@PARAFILTR ON = @BANNER = Ventura Publisher<190> @APP NOTE = Application Note #5 @NAME = Subjects: Accelerator Cards Speed improvement Ventura Publisher is the only IBM PC desktop publishing program which is fast enough to run on a good old-fashion IBM PC/XT running at a 4.77 MHz clock rate. Many people have been successfully producing documents on these machines for many years. However, while Ventura Publisher is much, much faster in drawing the screen and managing documents than the competition, the IBM XT definitely runs out of gas if your document contains lots of graphics or uses many of Ventura Publisher's advanced features like column balance, or Professional Extension features like tables and vertical justification. In addition, even if you are accustomed to the screen draw speed on an XT, you can dramatically improve your productivity by having the screen draw faster. Of course many of you are quite comfortable with your XT computer and don't really want to upgrade to an AT or 386. However, for a modest investment in a piece of hardware called an accelerator card you can improve performance of most Ventura Publisher operations by a factor of three compared to a 6 MHz 8086 computer. The technology described here should provide even greater percentage gains if installed on a 4.77MHz 8088 XT. This application note describes installing the SOTA 286i accelerator card in a Xerox 6065 (this is identical to the ATT 6300 and Olivetti M24). Although this particular accelerator card was chosen because is received the highest marks in a number of magazine reviews, the benchmark figures provided in this note give you some indication of what to expect with other similar accelerator cards such as the Microsoft Mach 20, Orchid Tiny Turbo, and AST Hotshot. Another alternative is the Intel Inboard 386/PC which will outperform any of these, but of course costs somewhat more. Street prices for the 286 accelerator cards range from $250 to $450. Street prices for the Intel Inboard 386/PC seem to be about $600. Both the SOTA 286i and Microsoft Mach 20 have the option of accepting a companion 16-bit memory card which allow them to achieve full AT performance (12 MHz AT performance in the case of the SOTA 286i) and to run OS/2. This companion board was not installed for these tests. @HEAD 1 = Installation To install the SOTA 286i card, you remove you computer's 8088 or 8086 processor, plug a cable (supplied with the card) into the now-empty socket, place the old processor into the card, and then plug the card into one of your computer's expansion slots. You then install a device driver in your CONFIG.SYS file and that's it! Your same version of DOS and all your programs still work, only faster. Using various hardware techniques this board achieves up to 13.9 processing speed improvements compared to the IBM XT. However, since most operations require accessing large amounts of RAM and since this RAM is still accessed through the XT's 8-bit bus, most speed improvements are not as great. In addition, hard disk operations remain exactly the same speed, although since many hard disk operations involve computation as well as data transfer, you will notice significant speed improvement on some disk operations such as opening Ventura Publisher chapters. @HEAD 1 = Benefits The real benefits for Ventura Publisher users of this technology are in the following areas: @BULLET 1 = Screen redraw. The time is takes to redraw a screen is dramatically less. The SCOOP page redraws in <$E1/2> to <$E1/3> the time required for an 8086 computer. Measure the redraw time (as described on page 2) on your computer and compare with the figures shown on page 3 to see what sort of improvement to expect. @BULLET 1 = Pagination. If you move from page to page a lot within a multi-page document, you know that Ventura Publisher formats each inte<->rmediate page when you go from, say, page 3 to page 7. As long as the document completely fits into conventional memory (or in the case of the Professional Extension, EMS memory), this time is determined entirely by the processor speed and RAM access times. Therefore, even compared to an 8086 6-MHz system, you will see approximately a 3x speed improvement. @BULLET 1 = Chapter loading. Even though opening a chapter involves significant disk access time and even though, as mentioned above, disk throughput is not improved at all, Ventura Publisher requires a significant amount of processing power to load a chapter because of it creates a large number of internal data structures, and because it inserts all possible hyphen into the text during the loading process. Therefore loading times, especially with long documents or documents containing a large number of paragraphs, such as lists, will load significantly faster. @HEAD 1 = Further speed improvements You can further improve speed, potentially by a very large factor, by purchasing an additional companion card to the SOTA 286i which provides high speed memory and allows the SOTA 286i to access this memory via an AT 16 bit bus. This card will be available in mid-1989 and sell for $295 list, unpopulated. It can hold up to 8 megabytes. Once installed, you can still access the rest of the memory in the system and use it for RAM disk or a print spooler. In theory this 16-bit daughter board should give you the equivalent performance to a 12MHz no wait state AT, except for disk operations which will still be the same as before. It should also let you take advantage of HIMEM.SYS which increases the conventional memory available to Ventura Publisher by about 56K. This board was not tested, but it is highly likely that theory will prove correct in this case. This companion board also will allow the SOTA 286i run OS/2, although with a slow hard disk this may not be all that useful. @HEAD 1 = Description of tests Test system: Xerox 6065 (Same as ATT 6300 or Olivetti M24). This is an 8086 system that operates at 1.9 times the speed of the IBM XT. Display: 600 x 400. 1.5 megabytes of EMS 4.0 supplied by Intel Above Board Plus. 640K disk cache using Super PCKwik. On-Screen Kerning was set to 18 in the Set Preferences option in the Options menu. The CONFIG.SYS file used when the SOTA 286i was installed is as follows:<$&Frame 1[v]> Norton benchmarks were performed with the Norton Utilities version 4.5 SI program. The Compatibility List chapter consists of 43K bytes of text formatted into nine pages. It contains a very large number of paragraphs. This results in a large amount of calculation time during loading, but little disk activity. Screen redraw for the Compatibility List chapter on page one was much longer than on page nine because most fonts on page one are italics (for which no screen font exists). This forces Ventura Publisher to scale the screen font in real time. The SCOOP chapter times were included to give you figures against which you can compare. The loading time was measured from the time OK was selected in the Item Selector until the Item Selector dialog box disappeared and the screen began to draw. The screen redraw time was measured from the time the ESC key was pressed until the mouse cursor reappeared. The first screen redraw time was ignored. The screen redraw measurement was then repeated four times in a row and the results were averaged to yield the times shown. The Wordperfect, archive and unarchive measurement were provided to give a sample of what can be expected for other programs. Speed improvements vs. an 8088 system would likely be much greater. Finally, selected benchmark times for an original Compaq Deskpro-286 are included for comparison against a low-end AT computer. The SOTA 286i meets or beats this computer in most tests.