On 09 Aug 2006, at 4:10 AM, Tyler Turner wrote:
Oh fercrissakes. We aren't comparing a machine with
NO video card
versus a machine with a video card. I never said
that the video card
NEVER makes any difference to 2D acceleration under
ANY circumstances.
That's not what turning down the acceleration on
Windows does. It doesn't disable your video card. It
disables features, like anti-aliasing, etc.
2D anti-aliasing is not handled by the graphics card! It's handled by
the *CPU*, which calculates everything itself and then tells the
graphics card what to draw. Of course disabling anti-aliasing means
you can scroll around faster -- if the CPU doesn't have to calculate
the anti-aliasing, then it can tell the video card which pixels to
draw much more quickly.
Graphics cards do have hardware-supported anti-aliasing, but only for
3D applications like games.
If you upgrade your processor but keep the same video card, you will
get faster Finale redraws. If you upgrade your video card, you will
see little to no improvement in your Finale redraws, because Finale
redraws, being a 2D task, are CPU-bound. All the graphics card
benchmarks bear this out.
I just performed a Finale test that puts more focus on
the video card. By dragging the screen around via
right-click drag, I find that the screen redraws MUCH
more smoothly when I turn the acceleration on my video
card all the way down. Why? Because it isn't having to
calculate all of the special effects.
No, this is because the *CPU* isn't having to calculate all the
special effects. The GPU only handles stuff like transparency, video
playback, lighting, caching windows, and 3D effects like (in Mac OS
X) fast user switching, Dashboard, and Exposé. Redrawing Finale
windows is handled by the CPU. You can make the CPU's job easier by
reducing anti-aliasing (thus reducing the number of calculations),
but this has nothing to do with the video card.
MM *could* theoretically offload the drawing of Finale screens to the
graphics card by making the entire scroll view score a massive 3D
texture, in which case the GPU would handle scrolling and zooming. I
have actually suggested this idea to MM, but this is not something
they have done so far.
Seriously, please just go look at some 2D benchmarks for graphics cards
Cheers,.
- Darcy
-----
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://secretsociety.typepad.com
Brooklyn, NY
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