The Quest for Speed! QuickST v2.21 Vs TurboST v1.84 <<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>> Reviewed by Gary Spiteri (ACE NSW) Using an ST/STE is fun! It's a joy to use because of its window enviroment, having everything graphically represented. However, because of its graphical nature, the ST demands a lot from its graphics system and to cap it all off, we users are an impatient brend and demand everything as fast as possible. We want windows to snap open and text to fly by. The only way to do this is with a screen accelerator. Atari itself introduced a screen accelerator when it released the MegaST - the Blitter Chip. The chips only job is to move memory very quickly, and speeds up the graphics display very well. This chip lives on in the STE/MegaSTE computers and although at its initial release, the Blitter was said to be available as an upgrade to all ST's it never happened and ST owners faced the prospect of being stuck with having slow displays. Incidently, the 68030 based TT doesn't have a Blitter chip because the 68030 processor itself does a much faster job! Anyway, to answer the pleas of ST owners, some very clever programmers coded the "Software Blitter" - this program did the job of a Blitter but faster than the Blitter itself! Until recently the two software blitters on the market were TurboST from Softrek and QuickST from Branch Always Software. Recently a third accelerator has come onto the market - NVDI but this is actually a GDOS replacement too, and is made by the same people who make OverScan. It is also recommended in conjunction with KAOS, and infact is only available from the programmers themselves in Germany. NVDI is thus a little out of this league interms of price and purpose and so I will restrict myself to reviewing the latest versions of QuickST and TurboST. QuickST v2.21 ============= This latest version of QuickST is the fastest version yet, and is advertised to be faster than TurboST (we will see...). Its list price is US$29.95 and includes a colour and mono version, control accessory, a cut down version (when memory and disk space are tight),MonSTEr (a big screen emulator), QuickIndex, QuickView and ArtST. QuickST is an \AUTO\ folder program which must be run at bootup and is controlled from a seperate accessory/program. In this accessory one can switch QuickST on/off, and choose desktop patterns/pictures. This configuration is the saved to the program (so that it will remember the configuration) and the only way to change the setup is to either keep the accessory in memory, or run the program version of the accessory. By setting QuickST to forget about using DeskTop pictures, QuickST will use as little as ~30K of memory. However having the control accessory installed will increase the memory usage. TurboST v1.84 ============= This is the latest version of the original software blitter. It retails at around US$32 and includes various versions for different screens/ graphics cards etc and a benchmark program. It is an accessory (although there is a \AUTO\ folder version) with different versions for colour/mono systems. The accessory has a dialog box to turn the accelerator on/off and it consumes ~60K of memory. It doesn't have the desktop pattern options of QuickST. SpeedTesting! ============= To test both programs out, various benchmark programs were used (details below) on a 4Meg 1040 STE with the Blitter on and running in High Resolution. Where percentages are given, 100% indicates the "normal" speed eg 200% indicates a 2 fold speed up. Benchmark 1: GEM_TEST.PRG from the NVDI package, all scores are relative to TOS 1.4 with Blitter on. Below is an edited copy of the *.BEN files that GEM_TEST.PRG creates. Tos 1.6 QuickST 2.21 TurboST 1.84 Blitter ON Blitter ON Blitter ON * * NVDI GEM-Test V 1.01 (c) 1990 by Sven & Wilfried Behne * * Betriebssystem : TOS 1.6 vom 29.07.1989 * Referenzsystem : TOS 1.4 * CPU : M68000 * Blitter : ein * Textausgabe : 182 % 799% 774% Linien : 192 % 268% 408% Rechtecke : 518 % 757% 802% Polygone : 113 % 113% 173% Kreise/Ellipsen : 104 % 104% 119% Rasteroperationen : 726 % 726% 725% Attributfunktionen : 100 % 346% 330% Auskunftsfunktionen: 100 % 101% 268% ESCAPES : 124 % 17773% (Wow!) 210% BIOS-Ausgabe : 115 % 225% 227% GEMDOS-Ausgabe : 110 % 708% 731% AES-Objekt-Ausgabe : 140 % 384% 374% Benchmark 2: SPEEDTST.PRG from the TurboST disk. The percentages in brackets are the calculated percentage speedup relative to the TOS 1.6 Blitter ON result. BIOS Function 3 paging Elasped Clock ticks: 4578 1861 1801 Elasped Time (Secs): 22.890 9.305 (245%) 9.005 (254%) BIOS Function 3 scrolling Elasped Clock ticks: 9107 6396 6262 Elasped Time (Secs): 45.535 31.980 (142%) 31.310 (145%) GEMDOS Function 9 paging Elasped Clock ticks: 9019 826 818 Elasped Time (Secs): 45.310 4.150 (1092%) 4.090 (1103%) GEMDOS Function 9 scrolling Elasped Clock ticks: 13541 5363 5279 Elasped Time (Secs): 67.705 26.815 (252%) 26.395 (257%) Benchmark 3: BMGTEFF.PRG from the QuickST disk. This program tests the speed of test in its various attributes. Expressed as /200ths Sec. Normal: 210 40 (525%) 42 (500%) Bold : 510 65 (785%) 42 (1214%) Grayed: 267 57 (468%) 267 (100%) Italic: 597 93 (641%) 597 (100%) Underlined: 235 47 (500%) 235 (100%) Benchmark 4: QuickIndex v1.8 (Commercial version) from the QuickST disk. All tests relative to TOS 1.6 with Blitter ON. CPU Memory: 100% 100% 100% CPU Register: 100% 100% 100% CPU Divide: 100% 100% 100% CPU Shifts: 100% 100% 100% DMA 64K Read: 193% 193% 193% GEMDOS files: 100% 