From: Daryll S. <da...@va...> - 2000-05-23 18:50:00
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Keith wrote: > The test was against their turboGL driver - which is considered to be > pretty well optimised, at least on the programs it runs on. The > comparison of framerates between the Matrox and Tdfx windows drivers has > them neck and neck at the lower resolutions, where driver issues > dominate. So I think that it is incorrect to imply that the Matrox > implementation is low-performance. That's definetly better for the Matrox drivers. I'm happy to hear that. > But it gets framerates that are no better than the Matrox driver on a > card which should be comparable -- demonstrating again that the matrox > turbogl driver probably *is* well optimized, and by implication that the > comparison of the two opensource drivers is valid. That may be true, but there is some contradictory information here. If "The comparison of framerates between the Matrox and Tdfx windows drivers has them neck and neck at the lower resolutions, where driver issues dominate." Why do you now say "the comparison of the two opensource drivers is valid."? It is difficult to compare objects when they share no attributes in common. I was mainly saying trying to say that you can compare Matrox Linux to Matrox Windows, and tdfx Linux to tdfx Windows, but that it is difficult to compare Matrox Linux to tdfx Linux. That was really the only point I was trying to make. There is no way to get more precise evaluations because too many factors change. The real question is if the drivers are the same at the low resolutions, and the low resolutions are dominated by driver performance not hardware performance, then why does the performance of the Linux and Windows versions of the tdfx driver diverge at the higher resolutions? It should be dominated by the hardware performance and the hardware should be the same. Maybe there is some technique being employed at high resolutions under Windows that we're missing in Linux? Maybe the hardware isn't really the same IE being setup differently. I honestly don't know. The fact is those are interesting things to look at, but no one has put the resources into doing those optimizations for the tdfx driver under Linux. - |Daryll |