Effect of CPU on icon loading

[MartinW]

I'm not really sure if the title is really what I mean here!

I have two main systems set up. One is an A1200 with ACA 030@40Mhz and a FastaATA, the other a GB-A1000 with 060@50Mhz and Oktagon IDE.

Now, the difference in responsiveness for drawing the windows (ie, loading/drawing the icons) is like night and day. The 060 based machine beats it hands down. It draws the windows pretty much like you'd expect a modern machine to do, while the 030 based machine isn't quite as bad as watching paint dry but it's not great.

Now, there are huge differences in software between the two machines (screen mode, no. of colours etc.) and I know that will have a huge difference. I'm going to make them match and see what the impact is.

Before I get too carried away though I just want to make sure that the 060 isn't giving the massive boost here? I was under the impression that without an RTG card the limiting factors were chip ram and HDD access. And that's where it is a bit weird because the FastATA machine is accessing the drive at nearly 3x the speed, yet it is the slowest machine.

So, in summary, is the 060 CPU whats making the GBA fly for screen updates?

[Daedalus]

There are a few things that will make a huge different to icon loading times. The CPU is indeed one, since icons have to have their palettes mapped to the current screen as they're loaded, which takes more CPU time to more precision and colours involved.

Other things also have a dramatic effect too, such as the drive itself (new drives are faster than old, and SSDs are faster for directories than mechanical), the filesystem used on the partition being read (SFS runs rings around FFS for example), number of colours on screen, icon system used (GlowIcons are slower than old-style 4-colour for example), and any patches the system uses, such as FBlit. Also, if you have something like DefIcons on one machine, that can slow things down, or create a larter difference between CPUs.

It's worth making as many things equal as you can, but the 060 will certainly make a difference when it comes to using CPU blitting, colour mapping, DefIcons and so on.

[MartinW]

Thanks for the clarification. I honestly didn't know the 060 was going to make so much of a difference in this case. It's become such a usable system now and that will only improve when I finish building the Picasso II card.

There are so many things different between the two systems that I think I want to standardise them both a bit anyway. One has CWB3.1, the other Amisys and I've never been overly happy with Amisys even though it looks nicer on the eye (I don't really like these prepacked systems at all if I'm honest but they do give you a lot of handy things setup from the start).

One thing I simply have no clue about is icons. I don't even know how to change the icon for a directory for example, let alone what kind I am using. I need to learn about that, probably by trawling through the massive "things you were afraid to ask" thread as that must have come up time and time again already.

During the week I bought a small IDE to SDCard adapter with a 128GB micro SDCard. I replaced the 8GB CF card that was in the GBA with it. This was before I fitted the 060 accelerator and while raw figures didn't show much of an improvement it certainly felt a little snappier. Nothing ground breaking, but definitely something. I always use PFS3D in the GBA and PFS3 elsewhere, I've never used anything else.

[UberFreak]

Since both Oktagon and FastATA dont use DMA, the CPU does all the grunt work of reading & storing to memory.