On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 07:57:58AM +0200, lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote:
>
> I remember using AutoCad 2.6 on an 8086 with a floating point
> accelerator and being impressed by the speed of its 3D rendering. I
> have no idea how AutoCad behaves these days, but faster rendering
> would imply finishing before it even started. So where is the real
> improvement?
>
You could have been impressed with Microstation (originally from
InterGraph) doing everything in scaled integers (it was clear it
came from Unix world too by several features, like regexp) so using
only the CPU. It run smoothly on 386 with DOS and DOS extender.
Once they "ported" it to Windows 95 and NT, we waited years for
the hardware to be able to give back the performance we had with
"poorer" hardware and OS. It almost took 10 years if I'm not
mistaken... And I hear that progress is "continuous". In another
world probably...
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
http://www.arts-po.fr/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