100% 100% Disk RPM: 300 300 300 TOS Text: 100% 302% 302% TOS String: 100% 1241% 1282% TOS Scroll: 100% 103% 105% GEM Dialog: 100% 263% 256% Also included with QuickST v2.21 is MonSTEr, a big screen (1280*960 pixels) emulator that takes advantage of the STE's hardware scrolling routines and is sped up by QuickST v2.21. I like using MonSTEr with NeoDesk v3, and STalker can use it to give a 80*60 character terminal emulator. As a test, I tried TurboST and QuickST running under MonSTEr compared to TOS 1.6 running MonSTEr. The program GEM_TEST.PRG didn't work under MonSTEr but the rest of the benchmark programs did. TOS 1.6 TOS 1.6 QuickST TurboST with Blitter and MonSTEr with MonSTEr with MonSTEr Benchmark 2: SPEEDTST.PRG from the TurboST disk. The percentages in brackets are the calculated percentage speedup relative to the TOS 1.6 Blitter ON result. BIOS Function 3 paging Elasped Clock ticks: 4578 4600 1864 4725 Elasped Time (Secs): 22.890 23.000 9.320 23.625 BIOS Function 3 scrolling Elasped Clock ticks: 9107 14744 12001 14743 Elasped Time (Secs): 45.535 73.720 60.005 73.715 GEMDOS Function 9 paging Elasped Clock ticks: 9019 9062 826 9063 Elasped Time (Secs): 45.310 45.310 4.150 45.315 GEMDOS Function 9 scrolling Elasped Clock ticks: 13541 19201 5363 19201 Elasped Time (Secs): 67.705 96.005 26.815 96.005 Benchmark 3: BMGTEFF.PRG from the QuickST disk. This program tests the speed of test in its various attributes. Expressed as /200ths Sec. Normal: 210 211 41 211 Bold : 510 512 65 512 Grayed: 267 269 57 269 Italic: 597 600 94 600 Underlined: 235 237 47 236 Benchmark 4: QuickIndex v1.8 (Commercial version) from the QuickST disk. All tests relative to TOS 1.6 with Blitter ON. CPU Memory: 100% 99% 99% 99% CPU Register: 100% 100% 100% 100% CPU Divide: 100% 99% 99% 99% CPU Shifts: 100% 100% 100% 100% DMA 64K Read: 193% 193% 193% 193% GEMDOS files: 100% 100% 100% 100% Disk RPM: 300 300 300 300 TOS Text: 100% 99% 301% 99% TOS String: 100% 99% 1233% 99% TOS Scroll: 100% 24% 24% 24% GEM Dialog: 100% 99% 262% 99% CONCLUSIONS: ============ Although Branch Always claim in their adverts that QuickST is faster than TurboST (I can say that Branch Always do a slag campaign against TurboST in their adverts), TurboST _is_ faster, and by around 5-10%. It seems that everything QuickST can do, TurboST does better (expect in MonSTEr mode). To illustrate this compare the results of BMGTEFF.PRG. QuiskST (in its manual) claims it speeds up all text attributes, and indeed it does. TurboST claims to speed up Normal and Bold text only - and it does, but it speeds up Bold text to the _same_ speed as the accelerated Normal text of 42/200 sec. Compare this with QuickST's 40/200 and 65/200 sec for Normal and Bold text respectively, this means that Bold text is an extra 4 times faster than QuickST. Most text displays are Normal and sometimes Bold text is used (users of LED v1.00 will relate to this) and so even though QuickST speeds up Normal text slightly faster than TurboST - this speed advantage is totally lost when Bold text is introduced. In MonSTEr mode however, TurboST doesn't speed the system up at all (infact it slows it down in some respects), where as QuickST virtually speeds up the MonSTEr screen by the same amount as a normal screen. I'm not surprised by this result since MonSTEr is optimised to use QuickST and not TurboST. On a more serious matter is the question of compatibility. In normal use I find that the \AUTO\ folder program QuickST is very fussy about its order in the folder... and problems have occured. In fact the makers of Overscan state in their manual the QuickST uses some bad programming techniques and illegal calls to the operating system. The effect of this is so great, that that software running OverScan has switchs to turn off certain features if QuickST is to be used and so prevent QuickST from crashing the system. TurboST on the other hand has no such problems and the accessory itself can be DCSquished very nicely and works fine - the same cannot be said for QuickST. The options from the external QuickST controller accessory/program are nothing new, there are pleny of programs that can do the same. TurboST's all in one accessory form is much easier to use and thus is always available for turning it on/off. And finally to the companies themselves. As mentioned Branch Always are currently running a dirt campaign against TurboST boasting that QuickST is much faster than TurboST (we've proved that wrong already). Dealing with Branch Always Software directly is a _very_ slow process (it took 2 months for my QuickST to arrive from them) and the customer service and fequency of upgrades are well below the standard Softrek offers. In fact, since QuickST v2.21 has been released, TurboST has gone from v1.82 -> v1.84 and upgrades are cheap and quick. It seems that Softrek don't waste their time with empty boasts, they just enchance a better product. In the past TurboST was much more expensive than QuickST, but a recent price drop has brought the two products in the same price bracket. Infact the upcoming QuickST III will be much more expensive than TurboST. So which should you use.... If you are going to use an accelerator for everyday use I recommend TurboST. However, if you want to use the MonSTEr screen, and want some little extras then go for QuickST. QuickST v2.21 (US$29.95) TurboST v1.84 (US$32.00) Branch Always Software SofTrek 14150 N.E. 20th Street P.O. Box 5257 Suite 302 Winter Park, FL 32793 Bellevue, WA 98007 USA USA <<<<*>>>><<<<*>>>><<<<*>>>>