Hardware Speed Comparison

Friends

I have been a Logos user since 1994, and was (1) excited about the release of version 4 and (2) dismayed at the hardware requirements. My conversations with the Logos sales personnel were sometimes humorous as I tried to argue system configuration with them. One quote: "Mr. Johnson, I work on commission. If I tell you that you won't be happy with Logos 4 on your current hardware, trust me!"

After much thought (and a l-o-n-g talk with my wife), I decided to invest in a new notebook. Before I passed my old notebook to someone else, I loaded L4 on it and ran some simple speed tests between the new and the old to gauge the difference my investment in hardware made. Interested in the results?

First, hardware configurations:

Old: Dell Latitude D520:

Intel Dual Core T2300 @ 1.66 GHz
3 GB RAM
Vista Business 32-bit OS
Video: Intel Integrated 945 Express Chipset
- 256 MB max. shared memory
- Display: 1400X1050
Hard disk: 150GB, 50.2 GB free, 7200 rpm
Windows Experience Index: 3.1

New: Dell Precision M4400

Intel Dual Core Duo P8700 @ 2.53GHz
4 GB RAM
Win7 Professional 64-bit OS
Video: NVIDA Quadro FX 770 M
- 500 MB dedicated memory
- Display: 1440X900
Hard Disk 300 GB, 203 GB free, 7200 rpm
Windows Experience Index: 5.7

Software: Logos 4 Scholar's, with a fairly large number of additional Logos resources I've collected over the last decade or so (Word Biblical Commentary, New American Commentary, etc.)

Test Results (minutes:seconds)

Loading the home screen (first time)

Old 1:20
New 1:17

Loading the home screen (after exiting L4 and immediately reloading it)

Old 20 sec.
New 15 sec.

Search on Luke 2:1-7

Old 1:25
New 35 sec.

Search on Phil. 1:1

Old: 56 sec.
New: 30 sec.

Search on Rom. 8:1

Old: 1:30
New: 25 sec.

Conclusions: Loading the home page must be mostly dependent on internet connection speed. Otherwise, the new hardware performs 2 or 3 times faster. The speed tests don't tell the whole story: several times the old notebook screen would go BLACK with a "Logos 4 not responding" message. It always recovered, but seems to speak of an overloaded system.

Was it worth the (considerable for my budget!) price tag for the hardware upgrade? It's hard to say, since I made the hardware upgrade BEFORE I bought Logos 4 (patience has never been my strong suit). I CAN say that i have been satisfied with the performance of L4 on the new machine.

Yours,

Steve Johnson

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Comments

Kevin Becker

Thanks for the details Steve. You might want to change your forum display name so spam bots can't pick up on it. It's not very intuitive so read this: http://wiki.logos.com/Changing_Forum_Display_Name

Milkman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/117995#Comment_117995

hey Kev. What's a spam bot?

William

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118040#Comment_118040

hey Kev. What's a spam bot?

Sorry, I am not Kevin but I think I can help.

A spam bot is a computer program that goes around looking for "email addresses." Once the address is found....OH BOY! look out here comes the hundreds of spam letters.

Michael Birney

Steve,

Thanks for the comparison. In my experience, as long as your hardware can handle it, L4 is amazing, and leaves L3 in the dust - I hope you have the same experience. I know keeping up on the hardware is expensive too, I'm not saying how much I spent on hardware in 2009-10, it makes me cringe.

I almost never look at the homepage, I've turned it off, that is a speed enhancer, and there are lots of ideas to boost the speed of L4 even more, just do some searching on speed in the forum (somehow that sounds bad).

Even in my newest desktop, an 2.66 I5 with 8gb ram, I still am careful to make sure linking is only on where needed, use collections to search instead of searching the library, etc... All for the sake a little less lag time.

Dave Hooton

Windows Experience Index: 3.1

You don't state what determines that score, but I reckon that the graphics card is the culprit. In your new computer, it could be the hard drive or graphics card, but either way the new graphics is superior with 2x dedicated memory.

The slight RAM advantage may be nullified by the 64-bit vs. 32-bit OS, but it has a better chance of keeping L4 in memory, further improving performance.

The newer hard drive may also contribute to performance.

Windows 7 will improve performance over Vista and then you've got a much
faster processor - not twice as fast but the Core 2 Duo is much improved over the first Core Duo - probably by 2x!

So I think I've fleshed out reasons why you are getting 2 to 3 times improvement!

Steve Johnson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/117995#Comment_117995

Thanks for the tip (about my display name), Kevin. Point taken.

Steve Johnson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118085#Comment_118085

Dave, you are right about the low Windows Experience Score on the old notebook being related to its integrated graphics. Another year, I will be able to upgrade my RAM above the 4GB level: I spent about all I could justify on this initial go-around. I'm hoping the 64-bit OS will pay off later when I can afford the memory.

