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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« on: May 07, 2011, 10:22:45 PM »
Quote from: Franko;636348
Could you clarify this time when you say...


You're talking to the news bot...
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #1 on: May 08, 2011, 04:55:59 PM »
Quote from: takemehomegrandma;636520
BTW, Will this update be free for existing 4.0 users?


What, just like 3.1 was a free update for existing 3.0 users, you mean? ;)
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #2 on: May 08, 2011, 05:11:52 PM »
Quote from: Franko;636539
PS: I aint whining about 4.1 I was simply asking if it still (like 4.0) required a GFX card to make it useable, simple enough question and simple enought ti understand... :)


Simple answer to your simple question: Yes, you need a graphics card if you want the best experience.


IMO, in this regard, it's no different to 4.0, 3.9, 3.5 and 3.1. You may *think* that 3.x runs fine without RTG and so did I until I got my first RTG card (the BVision as it happens) for my A1200 back in late '98. I was using 3.1 back then and the difference it was more significant than any other expansion since my first hard drive. Even more than my first accelerator card.

It's fair to say I haven't even used a later version of AmigaOS without a graphics card. After using workbench or even just a shell on a fast, high-resolution flickerless display you are immediately spoilt and can't go back.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #3 on: May 08, 2011, 06:25:27 PM »
Quote from: Franko;636546
@ Karlos

Hmm.... I clearly recall a wee while back you "thought" that it was just me who "thought" that OS 4.0 didn't perform well on an A1200 without GFX card... ;)

Then your recollection is failing you, isn't it? You stated that it ran so slowly as to be completely unusable. Exaggerated remarks along the line of a crippled tortoise or something to that effect. In response to which, I pointed out that it is no more or less usable without a graphics card than 3.x is. If you try to use 3.x on AGA in 256 colours on a DblPAL display with solid window dragging and sizing enabled, it's every bit as agonizing as anything 4.0 does on AGA.

If, on the other hand, you apply the same common sense that years of working with AGA *should* have taught you, you will immediately turn off all the 4.0 features that are clearly aimed at RTG displays, including but not limited to, all gradients, font antialiasing, RGB icons, solid window sizing / dragging and what not. If you do this and return to a good old 4-16 colour WB display with OS3.x style icons, you'll see that it's much improved performance wise. As part of testing, I've done this and can verify that it is the case. There are even pictures in the gallery here of my it running in that configuration back in 2004:

http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=3135
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=3136

The above was absolutely no different in performance than it was on the 040 and significantly faster at anything CPU-bound.

Unfortunately, many - yourself seemingly included - laboured under some delusion that your 160-240 MHz PPC was going to totally mitigate the limitations of the 20 year old AGA hardware it was attached to and deliver an experience unmatched by your 68K. It wasn't, it was never going to and it never will, end of story. If you needed to be told that then you can't be anything like as well versed in amiga hardware as you would have us believe.

If 4.0 classic made a major mistake it was in assuming that anybody using it would have had RTG and basing the default installation options around that. It should have included a "my planar-only display hardware is old enough to vote" option that would have installed for a basic 8-colour configuration with all of the above adjustments already made.
« Last Edit: May 08, 2011, 06:44:51 PM by Karlos »
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #4 on: May 08, 2011, 08:05:28 PM »
Quote from: Franko;636555
@ Karlos

Once again nothing but your own personal opinions on this (just as my posts are).

Your posts may be your personal opinion but mine are based on my experience. I tend not to rely on opinion when I can just get data from physical testing and I tested 4.0 before release and ran many like-for-like comparisons against 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9 on my system. I don't have the tables in front of me, but I can well remember the overall observations:

* OS4 graphics performance on AGA was on par with AGA + 68040 running fblit for most graphics.library drawing operations. Some faster, some slower. Access to Chip RAM is evidently the bottleneck for both. The 68040 scored slightly higher in raw memory transfer tests to ChipRAM than the PPC (both on 3.x/WarpOS and OS4) so theoretically it could be a bit faster for certain rendering operations.
* CPU-bound performance for PPC native recompilations of code was anywhere from 3-10x faster than their 68040 counterparts on OS3.x depending on how much memory access versus computation was involved in their inner loops. Figures for floating-point heavy code were higher still.
* CPU-bound performance for non-JIT 68K applications were typically lower (the slowest I managed in a synthetic worst-case test was about 1/10th the speed) but in normal cases not unusably so.
* CPU-bound performance for JIT 68K applications were typically on par or faster (wide variation in results) with the 68040. Some synthetic tests showed emulated 68K performance approaching native speed, but real code tends not to be that well "tuned".
* DiskIO-bound performance via the onboard IDE was on par with 68040, again, entirely as expected since the hardware interface is the bottleneck.
* NetworkIO-bound performance with large file transfers via Roadshow using the 68020 cnet.device was about 30% faster than AmiTCP4 on 68040 using the exact same version of the cnet.device.

