Performance and Video Cards

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card. I
am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.
Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

Any info would be great. Thanks.

Gregg—
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Gregg Bolinger wrote:

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card.
I am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.
Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

Any info would be great. Thanks.

Gregg

SDL relies on DirectX for the Windows part. It uses DirectDraw.

Julien

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card. I
am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.
Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

Any info would be great. Thanks.

  1. SDL is a layer (as the name implies). It doesn’t actually deal with the
    video card directly itself, it is a go between between your program and
    graphics libraries which actually do the real low level stuff.

If you run a 2D SDL application on a computer with DirectX, it will use
DirectX.

  1. What do you mean by “features”? SDL doesn’t do 3D graphics,
    which means talk about the latest graphics features doesn’t really apply.
    Though SDL does have functions that link it in with OpenGL, that does do
    3D graphics, and really quite well, too.

  2. Manufacturers make chipsets with OpenGL in mind too, as lots of games,
    including Windows only ones, use OpenGL.

    JamesOn Wed, 11 Feb 2004 08:18:36 -0600, Gregg Bolinger wrote:

And for the linux part?

Gregg

Julien Pauty wrote:> Gregg Bolinger wrote:

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video
card. I am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this
at all. Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

Any info would be great. Thanks.

Gregg

SDL relies on DirectX for the Windows part. It uses DirectDraw.

Julien


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DL] Performance and Video Cards

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card. I
am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.
Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

I don’t understand your question. Are you talking about 2D or 3D performance ?
Also, what features from a video card would you like to use ?
SDL doesn’t do 3D itself, but lets you use OpenGL for it, so if you know how to use it, you’ll get all OpenGL performance and features.

Stephane

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card.

The question is kind of messed up. Using more features is not the same
as getting better performance.

On MSWindows SDL uses DirectX for the few graphic functions that it
provides. So, its performance is the same as DirectX for those
functions. (There may be a nanosecond or two overhead for using SDL, but
seriously, nothing to worry about.)

I
am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.
Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

What he is talking about is accelerated 3D. SDL uses OpenGL for that.
OpenGL is every bit as fast as DirectX.

Because OpenGL is open the standard does not keep up with changes in
hardware technology as fast as DirectX can. The difference is that MS
can do anything they want while a standards committee actually has to
respect the users and the industry. So, the device manufactures add
extensions to OpenGL (using a standard extension mechanism) to provide
support for their latest features. Which means that OpenGL drivers from
the different manufactures do as good a job of supporting their hardware
as their DirectX drivers do.

What does that really mean for most people? Not much. Games have to test
to see if each special feature is built into the card you have and then
either use it or not. If you video card is more than a year old the
support in DirectX and OpenGL is going to be pretty much the same.

What does that mean for people learning to program using SDL/OpenGL?
Figure that it will be a year or ten before you know enough to start
using all of those new features in your own code. Which means it won’t
affect you at all. Then there is the fact that even if one was twice as
fast as the other, it would make no difference to 90% of the games out
their. Once you get over a 100 FPS you can’t see or feel the difference
in performance. And, there is the simple fact that the graphics APIs
used in most of the gaming market (PS2, Nintendo, and cell phones) are a
lot more like SDL/OpenGL than they are like DirectX. Which means the
skills you learn using SDL/OpenGL are more portable than the skills you
would learn using DirectX.

Microsoft works very had to make sure that everyone believes that
DirectX and MSWindows/XBox are the whole gaming market. The are large
part of the market, but not a majority of it. And, they are getting
smaller every month.

Any info would be great. Thanks.

Gregg

Hope that helps

Bob PendletonOn Wed, 2004-02-11 at 08:18, Gregg Bolinger wrote:

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Bob. Thanks a lot for that explination. That was perfect.

Gregg Bolinger

Bob Pendleton wrote:>On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 08:18, Gregg Bolinger wrote:

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card.

The question is kind of messed up. Using more features is not the same
as getting better performance.

On MSWindows SDL uses DirectX for the few graphic functions that it
provides. So, its performance is the same as DirectX for those
functions. (There may be a nanosecond or two overhead for using SDL, but
seriously, nothing to worry about.)

I
am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.
Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

What he is talking about is accelerated 3D. SDL uses OpenGL for that.
OpenGL is every bit as fast as DirectX.

Because OpenGL is open the standard does not keep up with changes in
hardware technology as fast as DirectX can. The difference is that MS
can do anything they want while a standards committee actually has to
respect the users and the industry. So, the device manufactures add
extensions to OpenGL (using a standard extension mechanism) to provide
support for their latest features. Which means that OpenGL drivers from
the different manufactures do as good a job of supporting their hardware
as their DirectX drivers do.

What does that really mean for most people? Not much. Games have to test
to see if each special feature is built into the card you have and then
either use it or not. If you video card is more than a year old the
support in DirectX and OpenGL is going to be pretty much the same.

