Re: [LAU] Suggested video card - Linux-audio-user

16 Aug 2007

Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
...
  On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 19:17 -1000, david wrote:

  855GM according to KInfoCenter's PCI report.

 Ugh.  No wonder it is slowing things down. 
Yup, the joys of life as a bottom-feeder! ;-)

...
  These days if someone says something nice about Intel
graphics, they are
 almost certainly talking about a 945 or better. 
Probably so. I'm using the Intel driver (courtesy of Xorg), and X still 
reports warnings as it tries to use various features of newer Intel 
graphics chips with the old hardware.

...
    I just bought a stack of Radeon 7200s for $5
 apiece just for putting into older Linux PCs with Geforce 2MX cards.  I got these
free. I don't do games on any of my computers, so more 
 powerful display cards don't really do anything for me.  
 One doesn't have to play games to desire a modest OpenGL card.  One
 could gain benefit from such a card by seeing the drawing of various
 applications be accelerated if they happen to be built on libraries that
 support OpenGL.  When such things line up in your favor, you get more
 CPU power available for audio because the graphics card is doing the
 display drawing for you.

 In one application I'm working on, switching the graphics process to use
 OpenGL just to draw text and simple line graphs to the display cut the
 CPU usage of that process by 75%. 
That's fine. I can't imagine how OpenGL would speed up scrolling through 
Rosegarden's Score window as a composition plays, but maybe it would. 
I'll see if it makes a difference on the desktop machines. Their cards 
support OpenGL.

...
  So, maybe a Radeon card would play games better.  I
don't know.  It is
 rather offensive that you consider this only of worth to gamers. 
Sorry, but I don't consider that offensive at all. I've used video cards 
for over 20 years, and some of my favorites were the ones designed to 
run OpenGL. I used to have a little old slow Elsa GLoria Synergy 
graphics card, with OpenGL executing natively on the card, that could 
run rings around the fancy expensive cards (at the time) when it came to 
3D games. I also used to work for a company that sold the original AT&T 
Targa video boards - ISA cards that plugged into 6MHz IBM AT computers 
and could capture and manipulate 30fps TV and movie video in real time.

I don't put down gamers - realtime games involving realistic graphics 
and sophisticated game AI takes a lot of horsepower!

-- 
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community