Help optimizing an A500.

[Britelite]

I'm also going to install Fblit.

Unless you have an accelerator (030 or higher) with real fastmem, you will not benefit from installing Fblit. On the contrary, it might actually slow things down.

[Britelite]

The real benefit of Fblit (if u ignore all the bugs) is on 32-bit chipram systems with a 25Mhz 030 or higher.

I'm assuming you mean 32-bit fastmem, because it's the fastmem combined with a faster cpu that gives the real benefit.

[Britelite]

No, I really meant chipmem.  Fblit is twice as fast at blitting on 32-bit chipmem systems than on 16-bit chipmem systems because it uses the CPU to write to chipmem 32-bits at a time doesn't it?

Yes, but the speed comes from handling the graphics in fastmem and only blitting the result to chipmem. Otherwise you wouldn't benefit from a faster cpu, as the chipmem speed is the bottleneck

[Britelite]

No, FBlit on an A3000/A1200/A4000 is faster than the blitter for some chipmem to chipmem copies. The blitter can't saturate the chipram bandwidth, while a really fast CPU can. I don't know what CPU it maxes out at. It also has the added benefit that icons etc can be stored in fast ram, which makes it even quicker. However things like full window dragging are sped up with FBlit and that doesn't touch fastram.

Of course, but the best speedups come when some of the data can be handled in fastram. As you said, chipmem maxes out at some point, but you can still benefit from the tasks that can be done elsewhere.