Can you explain why L4 needs such a monster graphics card?

Thanks,

Steve

Jim VanSchoonhoven

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118102#Comment_118102

My laptop has the following specs and times:

1.3GHz Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo Processor
4GB of DDR3 RAM, 2 slots, 4GB Max
500GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
13.3" HD LED LCD Display, Intel GMA 4500MHD, Wi-Fi 802.11 bgn, 0.3M Webcam
Windows 7 Home Premium Operating System (64 bit)

I have 36 tabs open including a search window that loads, I have about 2200 resources.

First time load up is 25 seconds

Second time load up is 15 seconds

All the searches mentioned were between 2-3 seconds

My hard drive is a bit over 250 Gigabites full.

I don't understand how I can have the slow hard drive, the wrong type of video card and a 1.3 processor and be this fast, something does not add up with our presuppositions about what it takes to run this program.

In Christ,

Jim

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118102#Comment_118102

Can you explain why L4 needs such a monster graphics card?

This is getting technical, but the graphics interface (GDI) of
Windows XP, 2000 and older OS was replaced by a new system in Vista and
Windows 7 based on a 2D (two dimensional) DirectX which had been
originally designed for 3D games. It consumes significant processing power and system
resources compared to GDI which then puts extra demands on the graphics card.

.NET is the applications
interface for L4 (L3 used Internet Explorer) and .NET uses WPF for its
graphics interface. WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is a high-level interface and that also places additional demands on the graphics card.

A technical explanantion can be found at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2d-windows-gdi,2547-2.html

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118109#Comment_118109

I don't understand how I can have the slow hard drive, the wrong type of video card and a 1.3 processor and be this fast, something does not add up with our presuppositions about what it takes to run this program.

Steve didn't elaborate what the search query was, so I'm not sure your results are relevant!

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118115#Comment_118115

Can you explain why L4 needs such a monster graphics card?

This is getting technical, but the graphics interface (GDI) of Windows XP, 2000 and older OS was replaced by a new system in Vista and Windows 7 based on a 2D (two dimensional) DirectX which had been originally designed for 3D games. It consumes significant processing power and system resources compared to GDI which then puts extra demands on the graphics card.

Windows applications used to use a "pixel" based graphics subsystem to "draw" things on screen. This worked fine when user interfaces were simple text boxes, list boxes, buttons, etc. But disadvantages started popping up that prevented people from using what they wanted and needed to use in their applications. For example, including other types of interfaces within an application, like video, 3-D, or animation, required a whole different way of programming that software. If you wanted anything in the application to scale (like the slider bar in Logos, which very simply makes the text larger or smaller), that was a very big deal to do that fast and easy (for the user). If you wanted more sophisticated use of colors to do shading, shadows, etc., again very difficult to do with the old pixel based graphics.

As video cards started to have their own CPU and memory, there was no way to use it. With the current graphics subsystem, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), graphics processing is offloaded to execute on the graphics card. This is done now, and in the future it will be done even more. I have a graphics card in my desktop system that has 4 GB of memory on it alone!

More sophisticated graphics applications can be done with WPF. Because it is a geometric system not a pixel (think "dots") system, everything is a shape on the screen; it's much easier to create geometric shapes, and do things with them on screen. Some of the animated moving around of people's ancestry in Logos 4 would be near impossible to do in Logos 3, at least as they get more sophisticated and the operations to move them around the screen increase.

As powerful as WPF is, it also creates a unified way to write software for screens. It can be used in a desktop app like Logos, as well as a web application. This was impossible before.

WPF handles much higher resolution displays because the coordinate system it supports is far larger than the pixel based one. A 1920 x 1200 display has 2.3 million of these "dots" or pixels. Now, our systems typically support 32 bits, or 4.3 BILLION of color, meaning 2 to the 32nd different colors possible. 2.3 million dots with 4.3 billion color opportunities, we are getting into pretty unwieldy numbers! What happens when displays are soon 3840 x 2000 with 64 bits of color combinations, and the displays are faster than before, yet the software now has to manage 8 times the information just from those changes alone, not including that it has to render and move things on the screen 30% faster or else you will see "ghosting" and flickering on your screen? Managing the screen by dots just won't continue to work, we have to start looking at the use of shapes to move information around. Even a complex textual document has way fewer shapes on it than every dot (and its associated information) on the screen.

The precision of the graphics rendering is much better. While it's ironic because we complain somewhat about some of the text rendering in Logos, in fact WPF provides much more sophisticated and exact rendering, making the display of some information possible on a screen that was impossible before. If you are in the business of rendering information on a screen in your app, there is just much more you can do with WPF. We see some problems in this area right now because it's new. Without a doubt there will be much that could not be done with the old pixel based system, and eventually it will be much better by all users' standards (most think it's better already).

