Computer hardware is undergoing rapid development and its capabilities increase every month. Video cards are becoming faster, CPUs continue to increase in speed, disk drives are larger and faster than ever, and system memory has become inexpensive enough that desktop systems usually have 512 Mb or more of memory installed. OS/2 users, however, often believe that they will not see real improvements in OS/2 performance with newer hardware due to a lack of specific driver updates for OS/2. Can this really be true? Sounds like an opportunity for some testing!
Last month, I described
here a new Opteron 240 system that was built to run OS/2 and has
hardware that is typical of what is currently being sold. It
would be interesting to see if benchmark testing would show any
improvement in the performance of OS/2 when running on the new Opteron
new hardware compared with another Athlon XP 1700+ system containing
typical two-year-old hardware. What makes a comparison of these
two systems especially interesting is that both CPU's have an internal
clock speed of 1.4 GHz so any differences in performance will be due to
factors other than the clock speed of the CPU. Here is a summary
of the two systems we'll use for our testing:
| System
1 |
System
2 |
|
| Processor |
Opteron 240 |
Athlon XP 1700+ |
| Motherboard |
ASUS SK8N |
ASUS A7M266 |
| Memory |
512MB dual-channel DDR 333 Mhz |
256MB DDR 266 Mhz |
| Video Chipset |
Nvidia FX5200 with 128MB |
Matrox G450 with 32 MB |
| Disk Drive |
West. Dig. WD1200JB 120 GB
ATA/100 |
West. Dig. WD40BB 40 GB ATA/100 |
| IDE
Controller |
Nvidia Nforce3 |
VIA® VT82C686B |
To begin our tests, we need to find a benchmarking program that will run on OS/2. The venerable Sysbench 0.9.4g is widely available and provides a pretty good range of tests which evaluate several specific performance areas. Another handy OS/2 video benchmarking application is the Clear and Simple Software VidPerf benchmark which you can download and try on your system as a comparison. Finally, we'll time some real-world file transfers between volumes as a check on our benchmark results. So, let's begin!
Video performance is central the look-and-feel that we experience on
our systems as users so let's start there. System 1 has an Asus 9520
video card with an Nvidia FX5200 chipset, 128mb of memory, and support
for AGP 8x while System 2 has a Matrox
G450 video card which supports AGP 1x, 2x, and 4x and has 32
mb of onboard video memory. Based on these hardware
features, we would certainly expect the video performance of
System 1 to be much better than System 2, so what does Sysbench tell
us?
| Sysbench Graphics (million
pixels/second) |
System 1 |
Sytstem 2 |
| BitBlt
S-> S copy |
531 |
187 |
| BitBlt
M-> S copy |
336 |
19 |
| Filled
Rectangle |
2219 |
842 |
| Pattern Fill |
2216 |
842 |
| Vertical
Lines |
46 |
13 |
| Horizontal
Lines |
1138 |
106 |
| Diagonal
Lines |
22 |
23 |
Sysbench runs a series of graphics tests that show a clear
winner here. System 1 is significantly faster in graphics
performance on every test. Let's see what the Vidperf benchmark
shows, though. Running Vidperf three times and averaging
the results gives a result of 2.38 seconds.
Above is the image from the third test. Running Vidperf on System
2 gives a result of 7.63 seconds. It looks as though Vidperf
supports the results that we saw on Sysbench and the video performance
on System 1 smokes System 2 by a wide margin. System 1 is
running the Scitech SNAP driver v2.2.2 while System 2 is running the
Matrox drivers for OS/2 v2.58.144. Some of the credit for the
video performance of System 1 must be given to Scitech for its SNAP
driver package for OS/2. Scitech claims to be offering AGP8X
support for OS/2 and, based on the results above, it looks like they
are delivering on that. Here is the configuration screen
for the SNAP drivers:
So, let's move on to file input/output operations. Both System 1
and System 2 are using ATA/100 IDE disk drives manufactured by Western
Digital and both are running with the DANIS506.ADD IDE driver replace
for IBM's IDE driver. What will we see in speed difference
between the systems? Running Sysbench gives the following
results.
| Sysbench
File and Disk Results |
System
1 |
System
2 |
| File
I/O-marks, kilobytes/second |
43113 |
21794 |
| Avg. data
access time, milliseconds |
13.3 |
13.8 |
| Cache/bus
transfer rate, megabytes/second |
71.8 |
83.0 |
| Track 0
transfer rate forward, megabytes/second |
47.5 |
46.5 |
| Middle track
rate forwards, megabytes/second |
42.6 |
40.1 |
| Last track
rate backwards, megabytes/second |
24.7 |
23.3 |
| Average
transfer rate, megabytes/second |
38.3 |
36.6 |
| Disk use CPU
load, percent |
3.1 |
5.2 |
| 64k
sequential, cached, write, kilobytes/second |
59887 |
39517 |
| 64k
sequential, cached, read, kilobytes/second |
62521 |
17686 |
| 64k random,
cached, write, kilobytes/second |
36154 |
25253 |
| 64k random,
cached, read, kilobytes/second |
86728 |
12131 |
As a check on these results, let's do a real-world test in which we
copy 16 files, with a combined size of 47 megabytes, from one HPFS
volume to another HPFS volume on the same disk drive. System 1
accomplishes this task in a speedy 5.15 seconds while System 2 requires
5.90 seconds to copy the same files, a 15 percent greater
time. Based on the Sysbench results, System 2 is much
slower on reads and somewhat slower on writes.
The general conclusion from this limited testing is that OS/2 appears
to benefit much more than I would have expected from the hardware
found in new systems, for graphics, file transfers, and disk
operations.
This article is courtesy of www.os2ezine.com. You can view it online at http://www.os2ezine.com/20031016/page_3.html.