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Author Topic: Why is hicolor WB so slow?  (Read 1769 times)

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Offline vic20ownerTopic starter

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Why is hicolor WB so slow?
« on: June 07, 2007, 03:27:32 AM »

I guess I just don't understand why workbench is so slow when it's in 256 colors.  The amiga is so fast at 2d graphics when gaming, why is workbench such a dog?

I realize the planar graphics are slow because each plane has to be written seperately, but is it really so slow that you can't redraw a simple background graphic without a 5 second delay?

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Offline madgoblin

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Re: Why is hicolor WB so slow?
« Reply #1 on: June 07, 2007, 03:45:28 AM »
Mainly it's because the resolution. Games usually use 320x256, but in workbench you are using at least 640x256 (non interlaced) or 640x512 (int.)
Thats at least 2x (or 4x) times more slow...
And if im not mistaken, the amiga have a bandwidth problem when working on high resolutions :(
 

Offline vic20ownerTopic starter

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Re: Why is hicolor WB so slow?
« Reply #2 on: June 07, 2007, 04:07:22 AM »

 But isnt just a small portion of the screen redrawn?  Still seems way too slow...
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Offline Damion

Re: Why is hicolor WB so slow?
« Reply #3 on: June 07, 2007, 05:13:59 AM »
Quote

vic20owner wrote:

 But isnt just a small portion of the screen redrawn?  Still seems way too slow...


Yeah, but like madgoblin said, it's a bandwidth issue. For example, it may be easy for me to lift 10 pounds of weight if I'm already holding only 20, yet that same 10 pounds will be much more difficult if I'm already holding 100 (instead of 20). Similar issue, drawing the same picture at higher resolutions will be slower because of the Amiga's limited bandwidth.
 

Offline LaserBack

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Re: Why is hicolor WB so slow?
« Reply #4 on: June 07, 2007, 06:41:16 AM »
vic20owner,

speed on workbench on AGA screens are limited to lot a of determining factors......cpu speed is crucial cause for example idem screen on a 040/40mhz is maybe 5x faster than idem screen on a classic A1200 with a 68020/14mhz

also if you map amiga roms into fast memory using blizkick or remapollo or any other tool you will accelerate workbench speed 2x aprox

if you use fblit you will get some speed improvments too

anyways all of that is limited by the low bandwidth of the chip memory on AGA amigas cause is only 2mb/seg

on ECS/OCS amigas maybe chip memory speed is only 1mb/seg

a discontinued geforce 2mx ' memory speed is about 2gb/sec..that's about 1000x faster than the Amiga chip memory

Amiga' technology is ancient

bye

bye, Laser

 

Offline Waccoon

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Re: Why is hicolor WB so slow?
« Reply #5 on: June 07, 2007, 09:25:01 AM »
There is the bandwidth issue, but keep in mind that games have highly customized routines that only do the minimum amount of work, usually only work at one resolution and in one color mode, use a specific, pre-defined memory space, clip to boundaries that are multiples of 8 or 16 pixels, and so on.

Workbench must be much more versatile.  It must clip and refresh intelligently under a wide variety of conditions without corrupting the display, using too much memory, or fragmenting memory.  In fact, Workbench has several window refreshing modes available to the application programmer.  They all behave and perform differently.

Legacy support is also important, as many people have found out after the updates from OCS to ESC, 68000 to '020 with caches, ECS to AGA, etc.  Games that bang the hardware will always perform better than intelligent code, but will also fail when the hardware platform is updated.  Commodore constantly warned people not to hit the hardware, but few people listened.  I really wonder how AAA would've been able to hit the market, given that it would not have been register compatible with AGA.

OS programming is not the same beast as game programming.  A lot of people don't understand this, and if they did, they would never ask for custom Amiga hardware instead of standard PC hardware.
 

Offline Oli_hd

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Re: Why is hicolor WB so slow?
« Reply #6 on: June 07, 2007, 10:04:15 AM »
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. I really wonder how AAA would've been able to hit the market, given that it would not have been register compatible with AGA.

From whats in the Haynie archive it wasnt ment to be AGA compatiable, it was however going to to be ECS compatiable.