Hi All,

An interesting question came up recently where someone said to me that AmigaOS was/is the fastest windowing system on the planet! That got me thinking, is it? If not, then what is? I am not sure!

I took the phrase "fastest windowing system" as how responsive it is. you may have your own interpretations though!

I am quite interested in what you all think is the fastest one!



Catcha,
Epsilon

Last edited by Epsilon on 05-Feb-2015 at 03:38 AM.
Last edited by Epsilon on 05-Feb-2015 at 03:28 AM.
Last edited by Epsilon on 05-Feb-2015 at 03:26 AM.

@Epsilon

I would think that FTDIs EVE would have a definite possibility of being the fastest today, as it is a Dedicated Display List GUI generator, but I cant remember if it can handle native 1080p HD out at 100 Hz, where AGA can only do 30 Hz.

It has a very mall amount of memory as well, meaning code has to be compact, and pumped through high speed buses, again leading to a possible higher speed of generation.

Until things are built and directly compared though, maybe the fastest is that which can render a new window in the frame after activation, which is limited by the refresh speed of the display and the driving chipset?

_________________
The older and more respected a scientist is, the longer it takes to prove him wrong.

@Epsilon

I dont think so. On my A1200 windowing system slows down to unusable when you have 10 windows open. It is just impossible to do anything. Thomas Richter on a.org explained why it is so slow.

These days compositing window managers are fast and only depend on your GPU.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@Epsilon

In the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, Amiga had the best refresh rate available, which is one of the reasons why NASA preferred Amiga to other platforms.

_________________
I sold my SAM460ex lite... waiting for money to buy a Raspberry Pi... or a Classic A1000 with Buffee... or an A1222... and OS4.3 FE update 11

@PhantomInterrogative

I also remember reading that NASA liked the fact that you could reboot an Amiga relatively quickly when things got confused.

Gives you a few more chances at communication with that satellite before it all goes a bit Kerbal Space Program on you...

_________________
"Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil."

@Epsilon

I would think MenuetOS would be very snappy.

Last edited by TheKorn on 05-Feb-2015 at 07:34 PM.

_________________
Raptor BlackBird (awaiting a Miggy like OS)
Amiga 4000 3.9 / Pegasos II 4.1 F.E.

@TheKorn

Interesting OS - thanks for the link. Might have to give MenuetOS a go! Have you used it much? What hardware is best for it? (I did see the compatibility list but not many computer brand models are listed)

@all

Yeah, AmigaOS certainly does slow down when lots of drawers are open on Classic Amigas. Especially with the default icons slowing down drawer loading times. It is better on the X1000 of course with AmigaOS4.1 and much faster CPU and Graphics cards, but still noticeable when lots of files are in the drawers...I wonder if this responsiveness is improved with SSD rather than traditional hard disks...on NG and Classic systems...

Catcha,
Epsilon

Quote:

In the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, Amiga had the best refresh rate available

Having a fast refresh rate doesn't make the OS GUI fast: Amiga's intuition has always been slow. Increasing colors makes it even slower...

There's a reason why there were so little games using the GUI. Slow UI routines is also a reason why so many people bypassed the OS.

Having a task using too much CPU will also slows everything down.

I don't know what's the fastest GUI but it's certainly not the Amiga.

What about BeOS ? Never used it, but it was known to be really responsive. Actually it was written with that in mind. Unlike the Amiga's GUI.

Last edited by Leo on 06-Feb-2015 at 12:39 PM.

_________________
http://www.warpdesign.fr/

@Leo

Ahhh, now I know what the f… evil frog is taking about, and its not refresh rate that’s normally about monitor but AGA/OCS has low refresh rate, not high refresh rate, made to work on TV's, way do people think we are using scan doubles and flicker fixers?

Quote:

What about BeOS ? Never used it, but it was known to be really responsive. Actually it was written with that in mind. Unlike the Amiga's GUI.

Not it was QNX, real time operating system, the ideas was it was supposed to guaranty a response time, I think its just marketing bull..

Many people wished and wonted AmigaOS to be a Real Time Operating system, but that does not make it one.

Amiga was hackable, it was well documented, Apple was not well documented, NASA need computers they can design cards for, pull and send data too, as well as an efficient OS with graphics. (PC's sucked at the time.)

More important AmigaOS has graphics, while Unix systems at the time was terminals, AmigaOS was used as graphical interface for Unix computers in some cases.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 06-Feb-2015 at 02:04 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 06-Feb-2015 at 02:00 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 06-Feb-2015 at 01:59 PM.

_________________
http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

Objectively (as in all things being relative) it would be. Of course, subjectively personal experiences will vary; I mean, if you have the GPU draw the windows and the system has high-end SLI GPUs then the speed would (should) be awesome.

Given computer and UI architectures of the '80s and early '90s, outside the lab, the Amiga OS with its ROM based Intuition, and its object oriented architecture, user first philosophy, with relatively low CPU/RAM requirements, it had the most predictable and consistently speedy and responsive windowing systems. The Amiga was in many ways a product of the limitations of the time and looking back Amiga OS was a UX pioneer.

The only place one can find consistent UX these days is with iOS and other smart phone/tablet OSs, and with game console UIs. These platforms also work with limitations, though most of them born from different realities i.e. 7+ year hardware design cycles, limitations of human interface devices, application modality, etc.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@agami,

Used many systems however, Amiga has always been the most responsive, clock for clock it can't be beat.

@Epsilon

Quote:

Epsilon wrote: I wonder if this responsiveness is improved with SSD rather than traditional hard disks...on NG and Classic systems...

It would make no difference at all for classics, First problem, fitting a sata drive, second problem is the bus speed, even on my A4000/060 with a scsi-3 harddrive the highest read speed I ever got was around 5.5mb/s, IDE drives gave around 2.2mb/s.

