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From: uzun@pnet01.cts.com (Roger Uzun)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A new Amiga...
Message-ID: <1204@crash.cts.com>
Date: 17 Jan 90 15:16:05 GMT
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Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 28

>> Tom McConnell talks about flight sims on 486 and how fast they are
>> mentions a 16 Mhz 386 sans math chip i s closer to amiga in speed

In graphics rendering speed, it would make little difference if one had
a 486 or 386 and absolutely NO difference if a 387 was added to a 386
system, because no flight sim I have ever heard of has any 387 code in it!
If you do see improvment in the performance on a 486 system, it means that
the program was taking a lot of time to calculate things, the code to
render the objects is limited by the BUS bandwidth of your VGA adapter,
and here you are looking at about 10-20 waitstates period, the fast the
processor, the more waitstates on your bus.  99% of all PC busses run
at 8 Mhz, a few will run at 12 Mhz.  In my experience updating an ega
display (320X200X16 color) is slower on a 386 machine (any speed, it makes
NO difference, but some VGA/EGA adapters do better than others) than
it is on an amiga, actually much slower.   The EGA screens jave a funny
memory architecture, and no special support hardware to access it.

So the speed increase you see on your flight simulator is due to increased
calculation speeds, NOT due to increased graphics speeds.  In fact in
all my tests, a stock amiga can easily outperform a 20Mhz 386 while
updating a 320X200X16 color screen, try some simple animations yourself
and you will see.

-Roger

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