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

[stopthegop]

I have one other to add to your list:

wballocfast >NIL:

works wonders, and I've found it to be very system friendly.

[stopthegop]

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.

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

[stopthegop]

Not all patches are bad, some work quite well and are very system friendly.  AmigaMance's point was to highlight the good ones.  He also warned people away from the bad ones, primarily by omission.  This isn't a simplistic clash of ideologies here("official" vs. "hack").   By all means, upgrade your hardware as much as possible and use the best (not necessarily the "latest") drivers.  But also take advantage of some really great ingenius little programs (or "hacks", if you prefer) that people have written specifically to overcome many of the shortcomings in the products that have the blessings of officialdom.    

[stopthegop]

Like stated before: If you wanna make OS3.x faster and more efficient, use a more powerfull accelerator card and/or GFX-card and/or more Fast RAM. That should do
the trick really efficient.

I've never heard anyone say their Amiga was too fast.  

 :pint:

[stopthegop]

Only problem I've had with WBallocFast is it refusing to work under DOpus.  I think this is a fault with DOpus though.  

[stopthegop]

X-Panel is a nice little tool.