Author: Johan Klockars (as28-3-8.va.g.bonet.se)
Date: 12-01-2002 20:23
> Ok, Its slow. I dont mean just slow, I really do mean its bloody slow as hell.
The Falcon was never fast, but it shouldn't be as bad as what you seem to claim here.
> I have tried the 16mhz option, as well as the cache,
Never (except perhaps when trying to run some old ST game on it) use the Falcon without both caches turned on or in 8 MHz mode.
> the speed difference is next to nothing
Doing what?
> Under Magic 6, trying to move a window while also displaying the contents is worse than it is on an STE & HiRes...
Obviously, moving a window in monochrome HiRes will be the fastest possible on any normal Atari hardware. The Falcon should definitely be significantly faster than an STE at that.
If you are comparing STE/mono to Falcon/8 bit, you should not be surprised if the latter is slower.
IIRC, the ST could access RAM every 4th cycle, which should give a RAM bandwidth (to/from the CPU) of 2M/s * 2 byte = 4 Mbyte/s. The corresponding number for the Falcon is somewhere in the 6-8 Mbyte/s region at best (it depends on the graphics mode), if memory serves me right.
That is, the Falcon should be able to throw around about twice as much data per second as the ST, best case. Thanks to the caches, the Falcon has a better chance of getting close to that on real code.
> It takes nearly a second to update the window,
In what graphics mode?
It shouldn't be that slow even in 640x480x16 bit, and most definitely not in anything similar to the ST modes.
> I keep reading about the Falcon having a Blitter, and I know that they do not,
As others have mentioned, there is indeed a blitter in the Falcon, but it's pretty much useless. The '030 can do most things as fast as the blitter, with less setup overhead.
NVDI normally does not use the blitter on a Falcon, unlike the standard VDI, for example.
> I have been putting the Falcon head to head against both my TTs ( One is bog-standard, the other is a bit nippy ) and the Falcon gets stuffed in every way.
It should be, for anything that relies on the CPU. The TT has twice the CPU clock, twice the bus width, and burst mode RAM (TT RAM).
> NVDI on the TT increases the graphics speed by 5 times on some features, and up to 20 times with others!
Well, the TT did not have a blitter, and was burdened with Atari's less than optimal software implementation of that functionality.
> and yet it does next to nothign on the Falcon.
IIRC, the effect of NVDI is most pronounced in the less demanding modes. It's harder to beat the blitter when there are more bitplanes to deal with. It will also depend very much on what VDI functionality you are testing.
> Dont get me wrong, I really dont care as I am now going to be using an eclipe & ATI Rage,
The RageII is 'somewhat' faster at throwing pixels around on the screen. ;-)
(Copying to/from ordinary RAM has to go via the normal Falcon bus, unfortunately, but the driver tries to minimize that.)
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