CompuServe Messages

Yes…that's why I mentioned 'full frame' animations…meaning the whole frame is loaded each time. Yes, if you're loading in only the deltas, then your data needs can be significantly smaller. The quality of the animation is also a concern. Something like a Disney full featured animation will have many more changes per frame than something like the typical 'Saturday morning cartoon' style of animation. The type of controller can also make a difference. A DMA controller can be reading the data while CPU is decompressing it. A non-DMA controller has to use the CPU to get the data off the drive, thus it's not available to do the decompression at the same time. So depending on how much CPU time is required to decompress, which is dependant on how much data is needed per frame, a DMA type card *may* end up being significantly better than a card that uses the CPU. IF the CPU needs aren't great, then both cards would come out about the same. As to data cacheing…again, it depends on how much data is needed. IF you need X amount of data off the drive, but the drive head can only travel over .75 X amount of data in that same time period…drive cache won't help since you can't cache data any faster than you can read it. However, if you only need X data and the heads pass over 2X amount of data…cacheing can speed things up significantly because the drive can 'read-ahead' and have the data already read and in cache before you need it.