On 13 Aug 2006 at 18:33, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 12 Aug 2006, at 4:59 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > Tyler is telling you that he's demonstrated that the graphics card > > on Windows *does* greatly affect 2D operations. You continue to deny > > it, but that's what his experiment has shown. > > No, Tyler's experiment has shown that the settings on that slider > greatly affect 2D performance on his specific computers (both of > which are budget video cards using 3-4 year-old chipsets). Tyler may > be right that his video cards are underpowered for his computers.
You're missing the point of Tyler's comparison. He showed that with a better graphics card, a computer with an older and slower CPU (i.e., much less CPU processingn power) could perform better in Finale than a newer computer with a lesser graphics card and beefier CPU/performance. That's incontestable. Yet you insist on contesting it. You can't have it both ways, Darcy. If 2D performance of graphics cards has not changed in 10 years (which you've argued at certain points in the discussion), then Tyler's experiment is relevant to current hardware. > Anyway, I regret getting bogged down in that issue because it doesn't > actually have much to do with my central point, which was that adding > a faster video card to the *Mac Pro* probably won't significantly > improve 2D performance -- in either Mac OS X or WinXP. And it seems to me that Tyler has shown that for Windows that is simply not true. > > For me, everything you've written has been very confusing. When you > > provide citations of articles that show the way OS X works, it is to > > show how much the CPU is involved. > > Quite the opposite -- did you even read those articles? . . . I skimmed them. > . . . They talk > about how OS X 10.4 uses the Mac's graphics card more heavily than > before (much like Vista will). . . . And the way Windows already does (and has for a long time), according to my understanding. Vista only adds the same kind of ridiculous graphics overhead that Aqua's useless transparency added to OS X. It may very well be that for these kind of layering and the new 3D requirements, the newer graphics cards add a great deal (I don't doubt it). But none of those things are involved in Finale's 2D rendering (though, of course, on Mac, the new anti-aliasing is part of Quartz, though it didn't need to be, seems to me). You seem to be arguing that all these new things that have been added (and will be added) to the OS make Tyler's arguments about 2D rendering irrelevant, at the same time you are saying that 2D issues have not changed in a long time because those were highly optimized a very long time ago. > . . . However, today's video cards are so > powerful that even the additional 2D demands of OS X are easily > handled by any card currently on the market. If the Mac now uses the graphics card for graphics operations, then I'm very happy for Mac users that they now have what Windows users have had for ages. What *I* learned from the articles you cited was that the CPU was still pushing massive numbers of pixels around once they came out of the GPU. > > And you have minimized the main point, which is the only reason he > > brought up the issue of 2D drawing and graphics cards, which was > > that investing in the graphics card gives more bang for the buck for > > application performance *in Finale* than adding processor cores. > > > > I don't think you've contested that point (just minimized its > > importance) > > No, I absolutely contest that point. Adding an additional core or > additional processor may not improve Finale performance much on > Windows, but I *also* think it's unlikely that upgrading the Mac Pro > a more powerful graphics card than the nVidia 7300 GT would make much > of a difference to 2D performance on that machine. Again, You're smiply refusing to see the whole point -- you've turned Tyler's argument on its head. He wants to spend his money on more graphics performance, not on a second pair of CPU cores. I'm sorry, but it's impossible to continue this discussion with you. -- 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
