#OS/2 better than DOS
I had an opportunity to do some 3DS rendering comparisons between DOS and OS/2
Warp yesterday, but my experience confirmed my suspiscions…DOS isn't worth my
trouble! Here's why:
I just got a brand-new pentium-66 machine, 16M RAM, S3 864 video, 540M IDE hard
drive. It had DOS 6 on it, and I was going to install OS/2 Warp. Since I've
never had a machine that I could render with 3DS under DOS (I always use HPFS),
I used this opportunity to compare. I installed 3DSR3 from scratch under DOS
and brought up 3DS. My intention was to render a couple of samples under DOS,
then load OS/2 and do the same to compare. However, I spent 4 hours tweaking
the system, trying to get 3DS to render without hanging. I tried NO HIMEM,
HIMEM only, HIMEM+EMM386 (with various switches), and I could never get a
rendering to complete. I thought the hardware might be flakey, so I installed
OS/2 (heck, if OS/2 likes the hardware, ANYTHING should!). The installation
went off perfectly, 3DSR3 ran fine (I didn't even try tuning for best
performance), and I could not duplicate the hangs. For comparison, I rendered
all frames of CHOPPER.3DS from the camera view, 640×480 FLIC using low palette.
Render time was 13:15. The first frame took 20 seconds, the rest averaged 19
seconds. Under DOS on this machine, I never got it to render completely before
it locked up, but each frame took the same time, or 1 second faster.
I did notice 3DS loads a bit slower under OS/2, but after the rendering
experiment, I'm losing < 5% in performance by using OS/2. However, if today is
an example, I would have gained 100% in productivity. I also gain the ability
to do other things while I render, and even run 2 copies of 3DS on this machine
to do background rendering while I model. If Autodesk would let The Yost Group
work on an OS/2 version, we'd probably get BETTER performance than even plain
DOS, and with multi-threading capabilities, 3DS could expand to new limits. As
for DOS, stick a fork in it, DOS IS DONE!
If anyone wants to suggest other ways to get my system running under DOS (I
haven't wiped it out…yet), I'll be happy to try to compare performance.
— Doug Azzarito