From:       Steffen Häuser SHaeuser@quark.de
To:         amiga-news.de  team@amiga-news.de
Subject:    H2 News
Date: Wed,  24 Nov 1999 14:02:10 +0100

Hi!

(Any replies please to MagicSN@Birdland.es.bawue.de)

I recently tested the latest Beta Version of Heretic II (i am Betatester)
concerning speed, and did a speedtest, where i compared the speed with the
speed on the PC of my
little brother of the PC Version of Heretic II. In both cases the SOFTWARE
RENDERER was used.

Hardware Data:

Amiga:

Cyberstorm PPC 604e 150 MHz (yes, only 150, i have a lowend 604e Board...)
Cybervision/PPC
OS: AmigaOS 3.0 (3.5 is ordered, but not yet arrived)+ WarpOS V4

PC:

Pentium II 300 MHz
Riva TNT (TNT 1) Based AGP-Bus Graphics Board
OS: Windows 95

Remember: All speed is done with SOFTWARE RENDERER, for both systems, for
fairness :)

The values (i tested at different places, but of course PC and Amiga version
were always tested at the same place):

Level                Amiga Speed (150 MHz)        PC Speed
(300 MHz)

dmandoria                 31 fps                 60 fps
oglemine1                 35 fps                 72 fps
oglemine1 different location with         24 fps
45 fps
lots of monsters visible
hive1 (lot of transparency FX)          9 fps                 27 fps
no typical situation for the game

And now some values in a higher resolution:

Startlevel in 400x300             24 fps                 41 fps
Startlevel in 640x480             10 fps                 19 fps

On an average i was usually (in 320x240) at:

                    25-30 fps                 around
50-70 fps

I estimate on a 233 MHz the average should be around 40-50 fps in typical
situations...

What do we learn of this ?

1. On an average the Amiga Version has the same speed like the PC version
   (at least if we had a PC with the same MHz-number, 31*2 = 62 fps
   for example, where the PC version had 60 fps, the Amiga Version 31 fps
   (first example)

2. Massive Transparency Effects are the death for every software-renderer,
   no matter if Amiga or PC. Luckily these effects are not displayed
   all the time. Situations like at the start of hive1 only happen in very
   few situations (hive1 is actually the slowest level in the whole game, it
   seems, at least at a certain position in the level)

3. The speed value of Heretic II is actually quite nice, even on a lowend
   PPC like mine, on a 233 MHz you will have values around 233/150 times
   as fast.

4. We can expect much more from 3D Hardware (Warp3D Support) (On PC there
   was a REALLY HUGE speedup for 3D Hardware, especially
   when Transparency was involved)

5. PCI/AGP did not give that much more speed than PowerUP-Bus/Zorro 3 (i did
   not do actual speedtests of Z3, but it is not
   that much slower than on Zorro 3. Also WB Window Mode is also not that
   much slower - though of course slower)

I was also told by Hyperion that they are currently making much progress for
the 68k version, and that it looks good that probably 060+software
renderer will be fast enough to get the game playable.

Steffen Haeuser