Cloanto Releases PowerPC Blitting Library for Personal Paint 7

The "personal_ppc_blit.library" for Personal Paint 7 and other Cloanto programs has just been released on Aminet (biz/cloan/PBlit_PPC.lha). Like previous 68K CPU blitting libraries, this library allows Personal Paint to work on bitmaps in Fast RAM instead of Chip RAM in supporting RTG environments. The PowerPC version adds to this advantage a considerable performance boost.

Benchmarked on a PowerPC 603e running at 150 MHz, this software-only blitter performed twice as fast as an AGA hardware blitter (please note: this is a comparison between hardware emulated in software and dedicated hardware, not software and software). The tests were conducted on a PowerUP board by Phase 5, running a mixed combination of average blitter operations (not just simple copies, but complex blitter logic). These results are particularly impressive in consideration of the performance overhead associated to 68K-PowerPC interprocess communication, task switching and memory sharing, which among other things involve frequent CPU cache flushing. As more parts of the Amiga operating system are ported to native PowerPC code, and with the fast evolution of Amiga PowerPC compilers, these results can only get more and more exciting.

We proudly believe to be the first company shipping PowerPC code to Amiga users. In spite of the very difficult times for Amiga software developers, at Cloanto we continue to invest more than ever in the Amiga, and we are working on new versions of popular titles like Personal Paint. We would like to thank the entire Amiga community for its continued support and trust in our software.