Re: where's tfm?
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
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