Finale 2004's performance is, unfortunately, bad all around. Finale redraws are very slow and getting slower, especially on OS X. What's more, it suffers greatly by comparison to the Distinguished Competition. Sibelius 3.x has effectively eliminated lag and redraws by using OpenGL 3D technology. (Perhaps Direct3D on the PC side.) The entire score is cached on the video card as a series of large textures. Then all of the transformations -- zooming, dragging, vertical scrolling, horizontal scrolling -- are done by the video card, not the CPU. This makes drawing the screen *much* faster -- Sibelius has no redraws and almost no lag. It's so good that you can scroll and/or drag around the screen even during playback.
The difference is most dramatic on an OS X machine. I know you're a PC guy, but some lunch break, go over to one of your colleague's Macs and try this. Open up a large score in Finale. Advance pages, scroll vertically and horizontally, drag around the screen, etc. Note the sluggish redraw speed. Now, open up the *exact same Finale file* in Sibelius. (You guys all have Sibelius on your machines for comparison purposes, right? Right?) Put accuracy of conversion aside for now, just look at how much faster the display is in Sibelius. *That's* what I'm talking about.
Sibelius 3.x has set the new standard for speed. Since I like Finale much, much better than Sibelius, I have to hope that everyone at Coda is taking this challenge seriously. Sibelius completely rewrote their graphics engine and it paid off beautifully for them. I want the same from Finale. I don't want you to tweak a little here, a little there. I want what Sibelius users have -- fast dragging and scrolling with live, instantaneous screen updating, and NO REDRAWS. If that requires you to copy their OpenGL/Direct3D implementation, fine. Great! Like I said, I want what they have.
Finale's graphics engine has long lagged behind Sibelius's, and with the release of Sib 3.x, the performance gap between the two programs is just embarrassing. In any side-by-side comparison, Finale is going to get trounced on speed alone, especially in OS X.
I understand that you guys concentrated on other things for Finale 2004, and that's fine. Finale 2004 has any number of terrific features. Now, it's time to build a new graphics engine to make all of those great features display faster.
- Darcy
-----
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn NY
On 01 Mar 2004, at 02:25 PM, Fisher, Allen wrote:
Thus Saith Darcy:
Yes. Write to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and tell them speed should be
their #1 priority for MacFin2005. Remind them that Sibelius is now *much, much* faster than Finale, with virtually no redraws, and they'd better catch up.
When you do, please be sure to list *specific* steps and situations where performance is undesirable. If all you say is "Finale is slow," there's not much a programmer can do 'bout it. If you help us out with some specific detail, it will help us serve you much better.
Allen
_______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
