Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!ur-tut!ur-cvsvax!srs!dan
From: dan@srs.UUCP (Dan Kegel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Super EGA cards survey?
Message-ID: <917@srs.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jun 88 18:21:57 GMT
Reply-To: srs!dan@cs.rochester.edu (Dan Kegel)
Distribution: na
Organization: S.R.Systems
Lines: 17

In article <248@octopus.UUCP> pete@octopus.UUCP (Pete Holzmann) writes:
> [ discussion of display speed (in chars/sec) on various EGA cards ]
> If your system isn't getting much speed out of the SST test, check your
> BIOS. Some of the Taiwan clone BIOSes (esp. DTK) are real DOGS.

The IBM BIOSes I've seen listings of do an amazing amount of busywork
to display characters, and are therefore slow.  
For this reason, most professional programs simply bypass BIOS when writing 
to the screen.
Users of such programs will see NO difference in speed between slow
and fast BIOSes.

Device drivers like NANSI.SYS and FANSI-CONSOLE bypass BIOS, too,
and take care of all the nasty details of bypassing BIOS for you.
-- 
  Dan Kegel   "Take this job..."
  srs!dan@cs.rochester.edu  rochester!srs!dan dan%srs.uucp@harvard.harvard.edu