3 ms·
Copper, scrolling, sprites etc., sure won't actually touch the frame buffer. What you're forgetting is the blitter, which indeed is a way for the Amiga to redra
by boomlinde 9y ago
Copper, scrolling, sprites etc., sure won't actually touch the frame buffer. What you're forgetting is the blitter, which indeed is a way for the Amiga to redraw the whole framebuffer faster than its CPU alone could handle, AFAIK well within the time span of a frame. Add game logic and other I/O to that and the difference could very well cross the line between not enough CPU and enough CPU.
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoWell, sure, but I guess I read what he was saying as "CPU can rebuild buffer before next frame", not as "CPU + specialized chips can etc." But if you read it the latter way, yeah, the Amiga creams the ST. But if what you're doing isn't something that the blitter can help with, the two are roughly the same. So for example, on the various 3d wireframe games that came out for those platforms (i.e. Starglider, etc.), the ST had a slight edge due to its slightly higher clock rate. In fact anywhere where it's just polygonal drawing, the ST had a very slight edge.
- z303 9y agoThe Amiga's Blitter actually has line [1] and polygon fill [2] modes. Obviously this does require code to be rewritten to take advantage of the extra hardware. On a CPU > 68000 the tradeooff between CPu and blitter is different [3] [1] http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node0128.html http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui... [2] http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node0122.html http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui... [3] http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=50815 http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=50815