OT: recommend fast 2D card?

[James Gregory]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 01:29:37PM -0400, David Williamson wrote:
> gqview, P4 2.66 GHz, gig of RAM.
> 
> But the point is, all other things being equal, a faster card should
> help.  I'm just curious if anyone has actually switched from a GeForce 4
> to another card and personally seen a large increase in 2D speed.

Well, it may or may not. The trouble is that the bottle-neck in viewing
jpeg files is more likely to be decompressing the jpeg files rather than
getting that data to the screen. Getting a fast video card *may* help in
the last stage there, but I suspect that to really fix your problem,
it's the software you use that you'll need to address.

I don't know of any software that does a fast job of this (I use qiv
btw, give it a go). But there's a couple of things such a piece of
software could do:

1. Generate slideshow images at the right resolution for your monitor
and store them in some kind of uncompressed format

2. Exploit the jpeg compression algorithm to only process as much data
as is required to get the image on the screen. My recollections of jpeg
suggest that this is possible, but I don't know of any software that
does it.

Anyway, I'm running a GeForce FX5200 and it has been suitably fast for
my 2D needs. Likewise the Radeon in my laptop has been great. The Matrox
card I use at work has been pretty disappointing though.

HTH,

James.

-- 
"Now, there are no problems  only opportunities. However, this seemed to be an
insurmountable opportunity."
 - http://www.surfare.net/~toolman/temp/diagram.html