It seems that Video Card/Display adapter reviewers assume (without providing evidence that I can find) that 2D performance is acceptable on all adapters from 2003 on. Adobe says that "...hardware, operating system settings, and software settings...(and a) damaged font."
Doing stuff other than gaming or viewing such editing, manipulating, and saving images is essetially ignored in the reviews I have found. It is likely that GPU/CPU tradeoff occurs in these tasks ignored by reviewers but central to this thread and the tasks that most of us perform. 1. 2006 Q&A to the point: "Topic Title: What matters in a video card for 2D windows acceleration?" http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1908172 refers to Adobe's site: http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/331412.html 2. 2004 Article http://www.a1-electronics.net/Graphics_Cards/Various/2004/Review_Dec04.shtml "What will you be using it for? Is perhaps the first question asked. What will the intended use be of your ATI or Nvidia video card. Will you be mostly working with 2D applications or 3D such as games. If you are only looking to run say 2D office applications such as Corel WordPerfect, Photoshop and alike then you do not need to buy an expensive top of the range card but something from the mid-range of ATI or Nvidia will give you the all the performance you need and more for 2D work while still giving you acceptable 3D performance." 3. 2002 Article. The issue may be drivers as in the article linked and quoted below. "... it's a real problem. Now that graphics chips are getting the internal precision to produce some truly stunning images, we'll want to capture that high-quality output and store it." http://techreport.com/etc/2002q3/agp-download/index.x?pg=1 "..today's graphics subsystems have gobs of bandwidth, from main memory (2.1GB/s or greater) to the AGP bus (1GB/s for AGP 4X) to the graphics card's own internal memory (20GB/s in some cases). Graphics cards can render hundreds of frames per second for display. But once the frames have been sent out the RAMDAC to a monitor, standard operating procedure is simply to discard them. That's all well and good when all you want to do is play video games, but for other uses, it's a real problem. Now that graphics chips are getting the internal precision to produce some truly stunning images, we'll want to capture that high-quality output and store it. Unfortunately, even the very newest cards and drivers don't seem to be up to the job. Despite over 1GB per second of potential bandwidth on the AGP bus, current cards transfer data back into main memory much, much slower than needed. At least, that was the claim of more than one person who wrote in response to my article." Roger -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David W. Fenton Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2006 3:04 PM To: finale@shsu.edu Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: Mac Pro unveiled On 11 Aug 2006 at 22:47, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 11 Aug 2006, at 7:50 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > So, then, you're saying that, on the Mac at least, my use of the > > analogy of printer drivers and vector-based font descriptions does > > not hold? > > Again, David, if you're interested in learning more about how drawing > is handled in OS X, I highly recommend the Ars Technica pages I linked > to earlier: Im not really interested in how drawing works on OS X. What I'm interested is your assertion about how drawing interacts with graphics cards *on PCs*. My reading and understanding lead me to believe that it works differently than the way you've described the process. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
