Guide: How to make OS3.x faster and more efficient. (Updated)

[Karlos]

Install a "smart refresh" like SmartWB. It will make you WorkBench windows faster, but it will also increase their memory usage.
NOTE: Although i have read many times that these patches are not required for gfx-card users, i'm using a BVision with the latest C-GFX update, and SmartWB gives me a noticable speed increase in window moving etc!! Could anyone give me some feedback on this?

In theory, on a good graphics card the graphics.library rendering functions are hardware accelerated so that simple refresh operations ought to be fast enough so that you never see them.
There are several problems with this postulate:

1) The time it takes the system to physically set up the drawing (GUI layout etc) is totally unrelated to the speed of the underlying hardware.

2) Good hardware is often let down by abysmal drivers and the pretty hacky way RTG is implemented. A lot of acceleration is missed out. BlitBitMapScale() for example is totally software driven on my BVision under CGX4.2 except when the scale is 1:1, despite the fact the permedia can handle scaled blitting no problem. For those functions that are actually hardware accelerated, the time it takes to reach them from the graphics.library calls usually dwarves the time it takes to perform the actual operation.

Smart refresh is based around simply blitting away the hidden areas of a surface and then restoring them when they become visible again. This uses more video ram but can be achieved in a couple of blits at most. Therefore it's always going to win where (1) and (2) are significant.

[Karlos]

stopthegop wrote:

I'm not sure I followed all that..?  In english: Is SmartWB a good thing or a bad thing?

If you have plenty of video ram on your graphics card, good.

The basic argument against Smart Refresh is that it ought not to be needed on modern cards where the GPU can do all the drawing at such speed that you'd never see it happen. Ideally, that should be the case.

Unfortunately, there are weaknesses both in RTG itself and in driver quality before you get to the GPU that can render this argument null and void.

Smart Refresh really only relies on one GPU operation, "blitting" (which is supported by all major cards/drivers) and enough spare video card memory to hold all the obscured bits of your windows whilst they aren't visible. Saving and redrawing the windows then comes down to performing blits and not a lot else.

It's therefore usually the faster setting - with the downside that you lose more video memory in normal operation (this can affect some 3D games on cards that have limited memory).

[Karlos]

FFS has never given me a single problem in over a decade. Oddly, the only partition I ever had go bad on any amiga was SFS :lol:

Then again, I'm the guy that owns systems fatally allergic to mmu.library too ;-)

[Karlos]

If you want to see OS3.x fly, you could always install it on WinUAE on a really fast x86...

*ducks*