What does that mean for people learning to program using SDL/OpenGL?
Figure that it will be a year or ten before you know enough to start
using all of those new features in your own code. Which means it won’t
affect you at all. Then there is the fact that even if one was twice as
fast as the other, it would make no difference to 90% of the games out
their. Once you get over a 100 FPS you can’t see or feel the difference
in performance. And, there is the simple fact that the graphics APIs
used in most of the gaming market (PS2, Nintendo, and cell phones) are a
lot more like SDL/OpenGL than they are like DirectX. Which means the
skills you learn using SDL/OpenGL are more portable than the skills you
would learn using DirectX.

Microsoft works very had to make sure that everyone believes that
DirectX and MSWindows/XBox are the whole gaming market. The are large
part of the market, but not a majority of it. And, they are getting
smaller every month.

Any info would be great. Thanks.

Gregg

Hope that helps

Bob Pendleton


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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card. I
am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.

The first point I’d like to make is that SDL graphics itself are purely 2D,
so most features of high end graphcis cards are actually completely
irrelevant to SDL. If you want to do more advanced stuff, you should use
the SDL/OpenGL combination, and both nvidia and ATI support OpenGL well
enough that there really isn’t any difference between OpenGL and DirectX in
what you can achieve performance-wise.

SDL uses the underlying graphics platform to access the hardware. On
Windows, SDL uses DirectX, so there isn’t anything to worry about,
basically. (Of course, there is the possibility that SDL uses DirectX
inefficiently - however, if you find this to be the case, you can easily
fix it)

Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

Well, I’m sure that chipset developers don’t ignore DirectX. OTOH, the bad
results of the GeforceFX in some benchmarks are often blamed on a GPU
architecture that doesn’t match DX9 specifications well enough. So it does
look like the designers do their own thinking, as well.

cu,
Nicolai
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-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----On Wednesday 11 February 2004 15:18, Gregg Bolinger wrote:

Browsing the SDL1.2 CVS tree, I see support for X11, XFree86, SVGAlib, libvga,
dga, and others I don’t recognize.

X11 and XFree86 support 2D and OpenGL hardware acceleration through
extensions(such as the nvidia ones I’m using right now). I don’t think
SVGAlib or libvga support hardware accel. dga, I don’t know about.On Wednesday 11 February 2004 19:33, Gregg Bolinger wrote:

And for the linux part?

Bob. Thanks a lot for that explination. That was perfect.

You are welcome!

	Bob PendletonOn Wed, 2004-02-11 at 20:15, Gregg Bolinger wrote:

Gregg Bolinger

Bob Pendleton wrote:

On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 08:18, Gregg Bolinger wrote:

I am new to SDL. I like what I have seen so far but I am concerned a
little bit about performance and high end graphics cards. It is my
understanding from talking to a buddy of mine that Video Card
Manufacturers like nVidia and ATI develop chipsets with DirectX in
mind. This is of course because Windows is currently the gaming
platform. So DirectX can actually use more features of a video card.

The question is kind of messed up. Using more features is not the same
as getting better performance.

On MSWindows SDL uses DirectX for the few graphic functions that it
provides. So, its performance is the same as DirectX for those
functions. (There may be a nanosecond or two overhead for using SDL, but
seriously, nothing to worry about.)

I
am wondering how SDL deals with this if it deals with this at all.
Also, is my buddy misinformed possibly?

What he is talking about is accelerated 3D. SDL uses OpenGL for that.
OpenGL is every bit as fast as DirectX.

Because OpenGL is open the standard does not keep up with changes in
hardware technology as fast as DirectX can. The difference is that MS
can do anything they want while a standards committee actually has to
respect the users and the industry. So, the device manufactures add
extensions to OpenGL (using a standard extension mechanism) to provide
support for their latest features. Which means that OpenGL drivers from
the different manufactures do as good a job of supporting their hardware
as their DirectX drivers do.

What does that really mean for most people? Not much. Games have to test
to see if each special feature is built into the card you have and then
either use it or not. If you video card is more than a year old the
support in DirectX and OpenGL is going to be pretty much the same.

What does that mean for people learning to program using SDL/OpenGL?
Figure that it will be a year or ten before you know enough to start
using all of those new features in your own code. Which means it won’t
affect you at all. Then there is the fact that even if one was twice as
fast as the other, it would make no difference to 90% of the games out
their. Once you get over a 100 FPS you can’t see or feel the difference
in performance. And, there is the simple fact that the graphics APIs
used in most of the gaming market (PS2, Nintendo, and cell phones) are a
lot more like SDL/OpenGL than they are like DirectX. Which means the
skills you learn using SDL/OpenGL are more portable than the skills you
would learn using DirectX.

Microsoft works very had to make sure that everyone believes that
DirectX and MSWindows/XBox are the whole gaming market. The are large
part of the market, but not a majority of it. And, they are getting
smaller every month.

Any info would be great. Thanks.

Gregg

Hope that helps

Bob Pendleton


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