CompuServe Messages

Beware of a trap I just fell into: I had (have) an animation running that will take 22 days to render to get 22 seconds of animation. I have a GVP 33 Mhz 68030 Combo card. As I began thnking about ways to speed up the rendering I n otice some very low prices on GVP 33 Mhz G_Force '040 boards for the A2000. So I got one thinking that the rendering time would improve significantly. I didn't really believe the peolple who told me that I would get a 10 fold increase in the rendering speed. But I thought 3 to 4 times might be about right. Well, after I installed the card and did the "boot from WB floppy" to insure that the card was installed correctly, I then rebooted from my HD before I installed thier '040 unique software. SO I figured I'd render a frame while I was at it. SURPRISE!!! No differnce in time over the '030. At this point I figure I have to set up the '040 unique software. I do the standard install from the included floppy. It includes a library that allows the '040 to emulate the functions of the '882. Then I do a power down, wait 10, power-up. Start a fram rendering – nothig is happening, or so it appeared. On investigating further I found that it had just SLOWED DOWN so much that it appeared to be nothing happening. In fact is slowed down by about a factor of 4. In addition, I could n o longer get decent mouse movement on the screen (I bounce out of LW while it renders to do some otherwork occasionally). It seems that when the routines of 68040.library are invoked, that even the mouse pointer is locked out of updating for positional changes. Bottom line: the GVP G-Force '040 with Software emulation opf an'882 does not speed up rendering or anything else. I REALLY slowas it down. In addition the serial port wouldn't wok with AutoPilot (didn't try anythin else.). Save yer pennies for a better '040 implementation – like the 4000T. wmc – via Autopilot!