Hi.

This is the second in a series of Stupid Picasso Tricks. ftriangles displays
random Gouraud-shaded triangles on a 24-bit 640x480 Picasso II screen.

ftriangles v2.0 is between 2.5 and 3.0 times faster than v1.0 was.

ftriangles takes one parameter, the number of triangles to display.  The
default if no parameter is given is 10.  You can safely run it with a very
large number, as in 'ftriangles 1000000', and abort it when bored.  Any mouse
click or key should cause it to exit after the current triangle completes.

If you feed it a negative number, such as -100, it will run in performance test
mode.  In this mode, it may not be aborted.  To get results which may be fairly
compared, you should leave the Picasso screen in front until it's done.  With
a negative parameter, the random number generator with a constant, so as to get
reproducible results.

Here are some performance results from my A4000/040:

v1.0:
ftriangles -100
drew 100 triangles in 27 seconds, performance of 3.70 triangles/second
ftriangles -500
drew 500 triangles in 131 seconds, performance of 3.82 triangles/second

v2.0:
ftriangles -100
drew 100 triangles in 10.90 seconds, performance of 9.18 triangles/second
ftriangles -500
drew 500 triangles in 48.86 seconds, performance of 10.23 triangles/second

I also switched from the ANSI time() call to the AmigaDOS timer() call for
v2.0.  So much for portability.  This enabled me to increase the resolution of
the timings.  The old method caused the times to be slightly understated.  This
implies that v1.0 wasn't even quite as fast as is shown above, and that v2.0 is
even more faster than one might guess.  :-)

Have fun!
_john

grieggs@netcom.com
johng@shell.portal.com