[Consortium] Benefit of Compiz to audio work?
Daniel James
daniel at 64studio.com
Wed Nov 14 10:38:54 UTC 2007
Hi Cory,
> Some have said that moving the drawing of windows off the the GFX card
> would help the load on the CPU and thus keep xruns to a minimum.
I'm sceptical about that, because drawing windows shouldn't be causing
xruns if the system is set up properly. I believe JACK Meterbridge uses
libsdl for drawing the meter needles efficiently, but I believe most
free software audio apps don't do much in the way of graphics
acceleration (yet).
I can think of a number of drawbacks to using Compiz on audio machines
though:
1. Reliance on proprietary drivers for systems that otherwise don't
require them. OpenGL is unusable if you don't have hardware
acceleration, and not everyone has a Matrox card.
2. Requirement for energy-hungry 3D cards (some of these cards need more
electricity than CPUs which are perfectly usable for audio work). Apart
from any environmental or cost considerations, more energy = more waste
heat = more cooling noise. Which is bad in the studio, of course.
3. Electrical waste mountain. There are millions of machines out there
which are perfectly (re)usable as audio workstations, but make Compiz a
*requirement* for using free software, and they'll have to go into landfill.
Y'know, both OS X and Vista have gone down the power-hungry,
new-hardware-or-forget-it route, and I'm not sure we need to follow them
there.
Cheers!
Daniel
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