BAXTER_A@wehi.dn.mu.oz (03/30/90)
Well, I don't know all that technical stuff. Play with Multiplot sometime. If the extra processors don't do anything, why is plot drawing so much faster on an A500 than a MAC SE? OK. Maybe you're right, its not the chips, its just the mother board design. Who cares? Multiplot compiled on Amiga refreshes much faster than multiplot on a mac. Regards Alan
kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu (Kent D. Polk) (03/30/90)
In article <6209@wehi.dn.mu.oz> BAXTER_A@wehi.dn.mu.oz writes: >Well, I don't know all that technical stuff. >Play with Multiplot sometime. >If the extra processors don't do anything, why is plot drawing so much >faster on an A500 than a MAC SE? >OK. Maybe you're right, its not the chips, its just the mother board >design. Who cares? Multiplot compiled on Amiga refreshes much faster >than multiplot on a mac. >Regards Alan I don't believe that Wayne was trying to compare the speeds of Amiga graphics with that of other micros. I see what the rest of the machine can do & just wish the graphics could keep up without the gyrations one has to perform to approach what is needed. In my view, the Amiga is an excellent platform for low-end technical applications, vastly superior in resources than a PC (MS-DOS) or a Mac for pretty much everything except for graphics. The current graphics capabilities have been the only thing which has kept me and others from using the machine for such things as CT, radiology and infrared image processing, volumetric (3D) waveform processing, acoustic holography, synthetic aperture tomography, etc. in something approaching, if not reaching, real-time (except for tomography :^) For these capabilities all that I need is: - line drawing capabilities which are a minimum of 4x faster than current OS calls permit. - WritePixel speeds of at least 10x current OS calls. - minimum of 8 bit pixel information - preferably with a 'packed pixel' format as an option. Note that with 8 bits of packed pixel format, one can easily set color scaling to an acceptible resolution for most technical applications by simply changing the color scale. Currently, one has to remap the data to fall into the selected color ranges which are available. The packed pixel format would also allow one to simply point to an unsigned char array of engineering data or calculation results & blit it to the screen. Much faster than what one has to currently do. While there are ways to get around some of the limitations, there needs to be OS support for these capabilities to 'honestly' use the Amiga in many technical arenas. With the help of several on the net here I have been able to overcome some of these limitations, but I wish there was an OS supported way of handling these situations. Without the OS support, I have a much harder time justifying the use of the machine for these applications. Please note that I'm not complaining. I find the Amiga an incredibly refreshing machine to develop on (especially when hooked to a *nix machine), and a tremendous relief when I come from a PC-oriented project. Just wish I could use it for these other applications. I'll confess, I actually do all my PC project development on an Amiga & use Cross-dos to transfer the files for compilation. Despite all the disk handling, the Amiga is a far superior environment for even simple text editing. Sure beats a PC with even a PC-NFS connection to a *nix server. Will never go back. ==================================================================== Kent Polk - Southwest Research Institute - kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu Motto : "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing" ====================================================================