#Animation Speed & 030
12 messages in this thread
Can the maximum speed of complex animations (i.e., hi-res or those with
many pixels changing between frames) be increased significantly with an
030, or are there other limiting factors?
It depends on how you're playing the anims. If you're doing it all with
the blitter, the 68030 won't help a bit. If you're using a combination of
blitter and 68030, it might help a little, and if the whole thing is being
done with the processor, it might help a lot, although you still have
limits in the speed of CHIP RAM. One way around that would be to assemble
each frame in FAST RAM using the 68030 in it's entirety, and then copy it
to CHIP RAM. This would speed up most anims, although it might slow down a
few with virutually no pixel changes per frame.
Actually, I suspect that you could approach if not reach the maximum 30
frames per second rate doing it in that last way. But I haven't tried it.
Of course, the tradeoff there is that you've now got the 68030 doing all
the animation work, and you've lost the ability to do a lot of processor
work while the animation is playing.
–>Steve Bennett
On a 3000, chip ram is accessed 32 bits at a time instead of 16 bits, which
can make for a significant performance improvement.
-Mike
I'm using Elan Performer, and don't know whether or how much it's using the
blitter. For worst case anims, top speed appears to be about 4 fps and I
need 15. I suspect it is swapping between chip & fast because it doesn't
access disk once its going, and anim in memory is > 1 Meg.
Bill, the biggest culprit to limiting frames/sec you can display is the use
of double-buffering. I didn't believe it at first when I heard it, but in
practice I've found it to be quite true. Try not to use double-buffering
techniques, especially in not-so-efficient packages like Director.
Thanks. I noticed the same results with double buffering in Elan
Performer.
Which 030 do you have?Is it the one for the 2000? is it the 28 mhz or the
33 mhz? Also whered ya get it from? Last question does using the 030 speed
up rendering times at all?Thanx for the help
I do not have an 030; hence my questions.
Bill, I have just been experimenting with playing a 40 frame digitized
16color high rez anim assembled in Dpaint (this is probably a worst case
situation) through Amigavision. I can tell you that there is a great
difference between play back on my 030 equipted 2000 (smooth and video
like) and our stock 2000 at school (sloooow!!).
-Paul-
I was hoping that would be the case. Would you say the increase is
anywhere near 4x ?
Yes that seems about right. The animation was saved out of dpaint III with
a frame rate of 15 fps. The 030 2000 appears to play back at that rate
while the stock 2000 cranks out about 4-5 fps. Again this is a playback
through Amigavision. I don't think you would find as great a difference
through a simple anim player (less demand on the system).
-Paul-
Many animations that tried to run full-speed on a stock Amiga go so fast as
to look positively silly on an '030 machine. On average, you will get much
more flexibility in the frames/sec you can display.