>Well, if you're only concerned about speeding up video, then you're
>right. EISA isn't the way to go. In fact, under DOS EISA is a waste
>of money. It's practically impossible to saturate the ISA bus under
>DOS anyway. Of course, you could always buy an EISA video board (VERY
>expensive) or get a coprocessed board (so you send it 100k of
>instructions and it produces a 1M image -- also more expensive than a
>dumb frame buffer). All local bus does is save you a little money on
>the add-in cards. What do you do when someone comes up with a better
>coprocessed board and you're suddenly slower again?
Well, that was one of the earlier points of this thread. Coprocessed cards
are not very helpful in certain situations. They speed up text-scrolling and
other graphics-intensive operations, but are only a solution for some things.
If you are sending data a window or screen to be displayed, a coprocessor
on the card will do you no good. The card will still get the information
at a snail's pace on ISA, and there is not much to process. Just throw the
info out to get an image. So as you open a window, close a window, whatever,
It is still slow.
AND, because of the work involved in going through the driver and processor
(and in some cases from the accelerator to the VGA card), instead of just sending out the info, if you are doing something like throwing images out, some
coprocessed cards actually slow things way down compared to dumb VGA. Another
example, multimedia. say you are doing animation, paging screens. Dumb VGA
is going to go way too slow because of ISA, and coprocessed cards wont do any
better, with the possibility of doing worse.
Let's bring the Amiga back in. It can do certain things faster than ISA
computers because it does not have such a huge bottleneck.
I do not mean to belabor this, but I am just trying to say coprocessed cars
are not an end-all solution. If you really want it, get an LB card that is
