21 Dec
2006
21 Dec
'06
9:37 p.m.
On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 23:34 -0800, Jon H wrote:
If you have a system that has a good realtime preemption patched kernel,
irq's properly optimized, a decent sound card, and a video card that has
drivers that are decent but has _no hardware acceleration_:
"Relying on the CPU and system ram to render FFT graphics and such" will
_not_ cause xruns.
In a properly tuned system with properly designed software the screen
update will definitly slow to a crawl - and perhaps it will be unusable
- but you should not get xruns (provided that the sound apps don't max
out the audio threads with realtime processing - in that case all bets
are off and no amount of graphics acceleration will help).
-- Fernando
On 12/19/06, Kjetil S. Matheussen
<k.s.matheussen(a)notam02.no> wrote:
I mentioned
video cards... I really prefer nvidia under
linux, due to
the quality of the proprietary drivers and ease
of
installation, and
This is a bad advice. The proprietary drivers from nvidia
cause xruns, and
should be avoided. But older (ie. at least 2-3 year old)
nvidia cards can
be used with the open nv driver instead, which I will
recommend, because I
have had experience with numerous nvidia gfx cards, and have
had very
little problem.
Actually anything you do visually will require a video card. The more
capable the card and the drivers the less resources it will take away
from the remaining system that is busy processing your audio. With a
good video card that handles the majority of graphical rendering I
experience almost NO xruns, that's at 5.8ms latency using an onboard
(nforce4) chipset, and lower than that with a dedicated soundcard like
the M-Audio stuff. Relying on the CPU and system ram to render FFT
graphics and such will cause xruns, a good video card will not.