Posted by Grant Foraker on December 23, 2004 at 12:17:16:
Bought a new laptop. Merry Xmas to me!! While getting everything load and patched I thought I'd see how my new 2.0 Pentium M (Centrino) with an ATI 9700 (128MB of dedicated video memory) compared to my three year old 1.26 P4 (64MB of shared video memory). Both laptops have 60GB 7200 RPM disks. Turned up some interesting things about Comet and Clear Type. The Clear Type option is down in Display Properties/Appearance/Effects/Smooth Edges of screen fonts. I've seen numerious mentions on how this is a desirable option to have on for LCD displays.
Well, maybe not. Just after installing Comet I ran a batch compile using IB from READY::. Took about 1:20. Old laptop timed out at 6:20. Wow, thought I. A day of so later after installing more software, patches, and changing a few settings. I ran the same batch compile again to help run the battery to 0% before a full recaharge. Very slow? Maybe because I'm on battery the HDD is slowed down to save power? Nope. After the battery recharge, I tried again. Still very slow. I started to undo some of the settings. When I undid the Clear Type the speed jumped back up. The other thing I noticed is that there is a speed cost when using full screen mode versus a window.
Old laptop:
Clear Type On/Full Screen 6:13
Clear Type On/Window 4:10
Clear Type Off/Full Screen 5:49
Clear Type Off/Window 2:36
New laptop:
Clear Type On/Full Screen 12:40
Clear Type On/Window 5:15
Clear Type Off/Full Screen 2:06
Clear Type Off/Window 1:19
Seems clear that Comet doesn't like Clear Type.