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

[spavatch]

I have the same issue on my Cybervision64. There is one solution that works fine for me - using a simple color palette with a monochrome bacground (I use that nice Amiga Forever boingball background).

[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:

[spavatch]

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

I must agree with that... :-D

You said what is your CPU speed?

[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?

[Mad-Matt]

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.

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 :/

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

[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

[Mad-Matt]

There is a free cgxv3 driver , but doesnt have as much hadware acceleration as v4  with the bvision, youd also need the ppc card :|

[spavatch]

MarkAshley wrote:
I thought anything with "Warp" in the title was PPC only...

And how about WarpEngine? It sure isn't PPC... :roflmao:

Sorry, I couldn't resist... :-D

[Amigaz]

@MarkAshley

The WarpDT picture datatypes is for 68k CPU's also

from '020 or '030 and up

[MarkAshley]

Is the speed increase significant with WarpDT?

[Amigaz]

Not significant but very noticeable.

[Karlos]

To speed up background images on 3.x on 680x0

1) make sure you choose a nice easy to decode format, eg IFF, PNG etc.

2) make sure that if your datatype supports dithering (such as warpdt datatypes), turn them off for 15/16 bit screens. It doesn't look as good but error diffusion dithering from 24-bit to 15/16-bit takes *ages*.

If you have a PPC card with OS3.9, both of these issues are mitigated somewhat as the 3.9 picture.datatype can use PPC to do the colour reduction/dither and many datatypes come in PPC flavours.

If you want backdrops to look good in 15/16 bit modes (without dithering by the picture datatype), you can take your original 24-bit image and dither it down to 15 or 16-bit in a paint package first and save it in a non lossy format. You can't beat precalculation ;-)

[patrik]

@MarkAshley:

As the limiting factor when displaying the image most likely will be the cpu, the following things will help:

1. Make sure the image has the same resolution as your Workbench in advance so you can disable the slow scaling in WBPattern.

2. Save the image as a not-too-compressed format like TIFF (not TIFF with JPEG compression) or PCX (the 040 performs bad with large and highly compressed images).

3. Install the appropriate WarpDT for the format of the image.

Also, dont be afraid to try different formats!


/Patrik

[AmiDude]

@MarkAshley

In order to speed-up the drawing of the Workbench
contents, you can use the following programs(only WB3.5+):

ftp://de.aminet.net/pub/aminet/util/boot/fblit.lha

www.stephan-rupprecht.de/downloads/WBCtrl.lha

Put it in your startup-sequence somewhere after the
Setpatch command.

C:FBlit
C:Wbctrl IMT=ICONFAST

Also, it's best to use a backdrop picture in the same
resolution as you Workbench and make sure it's in
IFF/ILBM format.
I use this settings with my A4000/060/PIV and the
Workbench backdrop (24Bit - 800x600) loads within 2 seconds!

:-)