Because WPF is not pixel based and everything on the screen is geometric objects, things like rotating, seeing the back of an object, turning the object in user defined ways, and making changes to the size or dimensions of objects based on user clicks and drags is much simpler in a 2-D world. This opens up many possibilities for better ways to present information online.

There are many more advantages - for example, doing things we take for granted with multiple displays (not just two, but three, four,...) is much easier because WPF transforms one virtual desktop that the software developer uses into the physical coordinates available on each users system. Again, near impossible in pixel based graphics. While it may seem strange that we use a graphics system that is largely built for 3-D, this is because it's a lot easier to consider 2-D a simplified form of 3-D (one dimension is just 0), when all the innovation in graphic hardware is in the 3-D capabilities. If you are just doing 2-D pixel stuff using the old graphics software, the only difference between the best graphics board now and one circa 2000 is the speed of the processor and memory it uses. Now with WPF, software designers can take advantage of cool stuff the hardware graphics designers have built in to support all these features I discussed and more.

Hopefully you can see why this is the future, and it had to be done. Faster hardware alone will render performance issues meaningless in the next 5 years, just like we fought the same issue in the early 90s with computers being fast enough to run Windows. That problem mostly went away due to faster hardware.

Hope that helps!

Steve Johnson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118145#Comment_118145

Thanks, Dominick. That was a good explanation, presented at just the right tech level.

SO, we can now expect an upgraded release of Logos Bible Atlas, the coolest map program ever?!?!

Steve Johnson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118116#Comment_118116

Dave & Jim, would it be helpful if I did elaborate on my search query? I kind of figure we all have different libraries of resources, so comparing "apples to apples" is problematic -- unless we got really serious and defined a base collection as a "test bed."

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118154#Comment_118154

Well, you could both post your numbers for "the" as in this thread --- http://community.logos.com/forums/t/5778.aspx

Rough and ready, but a Basic Search for god in the ESV bible would be more objective ie. you should have 4626 results with all Search options unticked.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118153#Comment_118153

Thanks, Dominick. That was a good explanation, presented at just the right tech level.

Much as I hate to admit it, it was pretty good[:D]

Ron

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118145#Comment_118145

WPF handles much higher resolution displays because the coordinate system it supports is far larger than the pixel based one. A 1920 x 1200 display has 2.3 million of these "dots" or pixels. Now, our systems typically support 32 bits, or 4.3 BILLION of color, meaning 2 to the 32nd different colors possible.

Hey Dominick, great explanation...I do have to nitpick the above statement though.

99% of computer displays are only capable of 8-bit per channel color (a.k.a. 24-bit). When Windows is set to 32-bit color, it is actually 8-bit per color channel PLUS 8-bits for the alpha (transparency) channel, not truly "32-bit" color as in 2^32. So you are getting 16.7 million colors, not 4.3 billion. There are a VERY few high-end displays that are capable of 10-bit per channel + 2-bits for alpha (so still 32-bit) which give 1 billion colors. Support for 10-bit color has to be available through the entire software and hardware pipeline though (and it is not in 99.99% of cases)...the video card, drivers, display panel, Windows, and the individual software application all have to support 10-bit color. I think Adobe Photoshop is about the only individual app that is currently coded to support 10-bit per channel color and last I checked, there are only 2 or 3 consumer monitors on the market that have full support for 10-bits per channel.

Hope that helps,

Ron

Jim VanSchoonhoven

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118191#Comment_118191

Okay I did the search for god in the ESV and it came back at .81 of a second!

In Christ,

Jim

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118206#Comment_118206

Okay I did the search for god in the ESV and it came back at .81 of a second!

My laptop (below) took 0.5 sec. Your 0.81 is roughly what one would expect from 1.3 GHz processor similar to mine.

Jim VanSchoonhoven

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118391#Comment_118391

I shut some of my other programs down and ran the search again 3 times and got .42, .45, and .50 of a second.

In Christ,

Jim

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118403#Comment_118403

My lowest without shutting down other applications is 0.42. That's still a pretty good 1.3 GHz.

How do you go with lag/response times when clicking on tabs in the layout ie. instantaneous, < 1sec, 2-4 secs?

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118460#Comment_118460

Hmm. I wonder if this search "God" in ESV) is influenced by size of library? Or maybe I am seeing beta impact. Anyway, two anomalies I see here, see what you think:

1. On very fast high performance engineering workstation (8 cores, 32GB memory, RAID, 4GB NVIDIA engineering graphics card, etc.) - search is about 0.25 seconds, 4359 results in 3811 verses. This has my copy of Logos, ~5000 resources, 4.0b SR-1

2. On my daughter's licensed copy, 815 books, much slower machine, quad core 3 GHz, 8GB memory, 256MB video memory (NVIDIA Quadro NVS 420), search is .14 seconds, which is FASTER. Plus, this version is beta 3 of 4.0c, and it gets 4693 results in 4050 verses. Is this a bug?

