Richard wrote:
In article <48E32CB2.8050107@hawaii.rr.com>, david <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> writes:
Richard wrote:
In article <48E1B535.7060202@hawaii.rr.com>, david <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> writes:
But my favorite video card for Fractint was a Hercules graphics card. ;-) ...only because fractint never tried to use your graphics card as anything other than a dumb frame buffer. Which was all it needed to be under DOS.
Sure, but graphics cards have moved way beyond that now. What fractint does with your video card now is purely a legacy compatability codepath that is the slowest way to use a modern video card, where "modern" is anything from the past 10 years.
Might be true of the DOS version. XFractint is using my much more modern graphics cards through the X video system, so I doubt that it's using any legacy compatibility codepath ... I bet Fractint spends much more of its time calculating numbers than it does accessing the video card, anyway. I can't imagine how Fractint could possibly use many of the "newer" features (3D acceleration and game-oriented stuff). Perhaps it could offload processing code to a modern GPU? -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community