![]() ![]() It is an erroneous assumption that just because you're not running a 3D game, that the video card doesn't matter. Good 2D video chips that did this in hardware resulted in buttery smooth frame rates. If the CPU had to blitter a masked texture over a solid background, or especially transparency, it would tank performance. ![]() Transparency and blitter were two of the biggest performance gains. These could result in huge gains in performance over a crappy entry level dumb frame buffer device. Many of the more advanced 2D video cards had things like wider memory buses, faster memory, faster bus connections (VLB or PCI) and accelerated drawing functions like hardware blitter, block transfers, shape drawing, transparency, page flipping and sprites. I have several Matrox cards which run Build engine games HORRIBLY, and will crash if you get too close to a transparent object on the screen. The Build engine uses VESA modes for rendering to the screen, and there were quite a few video chips that had poor/terrible/non-existent VESA support, Matrox being one of them. ![]() There were also some really good ones that had hardware accelerated drawing functions that drastically sped up graphics processing. Not all 2D video cards were created equal, there were many terrible ones that were essentially dumb frame buffers that had the host CPU literally do everything. Click to expand.It is an erroneous assumption that just because you're not running a 3D game, that the video card doesn't matter. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |