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Author Topic: PC still playing Amiga catchup  (Read 217950 times)

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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #179 from previous page: June 15, 2009, 07:59:48 PM »
Quote from: JJ;511307
To answer the question.
 
NO.  The PC is terms of hardware alone passde the Amiga well over ten years ago.   Probably more like 15.   Lets get real.


We already have so many speculations, but we are trying to get to the facts.  Gameport was supported in XP so your claim it surprassed it 10 years ago is false.  They still sell gameport based joysticks.  Even USB ones are inferior in speed of accessing.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #180 on: June 15, 2009, 08:03:51 PM »
Quote from: Hammer;511312
A yawn subject.

...

Hey I stopped arguing since it's obvious Amiga joystick port is faster, butl someone started to challenge it again.

>APIs enables the hardware to change significantly and reduce hardware complexity i.e. save on
>1. Transistor usage,
>2. Energy consumption.
>3. Maximised math units.

Hardware can be enhanced significantly and retain hardware  compatibility.  As for reducing hardware complexity-- well why do they retain processor compatibility then-- same argument can be applied there as well.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #181 on: June 15, 2009, 08:06:13 PM »
Quote from: GadgetMaster;511321
I think I agree with you here. The thread does seem to have run out of steam at this point.

Oh well. You could always start another controversial topic that will keep us entartained for pages and pages. or not.  :lol:

It'll sure keep the site lively. ;)


At least you should wait for the person arguing to reply before declaring the subject closed.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #182 on: June 15, 2009, 08:11:42 PM »
Quote from: Speelgoedmannetje;511354
I think you're mixing up the USB stack and the API. The USB stack can have a hickup from time to time (well, in Windows that is). But an API is just a redirection, which, especially nowadays, doesn't cause any noticeable delay.
Eh? Palette index swapping? For at least 10 years, that isn't been used anymore. (when a 32 bit palette became common in 3d acceleration)


You have to do many I/O instructions to get the joystick status compared to a MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0.  As for palette modes, they still have them in Photoshop; the point there was an example where API access would be inferior to the extent that Amiga would out do it.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #183 on: June 15, 2009, 08:14:16 PM »
Quote from: smerf;511365
Hi,

...
Maybe if you read this you will see that the 1khz is far surpassed by a PC joystick that clocks at 100khz or 300 kbit speeds.

and these results came from Radio Shack using Linux drivers on their gameports.

Once again can I get some of those drugs you are using, they have to be really good.

smerf


You must be on drugs if you think doing serial access via 201h is going to outdo the Amiga's move instruction.  USB would be faster than 201h serial protocol.  And we're not trying to surpass 1khz.  Which is faster is the point.  1Khz is not the top limit for Amiga--  that was another subject regarding some applications requiring 1Khz sampling.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #184 on: June 15, 2009, 08:19:20 PM »
Quote from: paolone;511292
Oh, my...

1. http://www.overclock.net/faqs/73418-how-improve-mouse-response-accuracy-changing.html

After many pages reading your silly rants about a joystick port that should be polled faster than on 20-years-later technologies, I simply got bored and entered "USB polling frequency driver" into Google, which gave me many interesting results. Just read what the first result has to say, "Windows by default has the usb ports working at 125Hz of 1000Hz that USB is capable of, giving 8ms response times. You can change the frequency to 250Hz(4ms), 500Hz(2ms) and 1000Hz(1ms) to get better response times" and please don't bug everyone else with your foolish assumptions.
...

Which is faster: MOVE.W $DFF00A,D0 or going through a serial protocol?  I hope you know when you write a general application for some PC, you cannot assume they have some specialized card in there.  You have to take the general case of Gameport or standard USB joystick.

>2. That's not true. Everyone else here explained you that APIs are better just because they allow programming in shorter times, compatibility-friendly with more HW configuraions..


Bullcrap.  You can have APis on top of standard hardware and those systems are better.  You can do things that APIs don't allow or are more inefficient at it.

>3. You don't even need an example, it's plain logic. Every time your OCS chip does a clock cycle, any modern, low-value GPU has already executed thousands of instructions.

Then give the APi calls that will swap the index #3 and #15.  And I'll time them on my machine.

>4. No, he doesn't need glasses. YOU need a reality check. Or maybe a travel ticket to fantasyland, to Amiga Neverland or so.

I timed it myself.  You go repeat the experiment and then reply.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #185 on: June 16, 2009, 12:24:07 PM »
Quote from: Fanscale;511545
amigaksi,

The Olympics are over buddy. Let's put out the flame :madashell: and move on to other things.


Stop the bullcrap; you're just serving as a biased sidekick like some others.  Be objective and perhaps  you will see such a clear cut point.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #186 on: June 16, 2009, 12:36:19 PM »
Quote from: Hammer;511524
Still limited to Amiga's memory design and graphic's processor speed. You want to start a frame per second race? Let's see HAM8 vs ....

CUDA GPUs have extremely large instruction issue per cycle rate, extremely large registers (e.g. can go up to 512 KByte), super-scalar (dual issue per SP) pipelines, extremely large SMT, caches (both hardware and software managed), high speed memory (and designed specifically for graphics i.e. GDDRx types), Ghz range stream processors(SP), multiple ROPS,Triple digit (e.g. 400Mhz) Mhz dual RAMDACs and 'etc'.

The amount of “Instructions in flight” (both in parallel and sequential(in pipeline)) in CUDA GPU kills any classic Amiga IGP chipset.

Should I bring in ATI Xenos?


Once you accept that Amiga can swap palette indices faster than API-based modern system, we can looks at other examples where Amiga wins.  I am not contesting you have more graphics horsepower overall in modern graphics cards but in some cases Amiga still wins when you look at time spent by CPU especially if you are going through APIs.  Frame per second race is also as easy as setting video memory pointers on Amiga.  I believe we had some of this discussion before-- regarding playing .anim files and decompressing them on-the-fly using a double-buffered approach.  Time to switch between frames is just for flipping pointers.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #187 on: June 16, 2009, 12:53:42 PM »
Quote from: alexatkin;511512
At the end of the day, stick your average PC user in front of:  Amiga OS, Linux, Windows, Mac.

Chances are they will figure out how to get on the Internet on the latter three, but stand no chance at all on the Amiga.  Mainly because they would be lucky if they even had a TCP/IP stack on it.
...

That's a biased comparison.  Internet browsers and websites mainly developed after Amigas stopped manufacturing.  They revised Windows many times to integrate internet and it's bloated websites into it.  I bet if internet was a big thing during Amiga's development, people would have had optimized browsers running on it within its RAM/processor limits.  People develop and optimize for what the target machine is.  

>Come on, lets be realistic.  The point here is, that for the vast majority of user a PC does exactly what they need it to do.  This might mean it can't do a few things the Amiga could do, mainly because they are things your average user does not need to do.  

It's a speculation to say Amiga only does those things PC cannot do that average user does not need to do so.  Many people use PCs today for painting, gaming, etc. can do the same on Amiga.

>The PC is a mainstream "do it all" machine, it makes no sense wasting time and money including backwards compatibility, except wheres its absolutely essential.  

It's absolutely necessary to maintain backward compatibility-- they do it on APi level and I was proposing they do it at hardware level so a programmer can have the best of both worlds.

>That is why they removed 16bit support from Windows some time back, it was no longer useful and just added bloat, bugs and more importantly a LOT of time wasted for the development team making sure it was still compatible with all the new stuff.

16-bit support is NOT bloated.  The entire Windows 3.1 OS fits in 1Megabyte.  Compare this with some application on XP where one of the hundreds of DLLs it uses is 1 Megabyte each.  By the way, the processors still support backward compatibility of 8-bit and 16-bit; it's stupidity not to include it within the latest OS.  

>As we said before, why bother including support for the PC to be able to do stuff that 99.9% of the userbase do not need, and can easily be done on custom hardware more efficiently?  If the Amiga is better at this than a modern PC then excellent, but it also proves the point that it would make no sense using a PC to do it.  Why would you want to use a Ghz CPU eating around 150W of juice, to do something that a custom board could probably do in 10W?

Custom board would have to be put into a PC as well right so the wattage would add up. Someone can make the same argument Amiga can do everything and just needs a custom board for dealing with bloated internet websites/applications.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #188 on: June 16, 2009, 01:03:18 PM »
Quote from: Roondar;511507
That's a dishonest question.

But I'll bite.

The PC implementation (using API's etc) will be faster doing it's poll than the Amiga's MOVE.W will be. Even if the serial protocol itself is slower, the vastly (and I do mean vastly) faster processor will need less time to execute the whole API based serial poll than the Amiga's MOVE.W will take.

Now, that the serial port on the PC is usually sucky and hence slower to be sampled is another matter, but the fact is that the code driving said sucky serial port is extremely likely to be faster than the MOVE.W.

If only because your 3Ghz machine can execute it's code -literally- thousands of times faster and the API overhead is not adding thousands of times more code.


I wasn't referring to the old serial port-- but USB HID being a serial protocol.  The I/O instructions aren't running at 3Ghz.  In fact, I have experimented a lot with I/O to parallel ports and other I/O instructions and some old machines running at 100Mhz...400Mhz have faster parallel ports than machines running at 1Ghz and above.  Take for example a Toshiba Tecra 8000 at 300Mhz-- it's parallel port gets 1 megabytes/second easily (going direct to hardware of course).  Now take a Thinkpad A31 (1.6Ghz) and it's parallel port gets only 700Kilobytes/second (going direct to hardware w/o bullcrap APis).

