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1990-06-08
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BMVGTEFF
========
(Benchmark for vgtext effects)
By Darek Mihocka. Copyright (C) 1990 Branch Always Software.
Release date: May 25, 1990.
Branch Always Software
Box 2624, Station B \
Kitchener, Ontario - new address this summer!
Canada N2H 6N2 /
Compuserve: 73657,2714
GEnie: DAREKM
BMVGTEFF is a new benchmarking utility designed to benchmark areas of
GEM that earlier benchmarking utilities such as Quick Index don't cover.
In particular, BMVGTEFF tests GEM's ability to draw text to the screen
using different text effects. These text effects are bold, italic,
underlined, and grayed (or light), and are found in most word processors
such as First Word or Word Writer.
BMVGTEFF is extremely simple in it's operation. All it does it is
print 5 lines of text to the screen over and over again, each time
shifting the text over one pixel. Each line of text has a different
text effect. The first line is plain text, the second line is bold
text, the third line is grayed text, the fourth line is italic text,
and the fifth line is underlined text.
Each line of text will take between 2 and 5 seconds to print. If an
accelerator is installed, the results will be faster.
When this is completed, the program prints out five numbers on the screen,
representing the relative time it took to print each text effect. Plain
text is always fastest, and italicized text is usually slowest.
BMVGTEFF can be used to measure how much faster various accelerators
can make GEM at this particular operation. This is important because
many word processors, and other GEM programs, make use of text effects.
Unfortunately, this also has the effect of slowing the program down. If
you have ever tried to italicize text in First Word, you know how much
slower that is that using plain text.
Using the Quick ST 2.1 software accelerator, printing of GEM text to the
screen is made 2 to 5 times faster. The numbers below, measured on a
4 meg 1040STE, demonstrate this fact.
In each screen resolution, the program was run 3 times. Once with a bare
STE with the blitter turned off (which is a similar setup to a 520ST or
1040ST), once with the blitter turned on, and the third time with the
Quick ST 2.1 software installed.
Monochrome:
no blitter with blitter with QST 2.1
normal 499 210 40
bold 862 508 65
grayed 639 266 57
italic 797 596 93
underlined 555 235 47
Medium resolution:
no blitter with blitter with QST 2.1
normal 523 220 32
bold 901 435 44
grayed 678 277 39
italic 869 481 60
underlined 587 246 35
Low resolution:
no blitter with blitter with QST 2.1
normal 626 216 43
bold 1030 340 54
grayed 756 238 50
italic 1014 428 71
underlined 642 221 46
The numbers above show that in some cases, GEM text will be about
5 times faster than without using Quick ST. The blitter chip helps
a little, but is a far cry from what an efficient text drawing routine
is capable of doing. These same sort of speed increases also occur
when using GDOS fonts and Quick ST 2.1.
Users of Quick ST 2.0 (or earlier) or any other accelerator will not be
able to enjoy the benefits of this improved speed. Only one program,
Quick ST 2.1, is capable of speeding GEM up this much.
For more information about Quick ST 2.1, download the file QST21NEW.ARC
from GEnie, or the file QST21.ARC from Compuserve.