And here's the rub. Most of the time you aren't even running CPU bound code, your applications are waiting for something. An InputEvent or timer interrupt or whatever. It's only when you start doing something intensive, like decoding a datatype that you really notice the difference that your 4-fold increase in clockspeed, bigger caches and faster FPU have given you.

Then again, you did say you found the latter (datatypes) to be one of the worst things ever invented and go to lengths to avoid using them so assuming you were sticking to old 68K applications that might in turn be running interpretively on your emulated 020, perhaps you are experiencing sub-par performance. But if that is true, then it's clearly a PEBKAC issue.

Quote
My remarks in regard to the the slowness of OS4.0 in my case are not "Exaggerated". As I already in the past told you I tried your suggestions but they made little or no difference to the speed or performance... :)

Then you need to dig and find out why, because your experience is clearly strange, at least from where I am standing. Look at it this way: You have a CPU that is potentially several times faster than your 68K for almost any operation but is, according to you, turning in slower performance. This, on a playing field you claim to have levelled by removing all the RTG intended eye candy as per my suggestions previously. Now, if that was the case for everybody else then you could comfortably say that something was inherently wrong with the OS and it's just really slow and I'd have no choice but to agree with you.

However, you have another user (in this case me) that has used the same OS on equivalent hardware and has not reproduced your experience when doing the same thing. Even the most elementary Sherlock Holmes moment should make you stop to consider "perhaps something is up with my configuration, after all it isn't that different to his".

If it was *my* system that was crawling, especially after making all reasonable changes to the configuration to mitigate the AGA performance issues and someone else was insisting that better performance was achievable I'd be pulling my rig apart to find out what the problem is.

Quote
I was under no "Delusion" of any kind but was sold a product that failed to mention in any of the advertising or even on the box that a GFX card was required to get it to perform at a decent speed,

I'm pretty damned sure it was advertised as recommending a graphics card, certainly everywhere I looked. In the same way that most software cites a minimum specification it can physically run on but that's about it. It's not even as if it was the first version of AmigaOS that this was true for:

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/os35.html

Quote
Mid-range performance
68030 or higher processor
8 MB Fast RAM
Graphics accelerator and/or scandoubler
Modem


In case you missed it, a "graphics accelerator" was the parlance back then for an RTG supported graphics card. Is there any reason at all to assume a later OS would go backwards in requirements?

Quote
all that was ever stated both in the advertising and on the very box itself was that a PPC board was required, not one single word about requiring a GFX card... ;)

So there was no "Delusions" on my part, more like false advertising on the sellers part... ;)

Strange, I always assume the minimum specification stated on any product is what you'll need for it to simply run but have no expectations beyond that. For instance, had I not have gotten the RTG card, I categorically *would not* have bought either OS3.5 or 3.9, since whilst they both work without, it's abundantly clear you get much more out of it with.

Quote
I laugh at how you always like to say "end of story" as if your word is the be all and end all of any given subject, time you got your head out of your rear end and realised your not the only one around here who knows about the Amigas capabilities... :)

I never claimed I was the "only one that knows about the Amigas capabilities", but I do know that OS4.0 runs as well on my AGA installation as 3.x does *if* I spend time messing around with it's configuration.


Quote
As for your last trite comment in that post, OS4.0 was sold as only requiring a PPC board nothing ever mentioned about a GFX card so from that it's perfectly reasonable to assume from the details given by the seller that if all you need is a PPC accelerator and the OS is written in native PPC code then it would be reasonable to assume the it would run faster than even an specifically written 060 piece of code... :p

It can, except when it's struggling to access your chip RAM for any reason whatsoever. Look, there's a bloody good reason why Phase5 put an expansion slot on the accelerator board and it came as no surprise to anybody owning one that the first device they released for it was a graphics card, then a PCI busboard. By far the biggest bottleneck on the card is the trapdoor slot that connects it to the motherboard (and thus the Chip RAM). If you thought the 68060 was penalized when writing to Chip RAM, it gets off lightly. In the time it takes your PPC to do just one 32-bit write to chip ram it could literally have executed a dozen or more instructions.

