In previous news, ticalc.org started to publicly address the performance of the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. But before even speaking of the TI-Basic and asm performance, let's have a look at the system menus behaviour.

Firstly the MODE menu. Its display was almost instantaneous on the TI-83 Plus. It was a little slowed down on the the faster TI-84 Plus because of the use of small font. Now on TI-84 Plus Silver Edition C it needs almost one second to display! :O Its display is so slow that it becomes perfectly feasible to take a photo with half the menu:


Now for the system menus using the large font.
Navigating through those menus was instantaneous on the old TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus. But now on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition we see clearly see the refresh from top to bottom. This means in particular that we can not use the calculator on the same typing speed as the old calculators. We must wait until the screen refresh is completed, or some keypresses are going to be ignored.

For example in the video below, I press four times the right arrow at the same speed on TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition to navigate the menus. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition ignores half of my keypresses! :O I admit that it is quite painful when using the TI-Basic editor in insert mode or when you are at the bottom of the screen, but maybe it's because I'm too accustomed to previous TI-z80 models and a new user wouldn't mind?

If there is no way to improve this speed, it would be nice to create a buffer capable of storing a list of unhandled keypresses, which will have to be processed in order later, once the CPU is available again - it allready existed in the early 1990s on the HP-48 calculators.

Video of the test:



Source:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11302&lang=en
Yup, that mirrors what I have been seeing on my own TI-84+CSE. The Mode menu is one of the worst offenders, menu speed-wise. I too have encountered frustration typing TI-BASIC code, as I mentioned in this topic. A key buffer would be nice, but if the calculator never gets a chance to catch up, that buffer would just fill up or grow indefinitely. Sad Thanks for sharing the video.
Actually I would say that the menu loading speed is kinda acceptable. It's slower, but it doesn't really get in the way. I think the main PRIZM menu takes even longer to show up. Scrolling menus and the PRGM editor must be a pain, though.

(Which is where DCS8 instant Goto will be handy)
DJ_O wrote:
Actually I would say that the menu loading speed is kinda acceptable. It's slower, but it doesn't really get in the way. I think the main PRIZM menu takes even longer to show up. Scrolling menus and the PRGM editor must be a pain, though.

(Which is where DCS8 instant Goto will be handy)
Yeah, that's going to be an even bigger plus for Doors CS on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition than it was on the earlier models. I've been repeating that same wish (that DCS8 was ready already) every time I have to scroll to an error. With regards to your first comment, which Prizm menu do you mean?
The one where you can run your add-ins from, access Run-Math, the program menu and other stuff. When I try to access it it takes over 2 seconds to load with many add-ins installed.

Also I'm gonna edit my suggestion in the DCS8 thread.
DJ_O wrote:
The one where you can run your add-ins from, access Run-Math, the program menu and other stuff. When I try to access it it takes over 2 seconds to load with many add-ins installed.

Also I'm gonna edit my suggestion in the DCS8 thread.


Shock

I never had that problem. Its always shown up in less than a second for me.

Sounds like you have a weird prizm, between that and the plastic smell still hanging round it Very Happy
Actually, now that I think about it, the 2 seconds loading was tested at 58 MHz. If I put the calc at 94.3 MHz, it takes 1 second. I have 15 add-ins installed.
DJ_O wrote:
Actually, now that I think about it, the 2 seconds loading was tested at 58 MHz. If I put the calc at 94.3 MHz, it takes 1 second. I have 15 add-ins installed.
I've never noticed any such lag, but I don't think I ever had more than about 10 Add-Ins on my Prizm. If what you say is true, then it sounds like the main menu could use some caching.
  
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