[linux-audio-dev] DRI + Jack conflict?

Steve Harris S.W.Harris at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Fri Feb 13 15:24:05 UTC 2004


On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 01:53:50 +0100, Tim Goetze wrote:
> >Hear hear. I think that GL accelration is a (potentially) important
> >optimisation for audio apps - it saves a lot of cache and memory bandwidth
> >that can be better used number-crunching audio.
> 
> i'm a bit skeptical about this GL + audio business. over the years,
> these splendid 3D accelerator cards have 'improved' to the point of
> being one of the noisiest parts in a system, and consuming serious
> wattage.

I'm only talking about doing flat-projection bitmap layering and so on,
nothing onerous. I bought a cheap, fanless nvidia card recently and there
are free drivers for the low-end ATI cards (which are plently fast
enough).

Matrox have just release a card designed for audio that has no fans (due
to downclocked 3d processor) and lots of acceleration on all heads.
 
> and if you design your application around it, a system that does
> GL in software will suffer big time from the cache, memory bandwidth
> *and* CPU cycle hit. i've seen some simple GL-enabled applications
> freeze software GL systems to a virtual standstill because it never
> dawned on the author that this has to be taken into account.

I'm not thinking of a 3D UI, just using GL to accelerate 2D.
 
> i do agree that GL is a potentially important optimization. i don't
> expect the potential to manifest itself within the next cople of years
> though. :)

Right, well in the meantime im doing it as optional - eg. I have an alpha
version of meterbridge which can use GL - if you have it, it's massivly
more efficient, it looks better and you can resize the windows.

- Steve



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