2D, Acceleration, And Windows: Aren't All Graphics Cards Equal?

[drutort]

i dont know if anyone found this out, but i ran by accident into a partial solution for flicker and stuttering when the gpu ramps up

the bottom line is, the memory is the main issue when ramping up and down between the 2d and 3d

you can use CCC profiles to modify this

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283348-33-5870-dual-monitor-screen-tear-flickering#t2118318

i posted there and tested this for hd movies playing in windows media center

this even effects when 2d slide show of pictures though the core does not jump to 3d mode

i created 2 profiles, one that has 2d mostly using when the gpu does not jump to the 3d mode which set want 0 and want 1 to 300/900 for some reason all is peachy when going to 900, flickering tearing in 2d slide show goes away

how for HD movies i noticed this was not enough as the gpu would jump to 3d mode, so i sent want 0 and want 1 to 300/1200 on my 5870 ( match your 3d memory for all 3 the same IE 1200)

this solved my hd flickering and tearing and all plays smoothly

you dont need the gpu to go up too high IMO, it works fine its the RAM that causes the issues, as you can see the GPU has hardly any load so no point in ramping it up too high, though it seems that too low gpu clock with high ram can cause a BSOD

 

[Mineria]

5870

BENCHMARK: DIRECT DRAWING TO VISIBLE DEVICE

Text: 35436 chars/sec
Line: 125523 lines/sec
Polygon: 3772 polygons/sec
Rectangle: 5819 rects/sec
Arc/Ellipse: 8472 ellipses/sec
Blitting: 7949 operations/sec
Stretching: 704 operations/sec
Splines/Bézier: 31626 splines/sec
Score: 1914

So whats up with your benches over here??

 

[Mineria]

@ stock settings compared to the GPU numbers from Tom's Hardware:

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/1788/2dbench.jpg

And my buffered result:

http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/2861/buffered2dbench.jpg

 

[al2suarez]

This article was posted back in January. This is already the month
of April and I am having Flickering issues. I received my ASUS
EAH5870/2DIS/1GD5/V2 just last week. It flickers when at idle
[GPU Clock:157MHz and Memory Clock:300MHz]. The temp at idle is about
40C which is not bad at all. If I play Crysis or ModerWare2 it plays
fine with no problems. The Flickering tends to get worse if I am
surfing the web. The bottom portion of the screen flickers really bad.
Prior to receiving my EAH5870 I had the same issue with 2 Sapphire Radeon
HD 5850 Toxic 1GB. Both Sapphire and AMD stated that they were hardware
problems so I RMA'ed them. But apparently this is an inherent problem
with the 5xxx series cards. I tested with latest Asus Driver and ATI
10.3 and problem still persist. How can it be that they still have
not fixed the problem. I am hoping that 10.4 will fix the issue. If
it doesn't remedy the problem i'm considering selling my card at a loss
and jumping over to NVidia.

 

[Michel Merlin]

$99 was TRULY a TINY PRICE for a windowing OS in 1985

A big error in history and market fortunately doesn't affect the core of this excellent article. You write:

In fact, Windows owes its very survival beyond the first two years of its initial introduction to someone who still holds great sway at Microsoft today — namely, Steve Ballmer. His advertising spot for Windows 1.0 remains unforgettable to this day, as does his chutzpah in pricing Windows 1.0 at the astonishing price of $99 (a veritable fortune in 1985)...

Remember that to get a decent multitasking OS, in 1985 you had to buy an UNIX workstation at around $40,000, where the OS license price, integrated and undisclosed, was probably at least $10,000 (I developed scientific software on all sorts of systems and languages since 1977, including porting our SunOS production on all flavors of UNIX and related hardware in 1991-94).

So Windows 1.0 may be seen as an awkward underpowered underreliable monkeying of an OS, yet selling it for $99 was really an extraordinary move, and one of Bill Gates' genius trait: he understood that software, being infinitely copyable, had a potentially infinite multiplying factor in matter of revenue, hence brought the max revenue with exploding the number of licenses by deflating the unitary license price. In addition, being by far the only one thus moving to become an affordable yet real competitor to a true OS, Windows 1.0 was really a big progress then.

Writing that Windows owes its survival beyond the first two years to Steve Ballmer is nearly the opposite of reality. Bill Gates has always been the clearsight, and Steve Ballmer the blind implementer; the replacement of BG with SB occurred in 2000, not in 1985; and was clearly a backstep, not an improvement, still less a salvation. Just an example, continuing to use the multiplying factor principle, would have lead to continue lessen the price of Windows ; and taking in account that immaterial goods are the most perishable (a salad of yesterday is still worth 70% its initial price; a newspaper of yesterday goes to trash) would just amplify that move ; if still in CEO office BG would probably lessen the actual prices (by at the same time lessening the face prices, improving more the products, and above all, adding more new and innovative products). By too exclusively hanging on its aging Windows and Office and trying to maintain too high prices on them, Steve Ballmer is actually costing money to Microsoft.

Versailles, Mon 21 Jun 2010 16:10:20 +0200

 

[Guest]

I tried running vb6 on windows 7 and it runs horribly slow when creating and moving objects on a form. I found that disableing visual themes for the program itself showed no improvement. But changing the entire windows theme to classic makes a huge difference and vb6 runs as it should.

So note to others that you may still have to disable aero all together to get an improvement.

I have a radeon hd 4850 and the latest drivers.

 

[Guest]

It would be great if this test could be performed again for nvidia, amd and intel graphics hardware (e.g. HD 3000 or similar) and drivers on Windows 7 SP1 and maybe Windows 8 Consumer Preview, so a more complete update could be presented.