Speed of icons and background loading on gfx card

[MarkAshley]

Sorry if this is a stupid question :-)

I'm using an A1200 with a Blizzard 1240, Mediator and Voodoo 3000. I've got a hi-res wallpaper but it takes ages to load it. Also my icons take a long time to appear when I open a drawer. I have downloaded Exoticons for my WHDLoad installed games and they take even longer to load.

I'm guessing this is because I have a middle of the road processor, but I thought the Voodoo would help. Is there any way of improving the performance of Workbench with this setup?

Thanks
Mark

[MarkAshley]

Heh, I didn't spend £150 on a Mediator and Voodoo so I could have a monochrome backdrop  :lol:

I seem to remember this happening before when I had my A1200 with AteoBus+Pixel64 graphics card. The desire to have a beautiful wallpaper with amazing looking icons was soon replaced by a desire to have drawers that open in less than a minute  :roll:

[MarkAshley]

Blizzard 1240@33. Thinking of overclocking it to 40 but I'm scared :-) and would it make a significant difference to Workbench performance if I did this?

[MarkAshley]

Mad-Matt wrote:
Updating the datatypes might help speedup backdrop rendering, especially with the warp datatype system for max speed as apposed to the junk that comes with os35/39.

I thought anything with "Warp" in the title was PPC only... I take it the Warp datatypes are optimised also for 68040 then?

Mad-Matt wrote:
Unfortunalty mediator coupled with the equally slow p96 doesnt help matters.  cgxv4 would have been much better to support, but because p96 was easier for elbox to simply bundle at no cost to them, it got the drivers instead :/

No chance to get CGX working with a Mediator then, even if I buy it?

Mad-Matt wrote:
icons / backdrops and just about everything was faster under cgx and bvision  Also ppc helps no end for speedy backdrop rendering if nothing else

Would be great if I could afford a bvision  :-(

Thanks
Mark

[MarkAshley]

Is the speed increase significant with WarpDT?

[MarkAshley]

Doesn't "C:Wbctrl IMT=ICONFAST" make the icons load in fast ram? I thought you could do that anyway in 3.9?

[MarkAshley]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I have converted my 24bit JPEG background to a 24bit IFF. This matches the colour depth of my Workbench. It still seems to take a long time to load though.

I put WBCtrl in my startup-sequence and icons to seem to load a bit faster. Exoticons still take forever to load. Would making the icons a bit smaller help?

Thanks
Mark

[MarkAshley]

Karlos wrote:
Are you sure your workbench is 24 bit deep? Most cards use 32-bits as the alignment allows for faster rendering.

According to ScreenMode Prefs it is set to "Voodoo: 1024x768 24bit BGR" and the slider is set to 16M colours (but is greyed out and thus not adjustable).

Framiga wrote:
Have you set in PVS(?)

Plane2Fast

What are they?

Framiga wrote:
and in Prefs:Workbench Images to Other Memory (or so)

Yes I have done that.

[MarkAshley]

@Framiga
I definitely have P96 installed.

@Karlos
I don't really understand what that means. Should it be using 24bit or 32bit? And should the BGRA bit be there or not?

[MarkAshley]

Ok, I still don't understand fully but it sounds like what I am after is the 32bit BGRA screenmode?

I went in to P96Mode and changed the TrueColour depth from TrueColour to TrueColour & Alpha (what I presume is the A in BGRA?). Rebooted and the "Voodoo: 1024x768 32bit BGRA" screenmode had appeared. Selected this screenmode and tested it, it displayed fine. Saved the screenmode and rebooted for good measure.

The backdrop does seem to load a bit more quickly (I have also made some other changes like converting to IFF etc), but large icons like Exoticons still take a long time to load. Would scaling them down make any difference?

[MarkAshley]

Cool, thanks for your help. I don't care about memory, I've got loads. I just want it to be fast  ;-)

What software can I use to scale the icons? I tried Iconian but it just locks when I try to save the icon  :-(