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From: wayneck@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM (Wayne C Knapp)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A new Amiga...
Message-ID: <5415@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM>
Date: 19 Jan 90 19:27:33 GMT
References: <4144@wehi.dn.mu.oz> <1051@sdrc.UUCP> <10302@microsoft.UUCP> <15588@well.UUCP>
Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or.
Lines: 62

In article <15588@well.UUCP>, farren@well.UUCP (Mike Farren) writes:
-> tom@microsoft.UUCP (Tom McConnell) writes:
> 
- >I've played around with flight sim on a '486, and it _way_ outperforms
- >the Amiga's ability to display fast complex graphics.
> ...
> Second: FS uses some very specific techniques to achieve its speed.  Its
> performance is NOT a general-purpose graphics benchmark.  More telling
> would be a comparison of the speeds of the '486 and the Amiga doing things
> like line draw, rectangle move, rectangle move with masking, area fill,
> etc. - things the blitter handles on the Amy.  Not that I'm saying the
> '486 wouldn't still win, but I think the Amy might surprise you; it'd 
> likely be a lot closer than you might expect.  And this without even
> considering the power of the CPU to be doing other stuff while the blitter
> does its thing.

Yes you would be surprised!  You would find out the following!

   a) While drawing both systems are limited by the bus interface to the
      graphics memory.  This is the real bottle-neck.  
   b) While drawing at okay speeds - the Amiga system blitter calls have
      a huge amount of overhead in them so much that a tiny blit takes 
      about 3 milli-seconds.  This really hurts the the Amiga since it
      3 msec. is long time to waste in computer time.
   c) Most people talk about blazing blitter speed have never written code
      that uses that blitter and don't know what they are taking about.
      (I wrote my own blitter interface routines.  This is where I learned
      most of the people talking about the blitter are only talking and not
      blitting) 

Now I like my Amiga 1000 very much.  I still program on it every day.  But,
when it comes to raw drawing speed it is hard pressed to complete in any 
way with the newer PC clones.  Let's hope that the 3000 will be a major
improvement in this area!  Newer PCs are getting fast.  Still the Amiga is
pretty impressive considering it came out in 1985!
 
- >Even a '386 running at 20MZ is faster than an amiga when running flight sim.
- >But a '386 at 16mz, well, that's getting more in the ballpark.
- >Remove the floating point chip, and it's closer even more!
> 
>Hmm.  So what you are saying is that a system which costs (conservatively)
>seven to ten times what the Amiga does will definitely outperform it, one
>that costs only five times as much might outperform it, and one that costs
>three times as much would go neck-to-neck (without multitasking, of course :-).

Huh?  My 25Mhz 386 with VGA 100Mbyte disk cost $2770?  I does bet my Amiga 1000
hands down in everything as far as speed goes.  But you mean I can buy a new
Amiga 500 system with say 20Mbyte hard disk for less than $400? Also PC clone 
prices have dropped a lot since I last bought.  You need to get up to date. 

I think that is one reason why the Amiga is having a hard time in the market,
PC clones are getting really cheap for the power you get.  In 1986 there was
the 7 to 10 times price difference but not today.  Not only that but these
cheap PC clones are starting to have a lot more graphics abilites than the
Amiga. 

We should try to be realistic when comparing the Amiga to other computers.
The Amiga has many strong points, but slowly some of its old strong points
like graphics are becoming weak points. SO COMMODORE HOW ABOUT SOME POWER 
FOR THE PRICE!!?!!   IT IS TIME FOR A MUCH BETTER AMIGA!!!!  

                                         Wayne Knapp