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From: bard@jessica.stanford.edu (David Hopper)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: How fast can the NeXT do Animation
Message-ID: <1991May6.024252.12256@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 May 91 02:42:52 GMT
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In article <3gbG4*$*1@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
>
>don't know how fast the NeXT really is.  The #'s quoted here are
>*quite large* and I'm not sure I will believe them until I see some
>better animation with my own eyes.

Nor I.  Thanks for the skepticism, Mike.

>-Mike
>
>===========================================================================
>From: aozer@next.com (Ali Ozer)

Poor Ali.  He was an Amiga-ite before he was brainwashed by Jobs.
(Wotta hypocrite I yam ;-).

>It all depends on what you do, but my experience is that "3-4 times slower"
>is not the general case.

Well, MY experience is that 3-4 times slower IS the general case.
Only rarely is it NOT that slow.

>Fiddling with the various user interface objects, typing, scrolling,
>searching, compiling, debugging, etc are all zippy; the color machine feels
>as fast as the NeXTstation in most cases.  The few times when the
>[...]
>at first. However, once the window is up and is in use, drawing,
>scrolling, moving, etc are all real fast. Certainly not 3-4 times slower.

Well, of course this will depend on the configuration.  I've used a
NeXTstation Color, and it was slower in practice (although it WAS faster
than my '030).

>(from /NextDeveloper/Demos) with a screen-sized window. It runs at about
>70-75 frames/second on the NeXTstation, and at about 35-40 frames/second
>on the NeXTstation Color.  With a monochrome image, the frame rate
>goes up to 80-85 frames/second on the color machine.  With the default sized
>window, the frame rate is 105 on *both* the NeXTstation and the
>NeXTstation Color, and 130 with a monochrome image on the NeXTstation
>Color. (These are all highly informal timings by the way, I just did
>them while typing this message up. Not official benchmarks by any
>means!)

Not official?  These are ridiculous.  I wonder what he used to do the
timing.  Try animating something large, even on an '040.  You can SEE
the frame rate, meaning it's at best well below 30fps.  It's jerky, as
well.  If an object is partly off-screen, it will visibly speed up; it's
also clear that maintaining a high frame rate consistently is
impossible.  Even BreakApp gets jerky.  Welcome to Mach, folks.

>Anyway, my experience has been that during every day, steady state usage the
>NeXTstation Color is certainly not 3-4 times slower than the NeXTstation;
>for most things, it's as fast.
>
>Ali, Ali_Ozer@NeXT.com

I think it's pretty much understood that the NeXT has not the real-time
OS that the Amiga has.  If the state of animation on the NeXT is
exemplified by the movies and games provided on-disk (c'mon, it's been
two years now), then the NeXT is no competition when it comes to
animation.  Even if Ali seems to think it is ;-)

Dave Hopper      |     /// Anthro Creep  | Academic Info Resources, Stanford
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