Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!psuvax1!news
From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger)
Subject: Re: NeXT/Amiga Flamage: Get a life.
In-Reply-To: es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu's message of 10 Apr 91 00:57:29 GMT
Message-ID: <d41G_cjl1@cs.psu.edu>
Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet)
Nntp-Posting-Host: sunws5.sys.cs.psu.edu
Organization: Penn State Computer Science
References: <!78Gjb8l1@cs.psu.edu> <10902@uwm.edu> <&5aGlabl1@cs.psu.edu>
	<1991Apr10.005729.22997@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 03:22:31 GMT
Lines: 24


In article <1991Apr10.005729.22997@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:

	   I must be missing something here. The 040 is about three
   times faster than the 030, right? And the color NeXT is 12 bits
   as opposed to 2 bits on the old NeXTs, or six times the bit
   planes. So, the color NeXT is twice as slow with the graphics/GUI
   as the original NeXT, right?
	   Truthfully I don't know what an alpha channel is. Is it
   basically an overlay screen?

It allows for transparancy so you can see through objects.

The NeXT OS 2.0 sped up the NeXT Postscript Display too.  I can't say
by how much, but there was a noticable difference on the Cube before
we upgraded to the 040 and after we installed 2.0.  I'm not sure how
fast the NeXTstation color is but it is definitely slower than the
NeXTstation mono.  A lot of the problems that people attribute to
Display Postscript are in fact due to paging.  You can do animation on
the NeXTstation color, but I'm not exactly sure how much on this
either since I haven't scrutinized a color machine .

-Mike

