At 11:16 AM 12/18/2005, Tim Ellison wrote:
Eric,
Here is an observation or two and not a necessarily a commentary on
higher CPU utilization with DirectX
In DirectX mode, I get a bunch of Unhandled Exception errors when using
the GUI (clicking on buttons and such). If I click on the button to
continue, CPU utilization goes from 25% to 3%
I am beginning to think that once I receive an Unhandled Exception
error, that the display parameter reverts from DirectX mode to GDI+.
Could this be happening?
The behavior I noticed with Matlab on Win2K was that doing drawing with the
acceleration on jammed the CPU utilization to 99%, and essentially hung the
system. If you killed off Matlab, it would go back to normal. Running
Matlab with the acceleration turned off, it sucked a bit of CPU while
drawing, but didn't hang.
I suspect that there are a whole variety of traps for the programmer having
to do with the application, the OS, and the video driver all coming to a
common understanding of what accelerations are present, what parameters
ranges are legal to pass, and so forth. There's such a variety of
acceleration schemes, and they tend not to be the best documented in the
world (at least in a convenient form for someone who doesn't have a full
time support team), particularly in terms of the interaction at all layers.
Clearly, if you've got the development and sales clout of a EA game, you
can probably get a lot of those questions answered (and the bugs
fixed). Likewise, if you're a Universal Studios looking to stream your
content to Windows Media Player, etc.
Jim, W6RMK
