Geminus is it worth it?

I’ve just come across discussions around Geminus, while deep diving the forum, and it appears to improve the UI responsiveness, and image file processing.

I’ve been using RiscOS 5.30 and Iris 1.029 as much as possible for my browsing only going back to my Mac Studio when a website fallsover or is unbareably slow to navigate.

Would Geminus improve the situation, as I know one of the issues with Iris is that the GUI and screen are CPU rednered opposed to hardware accelerated.

Or am I barking completely up the wrong tree here.

As for Geminus, I use it on this Pi4b and it pretty much lives up to its billing: http://www.sendiri.co.uk/geminus/index.html ; jpeg rendering and screen redrawing (in particular) is smoother/faster: when dragging one jpeg over another the screen redraws instantly instead of in strips. Not sure if it makes much difference to Iris however. Unless you’ve an NVMe- or SATA-connected hard drive, the best way to speed up Iris is to run it from RAM via IrisRAM.

Thanks George, I already run it via IrisRAM to reduce IO bottlenecks.

Just know some websites are slow to render when scrolling so wondered if Geminus would solve this or help.

I’ve just tested the rendering and scrolling of Iris with, and without, the Geminus speed-ups (Geminus offers 4 types of acceleration on the Pi4: sprite plotting, sprite cacheing in off-screen video memory, window contents cacheing in off-screen video memory, and jpeg plotting, and these can be toggled on/off as desired. My testing was unsophisticated (all on vs. all off), and used the BBC News page as a test piece. The result? to be honest, it didn’t seem to make a perceptible difference: scrolling was marginally smoother with the Geminus options on, but the page and sub-pages (when selected) rendered at pretty much the same speed. HTH.
PS: I didn’t reboot between Geminus setting changes, assuming that clicking ‘Set’ on the Geminus Menu would make the change in real time.
Further PS: this shouldn’t be taken as a general criticism of Geminus, which I find definitely well worthwhile. ROmark indicates a 4x speed-up in ‘Rectangle Copy – Graphics acceleration test’ for instance, fully borne out in the real world.

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