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118472#Comment_118472

Hmm. I wonder if this search "God" in ESV) is influenced by size of library? Or maybe I am seeing beta impact.

Your results differ because you didn't search as I stated ie. Basic Search with all Search options unticked.

#1 is a Bible Search with all options unticked

#2 is a Bible Search with Match all word forms ticked!

Now see what the numbers are!

It's still interesting that a high performance desktop should embarass an engineering workstation. My desktop (below) does the search in 0.27 sec.

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118492#Comment_118492

It's still interesting that a high performance desktop should embarrass an engineering workstation. My desktop (below) does the search in 0.27 sec.

It's built for complex system building, CAD/CAM, complex video editing, etc. The graphics card, while it will benchmark faster than the desktop video cards just marginally, really uses its power to ensure exact color and visual representations with no error - in other words it's a poor choice for a gaming rig given the cost.

As an example I have tried, creating a video in something like Roxio that would take an hour on the hi-perf desktop machine completes in about 5 minutes on the engineering workstation. So it's a matter of picking the right computer for the job...

Jim VanSchoonhoven

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118515#Comment_118515

Dave, I don't know why, although the searching with the l.3 GHz is not real fast , when it comes to opening tabs it is great, it opens them in under 1 second. It is really nice, I bought it because my 2 year old 2.2 Ghz with 4 gigs of memory was too slow, for Logos 4 there were lag times and scrolling down on bibles was too jerky.

My son and his friends are into computers and they told me about this little computer that was really fast for it's size and price, they told me if I bought it and was not happy with how it ran Logos 4 they would buy it from me for the price I was getting it for.

I bought it and I love it, it gets up to 12 hours of run time off a charge and it has a 13 inch screen and it is very easy to take any where. This is important to me because I go all over the place teaching people how to use bible study programs! I do not do any of the things listed to speed up computers for logos 4, I just use it like it came and don't have to tweak my program around, to get good preformance, that was not the case with my older laptop, I did everything I could to help with the speed and it still fell short.

Once again, I ask myself what is it about running the Logos 4 program that we don't understand, because if you look at the specs of this little computer it is underpowered, has the wrong type of video card and the harddrive is too slow! But I have noticed if you pay attention to other reports there is a small group of people that are running Logos 4 on computers like mine and reporting very good results, but most people ignore those reports.

I paid 630 dollars and it came with a free dvd recorder/player and it runs everything great! Although the searches are not a lot faster than a lot of others, the way it moves from tab to tab is what I like.

But there is one draw back for me, if I have too many other programs opened at the same time it starts getting slower. So what I do is just open Logos 4, Libronix 3, and another bible program that I use, and just run those three programs and everything works great!

There might also be a difference in speed if you had a big library, but I don't have a huge library, I have about 2200 resources in Logos 4, around 3200 in libronix 3 and around 1200 in my other program, so none of the programs are running large libraries. It handles my needs and did not cost an arm and a leg!

In Christ,

Jim

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118565#Comment_118565

Once again, I ask myself what is it about running the Logos 4 program that we don't understand, because if you look at the specs of this little computer it is underpowered, has the wrong type of video card and the harddrive is too slow! But I have noticed if you pay attention to other reports there is a small group of people that are running Logos 4 on computers like mine and reporting very good results, but most people ignore those reports.

That's probably because they are overclocked and really run at 2.8 GHz[:D]

We don't know everything if your 2.2 GHz was too slow, my 2.0 GHz is fine and your 1.3 GHz can run faster than both! Also, many Netbooks run L4 acceptably.

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118515#Comment_118515

It's at $14!!!! Do I hear $12???

I would be so upset if I bid $8 or $10 and found I lost out for about $4 or $5...

Kevin Becker

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118785#Comment_118785

It's at $14!!!! Do I hear $12???

I would be so upset if I bid $8 or $10 and found I lost out for about $4 or $5...

Dominick.... this thread is about Hardware specs. Could you have meant to post this in another thread? [;)]

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118791#Comment_118791

I thought he was offering his engineering workstation for sale ...

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118785#Comment_118785

Oops ha ha don't mind me..... I have Catena Aurea on the mind...[8-)]

Ron

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/118785#Comment_118785

I thought he was offering his engineering
workstation for sale ...

It's at $14!!!! Do I hear $12???

I would be so upset if I bid $8 or $10 and found I lost out for about $4 or $5...

And apparently he is selling it to the lowest bidder...I'll give you $6!