Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!gblock From: gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Gregory R Block) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: NeXT Press Release Message-ID: <11053@uwm.edu> Date: 15 Apr 91 19:28:04 GMT References: <2361@pdxgate.UUCP> Sender: news@uwm.edu Reply-To: gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu Distribution: comp Lines: 71 Originator: gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu From article <2361@pdxgate.UUCP>, by hal@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Aaron Harsh): > The terminal emulator I'm running on the '030 NeXT in front of me scrolls > back and forth between my previous screens in real time. I don't know what > advantage you'd get on an Amiga. (Faster than real time? :-) I haven't felt > the need to use my copy of Improv yet, but I don't see any reason why it would > be any slower drawing a couple hundred columns of text than this would be. Gee, I thought that was the point I was trying to make. That spreadsheets aren't much in the way of intensivity of screen stufff. Of course, people on the Amiga scream sometimes if it's not as fast as CED, which is supposed to be INSTANTANEOUS. Everything is on the screen at once, I guess. Definitely not something I think that DP could handle, compiled or not. If you can render a page of text onscreen INSTANTLY, tell me. > I don't know how you got this idea into your head that you'll be twiddling your > thumbs while you waiting for a block of text to pop up, but it's completely > false. It probably does take longer to draw a page of text, but it's very > hard for a human being to tell the difference between 10ms and 100ms. I didn't say it was THAT slow, please don't put words into my mouth. I just was saying it adds to the overall sluggishness of the NextStep system. I think it would be better if it were more responsive, and there isn't much that DP is good for. Not to make it worth slowing down the whole system. There are things that you NEED to do with a windowing system that would not need DP, and if you could turn it off, you'd speed up the windowing system just enough so that it wouldn't feel like spongy cheese. > Which is more display intensive: animating a hundred polygons or drawing > a couple hundred lines of text? Spreadsheets and terminal emulators don't > display much. They just calculate. (Well, I suppose terminal emulators read > data from ttys). So... DPS won't affect the spreadsheet or terminal emulator > user. (At least it won't affect it more than it will affect the flight > simulator user) At high enough speeds, it would interfere all right. I'm not talking about 2400 baud here. > So what you're saying is that unless you're running video games in the > background or furiosly waving your windows around the screen, your programs > won't be slowed down by Display Postscript. So you're trying to tell me that video games and waving windows around are the only thing that takes up display time??? Is that it? What about things like screen-redraws of graphics. I'm not talking bitmap. With the amiga, you can optimize your own routines. With DP, you can only hope that it's optimized, which it isn't. Take a look at the code sometime. > > Try comparing Quickdraw (not interpreted) on a 25mhz Mac IIfx agains DPS on > an '030 NeXT. The Amiga is faster than either one of thses because it has > special graphics hardware. The Mac is not much faster than a NeXT. For a > ~10% speed decrease, you get a graphics environment that's powerful, easy to > program, and consistent across devices. > > Aaron Harsh > hal@eecs.cs.pdx.edu And look how much smaller QuickDraw is compared to DP. And I never said I liked the speed of QuickDraw, either. But it's faster than DP. If it was DP, I doubt it would run much at all on the 68000 plus. QuickDraw on a 68000 is faster than DP on a 68040. Says something, don't it? -- - gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu - | IBM's brain is on overload, and Apple Gregory Block | needs to be potty-trained. C= may not Toaster+Amiga=The One True DTV | be marketing geniuses, but theyre the ________________________________| best engineers I've seen... -Wubba