to equal or larger than the largest file you want to process.
Adding 500KB in buffers with a 512 byte blocksize:

AddBuffers MyPartition: 1000

Hope that helps.
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Offline JetRacer

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Re: Question for PAR owners...
« Reply #6 on: March 31, 2003, 09:55:55 AM »
Then again, if the PAR plain sucks then it won't do you any good. Back to square one.
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Re: Question for PAR owners...
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2003, 12:01:45 PM »
Thanx everybody for the input.
 I guess my question was  more cryptic than it should have been.  
As llwrath said the DPS PAR board is pretty much self contained,
that's why I wondered if a faster processor would have any effect at all.
It certainly doesn't matter for grabbing an image from a video source etc...  that's all done by the board.
Importing an image means taking an IFF or Targa file, converting it to the PAR's own internal mjpg format and storing it to it's own HD.
I guess my question was really how much of that conversion was done by the DPS hardware and how much is done through the main Amiga processor.

Of course Jetracer is right in that it probably wouldn't be worth spending lots of money for an accelerator when there are plenty of fast and cheap PC sollutions around.

The PAR definitely doesn't suck, that's why it's still in use, even after all these years.  It's mainly used for puppet animation and is a perfect machine for that.

Just it's use as a framestore for 3D rendering is now put in question.

Well, again, thanx for the useful input
Tas