Monitor problem

[The Wassermans]

On Sun, 2008-07-06 at 21:12 +1000, Martin Visser wrote:
> I would disagree here. For display photographic images, almost no work
> is being done by the graphics card. Any basic card running as a frame
> buffer (with say 8MB) wouldn't perform much different from the 512MB
> card that seems to be standard. It is really only in 3D games or 3D
> display managers like Compiz where they will have appreciable benefit.
> With the right program your card could easily display 25 photos per
> second with no flicker - this is what any movie player needs to do!
> 
> Both Picasa and F-spot while feature rich, are probably rely too much
> on the CPU to do their work. Picasa is basically a Windows program
> running in emulation (using WINE), and F-spot is written using mono,
> which is a clone of the .Net framework. Probably the slickest way to
> view photos (and do basic manipulation) is gthumb. It used to be the
> default photo program until Hardy (you may need to install it from
> synaptic if you did a fresh install of Hardy).
> 
> I just did a 3-way test of the above 3 programs doing full-screen
> "paging" through some photos and gthumb is far quicker (at least 3-4
> times) than the other two for this function. (I am viewing 2592x1944
> images on a 1400x1050 so it has to do non-integer scaling/dithering to
> display these - which is where I think your problem was occuring.)
> 
> Regards, Martin

Greetings Martin,

I just downloaded and tried gThumb.  My first impressions are that it
slidescreen's very much better than both Picasa & F-Spot.  Just as you
said.  I will spend some time with it to see if I will adopt it in
favour of the others.

Much of the technical discussion that has been going on is well above
me.  But I'm trying to digest some of it. Maybe one day I too will be
able to converse so technically?

You say that Picasa for Linux is really an emulation using intergrated
Wine?  And therefore some aspects of the Windows version are
compromised?   Or were you assuming I had loaded Wine in order to run
Picasa?  Might be the same thing really?

By the way gThumb is available in Hardy.  No need even to use Synaptic.

Thanks for your help Martin

Dave W