Although I remember the notion of screens from the Amiga, how do they effect performance under MorphOS? It would makes sense a lower colour depth would use less VRAM but regarding resolution is that the same or does the OS still process the pixel doubling?
For example, if I played a 360P video in a 24bit, 640 X 480 screen would that use less cycles than in the native monitor resolution?

Not sure if it would need less cycles as either MPlayer or the GFX-card (if overlay is used) would still need to do some scaling.

It will need less VRAM as such low res would really be an oldskool 31kHz (aka VGA) signal send to the monitor (regardless wether you use VGA or something digital like DVI or HDMI).

Real performance issue will only arise when you have to many screens and windows open and run out of VRAM. This really only an issue for systems with 64MB or less,

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Can you think of an instance where using multiple screens would be more efficient than minimised/maximised windows?

If you put MPlayer in the fullscreen mode, it opens on its own screen, which is in the same resolution as your desktop and the image gets scaled by overlay so it doesn't make any extra cpu load. But as it's on its own screen, you can swap screens with command-m etc and let the mplayer be there on own screen without making things harder way. But when running it in windowed mode, I keep it on the Ambient screen...

In general, I like to have bigger apps on their own screens, especially if I want to run them fullscreen. Like OWB, Showcase, etc... if they have more of their own windows open, they stay cleanly on their own screen and you don't have to mess with them all on the Ambient screen. It's quicker to swap between programs that way. Also some legacy programs that don't use MUI (and MUI's way to minimize/iconify) it's better run them on their own screens IMHO. Like FinalWriter, Hollywood Designer, PPaint, ArtEffect, etc in my case.

And if a program doesn't benefit from enhanced mode effects, you can run them on non-enhanced screens and save some graphics memory by that. Non-enhanced screens also scroll their contents little quicker, so OWB etc can benefit that. But otherwise I usually keep screens in the same resolution and depth, unless some legacy program requires 8bit modes.


[ Edited by jPV 15.10.2019 - 21:44 ]

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Thanks for the info - as I'm testing MorphOS on a Powerbook DLSD I like to squeeze out every bit of efficiency that I can.

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Using Screens or having all windows on Ambient Screen is mostly a matter of taste.

Before I installed the Voodoo3 for a 2nd monitor (PowerMac G4) I rarely had anything running on an extra screen, and today everything gets opened on one the 2 screen that I have to have for 2 monitors.

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It's not only image scaling but some acceleration as not scaled image in WPA mode requires significantly more CPU load (there is also VMEM mode which seems to use less CPU than WPA but it looks broken).

For example in emulators I rely on monitor's scaler because overlay is way too blurry and the performance is only marginally slower w/o overlay.

Unfortunately MorphOS port of MPlayer hasn't been updated for years and besides few other things it's not possible to run fullscreen mode on any other screen than desktop's copy one. Maybe it wasn't a big deal back when you couldn't have two separate outputs from one gfx card, but it is now.