--0-1040572081-941177205=:12120
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII



On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, John Duncan wrote:

> Also, I was wondering.  On my P233 ThinkPad, Morphic is a dog,
> especially in 2.6.  I heard people discussing the high speed of
> PMacSqueak and the dogginess of IntelSqueak.  The 'lassic, being a
> big-endian machine with tons of registers, is supposed to have an
> architectural advantage for Squeak over the Intels, but is this enough
> to make Morphic fast at low clock rates?

Often, if Morphic "feels" slow, the kind of graphics card you have or your
screen depth setting will matter as much or more than the type of CPU.
The benchmarks that come with Squeak measure message send and bytecode
speed, so they won't help you with figuring out graphics card/screen depth
issues.

So, I whipped up a simple benchmark which attempts to measure graphics
performance in Squeak.  (See the bottom of this message.  Run "Morph
simpleGraphicsBenchmark".)

It's fairly brain-dead... it just opens a workspace at a fixed size, and
scrolls a bunch of text up and down 20 times.  (It does temporarily
disable inboard scrollbars, which can be a factor.)  The results seem
fairly consistent.  Having a much larger or smaller default font makes a
slight difference in the outcome (though not much), so it's best to run
this with the default font settings.

The benchmark mostly exercises the DisplayScreen primitive, plus some
character scanning code.

Fancier benchmarks ("speed tests" might be a better term) could probably
be created which measure the performance of common Morphic operations such
as resizing windows (in non-fastDrag mode)...

Here are some results from some tests I ran.  (I ran 2 tests per screen
depth combination.)  Mostly, you just want to pay attention to the values
where Squeak's screen depth matches the host OS's screen depth, although
the other values can be interesting. (e.g., on the NT box, you pay a huge
penalty if the two don't match, but it's not as big on deal on the other
platforms.)

Anyway, I find Morphic very usable at a value of 1000, reasonably usable
at around 3000, and pretty tough to use above 7000 or so.

- Doug Way
  EAI/Transom Technogies, Ann Arbor, MI
  dway at eai.com, dway at mat.net
  http://www.transom.com



266 MHz Apple iMac:
                        8-bit Sqk:    16-bit Sqk:   32-bit Sqk:
Host OS = 8-bit:        1512 1510     2287 2282     3123 3138
Host OS = 16-bit:       2321 2330     2023 2027     3165 3149
Host OS = 24-bit:       3049 3024     2959 2978     3075 3044


300 MHz Apple iBook:
                        8-bit Sqk:    16-bit Sqk:   32-bit Sqk:
Host OS = 8-bit:        1226 1223     2033 2022     2870 2883
Host OS = 16-bit:       2247 2249     1621 1616     2752 2721
Host OS = 24-bit:       3431 3425     1983 1979     2586 2542


300 MHz VAResearch Pentium II, Windows NT, ATI 3D RAGE IIC AGP card
                        8-bit Sqk:    16-bit Sqk:   32-bit Sqk:
Host OS = 8-bit:        951 941       5257 5258     5548 5538
Host OS = 16-bit:       931 931       1282 1272     3395 3375
Host OS = 24-bit:       991 982       1682 1672     3315 3355
Host OS = "True Color": 1101 1112     1552 1553     1632 1612


180 MHz Toshiba Pentium I laptop, Windows 95, Chips & Tech. 65554 PCI
board
                        8-bit Sqk:    16-bit Sqk:   32-bit Sqk:
Host OS = 8-bit:        6829 6762     8574 8924     11489 11521
Host OS = 16-bit:       7432 7441     9282 9265     11523 11428
Host OS = 24-bit:       8162 8128     10184 10143   14288 14305




--0-1040572081-941177205=:12120
Content-Type: text/plain; name="simpleGraphicsBenchmark.st"
 ; x-mac-type="54455854"
 ; x-mac-creator="522A6368"
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="simpleGraphicsBenchmark.st"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: imap_stub

0,664,2,1628,26,

--0-1040572081-941177205=:12120--