Any way to speed up image loading?

[fitzsteve]

Hi Ya'll!

Hoping for some advice, I've sold the WarpEngine 040 that was in my A4000D and all I had to put back in was my A3630 so now it's just 25mhz EC030 but there's some good news, I have fitted an FPU

It's not a basic A4000, it's still got all the excessive pimping and I was wondering if there is a way to get images to load faster.

I've got RTG, CV64/3D to be precise and plenty of Ram (16mb+128mb Z3 Ram) I also have a Deneb & Tocatta but they're not going to help :dry:

The OS is really quick, I've installed Classic Workbench P96 (based on Workbench 3.1) and it's nipping round really fast indeed windows, icons, etc all load fast. But it really struggles with images, the backdrop takes almost a minute to load and even the small IGame screen shots are slow.

Is there anything that I can go to speed them up? I'm running 800x600 16bit via the CV64/3D but that shouldn't be a struggle for a 4mb RTG card...

On the plus side, everything works well, the Deneb is operating happilly in DMA mode, the Tocatta is working nice with the native audio passed through.

Anyway, Cheers in advance for any help

 

[tlosm]

Hi Ya'll!

Hoping for some advice, I've sold the WarpEngine 040 that was in my A4000D and all I had to put back in was my A3630 so now it's just 25mhz EC030 but there's some good news, I have fitted an FPU

It's not a basic A4000, it's still got all the excessive pimping and I was wondering if there is a way to get images to load faster.

I've got RTG, CV64/3D to be precise and plenty of Ram (16mb+128mb Z3 Ram) I also have a Deneb & Tocatta but they're not going to help :dry:

The OS is really quick, I've installed Classic Workbench P96 (based on Workbench 3.1) and it's nipping round really fast indeed windows, icons, etc all load fast. But it really struggles with images, the backdrop takes almost a minute to load and even the small IGame screen shots are slow.

Is there anything that I can go to speed them up? I'm running 800x600 16bit via the CV64/3D but that shouldn't be a struggle for a 4mb RTG card...

On the plus side, everything works well, the Deneb is operating happilly in DMA mode, the Tocatta is working nice with the native audio passed through.

Anyway, Cheers in advance for any help

I mate, only little help can do warp datatype for 68k plus put the image on fast ram (cybergraphix setup) with your configuration will be better the cybergraphix 4 better with your cybervision 64 3d

 

[tokyoracer]

I am curious too as to what the "Amy" way is. Hehe.

 

[Ed.D]

Just a thought. If I recall, there used to be a setting in Prefs to load icons using "other" memory, which I think is Fast memory, leaving valuable chip ram for other graphics stuff. Not sure if you have this Steve, it may have been part of MUI or WB3.9. Maybe your CV64 has something similar?

I'm also wondering if the ADDBUFFERS command could be used anywhere?

 

[ChaosLord]

But it really struggles with images, the backdrop takes almost a minute to load and even the small IGame screen shots are slow.

Is there anything that I can go to speed them up?

Put in an 040 CPU. 25Mhz 040 is triple the speed of 25Mhz 030. That is 300%.

Or put in an 060. 060 is quite a lot faster than an 040.

If u lack a spare house u can sell to pay for an 060 then there is a simple trick u can do: Convert all ur superduper slowmotion .jpg images into a normal format like IFF or Targa or any other uncompressed format. .jpg wastes huge amount of cpu power.

 

[fitzsteve]

Thanks for the tips guys. I might try CGX4 and see if that's any better

I'll convert the .jpg's first and see what difference that makes. I'm pretty sure the IGame Screen Shots are already IFF but they're still slow.

If I get another CSPPC then this Amiga will inherit my CSMkIII, of course that will speed things up

 

[hooverphonique]

if you in any way can make your bitmap images match the setup of the framebuffer, it should help.. i.e. use 8 bit images for a 256 color workbench, etc...

 

[Tomse]

someone asked the same question some months back.

and as ChaosLord mentions, the decompression of the JPG images take alot of power.

conversion to IFF is a good start

 

[ChaosLord]

Thanks for the tips guys. I might try CGX4 and see if that's any better

I'll convert the .jpg's first and see what difference that makes. I'm pretty sure the IGame Screen Shots are already IFF but they're still slow.

Ok could you check these IGame screenshots and tell me what exact format they are?

If you view with a good viewer it will tell you the format and depth of the image. Maybe part of the problem is that they are IFF-24 and you are using a 16-bit workbench and it is having to scale the colors of every pixel down before displaying? .jpg would have the same problem if you are running a 16-bit workbench. Selecting a 24-bit or 32-bit mode is easier to deal with assuming the software is written in a reasonable fashion.

Or maybe the pics are just really big and are getting scaled down, that will burn a huge amount of CPU power.

The way you describe it I think it might be 4 or 5 different problems all hitting you at once.

But isn't this the same computer that used to have an 040 and everything worked great? To me that says that this is a 100% "Slow CPU problem". You need to understand that the 030 cpu is really really slow. It has almost no L1 cache at all. Not enough to decode .jpg efficiently at all. Also I am thinking that .jpg benefits from an FPU. 030 has no FPU at all. You can add an external one but it is very sloooow compared to the FPU that you get free inside your 040. The very fastest integer instructions on 030 take 2 cycles. On 040 they are only 1 cycle. On 060 they 0.5 cycles. Between the slow instructions, lack of cache and lack of FPU its a miracle that your computer can even boot up.

030 was awesome in 1987 when it came out. It featured dual L1 caches. Intel didn't think of that until many years later. But 040 just completely blew it away in 1990.

 

[bdb]

Steve, this brings up an old question: hard drive speed (or network transmission speed) vs decompression speed. Or, "How long does it take to get a file into memory, vs how long it takes to decompress it for use." The complexity of compression-to-decompression vs the file size to load.

So the smaller the file size and the fewer number of CPU cycles determines the display speed if access speed is not changeable.

The Warp data types are faster at a cost of £\$, decreased colors really does help, make the picture size fit the screen size (the OS can "fit" the picture to the screen size, but it is very slow), and such.

 

[fitzsteve]

Thanks for all the tips, I was hoping maybe for more efficient datatypes, etc. I know a faster CPU will be the obvious solution, I just sold the WarpEngine so I know how fast it was with that

Eventually this A4000 will inherit my CSMkIII but for now it has to live with the A3630

I'm going to head up to the office and have a little play now

---------- Post added at 18:01 ---------- Previous post was at 17:17 ----------

Problem solved (sort of)

I knew the 030 would be slower than the 040 but the general workbench speed vs images load (extremely slow) I just didn't think it was running right. :dry:

Turns out I left the OS3.9 Rom updates in my Deneb and something in there was really slowing down image loading.

I re flashed the Deneb with just the basic bits I need i.e USB drivers and SCSI.Device, etc.

Images are much faster now, not lightning fast, but as I expected they would be.

So peeps if you change your OS and CPU remember to change the modules left if the Deneb flash, some do more harm than good! oh: