Date: Sun, 02 Feb 1997 13:48:13 -0800 From: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> To: "Kenneth P. Stox" <ken@stox.pr.mcs.net> Cc: multimedia@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Hardware for video Message-ID: <199702022148.NAA02400@rah.star-gate.com>
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It is kind of tricky to get a fast PC nowdays. The issues are memory bandwith and PCI bus implementation. The Triton seems to be well implemented where as the Natoma, found in PPRO, I have my doubts about. For instance, I have a P100 / Triton chipset over here and a PPRO 200MHz / Natoma chipset. On the PPRO 200MHz , I get a few dma errors while capturing where as in the P100 I get less dma errors . The condition of both implementations with respect to video is that I get a better image capture/display at 640x480 32bits 30fps on the P100 than on the PPRO 200MHz. The PPROs 200MHz are nice for number crunching for instance, metgrab ( http://www.ishiboo.com/~nirva/Projects/metgrab/ ) is a cool video capture application which does real time video effects however you need a PPRO for this baby. For applications such as metgrab, the more memory bandwith available to the system the better it is. Unfortunalty, the Natoma chipset does not offer support for SDRAM and the best that we can do is get 50ns EDO ram. So for Pentium systems the fastest memory for video operations is SDRAM. For Pentium PRos with Natoma chipset is 50 ns EDO. For video capture to disk, is a little bit more tricky because I am not up to date with the fastest scsi disks. It is almost a safe bet that you will need ccd (concatenated disk driver) and more than one disk. You always can do "man ccd" to find out more about it. On the video display side you want something like an S3 968 PCI based card with VRAM -- a fast video controller coupled with fast memory. Playing with video applications you can eat up your color palette pretty quickly so must of the time I run at 32bits with a resolution of 1024x768 with my Diamond Stealth 64 video (s3 968) with 4MB of memory of VRAM. Corrections of comments are welcomed. Enjoy, Amancio
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