Martin Wuerthner has released some benchmarks showing a significant speed increase for the imminent ArtWorks 2 on the Iyonix platform.

According to MW Software, "ArtWorks 2 running natively on the Iyonix renders the illustration three times faster than the emulated ArtWorks 1.7 and most importantly, it renders more than 5 times faster than a StrongARM RiscPC can manage at that resolution". These figures are based on the timings of rendering RISC OS artist Henk Hunien's Raindrop illustration:

• Iyonix/ArtWorks 2 (16M colours): 31 sec.
  
• Iyonix/ArtWorks 1.7 using Aemulor (16M colours): 1 min 45 sec.
  
• StrongARM RiscPC/ViewFinder (16M colours): 2 min 40 sec.
  
• StrongARM RiscPC without ViewFinder (256 colours): 2 min 37 sec.

The figures should not be considered as a general machine benchmark, as the surprising extra speed-up is caused by the way Crystal, the ArtWorks rendering engine, works. "As Crystal updates the screen at configurable fixed time intervals while rendering complex illustrations, a higher proportion of time is spent updating the screen on a slower machine than on a faster machine."

It will also be interesting to compare how well ArtWorks 2 runs on an Omega - an ideal opportunity to do so would be at the Wakefield show where both will be present. Together with the forthcoming update to Vantage, the future for the RISC OS graphic artist looks bright.