At 08:49 AM -0700 06/23/2005, J.Weintraub (WarBanner) wrote:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
At 07:14 PM -0700 06/19/2005, J.Weintraub (WarBanner) wrote:
Okay, so I'm using my 350mhz B&W G3 w/ and Xclaim VR card
w/TV-out as a Digital Video Recorder (among other things). The
full-screen video is a bit jerky at times, and I was wondering:
would I be better off spending my money upgrading the CPU to
500mhz G3, or the video card to a Radeon 7000 (both cost about
the same)? Which is going to make a more noticable improvement in
playback, or is neither sufficient, necessitating a larger
upgrade?
Which OS?
Jaguar - 10.3.9
Which QuickTime?
Well, none, really. I've got 7 in there, but I mostly use VLC. I
prefer the controls and it seems to support more formats better.
Sad, really.
QuickTime has been getting slower and slower with each generation. :\
it's becomming Apple's defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
I've downgraded to QT 5 in a number of cases now.
Which format are the videos? mpeg-1, -2, -4, divx, ?
All of the above. Some are my own vidcaps, some are downloads. All
kinds of formats and codecs.
DivX especially is becomming a bigger cpu pig.
WRT hardware, first make sure you're not choking things by being
memory poor or using a slow hard drive. Then, IMO, the faster
processor is more useful then the faster video card. Some of these
codecs require lots of number crunching.
Drive is a 7200rpm 200GB. Memory is 256, with almost nothing else
running but the player. I doubt going to 512 will hurt, but I don't
think memory is my chokepoint.
IMO, 256MB is a rock-bottom minimum for OS X - assumin you're just
going to stare at jpegs. Iffa you're doing video work, I'd say go
for 768MB to a full GB.
The 7200rpm drive is decent. You have the OS and swapping/paging on
a 2nd drive?
Add memory.
Add processor.
Add 2nd HD for system and paging.
Yeah, I was wondering whether the codecs get decoded at the CPU or
the GPU, I guess. So if it's the CPU, then that's likely where I
should look.
The biggest problem is keeping the CPU fed - instructions and data.
So you need lots of memory.
The graphics processor is told things like "put polygons here and
here" "smooth that" "shade this" "bump item n left x pixels". All
the rest is done in the main processor.
- Dan.
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