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Vector graphics boost preview

By Chris Williams. Published: 23rd Oct 2004, 02:02:46 | Permalink | Printable

To be demo'ed at Guildford show

Here's an interesting yet cryptic email that arrived yesterday evening. Having spoken to sources to verify the news, here's the message (which speaks for itself):

Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:42:30 +0100
From: SIMON
To: Chris Williams
Subject: Faster drawfile rendering

Just to let you know that RISC OS Ltd will probably be showing a demo of fast drawfile rendering.

This demonstration will be brought to you by SIMON.

SIMON is a third party development team, working closely with Advantage Six and RISC OS Ltd to enhance the Adjust-32 experience.

The software demonstrated by SIMON will demonstrate that, on average, a RISC PC utilising SIMON's developments can render drawfiles significantly faster than any other RISC OS machine currently available on the market, including Iyonix. Benchmarks will be released at a future point in time to demonstrate this. As an approximation, this machine utilising SIMON for drawfile acceleration can plot drawfiles at up to 30 times the speed of a StrongARM RISC PC equipped with a ViewFinder. Similar speed improvements are found elsewhere across the desktop.

The aforementioned project appears to be under tight wraps, but we believe it is credible and is sensitive to the A9 range.

Developing...

Links

South East Show

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Discussion

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Yowch. That's cryptic indeed. Sounds pretty boggling. I do hope someone at the SE Show will take pics and report on suchlike for those of far far away.

imj on 23/10/04 2:23AM
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Sounds interesting? If not some sort of graphics acceleration, it must be nifty software!

jonix on 23/10/04 2:24AM
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Having re-read it a couple of times, it seems a bit odd that it mentions the ViewFinder specifically.

jonix on 23/10/04 2:26AM
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Well...

When referring specifically to drawfile rendering, one may think it uses some new FP routines? The author also mentions briefly "similar improvements" are also seen across the desktop. Is this SIMON perhaps an 'ARM wizard'?

What hidden strengths are yet to be found?

hEgelia on 23/10/04 3:26AM
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Doesn't ArtWorks (and the other CC software) have some sort of fast Drawfile renderer anyway?

I also thought that Viewfinder was especially slow at rendering Drawfiles (can't be bothered to turn my RPC on to check).

As far as SIMON goes, it's not me!

simo on 23/10/04 4:03AM
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Simo: where lots of complex rendering is involved, ViewFinder can be up to 7 times slower than VRAM, but that means at worst a 4x speed-up from the SIMON s/ware. It's a pity a similar speed-up can't be applied to VF...

George

bucksboy on 23/10/04 2:19PM
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From what I've seen, there's very little difference between a VF and a non-VF RISC PC with respect to drawfile rendering speeds.

The best way to check that would be to use the Drawfile render SWIs to render the same (large) drawfile in BASIC and checking OS_ReadMonotonicTime to see how fast it takes.

md0u80c9 on 23/10/04 7:15PM
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Sorry - to clarify. What I meant by the above is not in the order of 7 times slower. I think that render speeds to vary by a few cs, and I would suspect around 2X worst case scenario.

Not the 'up to 30 times' quoted.

md0u80c9 on 23/10/04 7:17PM
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Obviously the author wanted to quote the slowest plotter of Drawfiles (the Viewfinder) so his speedup code looked extra quick? If he had quoted the speedup over the Iyonix, would ppl bother talking about it? ;-)

Many years ago the authors of ImageFS showed at a Acorn Show their code for plotting lines to the screen very fast. It could do transparency, sprites, clipping and realtime moving of objects without the usual 'outline' shape on a humble RiscPC. I was gobsmacked when I saw it. Was anyone interested in putting this into RISC OS? No. Are they in this market any more? No. :-)

quatermass on 25/10/04 2:10PM
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Quatermass, No, but you can see it in Picsel Technology's software on selected PDAs and phones :-)

jogu on 25/10/04 8:51PM
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Speaking of phones, I want a Treo650. Shame about Blazer being the default browser though.

piemmm on 25/10/04 10:02PM
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Speaking of blazers, I want a new jacket for the winter. Shame the sales don't start until nearer christmas though.

Spriteman on 27/10/04 9:45AM
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