Efika + MOS 2.1 = Awesome!

[Sprocki]

Whats a good dock/startbar program for MorphOS? I suprised that it doesnt come with one.

Visit the "Objects" menu of Ambient.

Has anyone figured out how to use graphic card memory as regular Ram yet? :-D  Its funny that my 9250 has the same amount of ram as the Efika.

AFAIK it is not yet possible, maybe with a later update. Would be very useful, though. Think of those times as you could fall back to Chipmem when you ran out of Fastmem.

[Sprocki]

Piru wrote:
It would be possible indeed, but reading gfxcard memory is typically really slow.

To get an idea how slow it would be run "memtest vmem" (from shell). The 'verify'-speed is the readspeed.

58 MB/sec. on my ancient R7500 compared to the quadruple in regular memory. This should give a better relationship on any newer Radeon which means it is at least in speed regions or even ahead of swapping to the harddrive. Should be considered though.

[Sprocki]

Piru wrote:

58 MB/sec

No way. That must be write speed. Even my Pegasos2 with Radeon 8500LE only does 37 MB/s read.

Anyway. It is read speed:

Ram Disk:> memtest vmem
Video memory testing locks the bitmap while testing, please wait patiently...
Allocated memory at 0xea551000 -> 0xebe50fff, 26214400 bytes
Writing 0x00000000... 210 MB/sec.
Verifying 0x00000000... 58 MB/sec.
Writing 0xffffffff... 217 MB/sec.
Verifying 0xffffffff... 58 MB/sec.
Memory is ok!

[Sprocki]

Piru wrote:
@Sprocki
Just to clarify: This is a result from EFIKA system?

Sorry, no, this is from my Peg2 system. I didn't know there was such a big difference between those two as it was said both of them would have the same AGP capabilities. I therefore thought it wouldn't matter. I was wrong then.

If this is true, I guess it might be worth looking into this, then.

I cannot check for my Efi yet but your values seem to be confirmed by Britelite, so they should be correct. But well, 14MB/s is still much more than you can get by any other input (USB or - strange idea - mem cache via Ethernet), so why not opt it in in case of running out of memory? Better slow down than refuse working.

Anyway, I'm still wondering why my R7500 is so much faster than your R8500LE. Is this all due to the limitations of Efika? Then why should one buy an R9250 for that tiny board if it is that limited? Even my crappy R7500 would be enough for it.

[Sprocki]

spihunter wrote:
Say you were working on a larger type project on a Efika and you ran out of memory and couldnt continue? It would be nice to use the extra graphic memory to finish up?

This was my intention. Why let the double of your RAM lie about unused? It's quite bizarre to have a minboard with less memory than an addon card. Let's me think of Amiga times again when my A4000 had 18MB onboard but more stuck onto a SCSI card.
See also that for a lot of tasks you wouldn't need more bandwidth like playing MP3, delivering web pages, logging files, editing text documents, pixeling icons, playing SVN repository and many more. It would be great to even delegate certain tasks to that slow mem which will never need a bigger bandwidth.

[Sprocki]

Sprocki wrote:
Anyway, I'm still wondering why my R7500 is so much faster than your R8500LE. Is this all due to the limitations of Efika? Then why should one buy an R9250 for that tiny board if it is that limited? Even my crappy R7500 would be enough for it.

It is still unanswered: why should I put a better graphics card like R9250 inside the EFIKA when even an R7500 delivers enough throughput? If not more than 64MB of RAM is needed I see no reason to buy a better one.