Re: New IIgs owner.

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Roy Miller <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:

>Supertimer wrote:
>
>> Suffice to say that I have used an Amiga 500 before and the IIGS'
>> processor is not nearly as slow as its Mhz will lead you to believe.
>
>Was this caused by CPU power/speed, or OS/GUI overhead? In otherwords. Were
the two
>chips at those two different speeds really nearly equal, or was the Amiga
forced to
>do more than it's CPU should have been asked to do? OR, was it a matter of
RAM, so
>that the 512K of the Amiga was forced to go to disk too much?

A combination of things.  The IIGS's 2.8Mhz do not translate into the
equivalent
of a 2.8Mhz 68000 or 80286 that's for sure.  During the IIGS's day, Byte
magazine compared the speed of the IIGS to the IBM AT and they ran about
the same so the IIGS's processor is a good match to an 8Mhz 80286.  I'd
say this would be near 6Mhz on a 68000 so yes the Amiga's actual speed
would still be a little faster.  The highly optimized state of the IIGS
operating
system and programs pulls it the rest of the way.

Try using any GUI whether early Windows or GeoWorks on an 8Mhz 80286
and you'd instantly realize a IIGS running System 6.0.1 is 1) much faster
and 2) quite an achievement.

I am an avid PC user now so I don't have my head in the sand but I can still
say that in the early days of the game, the IIGS was quite a bit ahead of the
PC.  It took nearly 10 years for the PC to overtake what the IIGS had from
the start...I'm talking about the whole package including OS, GUI, sound
and graphics.

The breakthrough came around 1995 in my opinion.  Windows 95 combined
with improvements in PC sound (finally moved away from 4-voice FM synth
SoundBlaster) and graphics (3dx's introduction of the Voodoo graphics
accelerator) blasted the doors open and there was no catching the PC from
then on.  It took a long time before Apple could be bothered to put the lowly
ATI Rage graphics chip on Macs and more recently, Radeon chips (finally,
decent 3D for Macs).

PC multimedia hardware is so powerful now that I don't get why folks still
buy dedicated gaming consoles.  Who wants an X-box or Playstation2
when an Athlon XP based PC with a Geforce3 video card would do all
that those boxes can do and more?