declan@remus.rutgers.edu (Declan McCullagh/LZ) (12/13/90)
A few days ago, I had the chance to play with a NS Color for a few hours. It's a fun machine to use, but somewhat less than blazingly fast for animation/window moving, etc. In fact, the perceived performance seemed to be less than a 68030 NeXT computer. It's to be expected, I suppose - moving 6x as much data with a processor that's "only" 3-4x as fast (even though the better FP performance does in part make up for the speed difference). A nice suprise was that many of the applications in /NextDeveloper/Demos are now in color and have color icons. $-) Automata, Billiards, BreakApp, FractalTrees, Molecule, Poker, Mandelbrot, TopologyLab, and Stealth are all colorized. Mandelbrot, in particular, is stunning. In excellent color and with better performance, it's easily the best Mandelbrot set generator I've seen on any computer (whatever that means). TopologyLab is also quite interesting - the 68040 makes it fly. Conclusions? If I had to use the computer for day-to-day work, I'd probably not opt for a NS Color unless I urgently NEEDED it for color applications-on-a-budget, as the NS Monochrome and the NeXTdimension systems are just _so_ much faster in UI performance... Disclaimer? Well, the NS Color was probably far from the final model. I'd expect better performance (though not vastly improved) in the final product. Declan McCullagh Independent NeXT Developer
zazula@uazhe4.physics.arizona.edu (RALPH ZAZULA) (12/14/90)
In article <Dec.13.01.15.56.1990.7404@remus.rutgers.edu>, declan@remus.rutgers.edu (Declan McCullagh/LZ) writes... > >A few days ago, I had the chance to play with a NS Color for a few >hours. It's a fun machine to use, but somewhat less than blazingly >fast for animation/window moving, etc. In fact, the perceived >performance seemed to be less than a 68030 NeXT computer. It's to be >expected, I suppose - moving 6x as much data with a processor that's >"only" 3-4x as fast (even though the better FP performance does in >part make up for the speed difference). > >[stuff deleted...] > >Declan McCullagh >Independent NeXT Developer Is it possible to run the NeXTStation Color in a MONO mode, making the screen manipulations faster? Specifically, I'm thinking of getting a Color Station and a MONO MegaPixel display and upgrading to a color monitor at some later date when I have a better cash flow. Is there some way to tell the station that it has a mono monitor and not to do the full 16 bit color? |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | Ralph Zazula "Computer Addict!" | | University of Arizona --- Department of Physics | | UAZHEP::ZAZULA (DecNet/HEPNet) | | zazula@uazhe0.physics.arizona.edu (Internet) | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | "You can twist perceptions, reality won't budge." - Neil Peart | |----------------------------------------------------------------------|