Ross Vandegrift <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > Matrox is the only company I've ever heard make noise about their 2D
> > > performance. The box from my G400 DualHead billed it as the fastest
> > > 2D accelerator ever created. Don't know if it's true, but the 2D
> > > performs quite well for me!
> >
> > The mga driver has a very good reputation for 2D performance, but I just
> > replaced a G450 with a Rage128 Pro in this work machine and it's at
> > least as fast in general, in fact it feels slightly snappier, but maybe
> > that's just me. :) A Radeon should be significantly faster in turn. The
> > only thing lacking yet is Render acceleration for AA text. I'm
> > experimenting with that but no dice yet.
>
> Hmmm, that's really interesting. Maybe I'll have to see if I can find
> some ATI cards and do a comparison. Is it most likely the hardware and
> not the drivers? I'm also mostly interested in fast 2D performance from
> a card.
>
> (A friend of mine has a Rage 128 Pro. Maybe I'll see if I could borrow
> it and do some benchmarks....)
Most 2D operations (blits, area fills, etc) are "infinitely fast"
these days for all practical purposes on modern cards with a driver
that can accelerate the basic operations. Performance has to do with:
- Usage of video RAM.
- Acceleration of RENDER extension if that is in use
- Bus bandwidth. (speed of getting data to and from the card matters.)
Only the 3rd has any significant dependence on hardware alone; the
first is a function of the XFree86 core code mostly, combined with the
amount of video RAM available, the second is mostly a driver issue,
though speed does depend on the card; of the two I've tested with hw
accel, the G400 is darn fast, the nvidia binary drivers are a lot
faster yet.
I like the Matrox cards because they produce high quality output, are
pretty well accelerated, and have docs available to the community; but in
terms of pure speed, even for 2D operations, they probably lag recent
ATI and nvidia cards. ATI also does pretty well on the quality and
OSS areas, and if you have any interest in 3D, their cards are a better
bet. (Though the Matrox cards work fine for Quake3 level-games.)
In the end, 2D performance shouldn't be much of an issue for users on
any decently supported video card these days. The exceptions to this
are typically application, toolkit, server, or driver problems,
not HW limitations.
Regards,
Owen
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