Hi, On 15 Feb, this message from Brad Boyer echoed through cyberspace: > On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 10:00:40AM -0600, vinai wrote: >> I just set up an 8600 at home with the sole purpose of playing around >> with multimedia stuff on it. I'm actually quite willing to spend >> some time to try to get the control video device working if it means >> I could recover one of my PCI slots (the one in question, currently >> occupied by an ATI Mach 64 card). > > Even at it's theoretical performance limits, the control chip can't do > everything the mach64 chip does. However, it should be possible to > have better raw bandwidth into VRAM compared to a PCI card. It's worth > a try.
Yes, this seems a good apreciation of the situation. Additional thoughts: - in my experience, a graphic card on te standard PC bus 'eats' quite a bit of bandwidth, which will impact things like disk access - access to VRAM is _very_ fast compared to PCI cards, both for reading and writing. And believe it or not, X _reads_ quite a bit in VRAM. - the most interesting thig about control, that is not implemented yet, seems to be the hardware cursor, whose existance is proven. It is implemented in control as a bitmap in the last few bytes of every scanline. - disassembling MacOS drivers may give other acceleration ideas, but that is a tedious work. Cheers Michel ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michel Lanners | " Read Philosophy. Study Art. 23, Rue Paul Henkes | Ask Questions. Make Mistakes. L-1710 Luxembourg | email [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan | Learn Always. " -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
