13 Feb
2004
13 Feb
'04
11:28 a.m.
On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 01:53:50 +0100, Tim Goetze wrote:
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.
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. 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