CompuServe Messages

Bill, Well, let me back off a bit on what I said before. Display speed depends on a variety of things — the way a particular GIF picture was saved, the width of the pic, and the number of bit planes in the pic. Typically, the lower the res and fewer the bitplanes, the longer it will take to display. (The following observation is based on a 9600 connect). If there are multiple lines to be displayed per 1k block from the BPlus transfer, the slower it will be. As an example, when viewing a 640 x 480 256 color pic, that translates into about 1.5 scan lines of display per 1k block. For that type of pic, I've been getting a thruput of about 960 cps (you can't get the next block until the current block is displayed). However, if the pic is a 1 bit plane (2 color) that could translate to 10 to 20 scan lines of display to be done before the next block can be gotten, so you could get an effective cps of 300-400. These pics are the exception and relatively rare — the vast majority of online pics are 16 or 256 color. It's interesting to note that the higher the color density the faster the transfer/display. -sja