So a MOVE.W on Amiga OCS takes a few microseconds consistently.  Using a serial protocol involves a lot more I/O instructions which aren't that much faster as processor speeds are.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #189 on: June 16, 2009, 01:07:11 PM »
Quote from: jkirk;511541
no if you access the hardware directly you are doing an end run around the os. this introduces the potential for failure on future(or even current) hardware.


Not if hardware is backward compatible.  You can have well-behaved applications that go directly to hardware.  There's many on PCs as well as Amiga.  It's just that now PCs are more API-centered which is worse for them.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #190 on: June 16, 2009, 01:11:12 PM »
Quote from: EvilGuy;511544
Modern hardware is so powerful that swapping an entire scene out using the GPU can be done so much faster compared to an Amiga swapping two colours around. Legacy Amiga hardware is old and slow.

PC still playing catchup? Sure, if digital, 9pin joysticks are your thing. But the rest of the world has moved on to big and better things.


As I just explained to someone above, the I/O on modern systems is NOT as fast as the processors (or even memory accesses).  Even if you use GPU, you still have to feed the parameters from host CPU to GPU using API calls.  There's many more things than just joysticks especially if you rely on APi calls on PCs.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #191 on: June 16, 2009, 01:18:29 PM »
Quote from: Hammer;511509
Depends on the priority. Notice the CPU didn't keep up with the GPU market in pure math performance.


Compatibility is a MAJOR thing to have.  CPUs weren't trying to keep up with GPUs as their target wasn't just pure math performance.  But they did maintain backward compatibility on hardware level.  And I bet hardly anyone would upgrade to a new PC if it WASN'T backward compatible.  You could say why not make people use high level languages (like APIs) with some translation layer and allow processors to start anew everytime, but that's a suboptimal approach.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #192 on: June 16, 2009, 01:24:18 PM »
Quote from: smerf;511429
Hi,

@Amigaski,

How did you know I was on drugs, ...



Because of your experiments that you wanted me to repeat:

"Hook yourself up to a 1000V, then 3000V, then 9000V, they 27000V and then tell me at what voltage that your body has sensed a change in?"

>Using the Algorithm that the human body can sense, even if the PC was running at 500 hz the eyes would not see any change in the movement of the cursor even though the Amiga's joystick port was moving at a hz speed of 50% faster. In this case the human body (eyes) would sense a faster movement only if the difference in speed was 3 times faster. Which means that you are probably correct, the joystick does move faster but the human eyes would not see it until it was moving at least 3 times the speed of the PC joytick...  

Using same argument, I can play Amiga games perfectly fine on a 7.16Mhz OCS machine and since the frame rate doesn't miss a beat (as far as user experience goes) I'm better off than buying a 3Ghz machine to do something similar with no guarantees that it may not skip a frame every now and then (especially with a Wifi card plugged in).
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #193 on: June 16, 2009, 01:28:07 PM »
Quote from: smerf;511434
Hi,

@Trev,

Are you going to surrender the ship, are you going to quit, even though he is totally wrong, ...


smerf


I see your mental attitude is just to try to "win" regardless of what the TRUTH is.  You are totally wrong and misguided.  Your example of using port 201h serially is inferior even to USB HIDs.
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Offline amigaksi

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Re: PC still playing Amiga catchup
« Reply #194 on: June 16, 2009, 01:36:38 PM »
Quote from: Trev;511445
No, I'm in the relevancy camp. No human can trigger a joystick input at 1 kHz, and no mainstream Amiga-compatible display has a refresh rate of 1 kHz. It's really a question of whether or not both an Amiga and a "PC" can sample, process, and respond to an input event in a timeframe that matters to both the application and the end user. In short, they both can.

Limiting the criteria under which either an Amiga or a "PC" can be said to be "still playing ... catchup" is a sad, sad way to win a debate in general terms. NTSC Amigas are faster than PAL Amigas, but that won't stop anyone from arguing over which is "better" in terms of end user experience. Change of subject: PAL Amiga still playing NTSC Amiga catchup?

My one thousandth post should have been more interesting.


It's still relevant though that joysticks are faster on Amiga since you use up less CPU time even if you read them 60Hz.  As for palette modes, I bet it's faster even on modern hardware to set up a paletted mode for editing cartoons, line-art, cad/cam, schematics, and other things that rely on exact coloring and do not want shading which would bloat the file size unnecessarily.  Paletted pictures would compress a lot more losslessly than saving them as 32-bit image files and would be far less data to deal with when editing them.  So in that case, swapping palette indices is a useful feature.  

If you want to argue PAL Amiga playing NTSC catchup-- you have to compare with timers.  Timers are suppose to work at exact rates.  And in that scenario, the Copper method of doing cycle-exact transactions w/ZERO latency is the ideal method of doing it.  Not only is it ZERO latency w/558ns accuracy, but there's not INTERRUPT overhead involved.  No stacks to save current processor conditions and return from interrupt.  Here Amiga wins as well.
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