NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/misc-part1/8245

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 3.5 KB

Path: fc.hp.com!news
From: [e-mail] (Steve Koren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.hardware,comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.amiga.games,comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Subject: Re: Why are europeans dumb enough to buy amigas?
Date: 15 Mar 1996 10:45:55 -0700
Organization: HP Fort Collins Site
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In-reply-to: Avi Lev's message of Tue, 12 Mar 1996 11:48:53 +0200
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Avi Lev <[e-mail]> wrote:

[ I took the liberty of reformating your text to 72 columns from 95 ]

> are you comparing an Amiga to a PC??  boy you are a making a mistake

I was contradicting your claim that Amiga graphics card resolutions
"cannot be imagined by PCs" by saying that the chipsets in amiga
graphics cards were developed >for< PCs, which in many cases have newer
and faster chips.  That's all - no more, no less.  :-)

> especially when it comes to the PC. in the PC everything has to have
> some CPU intervention while in the Amiga the CPU doesn't even handle a
> byte when it's related to graphics display,

Not quite.  The PC and the Amiga are very similar in this regard.  The
PC graphics cards do on-card bitblts and whatnot just as the Amiga ones
do.  Also, it is not correct to say that the "the CPU doesn't even
handle a byte...".  There is a fair amount of stuff that goes on at the
API level before the graphics card performs an operation.  This may be a
little or a lot depending on the operation in question.  It is hardly
correct to say the CPU does nothing.  At the very least there are
gfx.library stub routines involved that are executed by the CPU.

I haven't directly done the comparison, but it would not surprise me if
in many cases the PC APIs had less overhead (comparing both systems with
gfx cards), since the Amiga graphics APIs were designed for ECS, and may
not have been optimized for things like S3.

> there are advanced support chips reponsible for relieving the CPU of
> such tasks and thus true multitasking is very much possible on the
> amiga than on the PC.

This is a function of the OS, not the hardware.  The PCs have higher end
hardware in almost all cases, often by a large margin.

> the PC is decades behind the Amiga and when PowerAmiga comes to the
> scene, hell you'll be ancient history, something to remember the old
> days when the computers were being developed, believe me no Amiga
> owner was ever dissapointed s/he bought the machine, try working even
> with a basic A500 and see the difference and don't compare the 2
> machince by thier software support cuz that ain't a good measure, try
> running some benchmarks on a PC and an Amiga and you'll see the
> difference.

That's an impressive sentence.

I couldn't quite decipher what you meant here, but I believe you are
saying that I should try working with an A500.  I've never owned a basic
A500, but I have owned an A1000 (since the first few weeks you could get
them), two A2000s, and current use an A4000 with a Cybergfx card.
Although I own a PC, I use exclusively the 4000 for personal day to day
use and have written a fair amount of Amiga software, so I'm at least a
little bit familiar with how they work.  Your misconceptions are very
popular ones, however.  Many Amiga people believe that all graphics
operations on PCs are done exclusively by the CPU, but it isn't so.

   - steve