watters@penguin.cis.ohio-state.edu (david r watters) (02/24/90)
In article <4358@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> pochron@cat6.cs.wisc.edu (David Pochron) writes: > >Speaking of the A2630 card...what's going on here in the March issue of >AmigaWorld where they benchmarked several '030 boards. Here's what they >achieved using Turbo Silver: > > A2630 GVP25 GVP28 H2800 GVP33 > -------------------------------------------------- > 61:04 36:38 33:52 39:46 31:26 > ^^ > What in the world is going on here?!? All the other boards finished >rendering in roughly half the time that the A2630 board took. The weird >thing is, all the other floating point tests gave similar results with respect >to all boards tested except for this test. Is there something about the A2630 >that makes it slower with TSilver, or did AmigaWorld just screw up somewhere? I think I know what was going on here! If I am right, this infuriates me, as it is the responsibilty of a powerfull magazine to present acurate data. The Boards were listed as being stock, so there is an overwhelming chance that the A2630 was a 2meg version. When you are using TurboSilver and have any decent sized data, that first 2megs runs out very quickly. This means the rendering was now being done in 16bit memory. Since 32bit memory is twice as wide, it makes sense that the render time would be twice as slow, which is what looks like happened. I have found this to happen with the A2620/2meg, and I think this magazine needs to be immediately contacted and FORCED to revise their findings! I helped out in the GVP booth at the July AmiExpo, and they were running an A3001 against an A2620 and the GVP was twice as fast with a Turbo Silver render, and we know that the A2630 is twice as fast as an A2620. During the demonstration, I had to make sure that the data stayed in the 32bit memory region on the A2620, as the GVP had 4megs on it. watters@cis.ohio-state.edu