Quote
So as usual on this subject your comments are typically flawed and based on nothing but you own opinions , so please stop with the high and mighty act that your word is somehow better than anyone else's  and your "end of story" nonsense you like state so often is a cop out for things you have no answer too... ;)

No, they are based on my experience, which as I've said is contrary to yours. However, there's no obvious reason at all why your system should be slower than mine, as far as I know the PPC chip is the same basic speed (240MHz?). If the software can perform acceptably on mine, then it must be capable of doing so on yours or anybody else's.


There were plenty of things wrong with 4.0 classic, especially in terms of support for hardware available to 3.x users, but basic performance for processor intensive tasks was not one of them.
« Last Edit: May 08, 2011, 08:11:36 PM by Karlos »
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #5 on: May 08, 2011, 08:20:43 PM »
Quote from: nicholas;636556
I think you might want to take a look at the credits on OS4.


Erm, I'm pretty sure I'm not listed anywhere in there, but I was a tester back in the early days of 4.0 classic.

I can neither confirm nor deny rumours that I have 4.1 classic running right now :lol:
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #6 on: May 08, 2011, 08:41:10 PM »
Quote from: Franko;636563

I asked a question here which HammerD answered perfectly for me but Karlos for some reason stuck his big nose in with his usual attitude he has these days of trying to belittle things folks say...

I think you'll find I answered your question perfectly reasonably too, stating that certainly from your perspective it would not be any fun without a graphics card:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=636544&postcount=33

You were the one that dragged this argument back up when you said:
Quote
Hmm.... I clearly recall a wee while back you "thought" that it was just me who "thought" that OS 4.0 didn't perform well on an A1200 without GFX card...

I've always been totally consistent on this front, so if you thought you could make that statement and have it go unchallenged, then that was your mistake.

Quote
Unfortunately you're not allowed to put moderators on your ignore list otherwise I would have had Karlos on mine for the past couple of months, as since my wee argument with Red I find Karlos attitude towards me has drastically changed since I first came to this site...

Yes, I'm sure we're all just out to get you :lol:

If it's any consolation I don't think moderators even have a working ignore list. Of course, it would be a bad idea if we did...

Quote
END OF STORY... ;)

:)
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #7 on: May 08, 2011, 09:11:21 PM »
Quote from: Franko;636580

PS: since you've posted yet again while I was typing this with the comment...

then I should remind you that again you are wrong as you chimed in before I made that post with this post

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=636544&postcount=33


I'm sorry, but what was remotely confrontational in post #33?

Quote from: myself
Simple answer to your simple question: Yes, you need a graphics card if you want the best experience.


IMO, in this regard, it's no different to 4.0, 3.9, 3.5 and 3.1. You may *think* that 3.x runs fine without RTG and so did I until I got my first RTG card (the BVision as it happens) for my A1200 back in late '98. I was using 3.1 back then and the difference it was more significant than any other expansion since my first hard drive. Even more than my first accelerator card.

It's fair to say I haven't even used a later version of AmigaOS without a graphics card. After using workbench or even just a shell on a fast, high-resolution flickerless display you are immediately spoilt and can't go back.


The first part was a totally matter of fact answer to your question. The second part was my own observation about RTG in general, specifically that it's one of those things you don't realise you're missing until you first use it then wonder how you lived without it. I'm sure I can't be alone in that view.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #8 on: May 09, 2011, 07:34:09 AM »
Quote from: smerf;636647
Hi,

@Karlos,

Why not just make it a black and white display, then it would really be sped up.

Oh!!

I forgot, you are used to black and white displays, after all you do use a MAC.

smerf


You're confusing me with someone else. I haven't used a Mac since OSX 10.3 and that wasn't through choice, either. The only mac prior to that I used was an emulated one on my A1200 to write up my final year thesis.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #9 on: May 09, 2011, 08:57:48 PM »
Quote from: JJ;636693
I think its because of all these similare avatars maybe we should change


Problem?

:lol:
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Offline Karlos

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Re: AmigaOS 4.1 for Classics imminent
« Reply #10 on: May 09, 2011, 10:53:13 PM »
Quote from: nicholas;636799
I might buy it and I don't even have a BPPC anymore.


Hmmm... CSPPC?
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