On NG systems it can make a small difference, considering that normal sata hard give around 30-60mb/s it's not really worth the expense to shave a second or two off booting times.

A greater difference would be made by keeping your drives defragged and optimised for icon loading.

_________________
OS4 Rocks
X1000 beta tester, Sam440 Flex (733)

Visit the Official OS4 Support Site for more help.

It may be that your sole purpose is to serve as a warning to others.

Quote:

On NG systems it can make a small difference, considering that normal sata hard give around 30-60mb/s it's not really worth the expense to shave a second or two off booting times. A greater difference would be made by keeping your drives defragged and optimised for icon loading.

You ever had an SSD? Loading speed does not matter at all unless you launch big binaries like OWB or MPlayer. Even an SSD slower than your harddrive will increase your system speed unless you load big binaries, where the speed is noticable.

Trust me. The first time you boot from an SSD on your Amiga System it feels like you just inserted a ultra fast turbo board, even it just increased the loading times of everything.

Funny that you point out fragmentation, as fragmentation has no effect on SSDs as there is nearly non seek time. Searching for icons is a simply not existing (around zero vs. several milliseconds on a harddrive). They just get loaded.

Even a lousy 22MB/s SSD/CF card is outrunning any HDD in most disciplines. When it comes to an SSD: Even the slowest SSD is doing 400MB/s these days.

I would never ever step back to use a harddrive. Especially as fragmentation of the file system is never happening again.

Geit

@Epsilon

Hello fellow country man.

I took the subject as to being the fastest on the planet now. But the responses went back in the past.

I don't know how fast the Mac was with its two colour screen but that should have made it quick. Then there is the Lisa. Could we also go back into 8-bit GUIs like GEOS?

I found on my A500 the GUI was a bit dog slow. After a while just using the Workbench brought the machine down as it managed all those window layers. My A1200, even with chip ram only, was faster and better in that respect.

@geit

Quote:

Even a lousy 22MB/s SSD/CF card is outrunning any HDD in most disciplines. When it comes to an SSD: Even the slowest SSD is doing 400MB/s these days.

That's not going to make any difference when the maximum transfer speed of the A1200's IDE bus is 2 MB/S. A hard disk is already vastly out-performing that these days.

@danwood

Thats what I told below. ANY SSD connected to IDE is faster than IDE Speed and probably faster than possible SATA Speed depending on the hardware (SATA Level) and driver quality.

Still the near zero seek times will boost the loading speed compared to a harddrive.

These days SSDs are always faster than harddrives. The only down sides are size and price.

All my main systems use SSDs these days and their size is 16GB, 64GB, 64GB and 120GB. The latter is used in Pegasos2 as 24/7 server drive. Beside the 16GB drive all systems are not even half filled, so the size/pricing argument is quite obsolete for me, as I store my huge data piles on mirrored NAS drives.

Geit

Last edited by geit on 09-Feb-2015 at 02:58 PM.

@severin

There might have been something wrong with your set up, An A4000 with a SCSI3 controler on the accelerator card can do more than 30MB/s.

Last edited by Jose on 09-Feb-2015 at 03:42 PM.

_________________

José

@Jose

Quote:

There might have been something wrong with your set up, An A4000 with a SCSI3 controler on the accelerator card can do more than 30MB/s.

It was a scsi-2 controller (cyberstorm MkII) with an adaptor card plugged into the drive which was a half height 16gb seacrate from way back in the 90's, My best drive was a "Digital" scsi-2 which gave the 7 mb/s but was only a 520mb, ok back then but useless now. My A4000 is long gone, using an X1000 now with a sam flex as a backup machine.

@geit

Ok, you caught me, I've never used one as I can't afford it. but from what I've heard on ML's and forums they didn't seem to make much difference but that was a couple of years ago, the drives have improved.

_________________
OS4 Rocks
X1000 beta tester, Sam440 Flex (733)

Visit the Official OS4 Support Site for more help.

It may be that your sole purpose is to serve as a warning to others.

@geit

Quote:

Funny that you point out fragmentation, as fragmentation has no effect on SSDs as there is nearly non seek time.

Defragmentation, however, can have noticeable effect on drive speed. A negative effect, that is (on systems that lack TRIM support, such as AmigaOS)

That's why you should never defragment a SSD partition.

(Thought I'd mention that here, since lots of people have commented about doing that lately)

But about SSD vs HD...

When powering up, HD needs to spin up. Sometimes this takes so long, that Amiga gives up, and shows the "insert disk" screen, after soft reset it boots normally.

Most drives aren't quite that slow, but this waiting time is effectively 0 on SSD drives. (doesn't matter that much on most X86 systems, for example, as bios takes longer than Amiga to reach "bootable state")

Even with defragmented HD, when booting AmigaOS, you can easily hear lots of drive head noise. Why? Because the OS is accessing lots of separate files, and even if files are defragmented, the HD has to find the next required file. This is called seek time, and it's way lower with SSD's (It's so fast the drive head noise is perfectly inaudible!!! )

So on power on, you get combined effects of spinup time and seek time for several small files. On reset, only the seek time has effect. SSD is faster in both cases, especially the first one.

Long time ago I wondered if someone made a program, that would somehow "combine all required files to one", which would then copy certain bundled files (ENVARC: for example) to ram:, execute startup-sequence etc.

Certainly would make booting faster, but would be incredibly complex, probably have tons of incompatibility issues hard to find, need update after any modification etc. - Well, back then I never thought of such "minor details"

Last edited by Jupp3 on 09-Feb-2015 at 07:39 PM.

so what's the best defragmenter program for OS3, OS4 etc.

_________________
____________________________
c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
mancave-ramblings
X1000 I BELIEVE