Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!texbell!vector!egsner!csccat!larry
From: larry@csccat.UUCP (Larry Spence)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Win3.0 speed
Keywords: Windows, win3.0, 3.0
Message-ID: <3715@csccat.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jun 90 19:26:41 GMT
References: <3118@phred.UUCP>
Reply-To: larry@csccat.UUCP (Larry Spence)
Organization: Computer Support Corporation. Dallas,Texas
Lines: 38

In article <3118@phred.UUCP> stevel@phred.UUCP (Steve Leach) writes:
>
>FYI, Using PC Magazine's test application for MSWindows I got the following
>results.  This application is called Display Information, version 1.20
>written by C. Petzold.
>
>The results:
>               win286/v2.11	       win3.0 		win3.0
>                in 640x480           in 640x480       in 800x600
>Lines             2.4                   4.2              4.4
>Rectangles        6.9                   9.0              9.8
> [ ... etc., Win 2.11 generally won over 3.0 ... ]

This isn't really fair.  The PC Mag benchmark measures atomic, low-level
screen-drawing throughput, not overall system throughput.  Although I was
a little surprised that things like line-drawing were _that_ much slower,
keep in mind that the main performance increases are at the application
level.  In other words, the larger amount of available memory makes _most_
non-trivial apps run faster.  Our app, a large (> 1 MB EXE) drawing program,
runs _much_ faster, especially when heavily loaded (complex graphics).  I
doubt if the PC Mag benchmarks even cause any code swapping while they're 
executing.  I don't know if they've got a 3.0-compatible version out yet.

The other thing is that if the benchmarks aren't 3.0-compatible, then you
might have been running in real mode (?).  Due to the larger system code in 
3.0, I would expect performance to drop in real mode, due to less available 
RAM.  What I would like to see is a protected-mode benchmark of 3.0-compatible 
apps like PageMaker, Excel, Arts & Letters (our app :> ), etc.  Things like
"time to load and draw large publication," "time to zoom and redraw," etc.

Our experience has been that many apps that were squeezed for memory in 2.X
now run very smoothly in 3.0 with some extra RAM (say, an extra 1 or 2 MB
over 640KB), even with other apps opened at the same time.

-- 
Larry Spence
larry@csccat
...{texbell,texsun}!csccat!larry